How have I never come across this artist before? A friend
put up an image of her Inhabited Painting
from 1975. The image immediately stuck me, the view over the shoulder of a
woman in a mirror. But is it a mirror? The brush in her hand is the point at which the two
bodies of the one woman meet, and this is where it gets complicated. Not a
mirror image quite, but a painting then? The thick blue line frantically scribbled
over the head of the first larger (the ‘real’) woman suggests she painted. And
not just painted, but erased. Here the brushmark works to obscure the figure,
not reveal it. The one we would normally associated as being the ‘real’ person,
the one over whose shoulder we look as we face her reflection in a mirror, is
the one that is transitory, whose identity is not only hidden but scratched out.
And that title ‘Inhabited Painting’, at first you presume the one who inhabits
is Almeida’s reflection. As if the reflection is within the painting. But wait,
the reflected woman is the one doing the paining. The blue strokes emanate from
her brush, wiping out the figure outside the
mirror. So maybe she is the one who is not real then,
the one over whose shoulder we look. But then, that would put us inside the mirror. And suddenly, the
viewpoint is reversed. We, the viewer of this photograph/reflection/painting
are the ones that are reflected. We are the ones that inhabit the painting, not
Almeida. And this sudden dizzying revelation, and the winding labyrinth of
thought that led me here leaves me thirsting for more.
So I go on a Google hunt. And all I manage to pull up is one
flimsy Guardian article which informs me that Helen Almeida is a Portuguese
artist from the early 1960s who was inspired by the neo-concrete movement in
Brazil under the leadership of Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. She embraces
their desire to liberate color into three dimensional space, experiments with
breaking the confines of the canvas. Her work was performative, which she
recorded in black and white photography. Her use of the colour blue is reminiscent
of Yves Klein signature Blue, yet she denies any reference to him. A denial to
be taken with a pinch of salt in my opinion, who can reject such a blatant
parallel? The author of the article agrees with me: In the work Study for inner improvement (1977) we
see a sequence of photographs where she looks like she is eating blue paint.
She had, it appears, protested Klein’s
use of women as objects. Insert the concept of anthropophagy (cultural
cannibalism-consuming other cultures as a way of asserting independence) which
was a popular ideology at the time. Chewing up Klein’s blue thus becomes a
liberating act for women and artists. So far, so good.
Her performances were often private; her husband architect Artur
Rosa photographed her. Can they still be called performances then? Experiments
maybe? This raises the whole realm of performance art and the problems of
documenting it. But her images are too clearly defined to fall into this
category. They might have originated as performance, but they are still
Paintings. She names them so herself. Some other pieces included her dressing
us in white with white canvas attached to her body and walking through her
garden, taking the canvas for a walk. Or attaching single strands of horsehair
to a drawn line in the ink to make the line look like it is lifted off the
page. She also slashed the canvas (inspired by Italian artist lucio Fontana)
and was photographed trying to slip through the slit.
Jessica Lack, the author of the article claims a political
motivation these performances were “Not just about physical liberation, but
psychological emancipation also”. She grew up in Portugal under rightwing
regime of Antonio slazar. The concept of a neo concrete movement appealed to
her generation of artist in Portugal.
And after that I quickly hit a brick wall. Most of google’s
results are in French and don’t lead anywhere interesting. Similarly is my
search in the public library. I get one hit when searching her name in the
catalog, it is: Making Callaloo : 25
years of Black literature, 1976-2000 / edited by Charles Henry Rowell. Ok,
back to the internet. Aventually I manage to download an essay from an
exhibition catalogue by one Filipa Oliveira, it is even in English.
“Over the last forty
years, Helena Almeida has developed a body of work, which started with the
process of exploring the limits of painting, transforming ideas and experiences
into images. She combined the photographic image with the drawn line and the
paint mark in compositions that examined space and drew attention to the
surface of the work." Filipa Oliveira
The inside of the outside of the
inside
The outside and the inside are inseparable.
The world is wholly inside and I am wholly
Outside myself
Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
Oliviera has a little more information for me. She began her
career as a painter. Interested in surfaces, she tries to rupture the plane of
illusion, challenging the object itself. Her works “exploded” or “expelled” into
a new dimension, or else deconstructed the constituent parts of painting. The
frame shifts away, the canvas falls, leaving the stretcher visible (revealing
the support structure, the inner workings, the organs of the object)
deconstructing the separation of inside from outside. This makes me think of
Deleuze’s body without organs, in a grotesque inversion. Merlau-ponty called it
chiasma. She is both work and object, author and embodied subject. They are inseparable.
Back we go to Inhabited
Painting, because this is more than just one work, it is her manifesto, it
sums up her aim and method and purpose as an artist. Trying to inhabit
painting. To do this, she must deconstruct it first. At this point in her
career she abandons painting entirely, for photography. Her subject is the
same-rethinking the limits of painting and drawing. And yet her choice to do
this through photographs is interesting. Is she suggesting that photography is
better at this then? That photography is the tool with which to deconstruct painting?
A photograph is even more two dimensional than a painting. It shows its organs
less, the process of its makings are left in the darkroom, in the trays of
chemical and sheets of negatives. The image aspires even more to a
self-constructed reality. But perhaps this is not what she is getting at. She
could simply be suggesting that paintings limits are better explored though
another medium.
Some historical context then: Almeida is working at a time
when painting was declared dead and ideas and concepts declared the successor, Sol
le Witts paragraphs on conceptual art had been written in 1967. Bu the 1970s
performance art was at its height. Cindy Sherman’s film stills were made in
1977. Photography is seen a valid form of documentation of art that is about
ideas, about subverting aesthetic tropes, and challenging art historical
paradigms. Almeida is exploring how to continue painting without doing it
literally, the era of the document and the statement and the performance.
Then we come to her use of series: Spatial concept,
uncovered interiority and depth to painting, or demonstrating the opposite-the
inexistence of something beyond the surface of the canvas? A new condition for
the medium: liberating it from the syndrome of the frame and allowing painting
to escape its ontological contingency: that of painted surface (that of
surface) -new way of thinking about the medium. So says Oliviera. But this
argument seems better suited to Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock and his yard full of tires than it
does to Almeida’s psychologically charged self-portraits.
But are they self-portraits? Despite the obscuring dashes of
blue paint, Almeida doesn’t seem to be trying to hide or obscure her identity.
Nor is she playing a role, as Cindy Sherman is. And yet, would these images be
so powerful if the subject were, say, her husband? After all, shouldn’t the
artist be the one taking the photographs, rather than appearing in them?
Oliviera declares that this is because Almeida is not interested in themes or techniques,
but in the elements, the paint mark and the line. And this requires the
physical presence of the artist in the image. “It is through her body that
object/actor, photography, and painting/drawing intertwine.” Photography then
is the means not the end. Like the documentation of performance art. Her photos
leave in the irregularities in grain and texture and are not the polished finished
products of high art. Does this make it just documentation? Part of process,
another step in the whole work then, from enactment to paper? Or the final
work? Oliviera reads in the influence of cinema. Enacting plots. Still from
films. Each image is temporal, depicting a suspension of action that comes to
life in spectator’s imagination. She is compared to jean luc Godard. This
argument sags in the middle. It doesn’t hold up. After all, who can say film
stills in the late 1970’s and not talk about Sherman? And Almeida’s images do
not contain a plot. Certainly not Godard. But if you had to draw the comparison
to cinema, then some of the eerie doubling does perhaps recall that infamous
female double in Bergman’s Persona,
the psychological intensity. Not just the split self, but in other works, such
as the Study for Inner Improvement she
tries to eat the paint. To take it into her, to ingest her own process, her own
art, and to become whole with it. Or is she? Like with Inhabited Painting, the opposite could also be true. She could be
attempting to vomit it up. When the act of painting is no longer enough, the
body must discharge it. As the series
progresses, the blue covers her body completely. But we are not finished. A
hand appears, to push this self-effluence aside. The artist is not conquered or
overtaken by her own creation. The body re-emerges.
This is where I begin to agree with Oliviera: It is not
about self-portraiture but authorship. She is able to be herself, another and
neither. Uses herself as an object, and empty vessel, as she uses the
horsehair, the blue ink, or stool from her studio. Materials manipulated to purse
her formal and conceptual interrogation of the image. Not autobiographical
because she is not herself in the images. “Her images usurp a tautological
desire for meaning that the immediate and pseudo-transparent nature of photography
seems to allow. She takes on a mask –without ever recurring to disguises or
makeup – in order to be photographable.” If not intimacy with the woman then,
it is intimacy of a different kind. A bodily intimacy. That of organs, and
bodies, of discharge, and hair and blood and paint. One exhibition is titled
“Inside Me”. Almeida swallows paint, weeps it, teases the line, is crossed by
it. She literally and poetically inhabits it. And yet for all this bodily
physicality, we are never wholly confronted by the mess of it. The photograph
stands always between us and her actual body. As does the paint, as does the
lines of horsehair. In the photograph, her body is transformed into light,
chemicals and paper. Clean and crisp, the least bodily representation of
reality of all. Even the mess of chemicals it takes to produce a photograph are
long out of sight. Through turning herself into a photo- she is the exact opposite
of body art, of embodying the painting, she flattens herself out, intertwines
herself with the flatness of the work; by turning herself into exposed light on
a page, she is denying her body. Even though at first she seems to being the
tradition of feminist body artists Hannah Wilke or Francesca woodman or Eva Mendez,
she is actually the opposite, even when she abandons the horsehair and the blue
paint-her body is the mass molded by the artist. The photograph pretends to
document an action: be that the traversing of a canvas, promenading through a
garden or eating pigment. Yet she refutes an association between her work and
performance, preferring the concept of theatricality. She prepares with
drawings, not rehearsals. Drawings create a cartography of the work; attest to the
artificiality of each gesture. There is no “action” no before or after. The
gesture is formulated, it doesn’t occur in reality (the falsity of photographs,
suggesting or promising factual evidence that doesn’t exist) no improvisation
or randomness. No particular audience, just the camera and the photographer.
All of this brings me a little closer to the questions then
that Almeida poses. I feel I know a little bit more about what she is not. But despite all my wrestling with
Oliviera’s interrogation of her work, and the scant biographical details
provided by Lack, I still don’t feel satisfied. I haven’t gotten to the heart
of this artist yet, or even to have begun to chip the surface of her stunning
body of work. My search is frustrated for today. Until I have access to some
decent university libraries (and this elicits my old thoughts about
universities as modern day churches, the institutions that guard the knowledge
for a very high price) or until I learn French, I will have to make do with
just looking at the images, and trying to unravel the knots of questions on my
own.
Filipa Oliveira
Helena
ALMEIDA: Inside Me,
Kettle’s Yard, 2009
Jessica Lack
Artist
of the week 59: Helena Almeida guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 October 2009
13.05 EDT
