En los años 80 las Guerrilla Girls utilizando formas de comunicación alternativas trataron de poner en cuestión el mundo artístico y cultural en Estados Unidos, especialmente en Nueva York.
Con un enfoque irónico enumeran las ventajas de ser mujer artista.
Por ejemplo: trabajar sin presión por el éxito, no tener que compartir exposiciones con hombres, poder tener cuatro trabajos free lance, saber que tu carrera despegará cuando tengas 80 años, poder elegir entre el arte y la maternidad, ver tus ideas en el trabajo de otros, tener más tiempo que dedicar a tu trabajo cuando tu pareja te abandona por una mujer más joven, que te hagan fotos llevando un traje de gorila en las revistas de arte, no tener que pasar por el apuro de que te consideren un genio ...
En la Tate Gallery recogen parte de su trabajo de crítica artística en esos años.
No es fácil cumplir las expectativas de críticos y público cuando tu primera película es recibida con casi unánimes aplausos y se hace con un Oscar.
Ahora la tercera película de Florian Heckel, director de "La vida de los otros" en la que nos traslada a la Alemania del Este donde un funcionario de la Stasi espía a un autor teatral siguiendo ordenes políticas de un alto funcionario enamorado de la actriz que comparte la vida del escritor.
La progresiva concienciación de este y las dudas morales que se le plantean al hasta entonces conformista funcionario nos llevan a un Berlín donde al cabo de unos pocos años el Muro ha caído sin que nadie lo esperase y la realidad ha cambiado al menos aparentemente.
Después de eso "Obra sin autor" (que sería el título original en Alemania) se ha convertido para el público americano o inglés en "Never look away" y en España en un poco original "La sombra del pasado"
Basada en la vida de un artista alemán, Gehard Richter , no demasiado satisfecho con la versión que da el director, cuenta las imposiciones que sobre el arte tuvieron regímenes totalitarios como el nazi o el realismo socialista en los países comunistas y la aparente libertad del mundo occidental donde las limitaciones son otras.
El joven protagonista aparece como un niño visitando la exposición de "Arte degenerado" que tuvo lugar en varias ciudades alemanas entre 1937 y 1941 unos años más tarde su vida personal acaba unida a la de un alto funcionario nazi, responsable de un crimen que marcó la infancia del joven artista.
Encontrar su verdadero estilo y su forma de expresión es su manera de superar una realidad difícil de soportar de dar testimonio de un crimen que le ha atormentado toda su vida.
La obra de Tetsuya Ishida, autor de culto en Japón y que murió muy joven y de forma abrupta, llega a Europa en forma de retrospectiva aunque algunos de sus cuadros ya se presentaron en la Bienal de Venecia en el 2015.
La alienación de los trabajadores en la crisis económica de hace unos años en Japón, el aislamiento y la falta de horizontes se muestran aquí en imágenes, masculinas, casi idénticas, pesadillas kafkianas tecnología deshumanizada y jóvenes y adolescentes perdidos y vulnerables.
Los rostros son casi intercambiables y el sistema educativo, laboral y de ocio y consumo son opresivos y mecánicos.
El autor siempre negó que ese rostro fuera el suyo pero sí reconoció su empatía con el dolor, pesimismo y anonimato de la vida urbana.
En el suplemento dominical del País, Francesc Miralles comenta una nueva tendencia en Japón. Que no te importe tanto la opinión de los demás. Algo realmente novedoso en una cultura oriental.
When most people think of surrealism, men such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico and Man Ray, spring to mind. It’s hard not to notice the lack of female names. We celebrate the women whose work has gained the recognition it deserves.
LEONORA CARRINGTON AND MAX ERNST
Leonora Carrington, began her career as the plus one of famous surrealist Max Ernst. It is easy to become acquainted with the story of Carrington’s life. The events would make a brilliant film - her sheltered youth, the elopement with an older man, the onset of war followed by a mental breakdown, a second elopement and finally settling down in Mexico. Her life is documented as a whirlwind of romance, pain, danger and drama.
In 1948, Time Magazine reviewed an exhibition of her work:
The walls … were hopping with demons. Feathery, hairy, horny, half-luminous creatures merged imperceptibly into birds, animals and plants. Painted with cobweb delicacy, they conspired and paraded before misty landscapes and night skies thick with floating islands. All the pictures had two things in common: an overall melancholy and the signature, Leonora Carrington …
This is an apt description of the hallucinatory world of Carrington’s paintings. When asked about the meaning behind her work, she said:
You’re trying to intellectualise something, desperately and you’re wasting you’re time. That’s not a way of understanding… [you can only understand] by your own feelings.
‘Leonora Carrington: Britain’s Lost Surrealist’, The Guardian, 2010
This response is more purely surrealist than any of the Freudian symbols or mythological references appropriated by her male counterparts. As Andre Breton wrote in his text Arcane 17,woman is a natural ‘conductor of mental electricity’. Likewise Carrington wants us to feel, not to think, and through feeling, tap into the unconscious and intuitive mind.
DOROTEA TANNING
Although his relationship with Carrington has been greatly romanticised, Max Ernst’s most successful and long-lasting relationship was with Dorothea Tanning. Here, Tanning explains her views on marriage and equality:
If you get married you’re branded. We could have gone on, Max and I, all our lives without the tag. I never heard him use the word “wife” in regard to me. He was very sorry about that wife thing. I’m very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a tossup who gets pregnant, the man or woman. Boy, that would end rape for one thing.
Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, 2003
Tanning’s early paintings often feature female, or simply feminine, characters in minutely detailed gothic and dream-like settings. The regular use of the female form throughout surrealist work has been an interesting playground for debate. Numerous critics, such as Susan Gubar, have argued that the surrealist’s appropriation of the female form in works such as Rene Magritte’s Le Viol can be seen as an aggressive objectification of women. Others, such as Germaine Greer, take this argument further, debating whether the female members of the group had internalised this viewpoint and perpetrated it in their own work.
Tanning’s sculptural pieceNue Coucheehas also often been interpreted as a comment on female sexuality due to its limb-like protuberances and nude pink fabric, however she strongly rejects any association to gender. Neither does she want to be analysed in terms of her femininity and labelled in the category of ‘woman artist’:
I wish you wouldn’t harp on that word, ‘women.’ Women artists. There is no such thing – or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist.’ You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.
Carlo McCormick, ‘Dorothea Tanning’, Bomb Magazine, 1990
Frida Kahlo is certainly no longer seen as the woman behind Diego Rivera, but at the time his fame was overshadowing. These days she has been appropriated as a feminist forerunner, stoic sufferer, Mexican national heirloom and one of the ‘Great Surrealist Artists’. People worldwide have been enchanted by her frank, intense and honest letters which give an insight into her character and opinions. The director of the Bellas Artes Museum, Roxana Velasquez Martinez del Campo, described her as ‘a woman in constant expression’ and this is what we see when we look at her self-portraits. They are instinctive depictions of her subconscious with repeated references to her physical and emotional pain:
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration. Harry N. Abrams, Discoveries: Frida Kahlo Painting Her Own Reality, 2008
It is this openness, which makes her remarkable and has caused so many people to respect and admire her.
Despite their rocky relationship, Kahlo’s love for Diego was insurmountable. In this explanation of her opinion of marriage, we see her fatalistic approach:
I don’t believe in marriage. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of traditions and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it’s a happy delusion – these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don’t think it’s conservative or delusional. I think it’s radical and courageous and very romantic. Julie Taymor, Frida, 2002
Es curioso que la galería Tate haya elegido este ambiguo título para hablar de tres artistas, (Frida Khalo, Dorotea Tanning y Leonora Carrington) y de sus relaciones sentimentales con otros pintores consagrados en aquel momento.
Unos meses antes de que la Tate presente una exposición sobre la larga trayectoria artística de Dorotea Tanning ya pudo contemplarse en el Reina Sofía de Madrid.
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t know.” So begins Albert Camus’ debut novel, L’Etranger – two sentences that have come to define The Outsider (published as The Stranger in the US) for the 75 years since its seminal publication. Why? Because within them lies the novel’s central philosophical question: how do we confront the idea that human life has no meaning? And how does society attempt to impose rational order where there is none? Born in 1913 in French Algeria, Camus was the chief architect of the paradox of the absurd, which at its root, questions how we live with the knowledge of our own meaningless. Nihilism, for Camus, was not the answer. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, before dying in a car crash in 1960 at the age of just 46. With his good looks and charisma, the writer became, over the course of his life and since, an intellectual celebrity who embodied the ideas that he promoted. Though loathing the label, he gave existentialism a fashionable edge – so much so that he was shot by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1946.
Meursault, the anti-hero of The Outsider drifts through the novel with cold, emotional distance; he is incapable of empathy, perennially bored with life, and is unflinchingly honest about both of these things. Despite his detachment, the character of Meursault remains just as absorbing as Camus himself by embodying the sense of alienation that we all feel sometimes.
“People all over the world connect the book to their coming of age, to grappling with the toughest questions of existence,” writes Yale scholar Alice Kaplan in her new ‘biography’ of the novel, Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic. “The absence of depth in Meursault, his strange indifference, has paradoxically drawn readers to him, since it’s natural to hunger for understanding when it’s withheld,” Kaplan continues.
But while Meursault floats through his existential angst, Camus was able to use his philosophy of the absurd as an excuse to enjoy himself with ever greater intensity. He dated a string of actresses, befriended intellectuals and bohemians, was fascinated by football, loved smoking (he even named his cat ‘Cigarette’), dressed well, and wrote essays on the importance of sunshine and nakedness.
As he once famously said: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
