OPPOSED
TO DISAPPEARANCE
Alicia Murría
"All means,
all weapons are valid to save yourself from death and time. If a straight
line is the shortest between two fatal and inevitable points, then digressing
will make it longer: if these digressions become so complex, so twisted,
so winding, so rapid that our tracks are erased, perhaps death will
not find us, time will become lost, and we can remain hidden in changeable
hiding places". A Carlos Levy.
It has been repeated
insistently that her musical training has had a strong influence on
certain aspects of Marisa González´s work, on her form
of understanding artistic output, and undoubtedly it is true. On one
hand it broadened a conceptual base that has led her to an unprejudiced
attitude which links different forms of producing art and is open to
innovation and to continually introduce new abilities and tools. On
the other, its influence is apparent in the way she links elements together,
in the way she creates visual sequences, displaying a kind of need to
introduce what is here in front and what is there behind, in other words,
the process itself is an essential part of the work. It is as if a single
image, a single note, were never sufficiently eloquent to express all
that the artist wishes to bring to play. Her images are never isolated,
even in the cases where they are separate they are treated as part of
a series with the expressed desire of extracting all the possibilities
of the image or the idea after diving deeply into them. After completing
studies in Fine Arts her length stay in the United States led her to
first join the then recently created department of Generative Systems
at the Chicago Art Institute which Sonia Sheridan directed, and later
continue her studies at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington. In
Chicago, through the use of the photocopier as a tool -we are speaking
of the year 1971- she began to produce her first series of manipulated
images placing everyday items directly on the glass part of the copier.
(We can see very frequently in art produced by women this facility to
use as part of their work common items usually close at hand, items
that form part of a personal or family context. One artist, in speaking
to me about this aspect of her work defined it with extraordinary precision:
"I always work with what literally is within reach of my hand").
And so Marisa González included paper of different textures,
padding from the filter of a dryer, elements taken from nature, rocks,
clay, even bones; materials she came across and that had been thrown
away, elements that presented specific shapes but which she, through
the possibilities that electrography offered (disarrangement, movement,
sequentiality) altered and distorted. In this work process remains in
the forefront and factors like the speed of the decision-making process,
(the idea of speed forms part of the concept of these types of productions)
and the element of chance produce surprising results which logically
become part of the sequences of images.
Today the use of technological resources in the field of art is very
common: however if we go back to 1971, the period in which Marisa González
began to investigate and work with these means, we can appreciate the
capacity for risk and innovation which even then characterized her and
which today continues steadfast in the way she approaches the creative
act. She explored an area that undermined the sacredness of the piece
of art, giving up materials which are traditionally referred to as "fine"
and works which are easy to sell, and placing her interest in aspects
and materials that are fragile, not very resistant to the passing of
time and purely experimental. By doing so she demonstrated a very generous
attitude with respect to the final concept which determines the production
of a piece of art and its access to the public.
It was a little bit later, but still within her American period, that
Marisa González began to work with the computer and photography,
and then explore the possibilities presented by the Lumena program created
by another Sheridan disciple, John Dunn. At this point I would like
to take a leap in time and focus on some of the work she did in the
90´s, a period in which I have been able to follow more closely
her successive appearances and the offerings of her continued exploration
and experimentation with various means, fundamentally the computer and
digital photography.
In 1993 she offered a series of works titled "Looks into time"
revolving around one theme, or more precisely around one image. It was
an image of little value chosen and forgotten some time ago which she
rescued to subject it to a series of alterations using the machine.
It the image (an appropriate photo) of a black woman displaying a sophisticated
sexuality, part goddess, part erotic myth supplied by the advertising
world. Marisa González subjected it to an almost merciless process
of manipulations and grouped the various sections of her exhibition
with revealing titles: "Desires", "Identity Vertigo",
"Territories", and "Silences". With this series
she addressed social and lifestyle issues related to the changes produced
in the situation of women in the developed world. It is a complex and
contradictory area where the traditional role of caring for the house
and the children is superimposed on the role of paid worker producing
a double workday made even worse by the external pressure coming from
advertisers who present a kind of perfect woman. They offer us a woman
who is an expert housekeeper, a dedicated and loving mother, and at
the same time an attractive woman who is desirable and always sexually
available. In other words, they present a model which is scarcely believable,
and above all, exhausting if you try to follow it. Its implausibility
does not make it any less alienating and oppressive to a woman´s
mind, nor does it make it any less attractive to a man´s mind.
This is not the only occasion in which Marisa González has dealt
with clearly social issues, with that with affects the daily lives of
men and women (At the Corcoran School, as a student, she exhibited the
sequence of a face of a woman who shouts, who tries to cover her face
in a gesture of fear while being attacked, an attack made even more
disturbing, if that is possible, because we are not aware of its origin.
Its origin is there, where nothing is said, where nothing is indicated,
where nothing is seen, the place where the imagination creates the most
terrible specters.) The themes of violence, rape, sexual exploitation,
loneliness, individualism, or genetic manipulation are issues she has
dealt with throughout this last decade. Even though she has never created
a documentary piece of work, nor directly reflected these themes, the
ideological foundation upon which her images are built has never lost
its intensity.
In 1995 she presented "Journey to Onil",a series of images
processed through the computer which revolved around games, childhood,
and memory; a sort of real and metaphoric journey in which dreams and
reality seem to meet. Marisa González had visited a doll factory
where she selected a series of head, limbs, and bodies that were in
reality discards, defective materials. It seemed to me then that after
producing works which were relatively belligerent with respect to reality,
that she had chosen a viewpoint that looked inward toward the darkest
folds of experience. The myth of childhood as an age of happiness and
purity is all too often unsustainable. The artist appears to be confronting
an introspective piece of work which is filled with melancholy. Those
dolls which are being made, unfinished, do not represent this supposed
world of games and sheltering in which everything is possible but rather
they observe the world from the darkness of empty eyes. Unattended and
pathetic, almost like a phantasmagoria, they represent, as few images
can, evil and the fatality of death. The artist wrote in an introductory
text, "The model-mold of the external body disturbs the idyllic
myth of childhood innocence. There is no axis, nor trunk, nor origin,
only molds, extremes, limits, silences, affections, and dreams".
In speaking of molds she introduces an idea which reappears later in
her more recent works, copies, cloning, genetic manipulation, human
intervention in, nature, no longer through the means used since time
immemorial, for the human being is characterized by his introducing
radical modifications in his environment, but rather by this step beyond
taken by genetic manipulation and which has given us scientific and
technological advances: clone, reproduce, copy. Marisa González
speaks through her photographs of the unfathomable loneliness of the
contemporary individual and of his new fears, his frenzies, and his
frustrations.
In the last three years she has directed her attention to this area:
the alterations, monstrosities, and deformities that nature produces
on its own or with human help. "Deviations" were images of
fruit she found B lemonsB in which the malformations enlarged by the
camera´s objective and later subject to digital intervention created
a universe which referred back to the human element: the textures of
the skin, of the folds, of cavities and cracks, of protuberances which
are obviously associated with the sexual organs. It was a kind of astonishing
sensual and sexual topography to which she added the physical presence
of the forms themselves. The fruit was spread out next to the images
on a large rug creating an enormous dazzling stain, yellow and organic,
which displayed its process of decomposition openly.
In her latest appearance -ARCO 2000- she continues the exploration that
under the guise of an attractive and almost spectacular appearance reworks
the idea of monstrosities but she also includes the idea of that which
goes beyond normal, that which is different or foreign. The red in the
strawberries, their shining texture, the cavities and protuberances
create in a very direct way disturbing images. "Organic deformities,"
-she writes- "genetic chaos in the established order, have constructed
a formal order referring back to the interior, to the most intimate,
to the body". They are forms sometimes threatening and other times
clearly erotic exalting the physical aspect, the exploration of the
body, sexuality. Nevertheless, they can also be evil representing the
fight between life and death.
The attraction for the ephemeral (the discarded materials, the decontextualized
elements which drag behind them their history), the use of series, the
concern for the process, are aspects which in different ways appear
again and again in the artist´s work. It could be said that at
the bottom of these options lies a will to not only break rules and
to deconstruct but also to put in doubt what we call reality (distort
what we understand as real to give it a more intense representation),
an effort which is connected directly to the area of perception and
which at the same time offers a reflection on time both real and experiential.
This period of experience and personal memory is for her a kind of material,
conceptual material with which Marisa González creates her works.
And perhaps it is here in this exhibition that she has been given the
opportunity to fully develop a project which is truly complex and extensive.
It can be said that in some of her works what nourishes, what feeds
the work, and sustains it more than its professional quality, is a kind
of battle against disappearance, an obsession with preserving the memory
of things, of what has been lived, of what was once "real",
of beings, of life experiences both personal and those of others, of
the tracks left by them. Nevertheless we are not dealing with a nostalgic
look back, she is not trying to weave using the threads of melancholy
but rather with a calmness in face of life´s processes, their
speed, and the way in which a few fundamental things disappear. Her
work is about a fight against death, and above all a fight against individual
and collective forgetting but at the same time it is the crystalizing
of an attitude that holds, more than anything else, something which
could be defined as the tenaciousness of existence. So we have the linkings,
the fact that an image insistently and obsessively directs us to another,
and this one to still another, and that one to still another, a kind
of circularity built through the desire and the need to understand the
world and the experience of life as an accumulation of multiple forward
and backward connections in which the present is constructed based on
fragments of history, memory, and expectations, but also on the basis
of a fragility that in the end turns out to be extremely powerful.
This is the work that Marisa González offers us, a body of work
that speaks to us with a radical intensity, with a generous opulence
of LIFE.
Murría, Alicia:
Art Critic and commissioner of independent exhibitions. She collaborates
in various Spanish and international publications. She is a writer for
the magazine LÁPIZ and the correspondent for the magazine Flash-Art
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