The Peripatetic Body Published in the catalogue for the exhibition aflujo • afflux at Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh, PA and Mesaros Galleries in Morgantown, WV, published by West Virginia University, 2006.
by Kristina Olson
Version en Español apriete aquí
Patricia Villalobos Echeverría uses her training as a printmaker to explore issues of transnational identity through images of the body seen in repetition. This post-Cartesian reassertion of the body forms the foundation of her conceptual terrain. Her investigation is aligned with that of other rootless contemporary artists who find themselves living and working in multiple countries. The nature of the international contemporary art scene, characterized by the proliferating circuit of biennial exhibitions, has fostered this nomadic condition. With this shared blurring of geographical and national identity, Villalobos Echeverría asserts the borders of the body in her projected installations, paintings, and prints as the locus of an itinerant self.
Much has been made of the return to consideration of the human body in postmodern art practice.1 This return began with Minimalism’s foregrounding of the body’s spatial presence in the 1960s, took a political turn with the rise of feminism in the 1970s and ‘80s, and was imaged literally in the identity art of the 1990s. The assertion of the body countered the anti-corporeality of late-modern abstraction. That development can be read as the denouement of the Enlightenment project with its commitment to René Descartes’ privileging of the mind over the body.
It is, perhaps, ironic that the body would re-emerge in the art of the late twentieth century. After all, this is the dawn of the post-industrial, post-colonial age where electronic, and now digital, technologies are supposedly breaking down borders—creating a global village2—and making the body obsolete.3 However, it is precisely in this context of fluid and ever-changing national borders and use of technology to invade the body and out-source many of its processes that the body has resurfaced with a vengeance.
Evidence of this trend is all around us. Popular media cater to the voyeuristic pleasure we take in looking at the objectified bodies of others: celebrity watching, Internet porn, medical and plastic surgery reality shows, and fashion. Controversies in contemporary art and media almost always center on contested images of the body. Examples include Robert Mapplethorpe’s, or Merry Alpern’s photographs, Karen Finley’s or Paul McCarthy’s performances, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photos, or the presentation of the bodies of Christian saints in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
The struggle, for an artist living in this context, is how to define the self when the body is both the locus of heightened interest and experienced as a free-floating signifier, not delimited by traditional borders. Post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha suggests that it is the spaces between traditional identity markers that an artist can mine for meaning, “Once again, it is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence. And one last time, there is a return to the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration.”<a 1="background"> /a>4
A survey of some of Patricia Villalobos Echeverría’s recent projects will demonstrate how she works in these interstices. The compositions are a product of her own rootless, transnational experience as someone who was born to Salvadorian parents in the United States, raised in Nicaragua, and returned to the U.S. to go to high school and later to teach. She has used repeated images of her own and other bodies to give a political voice to this concept of a peripatetic identity. The artist says, “I suggest that a political voice can be borne out of subaltern identities – where strategies can be created to stimulate a new political voice whose effectiveness lies in an alternate way of defining the body – where the body is no longer tied to location/place and the body itself becomes a chimera.”5
These themes of a rootless, multivalent identity are conveyed in Villalobos Echeverría’s work through images of a suspended and often doubled body. Examples of these devices can be seen in a group of medium-sized, untitled paintings from 2004. Each work involves a doubled, or in one case tripled, full-length image of the artist’s nude body. The small image is applied as a Lazertran decal over a large, gestural ground of a single bright color. The effect is that the artist’s contorted form, often connected at the head to her double like a Siamese twin, floats in an undefined, weightless space. The brushy, liquid ground is like the amniotic fluid out of which the artist births her doubled self.
This idea that the artist is the source of her own identity is presented quite literally in the earlier painting Origen (2002). A diptych format is used in this acrylic and serigraph print on canvas. To the left, a gold oval floats over a watery-blue ground with the Spanish word “origen” inscribed within. To the right, an image of the artist emerging from water with eyes closed is screened in black over a gold ground. Villalobos Echeverría has again delivered her own body and, paradoxically, uses the technique for multiple reproduction—printmaking—to comment on her individual, self origin.
The use of suspension and doubling come together most effectively in the artist’s projected installations. Hoverings (2005) is a minimal piece that involves two videos projected from opposite diagonal corners of a gallery onto a suspended, white, two-lobed orb made of EPS foam. In the first video, Hovermar, there is a close up of the artist as she drifts back and forth in ocean surf. The second video, Hoversnow, shows the artist walking backward through a field of snow. Eventually she lays on her back with a medical tube connected to her arm and bellybutton. The sound of crashing waves provides a point of continuity through the space.
The suspended, three-dimensional “screen” is always moving and its irregular shape distorts the footage and eclipses the projection of each video onto the opposite wall like a blind spot. This means that viewing the videos is partial, incomplete, and ever-changing. One is forced to move back and forth to see one video, then the other. Again, the formal strategy here reinforces the artist’s content of a shifting and incomplete experience.
Hoverings effectively conveys the artist’s feeling of a dual identity. This is expressed in the duality of locations (warm and cold, northern and southern), the dual nature of water (liquid and frozen), the idea of presence and absence, and the sense of the artist moving and live in the water and freezing and dead in the snow. In this simple, quiet piece, Villalobos Echeverría effectively summarizes the schizophrenic nature of human experience with feelings of separation, loss, discontinuity, and nostalgia for an integrated self.
The recent installation Polo/Velero (2006) has a similar format but is placed in a cramped space that allows only one point of view. Now the doubled video footage is of a male nude battered by ocean waves. The EPS foam has been cut into a kind of landmine or mace-like, multi-lobed form that gives the piece an aggressive edge. The projection uses a doubled-oval viewing field, like the shape of an eye mask, that was created in the editing process. Again, a partially-occluded view of a suspended body in an ill-defined space is produced. The body is pushed in and out of the limited field of vision by the intangible force of the water’s ebb and flow. The analogy suggested in this piece seems to be the manipulation of the body by nature, history, or politics.6 The viewer gradually becomes aware of the voyeuristic position in which they are placed, almost as if they are watching the man from a distance through the shaped lenses of binoculars.
Images of bodily violence were much more direct in earlier work where the artist showed herself bound, gagged, or fragmented. This was the case in the large structures created for Snow/Nieve and Reciprocity/Reciprocidad, both from 1999. Given Villalobos Echeverría’s history, it’s not surprising that she would refer obliquely to the bloody violence of Central America’s recent past through images of powerless and muted bodies. The small print Hovers (2005) is a more current and subtle example. Here, a liquid form covers the surface of the paper changing from a bright green at the top to a deep red at the bottom. Floating over this pool is the cruciform image of the artist’s doubled body. The headless bodies are joined at the neck, masking individual identity. A second vertical torso and bent legs form the hybrid’s “head” while arms overlap to make a single outstretched set. The deformed figure is strictly contained within a black zone that restates the cross-like pose of the body and denies it the freedom afforded the suspended figures in the other works.
The cruciform positioning allows for the comparison to images of the crucifixion of Christian saints. Though much has been written recently on Catholic content in contemporary art,7 for Villalobos Echeverría the reference is probably more to a generic image of human martyrdom, rather than anything specifically Christian. It may be fair to suggest that her reliance on the human body as the central motif in all her work owes something to the attention to the body of saints and their physical suffering in Latin Catholicism. In fact, the artist has found in the iconography of saints a template for her own handling of the body. The relationship of the saint’s body to place is not static in iconic imagery where the body or head of the saint is depicted as floating in a gold-leafed, abstract space. The implication is that they have left their corporeal entity and can be equally present through space and time.
The analogy to Villalobos Echeverría’s suspended bodies is clear. They too hover above time and place. The artist has characterized this suspension in her recounting of the merging of the identities across cultures of the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin with the Virgin of Guadalupe. She draws the conclusion that, “In fact, what occurs in transculturation is a disintegration of utopian visions of the world – something akin to post-human reality, the post in post human is similar to the trans in transculturation in that they both rather than signaling an evolved and higher state, signal an implosive state – one that is always in the making – in transit; both signal a constant state of re-signification whether it be embodied or disembodied.”8
This embodied re-signification traced throughout Villalobos Echeverría’s work can be summarized with a haunting video still from the installation <viro> created for the Lima Biennial in 2002. The video played on one of two monitors laying on the floor and titled upwards that were connected via umbilical-like cords to a central structure with backlit images of parts of the artist’s body screened in black on a red ground. In this still, the artist is seen lying in snow with eyes closed (upside down to the viewer) but this time she is fully dressed in black. This presentation is contrasted with one of the artist in white with eyes open floating in a blue oval that has been inserted so it partially obscures the snow scene. Again we see the artist’s body suspended in water and literally hovering here in an oval “bubble,” and again we have the doubled self in contrasting form (black vs. white, snow vs. water, conscious vs. unconscious).
The shifting self is defined only by the boundaries of the body in this footage where the specifics of landscape are abstracted. The setting in all of these projects is ill-defined. The viewer is never given any details or wide-enough of a view to conjecture in which ocean the body floats or in which snowy woods it wanders. The relationship to natural location is the polar opposite of that of an artist who is an obvious predecessor to this kind of work: Ana Mendieta (1948-85). For Mendieta, who was uprooted from her Cuban homeland by revolution, the North American landscape became a specific collaborator in her famous Silueta series (c.1975-78). Again and again, the artist imprinted her body’s outline in sand, in mud, and on the bark of fallen trees in an effort to make a new home for herself, to graft her body onto its new host. The result is an intimate dialogue between body and land. As Mendieta explained, “To know oneself is to know the world, and it is also paradoxically a form of exile from the world. I know that it is this presence of myself, this self-knowledge which causes me to dialogue with the world around me by making art.” 9
To conclude, Patricia Villalobos Echeverría’s work challenges this idea that there is an integrated self to get to know. Contrasting with Mendieta’s presentation, the body is experienced as mutable and distinct from any landscape. Rather than being a discrete entity that has stable meaning, the body in Villalobos Echeverría’s work is conceived as a neutral surface onto which the specifics of identity can be projected or manipulated. She proposes her own rootless, transnational experience as a metaphor for the experience of the body at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The artist’s wandering, multiplied body in <viro> is placed in an intentional limbo that may signal the body’s erasure or, by contrast, its triumph as the only constant in a destabilized world where identity is consumed in an apotheosis of the flesh.10
Published in the catalogue for the exhibition aflujo • afflux at Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh, PA and Mesaros Galleries in Morgantown, WV, published by West Virginia University, 2006.
NOTES
by Kristina Olson
Version en Español apriete aquí
Patricia Villalobos Echeverría uses her training as a printmaker to explore issues of transnational identity through images of the body seen in repetition. This post-Cartesian reassertion of the body forms the foundation of her conceptual terrain. Her investigation is aligned with that of other rootless contemporary artists who find themselves living and working in multiple countries. The nature of the international contemporary art scene, characterized by the proliferating circuit of biennial exhibitions, has fostered this nomadic condition. With this shared blurring of geographical and national identity, Villalobos Echeverría asserts the borders of the body in her projected installations, paintings, and prints as the locus of an itinerant self.
Much has been made of the return to consideration of the human body in postmodern art practice.1 This return began with Minimalism’s foregrounding of the body’s spatial presence in the 1960s, took a political turn with the rise of feminism in the 1970s and ‘80s, and was imaged literally in the identity art of the 1990s. The assertion of the body countered the anti-corporeality of late-modern abstraction. That development can be read as the denouement of the Enlightenment project with its commitment to René Descartes’ privileging of the mind over the body.
It is, perhaps, ironic that the body would re-emerge in the art of the late twentieth century. After all, this is the dawn of the post-industrial, post-colonial age where electronic, and now digital, technologies are supposedly breaking down borders—creating a global village2—and making the body obsolete.3 However, it is precisely in this context of fluid and ever-changing national borders and use of technology to invade the body and out-source many of its processes that the body has resurfaced with a vengeance.
Evidence of this trend is all around us. Popular media cater to the voyeuristic pleasure we take in looking at the objectified bodies of others: celebrity watching, Internet porn, medical and plastic surgery reality shows, and fashion. Controversies in contemporary art and media almost always center on contested images of the body. Examples include Robert Mapplethorpe’s, or Merry Alpern’s photographs, Karen Finley’s or Paul McCarthy’s performances, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photos, or the presentation of the bodies of Christian saints in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
The struggle, for an artist living in this context, is how to define the self when the body is both the locus of heightened interest and experienced as a free-floating signifier, not delimited by traditional borders. Post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha suggests that it is the spaces between traditional identity markers that an artist can mine for meaning, “Once again, it is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence. And one last time, there is a return to the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration.”<a 1="background"> /a>4
A survey of some of Patricia Villalobos Echeverría’s recent projects will demonstrate how she works in these interstices. The compositions are a product of her own rootless, transnational experience as someone who was born to Salvadorian parents in the United States, raised in Nicaragua, and returned to the U.S. to go to high school and later to teach. She has used repeated images of her own and other bodies to give a political voice to this concept of a peripatetic identity. The artist says, “I suggest that a political voice can be borne out of subaltern identities – where strategies can be created to stimulate a new political voice whose effectiveness lies in an alternate way of defining the body – where the body is no longer tied to location/place and the body itself becomes a chimera.”5
These themes of a rootless, multivalent identity are conveyed in Villalobos Echeverría’s work through images of a suspended and often doubled body. Examples of these devices can be seen in a group of medium-sized, untitled paintings from 2004. Each work involves a doubled, or in one case tripled, full-length image of the artist’s nude body. The small image is applied as a Lazertran decal over a large, gestural ground of a single bright color. The effect is that the artist’s contorted form, often connected at the head to her double like a Siamese twin, floats in an undefined, weightless space. The brushy, liquid ground is like the amniotic fluid out of which the artist births her doubled self.
This idea that the artist is the source of her own identity is presented quite literally in the earlier painting Origen (2002). A diptych format is used in this acrylic and serigraph print on canvas. To the left, a gold oval floats over a watery-blue ground with the Spanish word “origen” inscribed within. To the right, an image of the artist emerging from water with eyes closed is screened in black over a gold ground. Villalobos Echeverría has again delivered her own body and, paradoxically, uses the technique for multiple reproduction—printmaking—to comment on her individual, self origin.
The use of suspension and doubling come together most effectively in the artist’s projected installations. Hoverings (2005) is a minimal piece that involves two videos projected from opposite diagonal corners of a gallery onto a suspended, white, two-lobed orb made of EPS foam. In the first video, Hovermar, there is a close up of the artist as she drifts back and forth in ocean surf. The second video, Hoversnow, shows the artist walking backward through a field of snow. Eventually she lays on her back with a medical tube connected to her arm and bellybutton. The sound of crashing waves provides a point of continuity through the space.
The suspended, three-dimensional “screen” is always moving and its irregular shape distorts the footage and eclipses the projection of each video onto the opposite wall like a blind spot. This means that viewing the videos is partial, incomplete, and ever-changing. One is forced to move back and forth to see one video, then the other. Again, the formal strategy here reinforces the artist’s content of a shifting and incomplete experience.
Hoverings effectively conveys the artist’s feeling of a dual identity. This is expressed in the duality of locations (warm and cold, northern and southern), the dual nature of water (liquid and frozen), the idea of presence and absence, and the sense of the artist moving and live in the water and freezing and dead in the snow. In this simple, quiet piece, Villalobos Echeverría effectively summarizes the schizophrenic nature of human experience with feelings of separation, loss, discontinuity, and nostalgia for an integrated self.
The recent installation Polo/Velero (2006) has a similar format but is placed in a cramped space that allows only one point of view. Now the doubled video footage is of a male nude battered by ocean waves. The EPS foam has been cut into a kind of landmine or mace-like, multi-lobed form that gives the piece an aggressive edge. The projection uses a doubled-oval viewing field, like the shape of an eye mask, that was created in the editing process. Again, a partially-occluded view of a suspended body in an ill-defined space is produced. The body is pushed in and out of the limited field of vision by the intangible force of the water’s ebb and flow. The analogy suggested in this piece seems to be the manipulation of the body by nature, history, or politics.6 The viewer gradually becomes aware of the voyeuristic position in which they are placed, almost as if they are watching the man from a distance through the shaped lenses of binoculars.
Images of bodily violence were much more direct in earlier work where the artist showed herself bound, gagged, or fragmented. This was the case in the large structures created for Snow/Nieve and Reciprocity/Reciprocidad, both from 1999. Given Villalobos Echeverría’s history, it’s not surprising that she would refer obliquely to the bloody violence of Central America’s recent past through images of powerless and muted bodies. The small print Hovers (2005) is a more current and subtle example. Here, a liquid form covers the surface of the paper changing from a bright green at the top to a deep red at the bottom. Floating over this pool is the cruciform image of the artist’s doubled body. The headless bodies are joined at the neck, masking individual identity. A second vertical torso and bent legs form the hybrid’s “head” while arms overlap to make a single outstretched set. The deformed figure is strictly contained within a black zone that restates the cross-like pose of the body and denies it the freedom afforded the suspended figures in the other works.
The cruciform positioning allows for the comparison to images of the crucifixion of Christian saints. Though much has been written recently on Catholic content in contemporary art,7 for Villalobos Echeverría the reference is probably more to a generic image of human martyrdom, rather than anything specifically Christian. It may be fair to suggest that her reliance on the human body as the central motif in all her work owes something to the attention to the body of saints and their physical suffering in Latin Catholicism. In fact, the artist has found in the iconography of saints a template for her own handling of the body. The relationship of the saint’s body to place is not static in iconic imagery where the body or head of the saint is depicted as floating in a gold-leafed, abstract space. The implication is that they have left their corporeal entity and can be equally present through space and time.
The analogy to Villalobos Echeverría’s suspended bodies is clear. They too hover above time and place. The artist has characterized this suspension in her recounting of the merging of the identities across cultures of the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin with the Virgin of Guadalupe. She draws the conclusion that, “In fact, what occurs in transculturation is a disintegration of utopian visions of the world – something akin to post-human reality, the post in post human is similar to the trans in transculturation in that they both rather than signaling an evolved and higher state, signal an implosive state – one that is always in the making – in transit; both signal a constant state of re-signification whether it be embodied or disembodied.”8
This embodied re-signification traced throughout Villalobos Echeverría’s work can be summarized with a haunting video still from the installation <viro> created for the Lima Biennial in 2002. The video played on one of two monitors laying on the floor and titled upwards that were connected via umbilical-like cords to a central structure with backlit images of parts of the artist’s body screened in black on a red ground. In this still, the artist is seen lying in snow with eyes closed (upside down to the viewer) but this time she is fully dressed in black. This presentation is contrasted with one of the artist in white with eyes open floating in a blue oval that has been inserted so it partially obscures the snow scene. Again we see the artist’s body suspended in water and literally hovering here in an oval “bubble,” and again we have the doubled self in contrasting form (black vs. white, snow vs. water, conscious vs. unconscious).
The shifting self is defined only by the boundaries of the body in this footage where the specifics of landscape are abstracted. The setting in all of these projects is ill-defined. The viewer is never given any details or wide-enough of a view to conjecture in which ocean the body floats or in which snowy woods it wanders. The relationship to natural location is the polar opposite of that of an artist who is an obvious predecessor to this kind of work: Ana Mendieta (1948-85). For Mendieta, who was uprooted from her Cuban homeland by revolution, the North American landscape became a specific collaborator in her famous Silueta series (c.1975-78). Again and again, the artist imprinted her body’s outline in sand, in mud, and on the bark of fallen trees in an effort to make a new home for herself, to graft her body onto its new host. The result is an intimate dialogue between body and land. As Mendieta explained, “To know oneself is to know the world, and it is also paradoxically a form of exile from the world. I know that it is this presence of myself, this self-knowledge which causes me to dialogue with the world around me by making art.” 9
To conclude, Patricia Villalobos Echeverría’s work challenges this idea that there is an integrated self to get to know. Contrasting with Mendieta’s presentation, the body is experienced as mutable and distinct from any landscape. Rather than being a discrete entity that has stable meaning, the body in Villalobos Echeverría’s work is conceived as a neutral surface onto which the specifics of identity can be projected or manipulated. She proposes her own rootless, transnational experience as a metaphor for the experience of the body at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The artist’s wandering, multiplied body in <viro> is placed in an intentional limbo that may signal the body’s erasure or, by contrast, its triumph as the only constant in a destabilized world where identity is consumed in an apotheosis of the flesh.10
Published in the catalogue for the exhibition aflujo • afflux at Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh, PA and Mesaros Galleries in Morgantown, WV, published by West Virginia University, 2006.
NOTES
- See, for example, the chapter on “The Body,” in Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129-159.
- The concept of the global village was proposed by Marshall McLuhan in his essay Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
- The obsolescence of the body due to technological developments has been characterized as “post-human.” See Robertson and McDaniel as in note 1, 150-152; and Alicia Candiani’s essay in this volume.
- Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 9.
- Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, “Posthumanism and Transculturation,” unpublished paper delivered at the International Conference on Digital Art, Havana, Cuba, June 18, 2003.
- The connection to the violence experienced by male members of the artist’s family in Nicaragua perhaps hovers in the background of this piece. Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, interview with the author, Pittsburgh, PA, April 28, 2006.
- See Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004).
- Villalobos Echeverría, “Posthumanism and Transculturation,” as in note 5.
- Ana Mendieta, “Art and Politics,” from a lecture given at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York on 18 February 1982. Quoted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, editors, Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1065.
- Villalobos Echeverría, “Posthumanism and Transculturation,” as in note 5.