Reina Barreto
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The Body as Metaphor in Contemporary Cuban Women’s Art Reina Barreto
U
ntil recently, Amelia Peláez (1896‐1968) and Antonia Eiriz (1929‐1995) were
the two Cuban women artists to achieve the greatest national and international recognition. As art historian Luis Camnitzer states, “…women historically were not a quantitative factor in the production of Cuban art” (161). In addition to the significant contributions of Peláez Juana Borrero, Nélida Zaida del Río as other
THIS STUDY FOCUSES ON CONTEMPORARY CUBAN WOMEN
and Eiriz, Camnitzer lists López, Flora Fong, and notable Cuban women
artists from the past.
ARTISTS WHOSE VISUAL
numerous women artists
ART REFLECTS A
from Cuba, working with
a variety of styles, media,
GENDERED NARRATIVE
and thematic topics, who
have increasingly become
AND A
international exhibition
scholarly reviews,
PREOCCUPATION WITH THE FEMALE BODY.
documentaries.
Today,
the
there
are
subject
of
books, journal articles, interviews,
and
According to Cuban art
historian Abelardo Mena Chicuri, visual art by women in contemporary Cuba has been broadly reflected in the mass media and in exhibitions, catalogues, and books and has expanded the discourses of gender, race, and social groups. In reference to contemporary Cuban art today, the presence of what art critic Adelaida de Juan has called “la mujer pintada” (“the painted woman”)—woman as both subject and object of art—is often cited. This study focuses on contemporary Cuban women artists whose visual art reflects a gendered narrative and a preoccupation with the female body.1 In my analysis Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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I focus on seven prominent Cuban women artists whose work has recently and regularly appeared in art museums and galleries across the United States: Ana Mendieta, Sandra Ramos, Belkis Ayón, Marta María Pérez Bravo, María Magdalena Campos Pons, Tania Bruguera, and Elsa Mora.2 Although the artists featured in this article have often been discussed separately, my intention is to study their work side by side and explore connections and similarities in their artistic production and their use of the female body. This study examines how the artists mentioned above use the female body as a powerful symbolic form in their art. By making the female body, particularly their own, their primary source of imagery, these artists reveal the body as a site for the exploration of personal, gendered, ethnic, and national identities. In the work of the women artists discussed here, the female body transcends its physical boundaries and becomes a space for metaphor and a surface where female representations of identity are generated, inscribed, and negotiated. This study considers how Cuban women artists living on and off the island, and working with a diverse range of styles, media, and themes, use the female body to define the self in relation to different social and cultural contexts. The use of the female body in Cuban woman’s art provides insights into the female condition and serves as a discursive strategy for expressing a preoccupation with self‐identity, insularity, migration, spirituality, and memory. In order to explain the greater visibility and acceptance in Cuban society of women artists and their increase in number in the 1980s and 1990s, several art critics point to recent historical events in Cuba (the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the tightening of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and the Cuban economic crisis known as the “Special Period”), the effects of globalization, the development of art tourism, the Havana Biennial, and free access to higher level academic art training since the 1976 opening of Cuba’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA, the Graduate Institute of Art). The increase in the number of women artists also coincides with the development and wider international acceptance of performance and installation art. Art critic and curator Kerry Oliver‐Smith suggests that despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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the subsequent severe economic crisis in Cuba in the 1980s and early 1990s, “artists have been able to work within a critical arena denied [to] other citizens” and that as a result of economic reforms, “the art profession experienced a dramatic change” (23, 24). This change included the permission given to artists to be self‐employed, earn dollars, travel, and contract their labor overseas. Oliver‐Smith states: “Essentially, artists were able to negotiate as free players in the global art market” (24). Art historian Luis Camnitzer, however, discusses how economic factors play a role in the decision of many artists, including female artists, to live and work outside of Cuba today. Among scholars, it is not uncommon to hear about a Cuban art diaspora, and artists like María Magdalena Campos Pons often make a diasporic identity the focus of their work. Despite the changes to the art profession noted above, Sandra Ramos is the only woman artist mentioned in this study who remains in Cuba. María Magdalena Campos Pons and Elsa Mora now live in the United States, Ana Mendieta and Belkis Ayón are deceased, Marta María Pérez Bravo lives in Mexico, and Tania Bruguera resides in Havana and Chicago. International interest in Cuban women’s art has increased in recent decades, as has recognition for the Cuban‐born artists who have contributed to the history of women’s art in the United States. The recent surge in interest can be noted in the number of museum exhibitions and galleries featuring the work of various generations of women artists from Cuba. In addition to the artists mentioned above, established Cuban‐born artists living in the United States like Gladys Triana, Demi, María Brito, and María Martínez‐Cañas, as well as the newest generation of women artists from Cuba, are increasingly gaining exposure through gallery exhibitions and sales, and in academic studies throughout the United States. Whether they express themselves through photography, performance art, installation art, sculpture, painting, printmaking, or a combination of these, the recent work of Cuban women artists recognizes the body as a product of social, cultural, and political processes. Several of these artists illustrate the idea explained by Elizabeth Grosz that “some concept of the body is essential to understanding social production, Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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oppression and resistance; and that the body need not, indeed must not be considered merely a biological entity, but can be seen as a socially inscribed, historically marked, physically and interpersonally significant product” (140). Their work consciously engages with female embodiment or offers what Moira Gatens refers to as an “embodied perspective” (72). Art historian Mena Chicuri describes an “embodied perspective” as “expressing personal matters within a strong, social context” (60). While Gatens refers to an “embodied perspective” when discussing women’s writing, this term can be applied to Cuban women artists who, without claiming to represent all women, are in their own manner involved in investigating the ways in which women’s bodies are “constructed and lived in culture” (72). This embodied perspective manifests itself in the work of the Cuban women artists mentioned in this study through the following metaphors often cited by critics: the body as canvas, the body as vessel, the body as political site, the body as performance, the body as fountain, the body as altar, the body as mythological figure, the body as fetish, and the body as island. I would add the body as bridge, the body as sacrifice, and the body as memory to the list of metaphors present in the work of Cuban women artists today. The work of all the women artists mentioned at the beginning of this article relates to political themes to some degree, confirming Kerry Oliver‐Smith’s suggestion that political engagement is at the root of Cuba’s art of the 1980s and 1990s. My analysis begins with the body as political site and the performance art of Tania Bruguera. Her art reflects political themes, issues of power, control, and freedom, as well as a concern with historical memory. Eleanor Heartney states: “In Brugueraʹs world, concepts like freedom, liberty and self‐determination are not abstract ideals, but achievements that write their effects on our physical forms” (par. 4). The photographic images of Bruguera’s art reveal the body as a site of politics and performance. In Bruguera’s best‐ known performances, her own body is involved in ritual acts that exemplify what Enrique Fernández describes as “the personal/political, national/cosmopolitan, historical/modern and raw/artful dialectics of Cuban art” (par. 20). Art critic Sandra Sosa Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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Fernández notes that during Bruguera’s performances “an individual gesture is transformed into one with collective meaning” (par. 2). The photographs of Bruguera’s performances portray the artist engaged in ritualized movements, which relate to Sosa Fernández’s comment that “primitive ritual reveals the most hidden corners of our cultural memory and its signifiers. Human conduct becomes a means of understanding society” (par. 2). The emphasis of Bruguera’s performance on the ritual act allows her to explore cultural traditions and the connections between personal and political or national identity. In the photographs of two of her best‐known performances from 1997 and 1998, titled “El peso de la culpa” (“The Weight of Guilt”) and “El cuerpo del silencio” (“The Body of Silence”), Bruguera’s body is bare yet concealed behind a lamb’s carcass and slabs of raw meat. The carcass that hangs across Bruguera’s body recalls the body as a site of sacrifice and submission. Bruguera’s body is a social body, a collective body, a political site of resistance, and a continual materializing of possibilities through performative acts. Like Bruguera, Ana Mendieta’s work is closely tied to performance. Mendieta, who chronologically comes before the other artists mentioned above and whose influence is acknowledged by the later artists, and especially by Bruguera, came to the United States in 1961 at the age of twelve, and later served as a bridge connecting artists in the United States with artists in Cuba. Her art reveals a transformative identity: closely connected to Cuba, nature, the earth, and the female body, yet transient, changing, and ephemeral. Jane Blocker explains the performative quality of Mendieta’s identity: “No one true identity exists prior to the act of performing. No one identity remains stable in and through performance” (25). As Mendieta negotiated identities through her art, she created hybrid earth‐body forms that would share similarities with the female figures and self‐portraits produced by later Cuban women artists. Before her untimely death in New York at the age of thirty‐seven, Mendieta had a brief yet prolific career in environmental, performance, and installation art, as well as in photography, video, and sculpture. She emerged as an artist in the 1970s and Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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embraced the feminist politics and artistic experimentation of the time. Mendieta enrolled in the University of Iowa’s multimedia M.F.A. program where she began to develop her own hybrid form of body and earth art, which she called “earth‐body sculptures.” Between 1973 and 1980, she sought to establish a dialogue between the landscape and the female body by shaping her own body or silhouette into the earth and filling the space with flowers, water, fire, gunpowder, and blood to create her “Silueta Series” on location in Iowa and Mexico. Surrounded by earth and water, and transformed or erased by wind, water, and time, her sculptures represent a union with nature and an effort to temporarily recover her lost homeland of Cuba and the origins of her identity. Mendieta’s creation and recreation of self‐identity through the presence and absence of the body is discussed by Whitney Chadwick, who developed the following representational strategies to analyze the significant presence of the female body and the self‐portrait in women’s art: “Self as Other,” “Self as Body,” and “Self as Masquerade or Absence.” In relation to the “Self as Absence,” Chadwick compares Mendieta’s work to that of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo by stating the following: “Both have enacted the self/body through a registering of its traces and through images that suggest the absent body” (30). The body’s connection with performance and nature, and the allusion to the rituals and symbols of the Afro‐Cuban belief system, Santería, represent the various ways in which Mendieta re‐imagined the female body through her art and sought ways to identify with Cuba. The work of Marta María Pérez Bravo and María Magdalena Campos Pons, both of whom use photography as their means of expression, echoes Mendieta’s combination of the body as performance with the presence of Afro‐Cuban rituals and symbols. In her photographs, Pérez Bravo’s body interacts with religious and symbolic artifacts, making female expression a process of fusion and hybridization. From her early works to the present the following three elements are evident: the use of “her own body, the syncretism of her culture, and her search for meaning and identity” (“M.M. Pérez Bravo”, par. 2). As art critic Grady T. Turner states: “Subjectivity is central to Pérez Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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Bravo’s photographs, which are composed with an underlying symbolism alluding to her personal experience with spirituality” (par. 7). Her work encourages the viewer to think symbolically, to consider the body “as an altar, a vessel, a gate, a temple” (“M.M. Pérez Bravo”, par. 2). In her self‐portraits, Pérez Bravo uses white cloth, shells, candles, beaded necklaces, knives, and herbs, objects often associated with Afro‐Cuban religious rituals and beliefs, as extensions of her own body. In an image from 1999, “Ya no hay corazón” (“No More Heart”) from the series “Cultos paralelos” (“Parallel Cults”), Pérez Bravo’s torso and her crossed arms appear covered with mud upon which countless nails have been inserted, resembling an African nail fetish figure. Through the artist’s use of black and white photography, the focus on the body and the objects is made clear. Her poetic images appear to float in an enigmatic space, which unites art and spirituality and allows the body to serve as a metaphor for personal dreams and visions. Similar to Pérez Bravo’s self‐portraits, the female body in Campos Pons’ photographs and mixed‐media installations operates as a metaphor for both personal experience and Cuba’s unique syncretic culture. She embraces the performative quality of photography and uses her art as a way to explore issues of identity, displacement, memory, acculturation, autobiography, and motherhood. Parts of her body blend with objects to create an embodied narrative that tends toward abstraction yet expresses Campos Pons’ views on immigration, exile, sexuality, and her exploration of her Afro‐ Cuban roots. Some of the repeated objects alluding to her Aftro‐Cuban heritage include strings, ropes, and boat‐shaped vessels. Campos Pons’ works reflect her concern for women, the body, the self, and the celebration of renewal and regeneration that comes from the body. Gendered subjectivity is evident in Campos Pons’ work as she visually comments on the physical and psychological implications of being a woman, and particularly an Afro‐Cuban woman living in the United States. Her installations and photography reflect a diasporic, shifting or divided identity, as well as an identity that is productive and reflected through the metaphor of the body as fountain. In addition to Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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her body, the colors and objects she uses in her performance‐based photography function on a symbolic level that alludes to her personal history, women’s history, and Afro‐Cuban and Pre‐Columbian history. Campos Pons often uses her body as a canvas, as evidenced by the various photographic images of her skin covered with white, blue, red, or yellow paint. The painted and adorned surface of Campos‐Pons’ body acts as a narrative of historical and personal memories, motherhood, ancestors, and Afro‐Cuban religious rituals. Similar to Campos Pons, Belkis Ayón and Sandra Ramos use a combination of autobiography and cultural references with elements of national history. Belkis Ayón’s Afro‐Cuban heritage serves as inspiration for her large‐scale black and white collographs based on the characters, symbols, and rituals of the Abakuá, an all male Afro‐Cuban secret society established in the 1830s and still active in Cuba today. Ayón combines Abakuá mythology with her own imagery to create a highly symbolic visual narrative featuring the presence of a female figure called Sikán. Ayón uses her own body as the model for Sikán and the other silhouetted figures in her prints that often appear trapped or hidden behind masks without mouths. For JoAnn Busuttil, Ayón’s “explorations of the female invading regional and gender restricted traditions were used as a way to investigate underlying issues of a more personal sexual/psychological nature” (7). The female body as a site for the exploration of political, racial, and gender relations is evident in Ayón’s work. Her textured and layered images with their sharp black and white figures and their titles, such as “Arrepentida?” (“Regretftul?”) and “Desobediencia” (“Disobedience”), reveal a conflicted identity portrayed through a body that is often restless, silenced, and sacrificed. As with Ayón’s images, Sandra Ramos’s paintings and prints relate to what Whitney Chadwick calls the “Self as Other,” by which the self is identified with women from other times and places. Ayón identified with Sikán, a young woman from Abakuá mythology, while Ramos created a self‐portrait that merged her face with that of a nineteenth‐century Dutch queen and the Alice of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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Tenniel. In addition to her recurring self‐portrait, at the center of Ramos’s images is the theme of the body as island. In several of her works, Ramos merges her body with geographical characteristics related to Cuba, such as mountains, palm trees, the sea, and the physical contours of the island itself. According to Orlando Hernández, insularity or “the sensation of being isolated, separated from everyone, floating in the middle of the sea, has been a strong stimulant to the imagination of Cuban artists” (27). By equating her body with her island home, Ramos affirms her identity and associates her personal history with the history and destiny of Cuba. Elsa Mora, like several of the women artists this paper mentions, has produced artwork that explores the female body through the use of photography. Mora’s introspective and symbolic self‐portraits reflect aspects of personal identity that are revealed through powerful metaphors and dramatic images. Her two photographic series, “Ejercicios de Silencio” (“Silence Exercises”) and “Perda do Sentido” (“Loss of Sense”) utilize the body as a canvas or surface to express feelings and tell stories. The female body in Mora’s photographic series documents personal rituals, fears, and a sense of loss and loneliness. Mena Chicuri, in his notes on Mora in Cuba Avant‐Garde, reveals that the “Perda do Sentido” series was in response to the suicide in 1999 of Mora’s close friend and fellow artist, Belkis Ayón. In “Perda do Sentido,” Mora’s face, covered in black makeup with the piece’s title written on her forehead, and her hand, placed over her mouth and covered in black painted spots, serve as a canvas for expressing Mora’s sense of loss. The series “Ejercicios de Silencio,” completed during a 2000 residency in Mexico, appears to engage in a dialogue with Marta María Pérez Bravo’s “Cultos Paralelos” (“Parallel Cults”) series begun in 1990. The black‐and‐white prints in both artists’ series feature the female body engaging in private rituals with various objects. By becoming active agents in expressing their own experience and making women’s consciousness of self, body, and exterior world a major subject of their art, contemporary Cuban women artists contribute to the history of female subjectivity and Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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representation both on and off the island. The use of the female body as a symbolic and personal means of expression combined with the experience of diaspora and an interest in spirituality, particularly with the traditions of Santería, characterizes the work of the Cuban women artists in this analysis. The expression of an “embodied perspective,” reflects a desire to imagine and re‐imagine oneself by communicating through one’s own body. The metaphors that emerge in the diverse and complex work of Cuban women artists today, such as the body as political site, the body as performance, the body as canvas, the body as altar, the body as fountain, and the body as island, confirm the body as a point of departure from which these artists can identify a sense of self and create an immediate and personal connection to national and international issues.
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Notes 1
The artists featured in this article are all Cuban born. Although some of the artists live outside of Cuba, they still identify themselves as Cuban artists. Flora González Mandri points out that such is the case with María Magdalena Campos Pons, who even goes further as to position herself in an “in-between” space; between homes, languages, cultures, and artistic media. See: Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and the Arts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006, 185. 2
I am specifically discussing women artists whose works I viewed while attending the 2007 exhibition “Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art From the Farber Collection” at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (University of Florida, Gainesville) and the 2008 exhibition “Unbroken Ties: Dialogues in Cuban Art” at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale.
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Works Cited Blocker, Jane. Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print. Busuttil, JoAnn. Cuba: Five Odysseys. Northridge: California SU, 2001. Print. Camnitzer, Luis. New Art of Cuba. Austin: University of Texas P, 2003. Print. Chadwick, Whitney. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self‐Representation. Cambridge: The MIT P, 1998. Print. Fernández, Enrique. “Cuban Art, Multiple Themes Explored at UF Show.” Miami Herald. 17 June 2007. Web. 13 June 2014. . Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Philosophy, Subjectivity and the Body: Kristeva and Irigaray,” in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Grosz (eds). Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory. Boston: Northeastern University P, 1986. Print. Heartney, Eleanor. ʺTania Bruguera at LiebmanMagnan.ʺ Art in America 90.3 (2002): 131. FindArticles.com. Web. 10 July 2014. . Hernández, Orlando. “The Pleasure of Reference.” Art Cuba: The New Generation. Ed. Holly Block. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001: 25‐29. Print. Discovery: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies | v.2 no.1 | xxxxxxError!
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Juan, Adelaida de. 1996. “La mujer pintada en Cuba.” Temas 5 (1996): 38‐45. Print. Mena Chicuri, Abelardo. “María Magdalena Campos Pons,” in Kerry Oliver‐Smith. Cuba Avant‐Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art From the Farber Collection. Gainesville: Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, 2007. Print. “M.M. Pérez Bravo: Past Exhibitions.” Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Company. Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Company. 4 Nov. 1999. Web. 13 Jan. 2014. . Oliver‐Smith, Kerry. Cuba Avant‐Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art From the Farber Collection. Gainesville: Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, 2007. Print. Sosa Fernández, Sandra. “Tania Bruguera.” The H Magazine. Ceiba Publications. 2003. Web. 23 July 2014. . Turner, Grady T. “Scene/Seen. Marta María Pérez Bravo.” Women in Photography International. July‐Sept. 2001. Web. 9 Sept. 2014. .
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About the Author Dr. Reina Barreto earned a Ph.D. in Spanish from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on Cuban women writers and artists and issues related to gender, identity, and diaspora. Her publications include: “Transformation, Space, and Creativity in Maya Islas’ Lifting the Tempest at Breakfast” (Women’s Gaze: Female Visual Narratives and Narrations of the Visual in the Luso‐Hispanic World, a special issue of Letras Femeninas); “Gender and Identity in the Art of Ana Mendieta, Belkis Ayón, and Sandra Ramos” (Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies); “Subversion in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab” (Decimonónica); and “Utopia Deferred: The Search for Paradise in Julieta Campos’s El miedo de perder a Eurídice” (Caribe). Dr. Barreto is a tenured professor at Peninsula College.
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