The
intransmutability of Body Art
by
Jan Galligan & Lillian Mulero
Santa
Olaya, PR
“I
could have taken a bullet for the artist Chris Burden,” declares
Lillian.
“What!??”
“You know I have always been interested in
disrupting the natural order of things. And, for me, art should be a
means to provoke questions, not a platform that provides answers,”
she says.
“O.K.,” I tell, her, “But, would you really put it
on the line for Chris Burden?”
“Well, not him personally, but for
art, yes. Let's talk about this later,” Lillian instructs me.
We are just leaving La Puntilla in Old San Juan having toured the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture's three exhibitions, which have as the subject, the body: Cuerpo/Materia presenting twelve artists using performance to explore issues of the body; Behind the Scene: Arte, Cuerpo y Derecho featuring ten artists whose work directly questions censorship and the naked body as a contemporary subject for art; and Cosas, a diverse collection of twenty-two artists whose common subject is the human body. “Which work did you find most interesting?” asks Lillian. Before I can answer, she says, “Jorge Gonzalez has made the one piece that most clearly represents the body as both subject and the instrument of creation.” Using a gigantic stick of charcoal, Gonzalez inscribed a twenty-foot semicircle directly on the wall at the end of the gallery. “It is as if Da Vinci had given his Vitruvian Man big pieces of chalk and asked him to draw on the wall with his outstretched arms. Here, Gonzalez depicts the limits of the artist's ability to mark his place in space and time,” she says. In fact, I was thinking of the same work, entitled Vara de madera de doce pies, quemada por un soplete que permite un registro delimitado del cuerpo delineado sobre una superficie, although I saw Gonzalez's drawing more like the chalk outline left behind at a crime scene investigation. When the exhibition is over, this work will disappear.
At this point, we have reached our next destination, a small artist's studio apartment on calle San Justo in Old San Juan where Alana Iturralde has installed an enigmatic grouping of her artworks. The exhibition, entitled All That is Solid Melts into Air, presents seven ethereal pieces: El último toque de Midas, is made from ten tiny cake-like disks of porcelain and gold which she has arranged by placing one disk under each of her fingers and thumbs, with her hands spread as wide as possible. Iturralde says it is her intention that whoever would later install this work, place the disks using their own hands as the measure. In this way that person would directly become a part of the artwork. Cruces/cross is a small work on paper made from embroidery on canvas; Botanica rara, comprises a small grouping of dried plants, the leaves and branches have been coated with powdered purple pigment. Sobre plantas Carnivora, is made from rope which has been dyed blue and tied into knots; Poncho sentimental made from heavy cloth, calls to mind the felt shroud used by Joseph Bueys in his seminal 1974 performance where he shared an art gallery with a coyote; Monolith was created by pouring cement into a piece of fiber-board packing material such that the sculpture represents a cast of the mold originally used to make the the fiber-board packing material. Estumados is a small group of drawings made by rubbing the page with a charcoal covered cloth. Iturralde's exhibition is in the spirit of the 1980's when artists took the initiative to exhibit their work in apartments and art studios on New York City's Lower East Side, which led to a proliferation of artist run galleries and artist collectives, including ABC-NoRio, Patti Astor's Fun Gallery, and Gracie Mansion's tiny gallery in her one room apartment.
Back on the street in Old San Juan, I ask Lillian what other body-art artists or artworks she might have interfered with if she had the chance. “Well,” she says, “I wish I had been born earlier so that I could have participated in some of Alan Kaprow's happenings, or the Pop Art events of Claes Oldenberg, Robert Whitman and Jim Dine. I know that I would have found a mattress or something to break the fall when Yves Klein jumped from that roof in Paris. Who knows, if I had been there, I might have tried to get Carolee Schneeman, Marina Abramovic, or Karen Finley to let me stand in their place.”
The third stop on our art tour is galeria 20-20 on calle Cerra in Santurce to see the exhibition Entrenudos, organized by Sofia Bastidas and the Miami based Dwelling Projects, an organization which supports the creation, presentation and dissemination of contemporary art through an artists residency program and various exhibitions. Bastidas has brought together five artists plus a two-person collective, all working with fibers and fabrics to make art using materials normally found in hand crafts such as weaving and macrame. Of particular interest is a group of drawings on raw canvas by Greisy Lora of Miami, made using a sewing machine and multi-colored threads. From a distance they look like traditional pen and ink drawings. Close inspection reveals the stitches and elaborate cross-stitches used to create the images. Lillian says that the newest sewing machines can be programmed to reproduce a scanned image, “but you still have to work very carefully to feed the fabric into the machine.” In addition to the drawings, there are three small pieces that look like pages torn from a diary. I can make out a few of the words. It seems to say: if you really think about it, I mean really think about it, like really think about it and so forth, and seriously take a second, then you might ... Also of note is a set of three drawings by Leila Mattina of San Juan, which look like scientific diagrams. Careful analysis shows them to be a record of all the moles, beauty marks and blemishes found on the bodies of three people, all in their twenties. Mattina has included herself in this grouping, and it is interesting to see that she has nearly twice as many markings as the other two. Each portion of the body: head, arms, legs, torso, neck, back, etc. is indicated by a line radiating out from a central hemisphere. The marks are plotted along each radian and have been painted with special glow-in-the-dark colors. When the lights in the gallery are turned off, the drawings leave an eerie but mesmerizing after-image.
On our way out the door I ask Lillian again about her willingness to disrupt various body-art performances from the 1970's and 80's. “What about Vito Acconci?” I ask her. “Sure,” she replies, “I could have stepped in for him in any number of his conceptual video works.” “And Hermann Nitsch?” I ask. “No,” she says, “not him. Those Germans were too extreme for me. But, I would have jumped up on the stage with Gilbert and George to sing a few verses of Underneath the Arches.”
Link to article in Spanish, published in En Rojo, Oct. 7, 2014
Alana Iturralde [blog] http://iturraldeleon.tumblr.com
galeria 20-20 [Facebook] https://www.facebook.com/galeria2020
Dwelling Projects [website] http://www.dwellingprojects.com
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