Miguel Lopez Feminisms Agains Art Histor

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE: This is the lie authoritarianism always tells. No thing how absolute the regime's ability may seem, there are always ways to push back, to reject, to subvert—although finding the interstices where activeness is possible may require immense courage and creativity. In a conversation focused on Latin America's traditions of resistance, art historian JULIA BRYAN-WILSON and curator MIGUEL A. LÓPEZ survey queer, feminist, and ethnic practices that nullify the distinction between fine art and activism and locate spaces of possibility under conditions of impossibility.

JULIA BRYAN-WILSON: In May 2017, you lot and I both spoke at a conference at the Museu de Arte in São Paulo (masp); that aforementioned weekend, nosotros attended a trans-rights rally on Avenida Paulista that included many exuberant public expressions of gender variance. Jean Wyllys—the only openly gay fellow member of Brazil's parliament—was 1 of the other speakers, and we heard him talk well-nigh how theorists like Stuart Hall influenced his policy approaches to structural racisms, class stratification, and sexuality. In the intervening two years, the far-right, homophobic Jair Bolsonaro has been elected president; Rio's blackness queer councilwoman Marielle Franco has been assassinated; and Wyllys, after receiving serious expiry threats, has abandoned his seat and gone into exile.

MIGUEL A. LÓPEZ: The far correct is on the ascent across Latin America. Recent electoral results in countries including Argentina, Colombia, and Chile clearly show an ultraconservative plough, supported by neoliberal economic policies that attempt to assume total control of art, civilization, and education. Inevitably, people feel that we're going back to a time of state repression and censorship. Bolsonaro himself has publicly lauded the use of torture under Brazil's armed forces dictatorship [1964–85].

JBW: Perchance one way to brainstorm this chat is to outset to think together about the range of feminist, queer, and anti-racist activist efforts, inside Brazil and elsewhere, that are putting force per unit area on Bolsonaro'south regime and other nationalist consolidations of power, and to appraise artistic work produced in previous times of crisis in Latin America. Are at that place specific models or collective practices that you find yourself returning to these days?

MAL: Not precisely artistic work, but i style to recollect about those previous moments would be to attend to the reappearance of certain symbols, such as the handkerchief in Argentina. White textile diapers, which were transformed into handkerchiefs worn by the Mujeres y Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo starting in 1977, were a powerful expression of women's demand for the return of those forcibly detained and disappeared during that country'south military machine dictatorship [1976–83]. Now the greenish handkerchief is the main aesthetic marker used by hundreds of thousands of women demanding legal, condom, and free abortions equally part of the #NiUnaMenos feminist motility, which began in 2015 and has led to enormous demonstrations.

JBW: Similar fabrics, when worn on many bodies at the same fourth dimension, can plough a crowd of disparate individuals into a unified visual field—a pussy lid no less than a MAGA cap. It'due south a gesture whose touch translates well for the perpetual scrolling of social media. Beyond the political handkerchief worn during demonstrations, many queer and feminist artists across Latin America—really, all over the world—plow to cloth in their practices. One example is Randolpho Lamonier, who in his Profecias (Prophecies) [2018–] creates prophecies for wishful futures (the first blackness woman president of Brazil takes office; a queer army burns churches and inaugurates a secular state) that echo the tradition of sewn protest banners.

MAL: In add-on to feminist and queer activism, indigenous communities are fighting against the colonial impositions of structures of governance and the erasure of the memory of the racist, genocidal violence on which the nation-states of this hemisphere and much of the Global South are founded. In 2016, fourteen Q'eqchi' women won a guilty verdict against old military officers tried for crimes of rape and murder in Republic of guatemala. According to Maya K'iche' sociologist Gladys Tzul Tzul, this case was a turning point in judicial history: the first time that a national court ruled on charges of sexual slavery during an armed conflict. Throughout the trial the plaintiffs kept their bodies and faces covered with Mayan perrajes (shawls). Afterwards the verdict, they removed them. That gesture was, I believe, non but a ways of protection from retaliation (which was a significant reason, for sure), only too a way of taking shelter under the Mayan legacy. It was a strong affidavit of a communal fabric that had not been entirely cleaved, despite the violence.

JBW: It is imperative to see the interrelationships—and the discontinuities—among queer, feminist, and indigenous activism, equally discussed by Macarena Gómez-Barris in her contempo volume Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas [2018]. The far correct certainly understands that these movements are related, that all of them are about who is counted as fully human.

MAL: The encounter of feminisms with anticolonial indigenous struggles is peculiarly threatening for conservative political groups, because at that intersection, the focus becomes not only eradicating patriarchy, but also dismantling the persistent racist structures that organize club and the neoliberal, extractivist evolution model. Three years ago, in Honduras, the feminist and Lenca indigenous activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in her sleeping room. People and communities that alive outside or try to escape the Western model of life and capitalism'due south productive demands are existence assassinated with impunity.

JBW: Some of the beginning actions Bolsonaro took later on being inaugurated were to begin rescinding gay-rights protections and to disenfranchise indigenous communities in the Amazon.

MAL: Which were among his campaign promises. Nosotros are talking about a history that goes back to the first indigenous women who resisted colonization—in 1492. Those forces of resistance are nonetheless present in many performative experiments that get beyond the dominant elitist structures of contemporary art. I'm thinking of the enraged public interventions of Bolivia's Mujeres Creando, who define themselves every bit "indigenous, whores and lesbians; together, mixed in sisterhood"; or the transgender counter-history of the Museo Travesti del Perú [Transvestite Museum of Peru, 2003–13], a project past the late philosopher and drag queen Giuseppe Campuzano. Campuzano as well created and used textiles—weavings, Andean dresses—and nongendered masks to reclaim a nonidentitarian, non-Western memory of sexually dissident bodies.

JBW: The aesthetic force of the perrajes in the Guatemalan courtroom crucially depended on the use of handiwork to register connections between the oppression of women and of native peoples. In a similar way, many contemporary feminist artists are incorporating historical fabric methods into their work. In Teresa Margolles's serial "Nosotros Have a Common Thread" [2013–15], she enlisted artist-embroiderers from Brazil, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Usa to sew designs on fabric that had been in contact with people who suffered violent deaths (mostly women but also some men, including Eric Garner), or with the sites of their death—for example, the work about Garner was embroidered on top of a textile that was dragged across the sidewalk on which he was killed. Their techniques of embroidering were non yet, only as the vehement acts they refer to are local and specific.

MAL: I know how central the forms of political resistance unraveled in textiles, threads, fibers, and fabric are to your recent writings. Amateur textile crafts highlight narratives of amalgamation and melancholia belonging. I'k wondering how these handmade pieces of fabric, their wear dimension, and their capacity to acknowledge a collective memory tin can help united states rethink or confront the different kinds of hierarchies that are usually present when we talk near art, politics, and activism.

JBW: Absolutely. Extra-institutional, amateur, and non–fine artmaking are all primal to my theorizations of what is also frequently a very simplistic yoking of the terms art and activism, with no interrogation of the presumptions around those terms. So many practices of resistant visuality—including, in some contexts, "craft"—accept in the past been pushed out of the category of fine art. Merely I also don't desire to give up on this strange, troubled affair called "art" as a specialized realm of cosmos that puts ideas into circulation, nor do I desire to completely dismiss museums as possible sites where new narratives tin sally. We meet this emergence in Campuzano's Transvestite Museum.

MAL: I'grand with you on not giving upwardly the category of art. What I'g saying is a reflection on the construction of valorization that usually reinforces white, male, Western privilege. We both touched on related themes in our contributions to the symposium at the opening of "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985" at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2017. You talked virtually Cecilia Vicuña and mentioned the Chilean tradition of handcrafted arpilleras (burlap-backed appliqués). I chosen into question a notion of artistic "radicality" solely premised on a Western understanding of the avant-garde and the political body. In that framework—that is, an existing hierarchical relationship between art forms—mixed languages and representational systems related to popular, rural, or indigenous civilisation and noesis are usually not present.

JBW: Yeah, information technology's illuminating to identify Vicuña's work next to the usually anonymously sewn Pinochet-era arpilleras, considering the comparing shows the flexibility of textiles: They can signify as both industrially produced and handmade—they are understood as looking backward at the past and as glancing ahead at the future. You are curating a Vicuña retrospective at the Witte de With in Rotterdam opening later this month. How are you approaching these debates?

MAL: In the process of organizing the testify, I've found information technology revealing to explore why Vicuña's work—her ephemeral sculptures, her textile-based practice, her performative poetry—was mainly absent from narratives of anti-dictatorship art during Chile's military machine authorities [1973–90]. In 1979, in a solo prove in Chile, she exhibited a number of her paintings (influenced by indigenous art produced in the colonial America of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) that combined Andean philosophy, feminist eroticism, and sociology and popular myths.

JBW: Indeed—and the exhibition I cocurated with Andrea Andersson, currently on view at the Henry Art Gallery, emphasizes how Vicuña's ecological concerns are in dialogue with indigenous Andean philosophies. Because of her folkloric style and her apply of textiles, her many practices were non often viewed as "advanced" Chilean art.

MAL: Exactly. The paintings she exhibited then were incomprehensible in an environment dominated by performances and public art actions; they didn't fit in with what was labeled as "political art" according to the prevailing aesthetics of metropolitan centers. About of them were perceived as archaic or primitivist and even classified as merely bad painting. In the retrospective, which is titled "Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure," nosotros are presenting a broad range of materials that could aid the states reframe ideas of political appointment, including documentation of the spontaneous deportment of Tribu No, the poetry group founded by Vicuña in the late 1960s; an important option of her paintings produced in the '60s and '70s; and the silk-and-cotton wool banners she made in response to the Vietnam State of war.

JBW: Seeing all this piece of work of hers together will make the example for Vicuña non just every bit a theorist of text and textiles simply also equally a pioneer in her advocacy for what she called a "sensuous politics." My essay in your evidence's catalogue describes her delivery to an erotic socialism and to a style that could be chosen deliberate or defiant amateurism.

MAL: Aye, her attention to what she called "the other poetry"—bearding, nonprofessional creative practice—and its capacity to fertilize new forms of life offers a conceptual model that's very dissimilar from those generally articulated by Western, masculine aesthetics of activist art. This is something that you also stressed in your book Fray: Art and Textile Politics [2017], where you lot highlighted the fact that Vicuña's work was dismissed or not considered serious art considering of its ethereal quality and small size.

JBW: Vicuña ranges beyond so many different scales—often she works with what I call up of as polemical smallness. Since 1966, she has made very diminutive all the same extraordinarily stiff sculptures: her precarios. It is useful to keep in mind that sometimes economic or political circumstances impel ane to work small—peradventure becauae of a lack of resources or materials, perchance because the work needs to exist able to be quickly hidden to fly under the radar of censorship. A show yous recently co-organized, currently on view at TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica, about the ethnic painter Rosa Elena Curruchich, whose canvases are quite tiny, is a case in point.

MAL: Rosa Elena was the offset known female painter in San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. She was part of a family unit of painters (her grandpa Andrés Curruchich became renowned in the '50s). Even so, her pictorial work, produced since the mid-'70s, has non been well received considering of the prejudices associated with the strongly masculine tradition of painting in her community. The miniature format was necessary because much of her piece of work was washed in secret. But the smallness besides allowed her to ship the paintings discreetly during Guatemala's civil war [1960–96]. Rather than offer an exoticized image modeled for tourist consumption, her paintings propose a situated representation that vindicates the function of women within indigenous social organization and acknowledges the social value of feminized labor usually ignored by male painters.

JBW: I was recently appointed adjunct curator at MASP, and nosotros have had a lot of conversations near an upcoming exhibition that focuses on women artists before 1900, and about how the establishment called "fine art" has itself been structured to omit craft and native and female makers. And so to but include oil paintings or sculpture would be to overlook massive contributions made by women in terms of ceramics, weavings, or things like botanical illustrations. Of course, gendered divisions of labor were not the aforementioned in every location across fourth dimension—dismantling these assumptions is vital.

MAL: I agree. Going beyond the colonial vision of Western art history is crucial to reclaiming the cultural value of important creators who worked across the radar of institutional attention and outside of official languages of artmaking. That repertoire of aesthetics formed in the shadows of hegemonic fine art-historical rhetoric points to divergent ways of understanding and constructing the contemporary. This applies to fourth dimension-based work as well equally to objects. How exercise you perceive the result of resistant art through the lens of ephemeral or live events?

JBW: The materiality and smallness of Vicuña'due south work is riveting, just at the same time I continue to exist compelled by certain time-based interventions that were monumental, even epic, in scope—like the 1981 action ¡Ay Sudamerica! [Oh South America!] by the Chilean group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), in which vi airplanes flew in formation over Santiago and dropped four hundred thousand leaflets. The choreography of this result blows my mind: almost half a one thousand thousand pieces of paper! Raining downwardly from a squadron of planes! The text was about the necessity of imagination during Pinochet's dictatorship, though it did non direct mention Pinochet. It read, in part: "We are artists, just everyone who works for the enlargement of their spaces in life, fifty-fifty mental ones, is an artist." Hither is a complete reformulation of what an creative person is, and of the transformative office art can play during times of repression. I understand that CADA'south slice has been heroicized, to the detriment of the little crafty works of someone like Vicuña. Still, I find it indispensable.

MAL: Similar in terms of calibration and impact, merely with a very unlike strategy, was a recent project by Tzutujil artist Benvenuto Chavajay, who succeeded in irresolute the name of Guatemala's national stadium to Estadio Nacional Doroteo Guamuch Flores. After Mateo Flores won the Boston Marathon in 1952, the stadium was named in his honor. But Flores was born Doroteo Guamuch, non Mateo. Chavajay helped to recover his original, indigenous name. In Baronial 2016, later two years of bureaucratic wrangling and long meetings with civic groups and local authorities, the name modify was officially approved. This marvelous intervention in the country's social retentivity, its public space and institutions, was a clear demand for the right of self-determination. The contend around this work called attention to the racist structures of Guatemalan society, emphasizing the performative relation between racism and language—how language shapes subjectivity and organizes the globe in unlike means.

JBW: That was an important renaming. But merely as we demand to complicate the category of "art," let's also recollect that "activism" is not always progressive. It tin come from the reactionary Correct, and there is a developing visual civilisation effectually information technology—like the 2017 protests in Brazil in which virulently anti-queer, antifeminist demonstrators burned an effigy of Judith Butler.

MAL: Totally. That is very clear from some recent campaigns launched past religious and "pro-life" groups against ballgame and women's reproductive rights, such as representing in public space images of fetuses that are named as a "person" to construct a faux illustration between abortion and murder. The conservative Right knows how to use symbols and their furnishings in the production of the social body.

"Rosa Elena Paints" is on view at TEOR/éTica, San José, Costa Rica, though May eighteen. "Cecilia Vicuña: Nearly to Happen" is on view at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, though September 15. "Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure" will exist on view May 26–November 11 at the Witte de With, Rotterdam. "Histories of Women"and "Feminist Histories" will exist on view August 23–November 17 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Mod and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adjunct curator at the Museu de arte de São Paulo. She is a 2019–xx Guggenheim fellow.

Miguel A. López is codirector and principal curator of TEOR/éTica, San José, Costa Rica. He is the author of Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia (Dissident fictions in the country of misogyny; Pesopluma, 2019).

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/201905/julia-bryan-wilson-in-conversation-with-miguel-a-lopez-79515

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