In the last blog, I wrote about how Maisie Wisconsin uses body as part of her photography art. In this blog, let’s take a look at another artist who also uses her own body for art: Regina José Galindo.
Regina José Galindo is an artist known for her fight against gender and racial violence through breaking the limitations of the female body. Through employing her own body in extreme ways, Galindo reveals the violence racialized and gendered bodies face.
Make America Great Again
Piedra
Piedra, Spanish for stone, is a performance art featuring Galindo, covered in coal, like a stone, and crouches herself on bare ground. On her website, Galindo wrote:
Stone
I am a stone
I do not feel the blows
the humiliation
the lewd stares
the bodies above mine
the hate.
I am a stone
inside me
the history of the world.
Her body remains immoble. Two volunteers and another person from the audience urinate on her body.
The work focuses on the violence that bodies of Latin American women faced. To name a few, the Spaniards conquered Latin America in the 16th century. The history of colonialism is perhaps shown subtly through the use of a Spanish title. The Guatemalan Civil War took place from 1960 to 1996. For centuries, Latin American women struggled to find gender equality.
The female body itself appears soft and fragile, yet Galindo juxtaposes the female body’s frail quality, or society’s assumed gender standards for women, with the hard and unbreakable characteristics of stone. Galindo plays with society’s prejudice over different bodies. People often think of the female body as weak and delicate, while assuming stones are indestructible. Through this contrast of texture and quality, Galindo illustrates the strength of the female body that endured a history of war, enslavement, and exploitation. The female body embodies the durable quality of stones, enabling itself to survive in a society of power disparity and gender inequality.
There are also two men and one woman who urinate on Galindo. The presence of genitalia and the act of urination brings a sense of humiliation, debasing the artist into a victim of oppression. In addition, Galindo’s position as crouching and hiding her identity on the floor demonstrates a sense of inferiority. Further, the audience witnesses the urination and remains still, perhaps suggesting that when people see women suffering from atrocities of sexism, objectification, and abasement, they remain the bystander and allow such brutality to proliferate. There then has an interesting cross section of victim and perpetrator.
La Verdad
La Verdad, Spanish for “The Truth”, is another performance art where the artist reads testimonials of survivors from the Guatemalan Civil War while a male dentist injects anaesthesia into her mouth again and again, so she can remain silent.
This work focuses on the idea that victims of the Guatemalan Civil War from 1960 to 1996 were silenced because most of the war crimes were amnestied between the Guatemalan government and the guerrilla forces.
Pain seems to be a recurring motif in Galindo’s works, including Perra, Confesión, and Make America Great Again. The use of anaesthesia is interesting because when anaesthesia is injected into the body, it hurts terribly, but once injected, the body is numbed. The twist with this medium perhaps points to the use of violence in order to silence victims and those who are speaking up for them. The repetitive process of injection brings the idea that the ones in power are willing to do whatever it takes to silence the others.
Perra
Confesión
Recorte Pour La Línea
Recorte Pour La Línea, Spanish for “Cut Along the Line”, is another performance art where the artist stands nude for Dr. Billy Spence, one of the best plastic surgeons in Venezuela, to mark lines on her body. The lines indicate where to cut to reach a perfect body according to existing aesthetic standards.
The pain here is suggested through the title “Cut Along the Line”, where beauty is achieved through violence and destruction of one’s own natural body.
Further, plastic surgery is developed to achieve beauty, and by alluding to plastic surgery through these lines, Galindo conveys that women go through pain and artificial manipulation in order to achieve unrealistic and unnatural beauty standards.
There is also a power disparity between the surgeon and the artist. The artist does not have the will to decide the beauty model for her own body. Rather, her appearance is dictated by a male surgeon. Galindo’s lack of power to decide her own beauty points to society forcibly posing aesthetic molds onto women.
In Galindo’s work, her own body is a paint brush used to create strokes on a blank canvas, while everything around her is the blank canvas. The body is no longer restrained by its colour, form, or assigned gender, but becomes a subject of its own, achieving more than it originally intended to. Through breaking such limits of the female or human body, Galindo not only breaks physical boundary of the body, but also that of the mind: she breaks what people think the body is and is capable of.
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