Society of Institute Fellows The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College presents LYNN M. RANDOLPH
A slide presentation of recent paintings entitled The Ilusas (deluded women): Representations of women who are out of bounds
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 30, 1990
The Bunting Institute Colloquium Room 34 Concord Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138
In 17th century Mexico there was a floating population of women who were prostitutes, widows, orphans and estranged wives. They lived outside the legitimate estates of church and home; they were regarded by the church and others as dangerous. They defied and eluded the control of the confessors, creating their own religious myths. They were stigmatized and their discourse was disqualified by the Inquisitors who defined them as Ilusas, deluded women. Since they never claimed or admitted to any intercourse with the Devil they avoided being labelled witches. Unlike the mystic nuns, the Ilusas took public space, they prophesied, went into trances and claimed to have mystical experiences. They used their bodies in fabulous rituals, vomiting blood at will, simulating lactation, smearing themselves with menstrual blood and other excrements. They often regressed to infant behaviors and were frequently observed groaning and moaning in orgiastic ecstasies, thus symbolically performing private events of women's lives in public.
[Slide 1, Venus, oil on masonite, 14 1/2" X 10 1/2", 1992.]
This contemporary Venus is not a Goddess in the classical sense of a contained figure. She is an unruly woman, actively making a spectacle of herself. Queering Botticelli, leaking, projecting, shooting, secreting milk, transgressing the boundaries of her body. Hundreds of years have passed and we are still engaged in a struggle for interpretive power over our bodies in a society where they are marked as a battleground by the church and the state in legal and medical skirmishes, Mysticism represents a distinct form of feminine culture, it unwittingly created a rich space for exploring female empowerment. As Luce Irigaray points out, "Mysticism was the only place in the history of the West in which women spoke and acted so publically." The mystics contended that they obeyed the dictates of inner voices, a claim that was hard to dispute. Their narratives represent a place to revisit as we look for possible sites and spaces to create powerful new metaphors for women's subjectivity, sexuality, and spirituality. Mystical discourse subverts the symbolic on which it rests and remains outside the logic of the linguistic system. The church felt compelled to very closely monitor the behavior and spiritual conversations of the mystical nuns. Their records, notes and diaries contain some of the most erotic, surreal dreams and visions ever recorded by women. They lived lives of constant and heightened sensation, losing themselves and their boundaries in fantastic flights and visions. The historic church vividly emphasized bodily sensations in descriptions of suffering and rapture as represented in gaping wounds, thrusting bodies, and ecstatic eyes
[Slide 2. Raptured, oil on masonite, 14" X 10", 1992.]
When really good musicians "get lost" in their music while performing, their facial expressions often appear distorted, grotesque, and ecstatic, like some one having a seizure. This state of being unselfconscious is not like posing for others, it is not a social construction, it is a transgression. The politics and poetics of transgression are part of the search for new ways of empowering women that do not necessarily assume unitary subjects that are essentialist nor are they traps of authoritarian attitudes. The borderline between the spiritual and sexual become blurred. Whose hand holds the heart of the raptured girl? Some nuns were excruciatingly sensitive to every bodily sensation. one nun could not clasp her hands for fear of the libidinal discharge this might release, another was surrounded by a horde of demons who prevented her from speech. Marie de Joseph saw her words transformed into beams of light.
(Slide 3. La Petite Morte, oil on masonite, 14 1/2" X 10 1/2", 1992.]
Saint Teresa of Avila saw a small and beautiful angel whose face was lit with a burning light. He held a long golden spear 2 which had a little fire on its point which he thrust into her heart and entrails. When he drew it out, he also drew them out and left her on fire with a great love of God. This account, like many others, constitutes a space for expressing bodily pleasure that is outside the sinful. They were out of their minds. We can't hide from or cease to exist in our bodies. In her book Carnal Knowing Margaret Miles presses contemporary women artists and writers to create work that explores female subjectivity 'with Carnal Knowing, awareness that is recorded in the body, embodied self knowing, self-loving. Mystical language is obviously a language of desire, as in profane love, it is the heart that is bleeding or burning that is the symbolic home of joy and suffering. Beginning in the late 80s, feminist artists found themselves caught between essentialistic and deconstructionist points of view, a difficult and challenging location. Just when we were beginning to gain our subjectivity and autonomy, we felt the weight of our consciousness wanting to participate in a more inclusive and politically viable practice. To attempt to reconstruct a sense of the real, knowing that all efforts are subject to subsequent de-construction and are contingent upon the distorting effects of time and place and, given the shifting relations of uttering and utterance, requires a well developed sense of irony, a kind of self-admitted "enlightened false consciousness," an understanding that acknowledges its own inevitable transforming participation in a changing world.
[Slide 4. Embraced by Fire, oil on masonite, 14 1/2" X 10 1/2", 1993.]
If the self has become the sacred in a chaotic, complex, postparadigmatic and postmodern world where there are no longer any universals, then, to find ourselves, we must go to a place where consciousness is no longer master, a place in the dark that is also fire--into an Embrace of Fire, a melting, a contempt for form as such, where inside and outside are transposed and an unbounded illumination becomes desire.
[Slide 5. Therapy, oil on masonite, 14 1/2 X 10 1/2, 1993.]
The Ilusas represent a detour through metaphors to attend to women's realities that are forbidden--our wildness, our madness, our desires. Escape fantasies are a way of empowerment outside the world of male conquests. The historic shackles that have left us mute and caused a deep psychic loss are being purged. It is time to spit out the demons of stereotypes, self-loathing, selfbinding, self-censoring and complacent, compliant behavior. We must end our own delusions of a passive life.
[Slide 6. Eve's Tongue, oil on masonite, 14 1/2" X 10 1/2", 1992.]
Part of the crisis of representing women's bodies derives from the familiarity with theory and new critical thinking. The production of theory-driven art defers to the power of ideas and critique and, as a result, sucks all the juices out of the creative process. While I like to think of myself as a kind of moral and intellectual terrorist, I abhor the violations of first amendment rights and the alignment of some of my sisters with the religious and political right over freedom of expression. We create each other and ourselves in an ongoing and endless process of self-analyzing practices that are necessarily political and theoretical. It is a process by which the relations of the subject in its lived context can be re-articulated with the historical experience of women. The flight of the mystic nuns from the confines of their narrow cells was unlike "the Hero's Journey" of self-transformation. They met no obstacles and instead of narratives they produced epiphanies. Their interactions with the apertures of the Holy Body is not only erotic, it is also a negation of phallocentricism. The mouth and lips were conventional sites for kissing wounds and sucking blood. Eve's Tongue, women's language, a place where we receive love's grace, our erotic power, the tongue of love that speaks openly, intimately, differently, that flickers in and out inciting feminine ecstasy, the soul's mouth, the lips of my soul.
[Slide 7. Excessive Absorption, oil on masonite, 14 1/2" X 10 1/2", 1993.]
The mouth can also be a site that absorbs pain in a world that rains blood. Feminists insist on recognizing social and cultural differences while acknowledging that in all societies women have absorbed, borne, and eaten an enormous amount of pain. The language of the mystical nuns was outside of common sense and rationality, outside labor value; they were torn apart in pain, fear, cries, tears, blood, ecstasy, and joy that went beyond conventional life. Their extreme humility and obedience created an extraordinary amount of attention, often obliging the priests to ask them to refrain from excessive mortification. I am not trying to suggest that we go live as hermits in the desert, die as Martyrs, flagellate ourselves and wear hair shirts or that we cannot be present in rational discourse, but let's not choose to repeat the discourse of patriarchy. We can valorize dimensions of subjectivity that are radically different.
[Slide 8. Excessive Eruption, oil on masonite, 20 1/2" X 14 1/4", 1993.]
Subaltern women are erupting from the claims of a unitary body that is hierarchical and orders them at the bottom where the plates are shifting and causing fabulous flows of magma never before experienced. Anita Hill erupted onto the American scene with a force that cannot be contained. The last eight slides I've shown are collectively called the Ilusas, I see them as one large image.
[Slide 9. La Mestiza Cosmica, oil on canvass, 40" X 24", 1992.]
The Virgin of Guadalupe is a virgin who is not represented as a mother. Rather she is related to the Virgin of the Apocalypse who crushes the serpent and is in possession of the heavens, the place from which she protects her chosen people. She is still revered in Mexico today as she is a symbol of rebellion against the rich, upper and Middle class. She unites races and mediates between humans and the divine, the natural and the technological. In my painting a Mestiza stands with one foot in Texas and one foot in Mexico. she is taming a diamond-back rattlesnake with one hand and manipulating the Hubble telescope with another. I paint particular people, usually my friends and family. First I see them in my head, then I photograph them as they appear in my vision and I use the photographs as material resources for the painting.
[Slide 10. So?, oil on canvas, 36" X 24", 1993]
So? meaning so how am I, this young African-American woman, supposed to deal with this history? This reality? Past meanings, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable or finalized once and for all; they will change, be renewed in the process of subsequent developments of the dialogue. The postmodern world allows one to dialogue with the pre-modern, i.e. saints and mystics, as well as other current dialogues. Feminist's efforts to locate what is already present but concealed have been sliding across the historical maps. Our spirit is not a given, it is in the process of constantly making itself in the encounters of loved experience. In our worst recent historical moments, as in Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Apartheid rule in South Africa and the military tyranny in Guatemala today, we have sought to eliminate the self, the other of the self. Correspondingly, in our art historical texts and at the podiums of high modernism, the hegemony of post-Holocaust formalist interpretations of art served to isolate the act of painting from the horrors unloosed by the body politic. I believe it is important to reassert the presence of women's bodies; a presence that speaks to the totality of women's experience and not just in fragments, as body parts, or made grotesque in order to deeroticize. There is a palpable need to rehabilitate the images of mind and body through a process of personal interrogation that interprets the evidence of our own condition., our own time. our own metaphors for our realities, unashamedly.
[Slide 11. Self-Consortium, oil on canvas, 36" X 24", 1993.]
I think there is a similarity between the visions and experiences of the mystic women and the science fiction novels of Octavia Butler and the visionary work of Donna Haraway. Butler and Haraway are imagining new narratives for social thought, new (like Irigaray) non static utopias, that are beyond the available fragments, that exhibit a unity in difference, without creating oppositions. It is a co confrontation with Tricksters, Curanderas, Cyborgs, Mestizas, Saints and Angels that work to re-figure the figures of feminism, breaking boundaries, de-centering reality and using cybernetic sensorium. Donna Haraway states, "Science fiction is generally concerned with the interpretation of boundaries between problematic selves and unexpected others and with the exploration of possible worlds in a context structured by transnational technoscience.
For me the abyss of outer-space is a location to project new perspectives of social, political and spiritual concern without the weight of structuralists, formalists, rationalists and capitalists. In this painting, a young woman and her cloned android or trans individual move inside and outside inner and outer space with a large serpentine strand of DNA. Like the spider woman who spins her web out of her own body, the clone flaunts her electronic bio-constructedness. As Haraway points out, "It's important to learn to remember that we might have been otherwise and might yet be as a matter of embodied fact." Science fiction is in many ways only the unsolved questions of the future being imaginatively worked out and only a hair's breath away from the possibilities being experimented with in current technoscience. "Technoscience," says Haraway, "extravagantly exceeds the distinction between science and technology, the natural and the artificial, it signifies a mutation in historical narratives--its promiscuous fusing breaks old modernist rules of 'purity' and 'high art."' Haraway calls our attention to the implications of Onco Mouse, the first trade marked (by Harvard scientists) new life form which bears human genes for receptivity to breast cancer. Science, that great masculine enterprise, has engaged in cross-breeding--in impure bloodlines. Racists take heed! From gene experiments that might prevent aging to the promise of unlimited clean air and wonderful zoos of varied cyborgs, I find technoscience is unlimited space to create.
[Slide 12. A Diffraction, oil on canvas, 58" X 46", 1992.]
A diffraction is the effect that occurs when something interferes with the direct course of light, the difference that occurs, It is not a reflection,, a replication, or displacement of the same elsewhere. It is something that makes a difference. It is the visual metaphor that Donna haraway has been using in her recent work to identify a process for change. The screened memory of a powerful male figure in every women's life marks a place where change occurs. The shifts that occur with age and psychic transformations, the multiple selves incorporated in one body are embodied in the central figure with its two heads, extra fingers, and metaphysical space in between. Diffraction occurs at a place at the edge of the future, before the abyss of the unknown. The structural pattern of the matter in a galaxy may be repeated in a magnolia blossom. I'm trying to create bodies that matter. Perhaps by placing women's reality into a SciFi world, a place composed of interference patterns, Contemporary Women might 8 emerge as something other than the sacred image of the same, something inappropriate, deluded, unfitting, and magical something that might make a difference. I believe that we need to be active about this, not removed; transcendental and clean but finite; real (not natural) and soiled by the messiness of life.
[Slide 13. Along in the Wetlands of Desire, oil on canvas, 46" X 58", 1993]
In her book Carnal Knowing, Margaret Miles claims that the first theological meaning of nakedness was innocence, frailty, and vulnerability. I know that a naked women lying passively out in nature with her bottom facing us revealing her genitals in a way familiar to porn merchants can be interpreted as a replication of the exploitation of women's bodies. This painting was a vision I had that refused to go away. I tried to chase it away. Finally, I realized that until I painted it, it would haunt me. I've never denied myself my visions and I feel to do so now would be a violation of my own process. We all share with much diversity the same basic body parts and there is a limit to the positions and postures we regularly assume. When painting naked women the 'intentions and distinctions however complex are going to be important. How a figure is contextualized and materially produced are indicators of its purpose. For the most part critics and curators too easily dismiss attempts by artists to re-present the self imaginatively through the medium of paint. If one is trying to close the gap between art and life then painting, the medium that most concretely reifies both the split and the connection between the flesh and the image may be singularly qualified to take that project on. When I am painting a figure, I feel in my own body the part of the body my brush touches, paint is like a membrane. Painting the human figure has been a marginalized project in this country for centuries.
For me, the Wetlands are a place from elsewhere, a dream space and the woman you see is not beckoning or waiting for a lover, rather she's lost in her own place of creating desire as she turns upon her self or returns to herself. We are in a place that existed before and after Patriarchy, a primeval space, the swamps and before that the ice age sheets that melt into the future. The woman is not a Barbie Doll, but strong and alone. There is no evidence that someone else shared her bed. I am concerned with the beautiful, but for me beauty almost always has a sinister quality. I'm trying to recover the place of my own exploitation by going through it, not by being reduced to it, or insisting on resistance strategies that avoid it. I don't want our sexual and spiritual subjectivity to merely be reabsorbed or obliterated in the hegemony of much critical dialogue. I stopped painting nudes for several years. I understood and agreed with Laura Mulvey and, as a result, I didn't want to perpetuate a visual exploitation of women's bodies. Now I don't want to pretend as if they don't exist and I've come to see them differently. I've been reading Luce Irigaray and Helen Cixous, both of whom literally love women's bodies. Their descriptions of love helped me love my own body in a different way. A way that is outside of Patriarchal discourse, in the way I'm trying to paint my visions. I think by trying to go through the problem , our new images will incorporate a love of self on the woman's side. By refusing to participate in oppositions like theory versus fiction and truth versus art, which are hierarchical, a space opens up that transforms the logic of power into new methods that interrupt, intervene, short circuit, disperse and diffract endlessly, making energy explode into a new poetics of the body which will shelter many interpretations. However, I still think we should question representations with a vengeance while we are creating new ones. No one artist can make all the necessary changes or break throughs; you can't win in any final sense, it is an on-going process, an open-ended project that I feel I'm engaged in.
