EDUCATIONAL BOOKLET | 02 ‘PIEL DE GALLINA. Regina José Galindo’ TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes Department of Education
What role does the body play in the work of Regina José Galindo? The first of Regina José Galindo’s working tools was the written word. However, starting in 1999, the Guatemalan artist began to use her body - already present as a subject in her literary work - as a channel of expression and communication. This is the reason why her first performances were, in reality, visual representations of her texts, until they gradually became independent and began to be conceived as totally autonomous works. Regina José Galindo’s body in this way became an artistic medium which, over and above representing herself, the artist transforms into a vehicle which allows her to speak of all individuals and any subject. The body she uses in her performances is not therefore her own, but rather a tool that she uses to speak about all women. This is the case of Himenoplastia, a performance in which the artist underwent an operation to reconstruct her hymen as a way of bringing to public knowledge a common practice which many families oblige their daughters to undergo in a patriarchal and chauvinist society in which virginity continues to be a much-desired state which ensures that women can get married.
Regina José Galindo, Caparazón, 2010
When and why did the body begin to be used as a tool or material for the artistic action? Since the first artistic avant-garde movements of the early 20th Century, in the world of western art the artists’ bodies had remained hidden, repressed and subject to the stroke of genius of the artist. Creators were considered to be a species of incorporeal individuals - normally white westerners - whose expression did not allow the appearance of other individuals belonging to social minorities (women, homosexuals, natives). This reality was the transposition into the artistic plane of the absolute dominion of a patriarchal, colonialist and heterosexual regime linked to the unstoppable advance of capitalism. The “discovery” of the artists’ bodies starting in the 1960s was, in large part, a way of representing and reaffirming the “self” within a society which tended to homogenise everything, eliminating the differences between individuals. At the beginning of the 1960s, the body became a standard for the struggle to reaffirm the individuality of the people against the mechanisms of power. A first step in this direction - although it was still within the orthodoxy of the Modern Movement - were Jackson Pollock’s action paintings. The gestures and movements of the American painter then reached an absolute protagonism within the world of art, confusing the limits of the work of art. What was really artistic? The gesture and the movements of the artist on the canvas or the results of the gesture and movements?
A little after the time when Pollock began to move on the canvas, Yves Klein also decided to bring his body into the light, leaping into the unknown and immortalising a gesture which confused work and document. Klein, apart from his own, used other bodies as a paintbrush to create his Anthropometries in which the female anatomy, instead of being the traditional subject of the work, became a tool to create it. Finally, Piero Manzoni dedicated himself to signing bodies - again, female bodies- in a symbolic gesture which determined that these anatomies were works of art through their own decision. However, despite their apparent intention to transgress, all these first public exhibitions of their
own or others’ bodies were still an expression of a situation against which the struggle would a little later be undertaken in a much more open fashion: male, heterosexual, white and western hegemony against all remaining individuals. Thus, as the 1960s advanced, the use of the body became crazier and more violent, until it reached an unimaginable level with Viennese actionists and their particular interpretation of Freudian theories and the relationship between religion and sexuality (as in the case of the bloody rituals of Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl and Günter Brus). In the seventies, human anatomy had completely shaken off the remains of Modernity, having become a privileged vehicle for the struggle against established power. The body was no longer only exhibited and made explicitly visible and present but was also used as a medium for experimentation of unusual cruelty. Gina Pane, Chris Burden, Mike Parr and Ana Mendieta are just a few examples.
Yves Klein, Antropometrías, 1960
What has happened to the contemporary body? The use of the body as a place of struggle has became standardised and although it survives as an artistic form - performance - which continues to be fully valid, it has lost a large part of its provocative potential when used against what is established. This the case of Orlan, the French artist who subjects herself to continual surgical operations to transform her face and approximate to an alleged model of ideal beauty (a subject which Regina JosĂŠ Galindo deals with in Recorte por la LĂnea). Similarly, Ron Athey, the HIV-positive artist who sticks fifteen-centimetre needles into his scalp or his arms, while he tells his audience minute details of his illness, his heroin addiction and his suicide attempts. As has occurred in many other fields of the modern world, the works which use the body as a tool have lost their capacity to surprise; we have accepted them as just another manifestation of the art of the moment. Contemporary human anatomy, a long way removed from that first anatomy which began to come to light in the 1960s, has been incapable of subverting the established order, because that order has incorporated it into its ranks. The body of the artist has become, finally, the objet d’art whose overthrow was attempted over half a century ago.
What artistic form do the works of Regina José Galindo adopt? Regina José Galindo uses the artistic genre of the performance to create her works. In the late 1990s, she got to know this form of art through her circle of friends and since then she has adopted it as her own. This artist’s works are the actions she takes, not the videos that document her actions. She is not involved in videographic work. The recordings are the way of documenting her performances, so as to be able to exhibit them and bring them to an audience who were not present when they were created. The work of art is the action itself, ephemeral and perishable; it simply happens and, when it does so, it simply ceases to exist.
Regina José Galindo, Lo voy a gritar al viento, 1999
What is a performance and when is it a way of creating art? Actions, happenings and performances are ephemeral events whose existence as works of art has a very limited duration. Precedents can be found in the Dadaist actions and the futuristic soirĂŠes of the early 20th Century, although in the way we understand them nowadays, they began to be developed in the 1960s. It was at that time that the artistic object, venerated throughout the history of art, began to be questioned and to be vilified as just one more product of the market, an expression of the prevailing capitalism. The artistic actions arose at that time as an ideal instrument to demystify and decommercialise that object as, being intangible and ephemeral, it was impossible to sell them, buy them or convert them into objects of exchange and speculation. With these forms, the traditional status of the work of art crumbled to nothing and the place of the artist also changed as he began to take on roles which brought him closer to the role of mediator than to that of the creator. From then on, painting and sculpture were only two possibilities among the multiple options for creating a work. Nevertheless, establishing the limits of this artistic genre, performance, is at times a difficult task due to the multiplicity of possibilities which it permits. Thus, the work may be presented alone or by a more or less numerous group; it may or may not be accompanied by music, lighting and all kinds of effects; it can be performed in a museum or in a gallery, but also in a cafĂŠ, in the street or anywhere else. Finally, it may or may not be repeated and it is possible that it is based on a prepared script which has been rehearsed for months, but it may also be pure improvisation. This ambiguity in its limits makes the definition of performance more difficult but it also enriches it as an artistic medium which, however, does indeed keep to the same criterion with regard to the audience: that of not giving him or her clarifying information about the action with the aim of making him or her more sensitive and receptive.
What was the context in which the performance arose? After World War Two, the progressive growth of the economy, technology and industry led to a generalised optimism among the population, supported by the unstoppable advance of the capitalist economy. However, with the 1960s, a number of sectors of society began to question this situation, putting in doubt its capacity to satisfy the real needs of mankind and denouncing its power to alienate human existence. This particular climate would culminate, at the end of the decade, in the organisation of strikes by the workers, the development of the feminist movement and student demonstrations demanding the end of open conflicts or those supported by the dominant regimes, such as the Wars in Vietnam and Korea, racial intolerance and discrimination against women. The social revolutions which arose in this period were, in reality, movements against the alienation caused by industrial civilisation and served as a refuge for new ways of doing art which went hand in hand with demands for a change in the world order. The happening, performance, land art and body art were some of those artistic options which gave a voice to minorities and which brought into view spaces, tools and materials that were alternatives to the traditional ones. However, and just as occurred with the destructive and transgressive enthusiasm of the first avant-garde movements of the 20th Century, already halfway through the seventies the panorama had changed and the radicalism of the previous decade began to show clear signs of having run out of fuel. The Watergate scandal, the petrol price hike and a succession of deep social crises definitively brought the alternative proposals of the previous decade to an end and the system finally absorbed the demonstrations and the transgressive behaviours, which had earlier been carried out against it, as its own. This was the case of the hippie culture which, far from its original ideals began to sell itself as a simple quirk of fashion. In the field of art, the galleries hurried to market and commercialise ephemeral works whose main but unfulfilled objective had been that of overthrowing a market which in the end devoured them.
What is the context in which Regina José Galindo creates her works? The socio-political context of Latin American countries throughout the 20th Century, with their post-colonial economic dependence, their dictatorships and their hierarchical societies has been a perfect object for rebellion and transgression and has led to a linking of the art of performance with the denunciation of injustice and the representation of the traumatic. This is the case of Helio Oiticica, Lidia Pape, Artur Barrio and Cildo Meireles.
Another characteristic of Latin American performance is its ritualisation, with which the creators have attempted, on the one hand, to maintain artistic action linked with the ancestral, the original and the unique aspects of each culture and, on the other, to exorcise the human impulses supposedly repressed by technocratic, capitalist society. The blood rituals of Ana Mendieta are a good example. In the particular case of Regina José Galindo, the context of Guatemala has been absolutely fundamental to her work. Her own life, linked to the changes of fortune and shocks of Guatemalan politics, with the constant coups d’état, the succession of authoritarian regimes and the ongoing social and economic outrages, have from the start determined a subject
Regina José Galindo, Confesión, 2007
range which has revolved around one fundamental concept: the exercise of power and the violence associated with it. Thus, Galindo’s work oscillates between a number of different forms of violence: that of the conquistador over the conquered (Hermana, La Conquista), that of the victor over the defeated (Lucha), that of the representatives of authority over the people (Limpieza Social, Confesión, Voltios) and that of men over women (Mientras ellos siguen libres, Perra). In all cases, the violence is derived from the disproportionate exercise of power, in the hands always of individuals who are not able to keep within the limits of what is reasonable. This human incapacity of which Galindo speaks constitutes the origin of some performances which, apart from denouncing situations which we all actually are aware of, lead us to a moral reflection on our own limits, in relation both to our capacity to bear this violence and our hidden desire to be able to impose it with impunity.
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