Archaeologies of the body (or sex in public spaces)
André Mesquita
Translation | Gavin Adans
Translation | Gavin Adans
“Art is born of coitus between the male and female elements
of which we are all composed, and they are
more balanced in the case of artists than of other men.
It results from a kind of incest, of love of self
for self, of parthenogenesis.”
Jean Cocteau, 1930
In Monica Rizzolli’s “Fêmea” [Female] series of drawings, the different representations of the sexual act create rhythms where women seem to be penetrated sometimes slowly, with ease and willingness; in others, the act is portrayed as intense and quick, as if lust would escape through the mouth. The impulse obeys touch, it follows what is said or not said in the scenes and in the traces of erections, ejaculations, coituses, orifices and channels filled by tongues, hands, faces and penises. Here, the actual narrative of sexual intercourse between men and women matters less, but the role played by the human figure by means of the biological and physiological apparatus of naked body features prominently.
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| Monica Rizzolli | Female 02 | 2008 | Ink and gouache on paper | 21 X 15 cm |
Avoiding a strict literality of a reference to the real, the naked figure of Monica’s drawing orchestrates distinct visibilities of bodies occupying space, little by little revealing junctions and fractions of a topography of excesses. In order to exist, the naked figure in a painting or a drawing needs to be seen by someone, who is suddenly teased by the image. In this aspect, it is very interesting to note the creation of a piece like this by a woman artist, who, far from giving the work a feminist perspectivei, deals both with the tradition of the naked female body in the history of art and the reactions that such choice invites. Once in contact with naked body within this tradition, the spectator (usually a man) feels like taking the place of the character portrayed in the relationship, or even identifying with him or her. To see the naked Other is to have the vision of oneself, questioning our own fantasies and desires. How many people would we like to fuck right now? In “Fêmea”, our salvation at all times lies in the danger of being exposed, in overcoming the banality of the first moment when nudity is unveiled, so as to direct our perception towards the sexual zones of contact, which are not independent at all, but which nevertheless open up to the encounter of a new meaning to life. As Henry Miller wrote in 1957: “No cunt lives a life apart, independently. Such independence is utopia. Everything there is, is intertwined (…) To enter life through a vagina is as satisfactory a method as any other. When one enters a vagina willingly and there remains for a long time, it is possible to find what one had been looking for. But it is necessary to enter with soul and body – and leave behind any other belongings. (By belongings I mean fears, prejudices, superstitions).”ii
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| Monica Rizzolli | Female 08 | 2008 | Ink and gouache on paper | 19 X 22 cm |
As object, the body confronts the contemplation of the world, but also a subjectivity that touches the ego. Marcel Mauss already observed that there is “nothing more technical than sexual positions”.iii But, behind an apparent objectivity in the mechanisms and in the countless positions that Monica offers in her artistic work, the representations of the shared the sexual act violate the various distinctions between the public and the private, between men and women. Used to expose herself to male desire, a woman often experiences the visibility of public spaces as a kind of intimate vulnerability, whilst men have their masculinity challenged when their bodies are publicly exposed as an object of erotic desire.iv
An affinity with sex in public spaces, as a Dionysian potency full of orgiastic excesses, is expressed in the drawings as an idea of the “plural body”, by means of a narrative that all the time gathers events from other actions, positions and leftovers.
The men in “Fêmea” seem to swallow their promises of political, economic or sexual power. Nearly absent or headless in the drawings, the male body in the work helps to create the composition’s formal structure. Geometrical forms and elements balance out the figurative and the abstract. A leg can gain the form of a colour triangle, and it is with this ambiguity of form that the plural body imprints dynamism to the roles of social and sexual behaviour of men. As a provocation, it is possible to evoke here the thesis of writer, prostitute and near assassin of Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, in her “SCUM Manifesto” (1967): men, in reality, want to be women. The male, as “incomplete female”, spends his life trying to be a woman; he seeks to live and to be confused with women, claiming to himself all female features – emotional resistance and independence, force, dynamism, self affirmation, vitality etc – projecting in women his own weaknesses.v
To all of us, any subversion arising from the proposal put forward by “Fêmea” is rendered necessary not only by the questioning of the sexuality built by the media and by violence, paralysed by fear, prejudice and shame, but also made relevant by the attentive listening of our own obscenity, understanding the effect this creates in ourselves. The archaeologies of the body are also constituted by moans, whispers, screams, love noises and by fucking. Perhaps we should amplify them now, together with the images in “Fêmea”, in the invention of a possible imaginary for liberating action, which evades war and violence, creating a world where contact becomes more important than time in the form of commodity.vi
São Paulo, January 2009.
i In lieu of historical reference, it is important to say that from the 1970’s onwards, chiefly in America and in Europe, feminism has contributed to the development of new audiences for art, alongside the creation of new dialogue elements. For some artists, feminism has become a revolutionary strategy seeking to challenge women’s invisibility in society or else to create a visibility that reaches beyond the stereotypes of femininity. The history of women, including their struggles, recognition as a gender, domestic life, biological processes, births, family relations and of gender, violence related to abuse and to rape, became object of vital importance to artists in performance, installation, video, text, oral history etc. Above all, the feminist creed that “the personal is political” has led many artists to seek interdisciplinarity in their art projects, fostering interest for other fields of knowledge such as medicine, social sciences, politics, religion, education and activism. For a wider analysis of the issue, see
LIPPARD, Lucy R. “Sweeping exchanges: the Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s” (1980), in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change. Nova York: E. P. Dutton, 1984. pp. 149-158.
ii MILLER, Henry. O mundo do sexo [The World of Sex]. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Americana 1975. p. 42.
iii MAUSS, Marcel. Sociologia e Antropologia [Sociology and Anthropology]. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2003. p. 419.
www.rekombinant.org/old/article.html.sid=2360>. Acessed in: 10th Jan. 2009.
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