The smile of Eros or how to screw history
Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos
“History
is a whore”. The stinging statement of the Argentinean writer Tomás
Eloy Martínez that circulates in different versions in the language of
Latin America and the United States is a perfect perspective to see (Re) Evolution Comics.
This crucial exhibition in the career of Ivonne Ferrer (Havana, 1968),
as scathing as light – in the bad sense of the term when it refers to
the female genre – supposes a daring journey: to tell the history of
Cuba from the Colony up to date through scenes that make use of the
Cuban graphic tradition and dare “to rape” certain chapters of diverse
centuries approached with total pictorial freedom to unleash this
“potential of the obscene” revealed by Georges Bataille, and to create
versions of history parallel to the official narrations.
The
way she uses a great number of graphical sources refers us to the
metaphor of the thousand eyes of the fly – capable of landing without
making a big fuss in the most sordid zones of reality – that Eloy
Martínez himself considered as the only possibility to take a look at
the multiple forms of complicity between history and power. But
hervisual account not only has the levity of the smile and the
indiscreet enchantment of the libidinous, but that license that gives a
time without utopias to make fun of a history of the (r)evolutions in
other places of a global world that, at this time, expects more from the
artistic fictions than from the political fictions.
In
fact, these 24 works of comic art feed on the prolific Cuban graphic
universe of several centuries that Ivonne plunders, in the best sense,
with the freedom of an indecency that allows her to mix it
promiscuously, if needed,with European erotic illustrations. Thus, she
uses the resource of the popular smile to subvert the homogeneous vision
of power and to reflect that “second” look – that “second world”, as
Mikjail Bakhtin called it, that emerges from the carnival.
This exhibition feeds on the formidable reserves of this smile. It could be subtitled: How to screw history,
in the most prosaic sense of the verb, since the smile entrenches
itself in the same spaces where the excesses of eroticism are released
and there it echoes louder than ever.
The
virtues stressed by Bakhtin in Rabelais may be attributed to these
pieces: their proximity to the popular sources, and a character so far
from the official that “there is no dogmatism, authority or unilateral
formality” that may harmonize with her way to subject the dominant
stories to a ludic and lubricious treatment. The artist takes over “the
smile of the Medusa” and freezes in her images an account that
demystifies the official forms of power and history, and that is only
ruled by the carnival laws, challenging the archive starting from the
joyful understanding of the relativity of the prevailing truths that she
subjects to the force of Eros.
Spaces
of power in the island, as the building where the Palace of the
Captains General was located in the colonial period in Cuba, were at the
same time residence of the highest authority imposed by the Crown,
resting place for sailors, brothel and prison, but this type of
libidinous chapters were hidden.
Ivonne re-updates the Foucault of The history of sexuality
to discover from smile and sex alternate truths connected not only to
the Cuban identity, but to this end of the story time where lies keep
going: “…It is up to us to
extract the truth of sex, since this truth is beyond its grasp; it is up
to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what hold it in darkness".
That’s
why the artist brings to her contemporary practice the use of the
erotic impulse to activate the relation between thepopular smile and
history: excesses, after all, have often encouraged an inversion of the
official order. This mode of burlesque genre transplanted to the
demystifying review of history in art supposes a clear consciousness of
the fictions constituting history, not only in relation to the Cuban
chaos – the last place where the imaginary of utopia settled – but to
the whole world.
Jacques
Ranciere holds that there have been a mutation of the critical thought
into duel thought after the end of the political utopias: this
exhibition seems to contradict it, and suggests in exchange that smile
thought that dates back to medieval burlesque tradition, but that may be
connected in terms of plunder and of the re-appropriation of sources
with the influence of the pop art: for six years, Ivonne Ferrer revised
chapters of the history of her country, plundering old illustrations and
engravings that include cigar labels, advertisements of products – as
the “Does everything” soap that puts double sense to a daring image
of the slavery period – or newspapers of that time and vignettes of
folkloric figures, such as the The pioneer girl, the Charade Chinese, or
the Tropicana dancer, or posters that had in their moment the burden of
the propaganda that falls apart here with laugh.
Paintings as The last crisis I had with you
not only supposes a promiscuity of means – collage of digitalized
graphics printed on canvas and painted – but of references including
paraphrased titles of popular songs, an event of world repercussion,
newspapers of that period, and the representation of Cuba as a
voluptuous woman surrounded by bullets of clear phallic connotations.
The dinosaurs of a suspense and science fiction film as Jurassic Park
are used to suggest a map of Miami and Havana as a contiguous territory
for which these creatures, identical in both places, fight over. Each
scene uses mockery and/or sex tounmask realities with the same temerity
with which the people ridiculed thepowerful in the medieval carnivals.
The
distancing from the rigid history that allows the perspective of
amusement – more propitious when the own island is seen from the
distance – creates the necessary space for the laugh to echo. The way
back to Cuba, through this comic art, is full of imaginative freedom.
Thus, the exhibition includes – in a close relationship with the
postmodern meta-artistic creation – not only a graphic parody full of
crossed over appropriations, but forged found objects that are really a
fabricated entertainment, and the ludic use of apocryphal documents and
procedures in connivance with “real” historical sources.
The
orgy appearing in the piece devoted to Yarini, the pimp that became a
political figure in Havana, is a representation of how promiscuous the
history of the country has been since the conquest. It is also a sharp
allusion to how the revolutions of the XX century screwed history (in
all the popular senses of the word) all over the world.
If usually in post-modernity the appropriations do not have in general a critical intention, in (R)Evolution Comics the parody picks up a theatrical sense that is definitely burlesque.
Likewise, the procedure of pop affiliation in its relation to the
treatment of graphics found, responds to an end – to a “telos” –
completely different from this movement: to make a stark scrutiny, to
dismantle or remove history’s clothes, and to undress it in such a way
that its tricks are revealed.
It’s
very compound official version is transformed into diversions in the
style of pieces that are cultural artifacts, memorabilia of a
post-historical time that, asArthur G. Danto says, has allowed art to be
radically open. If the main topic of the Uneasiness of culture
according to Sigmund Freud was blame, Ivonne Ferrer has got rid of it to
lead, with no sign of shame, a smiling historical liberation.
Press Release | Aluna Art Foundation
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