Monthly Archives: March 2013

All the Guts, Without the Glory

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Taylor: Performance art, utilized by the likes of Carolee Schneeman and Marina Abramovic, placed the (gendered) body at the center, allowing for a means of expression or critique with no separation between art and artist.

Fraser: In her writings and her performances, Andrea Fraser asks her audience to consider the absurd contradictions of the art museum as an institution, a space that claims to serve the “public” but more often than not serves only the elite few.

Wilson and Corrin: Installation artist Fred Wilson critiques the museum’s overwhelming paucity of representations of people of color (specifically of people of Black or American Indian descent) and seeks to “de-neutralize” the public perception of the museum.

Andrea Fraser’s smart critiques of the institution that is the art museum thrilled me. I found the scripts from her performances amusing but, more than that, refreshing. Admittedly, I speak as an outsider from the “art world”, but Fraser’s playful but politically-charged work seems to me to fill a desperate void. In this “art world”, if I may indeed be so bold as to use such a homogenous image, I have the distinct impression that art and the artist take themselves too seriously. Fraser’s work admits and then critiques that nearly ubiquitous attitude, and the lack of brave, sharp-tongued individuals criticizing their own works or worlds. As an artist, she critiques the existing discourses surrounding art and, more specifically, the art museum… And the most wonderful part is that she does it quite literally within the museum itself! This, for me, is the proverbial cherry on top. She performs this critique from within the structure she is critiquing, speaking to the difficulty of a divorce between art/artist and the museum. She is able to deliver this critique, yes, but only within this sanctioned context. The “over-identification” observed in her work is endlessly fascinating, drawing on social tensions through the brilliant use of raciaized and class-based clichés and familiar “us” vs. “them” rhetoric. Fraser becomes Jane Castleton, the incarnation of the problematic nature of the art museum, the very thing she is fighting against.

Enjoyable and enlightening as these texts were for me, I was, like Fraser, disappointed to read about the “Sensation” controversy at the Brooklyn Museum and the relative silence of the museum. Art and the artist are not defended by what is arguably the most important part of the art world, the museum. Instead, questions of the exhibition of art/artist are chalked up to “consumerism”, and some bland desires to appropriate “pop culture” or “subculture” (which, as Fraser points out, raises even more questions on power dynamics within the museum). One must wonder if critiques of the institution itself, critiques like those from the likes of Fraser  or Fred Wilson, have been heard at all.

Perhaps it is my relative ignorance of art and the “art world” to which I keep referring, but it seems that while many artists rightly criticize the socio-political issues of their time, few seem to have critiqued one of the primary means by which they are able to critique, which is to say, the museum. I am left with the impression that the gaze of the artist rarely turns inward, so artists like Fraser, while they demonstrate incredible courage, are left quite alone in their bravery.

A Personal and Political Art History

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Chicana artistic sensibilities are bordered.  They emerge in a borderland of ambiguity and flux. #anzaldua #latorre

#YolandaLopez also contributed images of La Virgen that affirmed the mulitplicity of #Chicana(@) identity

As an art historian I was most drawn to Latorre’s assertion that the language that contributes to the binary separation between artist and intellectual must be rejected in order to disrupt the subject/object binary that underlies it.  Art history that is committed to radical change must contribute to dismantling such structuring principles but must at the same time affirm cultural-historical specificities.  The opening up of art history to interdisciplinary and creative experimentation is crucial if we are to maintain its relevance to experiences beyond those privileged to accept the cannon without complaint. I think that art historical treatments of Chicana art represent a crucial case study in experimental approaches that destabilize monolinear narratives of art history while respecting the parameters of identity politics.  How personal is the political and how political is the art history?

How do we negotiate the need to maintain the specificity of Chicana identity when it is characterized by slips and fissures that generate multiple meanings and experiences across time?  I found it interesting that while Chicana artists working in the 1970s felt alienated by second wave feminism and sought to forge images that they could better relate to, it is possible that Latin@s of my generation might feel a break, in turn, from this tradition.  Recognizing that I am not Chican@ and that this certainly contributes to the distance I might feel from this artwork (and that I should not necessarily seek to identify with these images,) I do feel it is important to appreciate both the value and the limitations of these representational vocabularies.  These artists certainly contribute to the affirmation of Chicana identity against its erasure in male-dominated discourses of Chicanidad and Latinidad, yet I am interested in the limitations of this art in perpetuating symbolic economies that are no longer as relevant to Latin@s of my generation.  Unfortunately we face the paradox of contemporary art that embraces dispersion and flux to such a degree that the specific is no longer visible.  What kinds of images/performances/gestures/language exist in the space between roses and pomegranates and the white cube?

“Purity Culture as Rape Culture”: The Traditional Norms that Promote (Physical and Psychological) Violence Against Women

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Lopez: In the wake of an international, male-led smear campaign against Alma Lopez’s 1999 digital print, Lopez’s commentary offers insight into the underlying patriarchal ethos which disables a portion of our society from seeing “Our Lady” as anything other than a “tart”, “stripper”, and “devil.”

Latorre: In Guisela Latorre’s piece we see how the double exclusion of Chicana women from both patriarchal discourse and the White, middle-upper class-oriented feminist movement gave rise to politicizing and decolonizing methods of creativity in the world of Chicana art.

This week’s readings for our class interestingly coincide with a handful of articles assigned in my WGST Women and Health course, specifically on the topic of “rape culture.” The great sense of horror that I felt reading through Alma Lopez’s piece about the threat of censorship by art institutions, the vilification of the female body, and the candid condemnation of any threat to a patriarchal, Chicano society is almost identical to the feelings I experienced reading through an article on “rape culture” in India.

The WGST article that I am specifically referring to was written in response to the tragic gang rape that occurred on a public bus in New Delhi late last year.

(http://prospect.org/article/purity-culture-rape-culture)

Just above, I’ve posted the link about this barbaric crime to help initiate my argument that the hostile, cultural climate that Alma Lopez describes in her article, Silencing Our Lady, parallels the “rape culture,” (referenced in the link) that maintains a sense of entitlement for men to denounce women and their bodies as inferior, defiant, and worthy of corrective abuse.

According to my WGST article entitled, Purity Culture is Rape Culture, rape, in its modern form, is not about sex, it is about power. “Rape culture lives anywhere that has a ‘traditional’ vision of women’s sexuality. A culture in which women are expected to remain virgins until marriage is a rape culture. In that vision, women’s bodies are for use primarily for procreation or male pleasure. They must be kept pure…This attitude gives men license to patrol-in some cases with violence- women’s hopes for controlling their lives and bodies.”

Referring back to Lopez’s article we see this concept of “rape culture” play out comfortably in the society that she grew up in. A society in which woman’s bare breasts, exposed legs and belly are seen as “offensive” and blasphemous while the male nude is anointed as god-like in countless religious institutions across the nation sounds a lot like a society that promotes violence against women.  A society wherein a rape survivor who to tell her story is held “on trial” for putting herself in a dangerous situation sounds a lot like Lopez’s reality. Any society that is threatened by the voice and agency of women is definitely a society that we should be concerned about.

I suppose I write all of this to say that I am just as disturbed by Lopez’s testimony as I am by the countless articles I read on the normalcy of rape in patriarchal societies. I feel relieved by the fact that the art institution chose not to remove Lopez’s work, despite the violent opposition. However, in the end, it is the sizable body of people who fervently resist the right of a woman to create a positive and empowering image of herself that really makes me shutter.

 

Chicana Art: “Breaking the Taboo on Sexuality”

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Latorre: Cultivated from a cultural group that initially wrote off gender and sexuality issues as specific to Anglo Americans, the innovative Chicana movement does not have nearly enough scholarly visibility as it should.

Lopez:  Lopez evokes the experiences of latina women through modernizing the Virgen de Guadalupe in her digital print entitled Our Lady.

After reading both pieces by Latorre and Lopez along with doing some more outside research of my own, I found the initial ambivalence of Chicana artists to identify with the feminist movement interesting.  A particular passage in Latorre’s piece comes to mind when thinking about this quandary: “Concerns over gender and sexuality were either relegated to the margins or completely silenced.  Many activists at the time, both male and female, held the perception that these were Anglo-American issues that would divide el movimiento and dilute its political effectivemness.” Latorre p.12

However, in the first few pages of Lopez’s piece Silencing Our Lady, we see that this belief is proven to be wrong.  In fact, it seems as though the activists use the excuse of political dilution to mask their real concern of bringing the issues of gender and sexuality within the community to light.  Unsurprisingly, we see this represented in the violent attitudes of men toward young women in reaction to the digital mural that portrayed female residents of the Estrada Courts Housing Projects entitled Las Four (below).

Source: http://www.rowan.edu/artbytes/abnhtm/art/alma.htm

Lopez’s digital piece Our Lady, which features a more contemporary, sexualized version of the Virgen de Guadalupe also sparked an intense debate spear headed mostly by male religious leaders.  Because this piece accentuates female strength and freedom through such an iconic religious figure, we see (as we did in the reaction to her Las Four piece) patriarchy’s attempt to censor and stifle anything that is not dominated by, or pleasing to men.

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In the article “Chicana Art and Scholarship on the interstices of our discipline” Latorre explores the concept of intersectionality as it pertains to Latina women as members of the art world. Latorre argues Latina artist use art as an outlet for social commentary on both their experience as women and Latino. Latorre suggests some Latina artists feel obligated to use their talents as artists to call attention to the injustices that affect marginalized groups of people. This concept of using art for social commentary reminds me of the art exhibition “ Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” I went to at MoMA Ps1 in New York City. Similarly, art works displayed in this exhibit all made social commentary on the social injustice issues facing Black people in Los Angeles from 1960-1980. I feel partitas offer invaluable contributions to the advancements of their race and gender when they utilize their art for social commentary., especially when they are minority female artists. Their art captures the raw emotions of historic events that textbooks leave out and are unable to convey. For this reason I cherish art created by artists from marginalized groups because it allows me to step back in time and feel what they must have been feeling during the time of their struggle when the art was created.

Censorship, Patriarchy and Exclusion

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Guisela Latorre: Latorre highlights the ways in which Chicano/a artists address issues of sexuality, gender and exclusion from a perspective outside the patriarchal norm.

Alma Lopez: By depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe as a modern woman, Alma Lopez incited a great uproar amongst religious men who deemed the work sacrilegious and offensive, raising issues of context, censorship and modern identities.

Alma Lopez’s Our Lady raises distinct issues of censorship and the role of the museum. Wielding complete curatorial control over a body of works gives museums the right to choose which works are shown and, fundamentally, which are not. In regard to Silencing the Lady, critical voices vehemently rejected the appropriation of the iconography of the Virgin Mary. The so-called offensive nature of the work depended upon the way in which the artist re-appropriated the image of the Virgin Mary and depicted a modern, sexualized version of the cultural and religious icon. Furthermore, intellectual and scholarly camps voiced resounding support for both the artist and Our Lady in resistance to censorship, but also in support of the ways in which the work incorporated women into the cultural narrative. The work thus highlights Guisela Latorre’s recognition of the ways in which the patriarchy excludes anyone they deem other. This distinction therefore highlighted gender, race and class as modes of exclusion and denial. By showing the Virgin in this way, the artist complicated religious imagery, but more importantly, the image confronted and undermined the whiteness and masculinity of the offended men. In this scenario, the exhibiting museum could easily have removed the so-called offensive work, but instead opted to keep the work on display. However, in the context of the museum (and not, say, a church), the act of censorship holds no grounds.

Censorship and Power

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I found myself surprisingly moved by Alma Lopez’s “Silencing Our Lady”. As a female Chicana artist, Lopez faces incredible obstacles to being recognized as an artist. The criticism of her work Our Lady, and the demands of those attempting to censor this work, truly exposes the inherently patriarchal nature of the art world. Her response to attempted censorship further illustrates the dangers of censorship in the art world.
Lopez was told again and again by protesters that she did not have the right to interpret this specific cultural icon in the way she is portrayed in Lopez’s print. I would like to ask: who gave these people the right to declare who can or cannot interpret something through art?
The fact that the main organizers of this protest were male is indeed significant. Because of their status as activists and religious leaders, these men (Jose Villegas, Deacon Anthony Trujillo, and New Mexico Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan) they believe they have the right to censor Lopez’s art. Their notion is patriarchal: they, as male leaders, know better than any woman.
If these men and their followers had succeeded, the installation would have been removed from the exhibit, effectively censoring the print. But, as Lopez questions, how would this affect the people who found inspiration and meaning in her work? What does it mean if people in positions of power are able to silence the expression of marginalized individuals?
For myself, I was glad to learn that Lopez was not censored and that the exhibit continued as planned.

Fears of the Feminine

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Latorre: How can we correct the lack of scholarship on Chican@ and Latin@ art, especially when the little scholarship that exists is male-dominated?

Lopez: La Virgen de Guadalupe serves as a unifying cultural symbol for Latina/@ and Chicana/@ communities because of her ubiquity and her embodiment of Anzaldúa’s famed “borderlands”.

As I was lucky enough to have the chance to take a class on the Virgin Mary with Sharon Elkins in the religion department, I was already familiar with the works and writings of the brilliant Alma Lopez. I was given the opportunity to read her collection Our Lady of Controversy, which contained the Cisneros piece she alludes to in “Silencing Our Lady: La Respuesta de Alma”, as well as see beautiful reproductions of her work and the work of her fellow Chicana artists. Lopez boldly reclaims La Virgen, interprets her in her own way and unapologetically shares that interpretation with us. She sees La Virgen in herself and in her fellow Latinas/Chicanas. As Cisneros ponders in her essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess, doesn’t La Virgen have dark nipples and a dark vulva like her? Is La Virgen not a mirror of Chicana/Latina identity, characterized by multiplicity, located on Anzaldúa’s fronteras? It is the tension caused by a history of racism, colonialism, and sexism, a complicated mélange reincarnated in la Virgen, whose body is a familiar “brown and round” as pointed out by one of Lopez’s supporters.

La Virgen suffered in her life, and Lopez draws a parallel between her suffering and the suffering of the multiply marginalized Chicana/Latina. She is, however, not complacent or weak in her suffering. She is instead interpreted by Lopez as empowering, as a strong woman like all the strong, unsung women heros of Lopez’s own life. It is this strength, this resilience, it seems, that terrifies the male viewer. The very body of the young Chicana depicted in Lopez’s work is denounced, seen as sinful, derogatory to Our Lady. But why? For its very femininity? I am brought back to an astute comment made by our classmate Camylle, who suggested the last time we met that the female body is seen as inherently sexual and, by extension, sinful and wrong. This fear of the feminine is in itself terrifying to me – for when will we, the feminine and the women of the world, ever be seen as anything but one side of a dichotomy? Will women be forever denied a sexuality or classified as hypersexual? How can women artists like Lopez rid us of this nonsensical double-standard?

 

Being Latina and a woman: Otherness in the Latino-American Culture and the mainstream art world

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Sentences

Alma Lopez: Lopez speaks as an artist and a scholar about her most controversial piece, a digital print, Our Lady which was adamantly protested by officials of the Catholic Church because of it’s redefinition of the Virgen de Guadalupe in order to address the experience of Latina women.

Guisela M. Latorre: This brief article highlights the importance of and lack of emphasis on feminism during the Chicana/o artistic movement, and also on the invisibility of Latina/o artists in art historical scholarship.

Response

These articles about Latina and Chicana artists opened the discussion of this course particularly in talking about artists beyond the African Diaspora. I found each of these articles especially fascinating, because as someone who has a great interest in African-American artists, it is not often that I get the chance to learn about Latina and Latino artists beyond Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo. I sincerely appreciated Alma Lopez’s discussion of the origins of her reinterpretation of the Virgen de Guadalupe, entitled Our Lady. I thought the beginning of her argument that revolved her participation in the Caesar Chavez Walkathon in which she saw murals in East Los Angeles that feature male heroes in the greater Latino community but no female heroines. Or the protest of Our Lady conducted predominantly by males who did not have any understanding of how the Virgen de Guadalupe connects to Lopez or other women Latina or not. I think this provides an explanation for the nature of Lopez work, which explores depictions of the female Latina body in the guise of colonialism and sexism.

The discussion of how Latina women were represented in mainstream Latino, Latino-America and American culture as opposed to Lopez’s depiction relates directly to Lopez and Latorre’s critiques of institutions such as art museums and spaces of higher education. Lopez describes how Our Lady was part of a show in Los Angeles at UC Irvine and was not questioned however New Mexico the digitally modified image caused a great ruckus. In the Author’s Note, Lopez explains how Tom Wilson, director of the New Mexico Museums, supported her piece and museums as institutions that should promote learning that requires challenging audiences to contemplate artwork outside of their comfort zone. Latorre also discusses notions of the problem with spaces that privilege art historical study which is often constituted by scholars who may not fully understand the narrative of the artist’s background. I thought Latorre’s mention of bringing non-white artists into the scholarship of art history was brilliant.

Have the Political Movements Taken Their Dose of the Artistic Supplement?

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“Chicana Art and Scholarship on the Interstices of Our Disciplines”, Guisela Latorres: The Chicana art movement tackled issues ignored by the political movement, such as gender, colonialism, and sexuality
“Silencing Our Lady: La Respuesta de Alma”, Alma Lopez: Our Lady stood as visual imagery provoking discussion about the gender relations, art, and religion of Chicana/o culture

Blog:
In class last week, we engaged in a skype conversation with Professor Leigh Raiford on her extensive work and our class material. At one point in the conversation, when she addressed the Black Civil Rights movement, she mentioned that “We don’t need another male leader like Malcolm or Martin; but an inclusive space for the diverse African diaspora.” I interpreted this to mean that the existing male leaders and patriarchal views are not necessary for the progress of the political movement. What is necessary is the acknowledgment of diverse identities within the movement. I found that her idea can also be applied to the Chicana/o movement that we are exploring this week. In the article “Chicana Art and Scholarship on the Interstices of Our Disciplines,” Guisela Latorres acknowledges that the Chicano/a political movement promoted nationalism, el movimento, and addressed issues of race and class within the ethnic group; but it ignored the topics of gender and sexuality within the community. Chicana artists, such as Alma Lopez, Juana Alicia, and Irene Perez, use their work to address these silenced subjects head on and provoke discussions on such controversial topics. These artistic female leaders mark a certain relationship between political movements and their corresponding artistic movements. Often the political movements, like Raiford tries to explain, take on a patriarchal perspective, addressing the shared marginalization of the group but ignoring the internal marginalization of women and other identities. This approach acknowledges the common identity of the ethnic group, rather than acknowledging the diversity of identities within the movement. Artistic movements, such as the Chicana art movement, tackle difficult subject matters which the patriarchal perspective of the political movement overlooks. In such a way, artistic movements supplement the progress of the corresponding political movement as a reaction to its ignorance. The irony of this situation is too hard to ignore as political movements attempt to address the ignorance of others yet ignorance can still exist in a political movement. Not all hope is lost as long as political movements take their dose of corresponding artistic movements, prescribed by Dr. Hinds.