It was in the seventies of the last century when the famous motto the personal is political was created , one that in the artistic field allowed the women to remove the housewives from their holes, to transfer their defiance to those figures of the domestic, denouncing with humor the psychopathologies caused by their pre-determined passage through the stages of life: from chaste bride to happy mom, from seductive pin-up to fiftyish women secluded in […]
The world has become a beehive leaky of peepholes from which to observe without being seen, virtual labyrinths traversed by stalkers. Obviating the Orwellian resonances, this world populated by spied spies can be read poetically like songs of love. In the film of Jean Genet (a chant d’amour) the peepholes practiced in the cells seem holes drilled by the uncontrollable force of desire, which slips through all the cracks, deceiving even the jailer. Masculine universes, […]
Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond categories of sex because the designated subject is not a woman, either economically, politically or ideologically (…) We are escapees from our class as runaway slaves (Monique Wittig, One is not born a woman, 1981) Until the 1970s feminism had been confined to a more or less homogeneous territory of political struggle for gender equality, but in the 1980s there were movements, artists and […]
It is so respectable to wake up and worry about «what I should wear» as reflecting on whether a sculpture has the proper shape, material and scale. I dare say that sometimes it’s the same exercise. This statement, which I rescued from a lecture given by Ana Laura Aláez in Arteleku, gives us the key to understanding the start of her career as artist and her evolution. For her, self-expression (first in the dressing room) […]
If we consider head hair as a psychic displacement of pubic hair (see Charles Berg’s The Unconscious Meaning of Hair), a broad panoply of sexual references is displayed according to the type of cut, tonsure, length, curl, color … leading to simplistic equations as shaved=celibacy or castration; long and red-haired=hot pussy. The history of art follows these symbolic displacements by immortalizing them in icons, such as the perfidious Lilith combing her red hair (Rossetti’s oil), […]
In the rites of passage the individual is separated from the community and then regrouped assuming a new status. At the threshold between these two phases, human being becomes transitional, remains in suspense, without social reality, and this invisibility allows him to move on the margins of the consensual structure. The «liminal person» is a creative power, liberated from all taboo. Within the ritual it is represented with asexual or bisexual attributes. The anthropologist Victor […]
If a work is too legible it is not art, it is propaganda, Andrés Serrano argued in relation to the visual reflection of his ambiguous religious feeling, blasphemous for some and beautiful for others, because it is this breadth of readability that bothers, especially when one appeals to the purity of the impure or, rather, when the latter term is emptied of all meaning. Fernando Bayona also observes the world through the flesh, while his […]
The moderns say that loving does not imply dependence, that true love only emerges between independent spirits, between autonomous beings. Sweden took this idea to the extreme of becoming the country with more people living and dying alone. The documentary by Erik Gandini, The Swedish Theory of Love shows how the family of the future (claimed by Olof Palme) has mostly taken the uniparental form of single mother self-inseminating at home. The Nordic model has […]
