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Emerging Identities
muñecas, figuras, artifacts
Donald Wellman
The European Elsewhere has here
perfected the European ideal she said. …
Thanks to spirit-possession, death is fast
forwarded into life. … She was an
impossible being, holding dissimilar
things together, bringing the back-there
and the over-there slap up against the
here and now. … And then the familiar
itself becomes more difficult to see as
strange. Is that what the trick takes, I
wondered, to abut the here-and-now
with the back-then and over-there so
you see your world anew?
Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State, 7-9
Ana Mendieta, Silueta, 1978
How fitting, therefore, how laden with possibilities for stately
representation , is spirit possession—especially under the mantle of
the influence of the spirit queen. For here not only is mimesis unto
death the political art-form par excellence, repeated and worked over
continuously, and not only is this obsession itself obsessively at the
service of the embellishment of the space of death created as
memorial to the founding violence, but in addition death is inflected
through the shadowy female consort of the legitimating figure of the
Liberator so as to fortify the “break-through economy” of taboo and
transgression in which the authority imparted by the looks of the dying
is harvested first in the entranced body lying perfectly still in its halo of
flame, and then in frenzied body-contorting, eye-staring, performance.
Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State, 78.
Pedro José Figueroa, Simon Bolivar, Liberator and Father
of the Nation, 1819
No future oriented project can be constructed without reclaiming the
past and reassessing the roots that nourished it. In search for that
symbolic terrain, we Venezuelans, unlike the Mexicans or the
Peruvians, found ourselves without a conspicuous pre-Columbian past
that might have served as a base to legitimize the slow process of
national affirmation. Having rejected any link with the mother country
of Spain, and yet finding it impossible to conceive of ourselves as
independent of our colonial past, we began to develop our modernism
by means of successive overlapping layers of legitimizing utopias,
trying with greater or lesser success to cover up that colonial past,
which we experience as a stain, a violation that we would prefer to
forget.
Ariel Jiménez. American Utopias. Colección Cisneros [Notebook 5]. Tr. Cola Franzen.
Caracas, 2002: 3.
Antonio Ruiz, La Malinche, 1939
That stain associated with the colonial past can be figured as the
rape of the mother by the conquistadors. It is primal and sexual to a
mestizo identity. It can also be figured as the betrayal of the people
by the daughter. This is the tragedy of la Malinche, redeemed by the
national virgin, la Guadalupe, but that is Mexico’s story, a prototype
of the resolution and subversion of desire. Caliban, present in his
absence, too haunts these islands and forests. On the costal
Caribbean of Venezuela the indigenous populations were eradicated.
Laura Mulvey writes
that “in Jimmie
Durham’s image
of “La Malinche”
the tradition of her
treachery is lost
under her tragedy”
(69). Mulvey
equates the gold bra
with the European
desire for gold and
the colors white and
gold with the
Spanish baroque.
Jimmie Durham,
eds. Laura Mulvey,
Dirk Snauwaert, and
Mark Alice Durant
(NY: Phaidon,
1995:69)
Jimmie Durham,
La Malinche,
1988-91
Not allowed to touch himself by Prospero, Caliban attempts to imagine his identity
by first drawing his nose. “Durham’s Caliban is a slapstick image of the savage
attempting to render himself without reflection, extrapolating from the blurred
lines of his own nose. By employing the language of his inventor [Prospero] he digs
himself deeper in the hole of signification in which he is trapped. This is Caliban’s
paradox.”
Mark Alice Durant, “The Caliban Complex or a Thing Most Brutal” in Jimmie Durham, eds. Laura Mulvey,
Dirk Snauwaert, and Mark Alice Durant (NY: Phaidon, 1995: 78-87: 86).
“What is our history, what is
our culture, if not the history
and culture of Caliban?”
Roberto Fernandez Retamar,
Caliban and Other Essays.
Minneapolis: Minn, 1989: 14.
Jimmie Durham, Caliban, 1992.
“The scant visible importance of the pre-Columbian Amazonian
cultures—whose works were not meant to survive but whose cultures
have, and are still active today – means that our modern imagination
can recover the indigenous culture only marginally, and is focused on
the purity of the landscape …. and on the newness represented by the
Venezuelan mestizo.”
Ariel Jiménez. American Utopias. Colección Cisneros [Notebook 5]. Tr. Cola
Franzen. Caracas, 2002: 11.
Following slide: Armando Reveron, Paisaje blanco, 1934
Dissident Artists like Alexander Otero
attempted to insert the purity of
American Landscape into Universal
History, “erasing continental limits” in
order to contribute to the advance of
painting (Otero in a letter to Alfredo
Boulton, 1947, qtd. Jiménez, 15) …
this lead to Venezuelan
Constructivism. An alternative path,
associated in Brazil with the
anthropofago manifesto of Oswaldo
de Andrade, with its ritual absorption
of the “sacred enemy” – converting it
into Brazilian flesh without the
absolute negation of the other as
“stranger” – offered to Brazilian
artists an independent path.
Ariel Jiménez. American Utopias. Colección
Cisneros [Notebook 5]. Tr. Cola Franzen.
Caracas, 2002: 16.
Alejandro Otero,
Tablon 23. 1974
Willys de Castro, Objeto activo (amarelo), 1959-60
Alejandro Otero, Bloody Mary,
1961
The origins of painting lie in the landscape and in the human body. That is the
commonality underlying the work of Armando Reveron, Alejandro Otero, and
Willys de Castro.
We are uncomfortable with our own bodies and with the bodies of others.
Bodies leak. There is a stain on the post-colonial imagination of slavery and
genocide. I see that stain in Bloody Mary.
Armando Reveron, Hija
del sol [India], 1933
Oil on burlap
Ariel Jiménez sees Reveron as indifferent to processes of Modernism in the arts,
for instance the constructivist impulse that is of fundamental importance to Otero
and Wilys de Castro (4). And yet, Luis Pérez Oramas, is able to present Reveron as
modern, not because he is immersed in a program like Otero’s universalism, but
because he is an instance by default of the modern style, altering established
practices of composition and use of materials in response to expressive necessity.
John Elderfield in the splendidly produced catalog for the recent exhibition at
MOMA argues that it is a mistake “to split off Reveron’s atavism from his
modernity” (74).
“Atavistic” unlike “archaic” to “primitive” has a unique resonance with the work
each of the artists I will allude to as my ideas evolve: Wilfredo Lam and Ana
Mendieta in particular.
Armando Reveron, The Creole Maja, 1939
Proprioceptive – the sense of the body as it falls or leaps or lies prone on the
ground. We have become estranged from that with which we are most
familiar wrote Charles Olson, ushering in a form of postmodernism.
Jean Dubuffet, Woman Grinding
Coffee, 1945.
Plaster, oil, sand and tar on canvas.
Reveron is modern because the image disappears into the materiality of the
means, for instance his low resolution style on burlap creating texture that is
a distinctive example of what Mallarmé meant when he said that painting
must be immersed again in its origins.” A similar transformation of raw
materials can be seen in works by Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapies.
Antoni Tapies, Principio,
1995
Polvo de mármol, barniz
pintado sobre madera
200 x 175 cm
Armando Reveron, Desnudos, 1938
Reveron’s nudes represent enabling absorption with relation to European
projections, as does Oswaldo de Andrade’s anthropofago manifesto or
Fernando Retamar’s thesis concerning Caliban’s essential hybridity. Reveron’s
Creole Maja, like his landscapes represent a reinvention of painting. A
reinvention of Goya that reconfigures the nude in relation to an emerging
mestizo world. A world whose dim but magical outline, becomes a tropical
glow in a dim interior. It is a world that shares the originary impulses of
magical realism, of negritude, and of chthonic, post-feminist mysteries like
those of Ana Mendieta.
Armando Reveron, La mujer del rio, 1939
Ana Mendieta, Guabancex (Esculturas Rupestres) / Goddess of Wind (Rupestrian Sculptures) 1981.
Aimé Césaire
Have No Mercy
Keep smoking swamp
the rupestral images of the unknown
turn the silent dusk of their laughter
toward me
Keep smoking o swamp sea urchin core
dead stars calmed by marvelous hands gush
from the pulp of my eyes
Smoke smoke
the frail darkness of my voice crackles with blazing cities
and the irresistible purity of my hand summons
out of vast distance from a genetic inheritance
the victorious zeal of the acid in the flesh of life –swamp—
like a viper born from the blond force of resplendence.
Wilfredo Lam, illustration to accompany a selection
of poems by Aimé Césaire in Hemispheres 4, edited
Yvan Goll, 1944.
Reveron ‘s symbolic register resonates with postmodern insecurities and
celebrations of the body. His muñecas are fetish objects that allow
imaginary satisfaction of an expressive, possibly therapeutic reality. When
the dolls showed their legs, in their inanimate displays, he called them
sinful … if any one knew. He daubed the rough canvas with burlap brushes
of his own manufacture, smeared it with brilliant charcoal. He tied a burlap
belt around his waist. In a restrained relation to the mannequin, so often
the subject of modern art, he made copies that leaked human vitality and
emotion. His work in a performative vein is a rehearsal, an act of imagined
boldness that requires secrecy, that happens in alienation, without
understanding or celebration. According to Elderfield, the muñecas
demanded forgiveness for allowing public exposure of their genitals,
atonement. Elderfield also speculates that Reveron spoke through the
muñecas as a ventriloquist might (66). The muñecas represent an
exploration of origins.
His Bailarinas are an act of conjuring.
Armando Reveron, Bailarinas, 1948
Aimé Césaire
Survival
I conjure you
pathetic plantain tossing my naked heart
in the daylight with my psalm
I conjure you
old hougan of nocturnally deaf mountains
only the night before the last one
and its rumblings of boredom knocking at the insane postern of buried cities
but this is only a prelude to forests on their way to the bloody neck of the world
it is my singular hatred
drifting its icebergs in the breath of real flames
give me ah give me the immortal eye of amber
and the shadows and tombs squared in granite
for ideal barrier of damp planes and aquatic grasses
will hear in the green zones
the spokesmen of oblivion knotting and unknotting
and roots of the mountain
raising the royal decent of the almond trees of hope
will blossom through the paths of flesh
(the sickness of the living passing over like a storm)
while the Sign of the Sky
a golden fire will smile
at the ardent song of my body in flames.
Armando Reveron, Anciano,
tres mujeres, y niño, 1948.
The muñecas belong to the “category of grotesque realism” (Elderfield
63). This grotesquerie can be said to leak into the paintings and violate
some of the notions of boundary, bundle and restraint that Elderfield
derives from the etymology of the term, originally meaning a boundary
stone, later a wrist, or an angled protuberance. Norman O. Brown spoke
of a similar set of meanings in his book on Hermes. Elderfield argues
convincingly that a tension related to taboo and restraint is enacted,
when the dolls, made of bundled rags themselves, become the subject of
a painting practice that uses instruments, burlap, twigs, and other
substances, made into brushes. The brush, the mannequin, the painter in
his coarse garments, all participate in the same ethos, in some sacred
kinship of artifact and nature, impermanent artifact and impermanent
nature, recorded in the painting.
Wilfredo Lam, La Jungla, 1943
Alejandro Carpentier praises “lo real maravilloso de América” in one of
the first uses of the term “magical realism” with reference to the arts of
Latin America. El nacional 1948.
Lam resists the re-colonization of Cuba by tourism ad by a romantic
nostalgia that creates a pastoral version of the guajiro and mulata. “My
idea was to represent the spirit of the negroes in the situations in which
they were then,” he told Max-Pol Fouchet (qtd. Sims 62).
Although he trained to be a priest in the Lacumi cult as a child, when the
symbols of Santeria appear in his work, they appear in new
revolutionary contexts (Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth Century Art of
Latina America, Texas:2001: 122)
Armando Reveron, Luz tras mi enramada, 1926
Kamau Brathwaite
Totem
The altar must be made of skulls
spiked head of slave by the wayside
the bones that the dog shark’s
dark bark of teeth left by the sea side
for bones are vegetable arms
that clutch dreams
that grow the fatty pork of flesh
the gods will eat
are relics ruins
fetish of sperm
totem of screams
hollow bamboo branches
of what once was a tree
Lam’s La jungla, Reveron’s Luz tras mi
enramada, Mendieta’s siluetas,
hovering as they do on the edge of
visibility, emerging from the wicker
work of cane and grasses, link fertility
with erosion or decomposition, for
curative purposes with respect to a
primal stain.
Ana
Ana Mendieta, Silueta, !978
In the spring of 1985, Ana Mendieta submitted a proposal to install
seven wooden totems for the MacArthur Park Public Art Program in
Los Angeles. “Each tree trunk,” she wrote, “will have an image
carved/burned into it representing the seven powers of life (that rule
the jungle).” The grouping, title, La jungla, alludes to Lam’s 1943
painting of the same name.
Zambrano, taxi driver of Haitian aspect and guide to the mountain, speaks of
the spirit queen, “He asked us if we knew what the spirit queen was all
about, and took us outside behind the shed on the edge of the canefield. …
he insisted the Indians are the primary source of spiritual regeneration. …
the spirit queen, whom he adored , had no particular “racial” identity. No!
She was not Black, not White, not Indian, nor any mixture thereof. Instead,
he paused, she was the nation. It was that simple. What’s more , her father
was a vagabond. Her mother used to beat her. And one day, she
disappeared, taken away by the water spirits, known as encantados.
Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State, 31-32
All of one wall was taken up by a huge portal
or shrine. To the left was a three foot high
statue of El Indio Guaicaipuro. On the right
was a similarly large statue of El Negro
Primero, while in the center was a massive
statue of the spirit queen. On the extreme
right was a bronze colored statue of the
Liberator, about a foot in height. Densely
occupying all remaining space were scores of
candles, portraits, and figurines of spirits. It
was dark but for the candles and the dim
light of a naked bulb draped with red cloth.
At the center of attention for the several
people therein was this tremulous highpitched voice coming from nowhere and
extending everywhere.
Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State, 59.
Ana Mendieta, Silueta, 1978
In the making of modern nations, the dead do double duty. Out of nowhere,
it seems, people conjure up a slice of deadness and borrow from it their
names, battle cries, and costumes, in order to present the new scene of
world history in dazzling form while reaction sets in and the spirit of
revolution gives way to ghosts retracing their steps … we remember the
Indians … . Yes! They do double duty and the tradition of the dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State, 10
“The bundled cloth that forms their skin is wrapped around wire skeletons for
stability and it is rutted and un even.” A 10-year old boy appears doll and
unnaturally aged, as he stands on a pedestal. The man in the long beard is
Reveron wearing a mask. The pre-pubescent girls come from the
neighborhood, but one behind the old man’s head is possibly a muñecas
hanging from the wall. Ages and sexes, human and mannequins dissolve, mix,
their natures confused, merged in their function as elements in an inscrutable
dram that has both magical and emergent purposes. Magical because this is an
experiment in a reality differently rooted in nature, emergent because purpose
and function like the immateriality of the image seem only in the process of a
possible resolution. Material means of the roughest sort used for immaterial
purposes.
Armando Reveron, Self-portrait with Dolls, 1948
Conclusion
“Danger cannot be named,” wrote Michael Taussig, “it leaks.” (39) In his earlier
study, Mimesis and Alterity, he argued that the power of the copy over that of
which it is a copy, a form of magic. He argues specifically that the fetish power of
appearance is on the opaque surface of the copy (230). Reveron knew that his
images were copies of scenes, employing figures that in their own realm were
inert copies of living forms. The muñecas then leak magic into that copying
which was his painting. It became important then that the surface achieve a
paradoxical, opaque translucency.
Masks used by Reveron in the 1940’s in staging his ritual performances. They are thought to be selfportraits.