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MEMORY FRAGMENTS

MOURNING AND CORPORALITY IN THE IMAGINARY of Marisa González

Fernándo Castro Flórez


Oscillation is representative of the artistic experience that occurs in a technical world where the need to plan is felt.
Perhaps Benjamin is the philosopher that has best understood the problems of the work of art in this time of massive reproduction, when mediation has become generalized. Even though there was a last refuge for the value of the cult now falling apart due to the aesthetic of the surprise and novelty: photography maintains the cult and the memory of our loved ones, distant or disappeared1. The remains of an experience are found in photography, an experience that being surrounded by silence cries for a name. Without any doubt the technique does not lead, in a lineal perspective, towards a mastery of absolute "rationalization" but rather seems to surround some objects or images of magic value. Marisa González understood in the 60´s the importance of the technological offerings, and of course, of the developments of the photographic breaking with a dominant aesthetic of a (post)informalist nature which had something of a "hard surface", a wall (political more than aesthetic) from which she brought forth "organic forms, vegetables, that broke it down, that opened it up to space and to the sky. She put the wall in motion and began to make it multidimensional"2. It is important to remember the works done in Chicago within the program of Generative Systems on 3M photocopiers using thermal paper3, and also her early works using discarded products, creating a "language of discarded elements pulled into another context4". This creator´s flanerie aesthetic causes the figure of the ragman as the poet of everyday things to reappear, as well as a particular version of the processes that in different coordinates, arte povera would set off. In the end, this gathering of what has fallen to earth, the redemption of that which was cast aside, comes to be an entering into the complex territory of memory with which this modern age has very complex relations. "Everything", writes Eugenio Trias, "reduced to rubble, piled up, loose, separated, pure "free association". Each time lightning flashes, an image of those things remains trapped in perception: a mnemonic track reaches conscience and vision. For he who allows himself to be dragged, not by the motion of history, but by the lashing of involuntary memory; for he who waits and attends this fugitive time which is a time of remembrance, for him there is, in the midst of the desolation, a certain comfort and hope. Poet in the middle of the night, his priesthood consists of the administration, in the moments of light, of these treasures lost in an ancestral memory turned into debris. The poet, in the midst of his busyness, takes on the role, for that reason, of a ragman"5. The fragmentary, and in some cases abstract, memories of Marisa González, are superimposed on her preoccupation for the human figure, there is a constant search, in this creator, for this reflection that we call shadow, an inquiry into the archetype that Jung described in his enormous influence on the self6. This implies never-ending work on identity and alterity7: "The composition of a painting", states Marisa González, is in the dialectic between the singular and the multiple, between sequential rhythm and the static movement"8. But the difference from the identical also assumes the manifestation of an unlikeness anchored as much in the desire as in the logic of the visioning. "From the beginning, in the dialectic between the eye and the look, we see that there no coincidence at all, instead the true effect of a lure. When in love I ask for a look, it is something intrinsically unsatisfactory and which always fails because You never look at me from where I see you. Or the reverse What I look at is never what I want to see"9. The symbols speaks of the perishable, of pain as a code of life, from this nature in which our desires find a mirror in which to reflect themselves. Marisa González sets off metamorphic processes, in this time that flies, accepting the wisdom of life, the event that leads to the act of creation: "Evoke the light. That in prolonged rigidity our look may reach the vision that we have been pursuing. Metamorphosis: everything changes. But what is at the root of suffering also makes possible the innocent joy of creation: live"10. This creator has subjected the most diverse objects to a decontextualizing process, connected to the idea of image typical of surrealism, aided by the systematic use of technologic mechanisms: "The same object," Marisa González warns us, "taken out of context, transformed, manipulated, or simply concentrating our attention on a particular detail, figure or form, which an accident of nature or man has constructed and which with the change in location, lighting, and adding a new vision to it, is transformed and takes on another dimension, another dynamic, another narrative"11. Marisa González´s attitude towards the use of technical means (photocopier, fax, computer) has never been naive or merely technical superficial, to the contrary, from the beginning she saw "in the new technology a perfect vehicle to visualize transformation, movement, and time"12. In the debates in the 70´s about the relationship between art and science she put her faith in the use of technology with an artistic purpose1.3 "Since Marisa began using the photocopier many might consider her a Copy Artist, but she is not a Copy Artist. She is, above all, an artist. (...) And I don´t know of anyone in Europe who has used the photocopier in a more direct, organic, and powerful way"14. She has also worked on a regular basis with the Lumena/Time Arts computer graphic system created by John Dunn postulating a genetic manipulation of images15. "Someone mentioned recently a "digitalization of experience", referring to the order imposed by the new vision machines. The observation made by Peter Weibel is related to the work Marisa González proposes here in this series of variations titled Looks into time. The assumed territory set off by a first representation moves toward a possible system of shapes subjected to strategies of spatial and temporal dissolution which for her are "vertigos" or "silences". They could also be tracks or marks made absent or turned into an echo, an escape, or a resonance. They are moments of a Variation that not only carried out with cold technical execution but perhaps should be read in light of that other reference point which brings it closer to life and desire, two faces of another machine which escapes us, as in the same way the moments of a image which is never the same slip away in unreachable flight"16. In a certain sense Marisa González performs a deconstruction of the abstract norms of the technological poetics in order to, through her constant work with these virtual machines17 propose an iconography of rhythms in which she moves from the generative aspect to the decomposition. The importance that music has in her aesthetic formation has been underscored along with her particular sensitivity for temporal processes19 and her great concern for the element of composition20. This discourse of flight21 is presented in serial form with the serialization understood from a more practical than analytical position "in such a way that each image enjoys autonomy due to the high degree of emotional consistency it represents"22. Series and progression, variation of the same or a small difference, ritornello, to make use of a deleuzian23 notion, are aspects found in the work of Marisa González which establish a certain approximation towards minimalist positions where a systematization of the compulsion "of the unbreakable ritual of obsessions, with its precision, its meticulousness, its delicate exactness, covering up a chasm of irrationality"24. The serial structures, the minimalist canon, represented a blow for the dominant abstract code gestures, and also a different contingency of the questioning of the place of a work of art25. The fragmented plastic language is subject to, in Marisa González work, a repetitive process26, in which not only the calculated but the random plays a major role.
William Benjamin pointed out that the viewer tends to look for in photography that tiny spark of chance, of the here and the now, "with which reality has singed, so to speak, its character of image, to find the invisible place in which, in a certain way of being of that minute that happened time ago, today rests the future and so eloquently that, looking backwards, we can discover it"27. In the case of Marisa González the procedures she uses in her portraits and self-portraits introduce the element of chance as well as the setting in motion of the metamorphosis: "the roots seemed to be self-portraits, and the self-portraits seemed to be roots"28. It is evident that photography is a determining factor in this artist´s focuses, "whose fertile imagination takes us back in history to photographic techniques very appreciated by the vanguard, such as raygraphs and schadographs"29. although she adds a special emotional character. "Photography shows us a previous reality and even though it gives the impression of being ideal, it is never understood as something purely illusory: it is the document of a Areality whose reach we are beyond"31. Once more the indicative quality maintains the joy of the look32. The punctum is the detail that tears the look, an impulse to reach beyond that which at first sight is met. Derrida has pointed out that the punctum is beyond the field and beyond the code. It is the place of irreplaceable singularity and of the unique referential aspect, the punctum radiates, and most surprisingly, it allows for metonymy. And since it allows itself to be dragged in its relays of substitution it can invade everything, objects and feeling: "this singularity is not in any part of the field, here we have it mobilizing everything everywhere, it pluralizes itself. The punctum induces metonymy and it is its strength, or more than its strength, it dynamis, in other words, it potency, it virtuality"33. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Sigmund Freud warns us that the conscience emerges from the trace of a memory, that is, from the death wish and from the degradation of existence, something which photography sustains as the duplication of reality but also as the theater of death34. In the age of the downfall of memory (when the cathodic vertigo has cast is spell), time is dismembered, "from this dismembering emerges the presence of remembering"35. Photography does not recall the past but it is the testimony that what I see has been, a practice that has something to do with "resurrection", but also with the moving of everything towards the past, as if reality were sinking into a land of shadows. On one surface something real that can no longer be touched has condensed, the temporal density of a photograph is paradoxical, there is no room in it, nothing can be added, nor is there any future, a factor that causes its patheticalness and melancholy. Time is stalled while we become witness of the non-present, possessors of a great tear which is a counter-memory. "Photography is a denaturalized theater in which death cannot "examine itself", think about itself, and internalize itself; or even more: the dead theater of Death, the prescription for Tragedy; Photography excludes all purification, all catharsis"36. By means of the photograph death expresses itself in future tense, while a catastrophe that happened remains present. From her earliest works to her most recent, Marisa González has reflected upon ruin and decomposition, either through objects or meditating on the corporal element, in a mixture of testimonies of the feelings and the evoking of the power of dreams.
"Locate desire, build dreams,
reinvent the self and the other, invent a new utopia,
Awaken the body,
beginning with the body. Serialized body-Programmed body-Cloned Body,
Fragments of your own device"37
One of the more intense series of this artist is the one she created using portraits of dolls, included in the exhibition titled Broken Dreams, Broken Silences (1995), in which an enigmatic face appears "from which the eyes have been removed and in their place remain only dark cavities filled with an emptiness peering out from these neutral windows which configure the frame of their retained images"38. Contemporary art glides in parallel to these murky lives of toys, from the woman offering herself to those gawking in Etant donnes, to Bellmers´doll; as much in McCarthy´s eschatological situations as in the obsession for ventriloquism that Juan Muñoz presumes. Small perversion appear everywhere, something repressed that comes back in the form of the abject, which is not necessarily related to filth or to health, but mainly goes back to a disruption of identity: "the despicable element is perverse in since it neither abandons nor accepts a prohibition, a rule is a law, but rather it diverts it, it sets it off track, it corrupts it"39. In a certain sense it could be accepted that what we have are neither bodies nor toys, but fetiches, removed from any type of ceremony and included in an extraordinary exhibitionist drive which, on the other hand, sanitizes the most turbulent realities. Fetishes, whether they refer to a part of the body or to an inorganic object are, according to Freud, the presence of that nothingness that is the maternal penis and at the same time the sign of its absence. As the symbol of something and at the same time it negation, fetishes can only be maintained at the price of an essential wound, in which two reactions make up the nucleus of a true fracturing of the self. The multiplying impulse, the tension that leads to collecting is typical of the fetishist: the succeeding incarnations do not use up completely the nothingness for which they are a code. As for presence, the fetish-object is effectively something concrete and even tangible, but verification of an absence is, at the same time, immaterial because it points back to something that is beyond itself, it can never really be possessed40. Rilke reminded us of the slovenly even impure dolls that bore witness to the first loneliness of childhood, "wedged in beds with railings, dragged to the heavy folds of illnesses, included in dreams, wound up in the misfortunes of feverish nights: that is what the dolls were like"41. These heartless beings ceded their bodies to an even more powerful one, open to the unknown; because of this they entered into the intimacy of life more deeply than any other thing. Childhood knows little about patience, the doll was the limit of that impossibility; they gave in to any caress and they kept the memory of none: it was impossible to know what happened to the warmth that they had received. They taught silence42. "Reality is like a joyous mirror; the child identifies with his double, with an image that is not him, but one that makes it possible for him to recognize himself. And by doing so he fills an emptiness, an "opening" between the two term of the relationship: the body and the image. The dolls are privileged witnesses of this transparent relationship"43. The transparent image appears to be the threshold of a visible world, the identification or rather transformation produced in the individual ( the function of self) when it assumes an image that makes up the symbolic womb, before language restores its universal properties and introduces it into elaborate social situations44. We recognize the way the girl´s fantasies materialize in the cold body of the doll45, as well as the drives that can be unleashed in adults with respect to those artificial bodies which make certain psychological projections possible: objects end up being incarnations of the disturbing or the inhospitable, evil or sinister in Freudian terms46. The most important change in contemporary art and theory is that which replaces the conception of the understood as "authentic" and resulting from its representation, with its acceptance as a traumatic event. In his seminar on looks Lacan postulates that the look precedes the invividual47 who comes to perceive it as a threat, as if it interrogated him; it can even come to symbolize the concept of lack in the phenomenon of castration.
Today´s art rejects the old rule of pacifying the look, "it´s as if art wanted the look to shine, the object to rise up, and that the real to exist in all the glory (or horror) of its driving desire, or at least to evoke that sublime condition"48. The photographic story Broken Dreams, Broken Silences began in 1986, prolonging its existence for a decade up to the series The Mirror of the Clones (1996) where the dolls stared at themselves as if they were surprised. In some pieces sequences of the process of the making of the dolls appear, stressing the element of the molds, or boxes full of arms and heads, in a tremendous evocation of mutilation. "The work of Marisa González comes to bear at precisely this moment. Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, through its fetishist images -boy doll/girl doll- transformed and manipulated using the computer, becomes an exhibition which insists upon offering maximum nostalgia. This cold awareness of the impossibility of going back, of the impossibility of fulfilling yourself through the other, clearly foretold and anticipated in its origin. Her pieces touch upon this lucid distance of the question about how the identity of the individual can be achieved through its fulfillment as a body"49. The dolls have been, technologically, thrown into the time of fantasies, subjected to all kinds of manipulations, with their "faces deformed or marked by a dramatic illumination".
Marisa González maintains, as an emotional and aesthetic constant, a concern for the rescue reality, as if she were the person responsible for guarding elements on the verge of death, even if it through the precarious practice of recycling. In a certain sense, this work, representing unquestionable commitment and honesty, has to be understood as fragments of a melancholic message. We must remember that ambivalence is the motor of conflict; mourning borders on narcissistic identification, ruin speaks to the self as is only it could understand the traumatic event. "The conflict that arises in the self, and the fact that melancholy usually substitutes for the fight over the object, must act as a painful wound that demands an extremely high counterweight"50. The effort of the duel demands the building of an image of the other that is the equivalent to a birth. Melancholy sees things from the point of view of the loss, the disdain for the world leads to the awareness of the vanity of things. The obsession when faced with expiration and the disillusion that takes hold of you at the same moment that you have reached the object of your desires "are manifested precisely in the aspiration for the most perfect solitude and are also shown paradoxically in the most idyllically serene landscape"51. Precisely because it is under the guise of an evocation of the past that spirits are evoked, photography exorcizes it remembering it as such, and for that reason it is one of the privileged instruments of social memory, in being given the normalizing function that society places upon funeral rites, "namely, revive indissolubly the memory of the disappeared and the memory of their disappearance"52. The eventuality of the photograph confirms that everything is perishable and at the same time it indicates that reality is fundamentally unclassifiable. Marisa González has found the contemporary ruin and in her desire to conserve what has been, acts like a photograph transforming reality into antiquity53. It is clear that our time is nostalgic and that photography actively promotes this feeling in that it is an elegiac and crepuscular art. "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in mortality, vulnerability, the changeability of another person or thing
Precisely because they isolate a moment and freeze it, all photograph testify to the merciless passing of time"54. The efficiency of the photograph´s nostalgic declaration depends on the constant enrichment of the familiar iconography of mystery, mortality, and expiration. An immediate romanticism of the present is found in the photograph. "In the same way that the fascination exerted by the photograph is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentalism"55. With the anxiety of precariousness there is no need for a commemorative monument, nor would we need the inventory (photographic) of mortality.
"As I have pointed out, the photograph has to do with the idea of an awareness of disappearance, according to Freud photographs respond to the need to capture fleeting experiences, a practice related to memory, a visual prosthesis with which to endure the unnameable and its implacable arrival. André Bazin indicates that photography does not create eternity as art instead it embalms time56. it steals it from its own corruption, it benefits from a transference of reality to its reproduction. If, on one hand, the photograph is a sign of reception, it is also an interpretive moment: a photograph is at the same time a pseudo-presence and a sign of absence. Modern art has evolved in such a direction that it no longer possible to find in its works those forms of comfort and reconciliation with ruin that it previously promised us: the act of hiding, the veiling of meaning is accepted in a state of exception in which the starting point is no longer the manifestation of what was hidden, of an end that is a new harmony"57. Marisa González proposes a series of works that have something of poetic veiling, as if it were necessary to maintain the suspicion of another presence. Everything that can be transmitted through the interchange of symbols is always something that is as absent as it is present, it serves to produce this kind of fundamental alternation the causes it, after appearing at one point, to disappear and reappear in another: it circles leaving behind it the sign of its absence in the place where it came from. A work of art is considered to have the veiling function, "it is a descent to the imaginary plane of ternary rhythm subject-object beyond, fundamental in the symbolic relation. Put another way, within the function of the veiling the projection of the intermediate position of the object is contemplated"58.
The indicative image has as a general effect "of implicating the individual completely in the experience, in what is experienced in the photographic process"59., a commitment to images, which in the case of Marisa González is total. Menene Gras has underscored the link between violence and perversion in the images of the dolls that Marisa González presents, Ashowing their negation through the fragmentation of the human body, and what their dismemberment means60, from an old image, made in Chicago in 1972, that allegorizes rape (the fragmented body and the destroyed beauty) to the series Looks into Time (1993), in which she highlights the use women´s images for advertising purposes. Ana Martínez-Collado has suggested that Marisa González criticizes feminine narcissism, stepping away from the politics of the slogan or from the culture of the complaint to propose a reflection, almost philosophical, on the human and global process of decomposition61. In the series Deviations (1998) she used the image of the rotting of lemons that took on forms that seemed to serves as allegories of the human body, but she also expresses her concern for ecology as in the interactive CD Rom titled Deviations 1999-2000:
"Transgenetics that speak
Fragments that talk
Bodies that converse,
It´s not what we see, but it is what we feel"62.
Marisa González links the image of the dolls coming out of the molds with genetic chaos, that counter-utopia of cloning that is written in the contemporary technological universe of imagination. "Marisa recognized the importance of technology at the end of the 20th century and she took in on daringly, unafraid, experientially and in total harmony with the deepest of her sensitivity. Her work acquired in this way a contemporary imprint: it was a powerful manifestation of her personal metamorphosis within the metamorphosis of Spanish society"63. In the work she has set out for Art and Technology Foundation she introduces a new iconography through photographs taken of the dismantling of a bread factory in Bilbao, which brings the artist back to her childhood in that city. Amidst ruin Marisa González picks up balance sheets, different materials, architectural structures, all kinds of images, not because of an interest in archeology but to construct an immense mirror of the human experience. "One has to examine her works not as pretty images, but as the record of a process of personal and artistic growth"64. It is the need to germinate and grow, but also the obligation to not forget what has fallen to the ground, be it a toy or an abandoned building. As Marisa González points out there is no axis, nor trunk, nor origin, "only molds, extremes, limits, silences, affections, and dreams"65. We know that innocence has ended; even, in the style of Jacques Derrida, we could accept that the beginning is a crossing out or correction, although what is decisive es accepting that creation does not have an end. To spread out the imaginary cycles of metamorphosis66 Marisa González uses the metaphor as a tool of expression, presenting bodies that are molds, "the artificial body as a natural icon"67. mutating or simply rotting fruits, buildings reduced to rubble. In the end the paradox of visualizing the silence of dreams appears, these half-veiled desires, those enigmas which have no solution. "Poetic expression", writes Eusebio Sempere, "flourishes at the moment in which the spirit feels the need to manifest the unreal desire to create, and this manifestation is explicit in the work of Marisa González-Portillo"68. This radical work, formulated as a series of an insistent rhythm, appears as an allegory of the loss of memory in the midst of all the images69. Life may not be more than the history of a mirror that writhes, "leading like a punishment, to loneliness, to the night forest, where we are a memory of ourselves shaking in our hands"70, and because of this the artist has to bear witness to the indefinite; to the eventuality that nothing might happen a sensation of anxiety is added, but this suspension may be accompanied by pleasure, in clear anticipation of joy, "that which endeavors to increase being carried away by the event"71. "We feel the need to continue in the magma of obsessions, to began the process time and time again"72. Julien Green wrote that in all photography there could never be anything other than the reflection of an absence. Marisa González keeps the memory of friendship, she contemplates tenderly the photographs of her undressed dolls in a world that has a glacial climate, well aware that at the end of the effort of the duel "she becomes a free self again, freed of all inhibition"73. It is necessary to accompany reality in its fall, to follow the moving poetic impulse which in Marisa González acquires a heroically testimonial tone.
1. "In the first photographs the aura in the fleeting expression on a human face vibrates for the last time and that is what constitutes its incomparable melancholic beauty". Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductability in Interrupted Discourses I Editorial Taurus. Madrid. 1973. p. 31.
2. Sonia Landy Sheridan, Marisa González, in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
3. "The photocopier is an instrument of today that joins the repertoire of tools available to the artist to create his arte". Marisa González, Generative Systems: Electrography in Marisa González. Nicanor Piñole Exhibition Hall, Gijón Municipal Cultural Foundation, 1985.
4. Marisa González, in Marisa González, Santander Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, 1983.
5. Eugenio Trías, The Lost Memory of Things, Editorial Mondadori, Madrid, 1988 p. 124.
6. Cfr. Carl G. Jung: Aión. Contributions to the Symbolisms of Oneself, Editiorial Paidós, Barcelona, 1989, p. 22.
7. "Marisa González works from a series of ideas among which we can find, the meaning of the identity of the human being, its territories and borders, its qualities or characteristics such as desires, failures, the relations of the individual with his surroundings and their expansion to other environments, the attitude towards all of them, those reactions that run from silence to protest... They are works dealing with the "self" and the "other" that she treats sometimes from within and other times as a spectator, works in which allegories are usually included to the point that they break the powerful dramatic sense, in such a way that many times one has the feeling that he is witnessing a game, a game the alternates the public and the private, but that tries to establish appropriate common places for this exercise between the real and the fictitious". José Ramón Danvila, The Rhythm of Emotions in Marisa González. Journey to Onil, Galería AELE, Madrid 1996.
8. Marisa González, Generative Systems: Electrography in Marisa González. Nicanor Piñole Exhibition Hall, Gijón Municipal Cultural Foundation, 1985.
9. Jacques Lacan, The Line and the Light in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis El Seminario 11, Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1995, p. 109.
10. José Jiménez, Body and Time. The Image of Metamorphosis, Ed. Destino, Barcelona, 1993, p. 326.
11. Marisa González, Generative Systems: Electrography in Marisa González. Nicanor Piñole Exhibition Hall, Gijón Municipal Cultural Foundation, 1985.
12. Sonia Landy Sheridan, Marisa González, in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
13. "Basically connected to the plastic arts vanguard of the 70´s, as traceable as numerous precedents are, the model of relation stopping being defined by the track left by the machines used in the habitual means of artistic expression to move on to be defined by the use of means specifically technological with a artistic purpose". Fernando Huici, Marisa González, in Marisa González Nicanor Piñole Exhibition Hall, Gijón Municipal Cultural Foundation, 1985.
14. Sonia Landy Sheridan, Marisa González, in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
15. "The appropriation of the computer for the genetic manipulation of the images with which previously another machine has been fed, employing as the initial method the practice of deconstruction in all its implications". Menene Gras Balaguer, When Time Opens Cracks in the Memory in Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
16. Francisco Jarauta, in Marisa González. Looks into Time, Galería AELE, Madrid, 1993. p. 29.
17. "Those kinds of virtual machines that configure the look of contemporary man and whose aim is none other than the exploration and demonstration of a world thought of now from processes dominated by variation and alteration, repetition, and difference, these being understood as categories of the virtual". Francisco Jarauta Marisa González. Looks into Time, Galería AELE, Evelyn Botella, Madrid, 1993. p. 28.
18. Huici establishes the importance of the serial cycles in the work of Marisa González in relation with the formation of a passing period of time, "something that is distant from the traditional static state of painting to approach that diachronic sensitivity of the musical that the artist shares due to her training". Fernando Huici, Marisa González, in Marisa González Nicanor Piñole Exhibition Hall, Gijón Municipal Cultural Foundation, 1985.
19. "She was well prepared to investigate in the context of the temporary because she had begun studying, the "Art of Time" primigenial. She wanted to transfer this experience to her visual art". Sonia Landy Sheridan, Marisa González, in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
20. José Ramón Danvila emphasizes the determining character of musical training in Marisa González´s work, "which justifies her passion for rhythm and to always show the argument or the image in fragments that speak to us of sound, time, space, or movement". José Ramón Danvila, The Rhythm of Emotions in Journey to Onil, Galería AELE, Madrid 1996.
21. "And a discourse of flight longing to alight on the starched tablecloths of softness, a fertile game that makes it possible to suggest, from the horizontality of the keyboard, the warm intensity of beauty". Josep Sou in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
22. José Ramón Danvila, The Rhythm of Emotions in Marisa González. Journey to Onil, Galería AELE, Evelyn Botella Madrid 1996.
23. Cfr. Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Mesetas. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Ed. Pretextos, Valencia 1988, pp. 300-301.
24. Rosalind E. Krauss, LeWitt in Progression in The Originality of the Vanguard and Other Modern Myths, Ed. Alianza, Madrid, 1996 p. 269.
25. Cfr. the interview of Paul Virilio by Catherine David en Collisions Arteleku, San Sebastian, 1995 pp. 51-53.
26. "Expression through repetitive fragments/Repetition as a symbol of reproduction/Reproduction between form and meaning" Marisa González, poem included in Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Marisa González, Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
27. Walter Benjamin, Short History of Photography in Interrupted Discourse I, Ed. Taurus, Madrid, 1973, p. 67.
28. Sonia Landy Sheridan, Marisa González, in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
29. Fernando Huici, Marisa González, in Marisa González Nicanor Piñole Exhibition Hall, Gijón Municipal Cultural Foundation, 1985.
30. "Static photography or photographs sequenced and arranged to suggest movement, the reason for both is to make time and space lasting, to conserve the memory of events, and to try to convince the spectator that others, pure invention, have a depth of reality. From these ideas comes the work of Marisa González, a work on the image characterized by its emotional structure and which makes use of technology to find the appropriate language". José Ramón Danvila, The Rhythm of Emotions in Marisa González. Journey to Onil, Galería AELE, Evelyn Botella Madrid 1996.
31. Julie Kristeva, Language, That Stranger. Introduction to Linguistics. Ed. Fundamentos, Madrid, 1999, p. 320.
32. "That index is the indication that, like the bone in paleontology, will allows us to re Marisa González, Santander Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, 1983 construct the meaning of the work, or put another way, what the work itself, as much as it filled our senses, it stole from the meaning. It is of little importance, I quote more or less Freud, that taking advantage of this genuine sleight of hand, this hand game that replaces everything with practice, and releases the prey by the shadow, the satisfaction of seeing succumbs to the need to interpret". Jean Clair. Praise for the Visible, Ed. Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1999, p. 219.
33. Jacques Derrida, The Death of Roland Barthes in Poetics, special Roland Barthes n1 47, Paris, Seuil, 1981. p. 286.
34. "What photographs try to forbid through their simple accumulation is the memory of death which is an integral part of the image of memory". Benjamin H. D.Buchloh, The Atlas of Gerhard Richter: The Anomic Record in Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter. Llibres de Recherca, MAGBA, 1999, p. 147.
35. Eugenio Trías, The Lost Memory of Things, Editorial Mondadori, Madrid, 1988 p. 120.
36. Roland Barthes, The Lucid Camera, Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 1990, p. 157.
37. Marisa González, Identity Territories in Marisa González. Journey to Onil, Galería AELE, Madrid 1996.
38. Menene Gras Balaguer, When Time Opens Cracks in the Memory in Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
39. Julie Kristeva, Powers of Perversion, Ed. Siglo XXI, Mexico 1988, p. 25.
40. Cfr. Giorgo Agamben, Freud of the Absent Object in Stays. The Word and the Phantom in Western Culture, Ed. Pretextos, Valencia, 1995. pp. 69-76.
41. I have dealt with the poetic vision of the dolls in Fernando Castro Flórez, The Soul of the Dolls in Praise for Laziness. Notes for an Aesthetic of Tiredness, Julio Ollero, Editor, Madrid, 1992, pp. 93-101.
43. Ana Martínez-Collado, The Person I Was, The Person I Am, Through the Concave Mirror in Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Marisa González Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
44. Cfr. Jacques Lacan The State of the Mirror as Trainer of the Function of Self as Is Shown to Us in the Psychoanalytic Experience in Writings I Ed. Siglo XXI, México, 1971, p. 87.
45. Ana Martinez-Collado has introduced, commenting on the works with the dolls, an opportune quote from Simone de Beauvoir, "the doubling is only dreamed (...) in girls it appears in the doll, in which she recognizes herself more concretely than in her own body, because there is a separation between the two". Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. The Experience Lived. Volume II, Ed. Siglo Veinte, Buenos Aires, 1981, p. 414.
46. "E. Jenks emphasized as the case par excellence of evil, the Adoubt that a being apparently animate, be in effect living and vice-versa: an object without life be in some way animate" citing for that reason, the impression that wax figures give, the "wise" or "automated" dolls. Sigmund Freud. Evil preceding E.T.A. Hoffman, The Sandman Ed. José J de Olañeta, Barcelona, 1991, p. 18.
47. Cfr. Jacques Lacan What is a Painting? in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. El Seminario 11 Ed. Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1987 pp. 112-126.
48. Hal Foster, The Real Thing in Cindy Sherman, National Museum Queen Sophia Art Center, Madrid, 1996. p. 80.
49. Ana Martínez-Collado, The Person I Was, The Person I Am, Through the Concave Mirrorin Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Marisa González Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
50. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholy in Complete Works, volume 11. Ed. Orbis, Madrid 1988, p. 2100.
51. Remo Bodei, A Geometry of Passion, Ed. Muchnik, Barcelona, 1995, p. 166.
52. Pierre Bordieu, Essays on the Social Uses of Photography, Ed. Minuit, Paris, 1965, p. 54. 53. "Photographs in themselves are instant antiques".
54. Susan Sontag, On Photography Ed. Edhasa, Barcelona, 1989, p. 25
55. Susan Sontag, On Photography Ed. Edhasa, Barcelona, 1989, p. 81
56. Crf. Andre Bazin Ontology of the Photographic Image in What is Cinema? Ed. Rialp, Madrid, 1999, pp. 23-24.
57. Hans-Georg Gadamer, In the Shade of Nihilism in Poem and Dialogue, Ed Gedisa, Barcelona, 1993, p. 99.
58. Jacques Lacan, The Function of the Veil in The Relation of Object. El Seminario 4, Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 1994, p. 159.
59. Phillipe Dubois, The Photographic Act. From Representation to Reception, Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 1994 p. 74.
60. Menene Gras Balaguer, When Time Opens Cracks in the Memory in Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
61. "The sequences multiplied endlessly whose sign indicate for us the process of decomposition of a world supposedly rooted in the unity of an individual not yet separated". Menene Gras Balaguer, When Time Opens Cracks in the Memory in Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
62. Text by Marisa González on Deviations 1999-2000.
63. Sonia Landy Sheridan, Marisa González, in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
64. Sonia Landy Sheridan, Marisa González, in Marisa González. Alcoi Cultural Center, March 1991.
65. Marisa González, Identity Territories in Marisa González. Journey to Onil, Galería AELE, Evelyn Botella, Madrid 1996.
66. "In the process of capturing, exploring the metamorphosis of the sequence, the images generate new images and end up converting themselves into something totally unrecognizable, new images are born of their own making, these new images generate themselves again and lead to a new metamorphosis and a new image, until the never-ending cycle is completed". Marisa González, in Marisa González, Santander Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, 1983.
67. Marisa González, poem included in Broken Dreams, Broken Silences, Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1995.
68. Eusebio Sempere, in Marisa González, Santander Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, 1983.
69. Kracauer pointed out that there has never been a period of time so informed at itself, thanks to photography, although by the same token this outpouring of photos demolishes the dikes of memory and so there has never been a period of time that knew so little about itself. Buchloh points out with respect to the Richter´s photographic vertigo that "the Atlas also delivers its own secret like a collection of images: a perpetual pendulum between the death of reality in the photograph and the reality of death in the mnemonic image". Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, The Atlas of Gerhard Richter: The Anomic Record in Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter. Llibres de Recherca, MAGBA, 1999, p. 167.
70. Leopoldo María Panero, And the Light is Ours, Ed. Libertarias/Prodhufi, Madrid, 1993, pp. 161-62.
71. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Sublime and the Vanguard in The Inhuman. Conversations about Time, Ed. Manantial, Buenos Aires, 1998, p. 97.
72. "The true transformation of an individual, as transformation-individual of time is "pass all present into oblivion, but preserve the past in memory" And if forgetting cuts off the route to all returns beyond the present, the memory founds, from that moment, "the need to begin again" Alain Badiou, Deleuze. The Cry of Being, Ed. Manantial, Buenos Aires, 1997, p. 95.
73. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholy in Complete Works, volume 11. Ed. Orbis, Madrid 1988, p. 2092.

Castro Flórez, Fernando: Plasencia, 1964. Professor of Aesthetics at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Art critic and exhibition curator.



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