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26/2/2007

Susy Gomez

Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid

The desert shore

The artistic infinite
by Sebastia' Camps

‘Can works of art be made without being works of art?’ In this question of Duchamp’s that preceded the genesis of his first ready-mades in 1913 we find a programmatic line that transforms into art what in itself is not art, and at the same time, if we take the question in the opposite direction, as in the case of the Gioconda, reduces the art of the past to non-art. We would have to stop, however, in a beyond, in that which precedes or covers the actual content of the question and unobtrusively orders it with a succession of other phrases as if these were so many magnetic particles. In other words, this phrases succession endows the phrase in question with a style. Indeed, this question, with its crystalline and ultimately impenetrable symmetry (which merely proclaims the helplessness of the person who articulates it and the dissolution of the object under investigation in a logical-linguistic phantasmagoria) seems as if it might have been lifted from a document of the same period, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

And, according to Wittgenstein, one does not speak of something that ‘is not’. Consequently, in the case of a ready-made we are not speaking of a non-being, of an object that is pure façade, but of something that —having abandoned its original being— finds itself, at the moment in which we contemplate it, frozen at a point of its figurative movement in which, without a gesture, without nothing, matter becomes metaphor, the closest thing to a line of poetry, since this artistic passage is driven only by the univocal, not impressionist or reverberant, dynamic of language.

In the so-called assisted ready-mades there is a second degree of elaboration in the sense that the materials started from (a winter landscape, a battlefield) already have a representative dimension. What we can say then is that the collection of photos (full-body, life-size, large-format, thus taking us to the issue of the measuring of the body, confinement within set coordinates, as one of the basic elements of this exhibition, above all in the case of the two sculptures, and in Susy Gómez’s work as a whole) that Susy Gómez offers us fits this last definition of the ready-made, inserting themselves at some point in the Duchampian transit between non-art and art. They are, to begin with, heirs, these retouched photos, of the defaced print of Leonardo’s Monna Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q., 1919).

So what do they become, these models, these archetypal women, after the appropriative intervention by Susy Gómez? Of course, unlike Leonardo’s Gioconda, these female silhouettes have not previously existed within the context of the tradition, they have never been the object of a museological cult, they have come into being and barely persist as a blink in the machinery of reproduction. And the stilt-like legs, the cranium, the eyes, the famished compliance, giving the print of the woman represented here a certain resemblance to Kafka, and leaving us suspended in a straightforward continuation of the question we asked ourselves at the outset: can works of art be made without being works of art? In other words, without being. Almost inevitably this dress hanging from a stalactite takes on carnality in the realm of the healing gesture, of fantasy. In this sense, Susy Gómez’s great contribution of is of a Freudian order.

As a rule, the sexual genealogy of L.H.O.O.Q. tends to be passed over. But it seems to me that by bringing to light the symbolic roots of this work by Duchamp (that is to say, by inscribing in it certain unquestionable symbols that install it in this other guise in the museum of our culture) we will also open up a line of approach to the retouched photographs, or assisted ready-mades, Susy Gómez’s. I am thinking here of another text closely related to the Leonardo picture and almost contemporary with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’ by Sigmund Freud, first published in 1910.

In the first instance we have the action of scribbling a moustache and a goatee on the face of the Monna Lisa, without doubt an irrevocable act and, within the realm of Leonardo’s impulses, an uncomfortably irreverent one, since, like it or not, the Duchampian ready-made takes Leonardo’s love of a phallic mother, unmasks it by cross-gendering this mother as a man and flings it back into the wider field of the history of art. It is like a bad stage play as written by André Breton: a subject, after being obliged to repress his love for his mother (a mother whom in his fantasy he endows with a phallus) is left with no way out other than auto-erotism (whose synonym or substitute, for Marcel Duchamp, would be the auto-plagiarism). So it is, then, that on encountering what is perhaps the most famous of all ready-mades (a line, a dislocated axis that Susy Gómez’s photographs extend), in some way we attempt with our contemplation to analyse and to transcend our neurotic (in the sense of paralysing) contemplation with the tradition. Duchamp’s blot, then, is inscribed, acts as double, on two complementary levels: as a purely pictorial device, on the first level, but unthinkable, inassimilable, without the energy it derives from a second and deeper level whose explanation is given us given by the Freudian discourse.

The ‘memory’, at bottom a fantasy, of being visited by a vulture and suckling on its tail governs the whole of Leonardo’s sexual life and is finally resolved in the blue mantle of the Virgin and Child with St Anne whose contour reproduces the silhouette of a vulture. The blot re-encounters the blot. Ultimately Duchamp does not break out of the history of art. This cumulative wisdom belongs, as a kind of cultural, creative, generational sediment, to Susy Gómez. In fact Susy Gómez neither approaches nor moves away from the tradition with the act of staining or painting.

Her work based on a photographic support opens directly, without preamble, on self-flagellation and self-analysis. This being so, this model —let’s say Central European, Slavic— is as far removed as one could imagine from Gregor Samsa’s sister, who at the end of the story raises the brilliance of her forms as a hard pillar of forgetting; in other words, the survivor in any era. In fact, after the partition of the body into fields that are ignored, she ends up forming part of a world of wasp-women, buried alive in the communal grave of luxury under shovelfuls and shovelfuls of sequins and silver shavings.

The first thing that emerges in this collection of paintings is the issue of unity, the question of their common roots. But both the oneirism and the abstraction (an abstraction that, as in De ahí vengo, III [I Come from There, III], comes close at times, in its pursuit of the sublime diffuse phantasm, to Odilon Redon, or the Rimbaud of ‘Voyelles’) act in the manner of a syncopated photomontage. The two styles create an alternative whose unifying element could be condensed in the figure of Miró: on the one hand the more pared-down Miró of the 1920s, influenced by haiku, the Miró of the 1925 Photo, ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, and on the other the Miró of the Constellations with their ‘all-over’ distribution of forms that had such an influence on Pollock and the New York School. But, for Susy Gómez, as previously with her practice of the ready-made, in which the stain launched in part from the unconscious was, after all, an assumption of masochism as a constitutive element of the female body, is something that precipitates us into a reading parallel, but not coincident, with Duchamp’s practice. Thus, in the case of these paintings, quite apart from the traffic of influences and the dialogue with history, we could say that Susy Gómez is speaking for herself, or continuing with an artistic action that at some previous moment in her career was sensed as interminable, with a succession of pictorial splashes against the walls of the gallery. Clearly there are three pictures, De ahí vengo, II, III, IV, that are a consequence of the inscriptions with paint-daubed hands and feet on the walls of other galleries. Though it may not have been this way, it could be said that, as in the case of Pollock, the canvases were laid flat on the floor and that, unlike Pollock, throughout the process of elaboration there has been a restriction of the degrees of freedom that it has inevitably marked the structure of these pictures, which oscillates between the dramatic encounter and the melancholy withdrawal, with a thick central axis —I Come from There, I, brutally biomorphic, the product of a stable equilibrium that is in the last analysis a solemn submission— and some transverse sinoid waves, an alternating current reinitiated time and again that is simply a restricted see-sawing, a precarious balancing. In short, a flamboyant floating in the air and on the basis of a bound and imprisoned core: oneself.

It could be said that Susy Gómez is not hungry for a form but is perhaps traversed by a form, and that, with regard to the paintings of Miró, to the works of Duchamp, perhaps she is sunk with them in something more primitive. The function of the critical commentary, of the attempted reading, and the raison d’être of the spectator would then consist in positioning oneself on the threshold between conscious and unconscious and, in Susy Gómez’s case, crossing that threshold to shift the ballast of the unconscious over toward the side of reason, of the visible, of our cultural baggage, so as to constitute with this a half truth, a new secret. And although she belongs among the ranks of the great cultivators of the secret, this does not mean she can easily be considered a professional practitioner of self-analysis.

Any kind of self-analysis probably begins with the video, or ‘work in progress’, Father Mother. But it is, even so, the film of an artist, the cinematic revelation of how the family novel is synthesized in the repetition of a form. The succession of images is underlined by the pyramid, the Indian file, the triangle, the circle of bodies emerging from the urn; and clothes, hairdos, contemporary attitudes of the body: far removed from formalism, the dirty interweaving of realism is integrated into the great pyre of the poem.

The inherited (Miró, Duchamp) ends up bound in a kind of gag and is discernable in the final finished work as a mental residue, as a supreme value on the fringes of consciousness. It can be said, then, starting from this premise, that in the fifth picture the moon becomes physiological painting, that this is a nod to the carnal, attentive to the flowing in and out of the tide. This moon can also be seen as a distant conceptual operation along the lines of Jasper Johns’ ‘flags’ and ‘targets’.

With regard to the ground of this picture, we can say that the black, the dark, has already been an object of exploration, in particular with the ephemeral sculpture Como crines negras. El fluido en que estás [Like Black Manes. The Fluid You Are in] (Como cuando duermo, 2003, Galería Toni Tàpies). The black or the intraworld of writing. It was to some extent evident there that the black —that is to say, the mountain of coal, shining like diamond— was very close to moonlight, to the treasure of carbuncles in the cave, to the German Romantic imaginary, and at the same time, with the oily stain, the greasy black tide, it was possible to capture the written sign, underlined by the, blackened or painted branches of the fig-tree. (This with regard, in that work and in others that move in the same orbit, to the colour, to the pigment, to the light base, to any characteristic that did not have to do with something more physical, even physiological, with any aspect not easily qualify with a beautiful adjective: the weight, the volume, the inert mass, and the uncontrollable effect of dragging, the heavy hand they hold out to us.)

There is a strange structural similarity, too, between this painting, I Come from There, VIII, and Miró’s 1925 Photo, ceci est la couleur de mes rêves. In both, one quadrant contains a similar refracting box: a white lunar field, a plastering of the brush in the blue. The Miró picture is shot through with ambiguity, the sinoid flashing an affirmation, the painting understood as a discharge of electricity or light, as if the brush in connecting with the invisible face of the brain were also imprinting on the canvas chromatic radiations. This is why a painting is as ‘true’ and as ‘real’ as a photograph. And vice versa, if we approach it from a different viewpoint: why a photograph is as ‘mental’ as a painting. Perhaps we are dealing here, with this picture of Miró’s, with the equivalent of something Wallace Stevens said in reference to modern poetry: ‘The poem of the act of the mind’.

The material moon, the sphere of Susy Gómez’s painting: how the inheritance of a certain tradition is paraphrased in a lunar cycle that, at the same time, is mimed, fictionalized in a handful of pictorial substance, in a handful of something that in its momentary topography achieves a synthesis between the inert and the somnambulistic. More than a painting, I am painting, the picture seems to say to us. It thus goes beyond the actual marks made, which have direct contact with the psyche, to give itself up, stupidity and destiny, to a physiological asseveration.

It is easy to affirm in this context that VII is situated in a realm of conflicts such as we find in another Miró painting, the 1929 Queen Louise of Prussia. In effect, in this picture Miró echoes the divergence —or rather the dilemma— of styles to be found in another work, the German Pavilion for the International Exhibition in Barcelona: the tension between the International Style of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture and the rationalist-academic style of the sculpture by Kolbe. In Susy Gómez’s picture the contrast is between the civilizing and civilized Velázquez-like line of the ruff and the foundational Oedipal line of Susy Gómez’s natal horizon, the whole imbued with the energy of the black: we know that in Susy Gómez’s work black, indistinct sediment from which the stain comes, means energy. And at the same time, this picture is a deeper exploration of a muddier place than the one she visits in her photographic ready-mades. In fact, it is the distorted, broken-ribbed picture of a moribund awakening, of a menacing dawn moments before the definitive void appears between cultivated beauty and the stuttering of the landscape, between the unattainable dream and the heaviness of the material.

The line of the landscape, a scar that marks the assumption of its identity, an identity that finds consolation for its emptiness in the indefinite continuation of precisely that scar, that wrinkle in the landscape that was closed up with the turmoil of the sign. This unbroken continuity, this subconscious somnambulism is at times a giving-oneself-up to gravitation on the part of one who is hung or transported, which we could also call an artistic infinite.

Scar, source that flows, waterfall. Initially, I Come from There, VI was something else: a lunar fluid ran, like the water of a cascade, diagonally across the picture, and like some kind of flowing arm served as the member that brought into contact two orders of things, the celestial and the terrestrial, desire and the discourse of desire, cruel myth and romantic fantasy, transfigured body and disfigured body (this central form recalled, and recalls, the arm of the child Saturn devours in Goya’s painting). All of this is articulated by, or buried under, a chain of associations to arrive at the definitive representation of a waterfall. In any case, it is a fatally wounded representation: a variation filtered by the pentimento of an amputated lunar river that preceded it, this waterfall that emerged at the last moment in the execution of the picture is exactly a last moment before the vision is lost in the black of night and the universe, the seen and the experienced, becomes unrepresentable. There is a buried, probably unconscious homage to the waterfall in Duchamp’s Étant donnés, but just as La chute d’eau is drawn into the representation, it constructs a kind of calligram with Le gaz d’éclairage (the end of the falling line is the female sex), so here the picture I Come from There, V cannot help but connect with the lighted candle of I Come from There, VII. Both pictures, in their unity and their separateness, constructed, as if there were any doubt, under a gravitation that is lunar and thus cyclical, they are sketches, representations of moments in the fluid, be it of light or sex.

In Susy Gómez the final object, which is never kitsch, enters by way of our deductions into a floating repertoire, is submitted to a sort of weightlessness that makes it transportable (sometimes by means of a gigantic operation that is almost posthumous in its pulverized matter, its humus, almost mythic in its weight and scale). And all of this serves even more to construct a secret, a kind of elegant secret, that is transmitted by word of mouth.

Against the flow or the capacity for transformation, for itinerary, of the whole associative chain of images through the overlapping of the pentimento, against the flow of the blood, in short, we find ourselves with sculpture as confinement. Garments, iron curtains, shoes, birds, a bronze canoe: ballast, collapse, dream of flight, fall. To imprison, suspend, inter, spirit away, hiding as prelude to disappearing: an absurd disappearance that will permit the return of a tunic of galvanized steel sustained in the pure void of the phantasm. A narrating I that in the levitation of its galleristic trance is able to transcend the wall. And a wall is a wall, steel is steel, matter is matter. If on the one hand we have the voluptuousness of the image, on the other we have the terror of the definitive. And even so, confined and transported, gagged, confounded with the material, the I of this artistic trajectory finds in the fact of moving a unique propulsion. Thus the black, which is ashes, the death instinct, will also be the source of the written sign: out of a ton of coal, buried alive, comes the stuttering voice of the story accompanied by the sign of a foundational line that extends toward the infinite.

As in the Young British Art of the 1990s, it is evident that in Susy Gómez’s work, too, there is an engagement with the kernel of the historical avant-garde, even if this does no exclude the attempt to steer a path through the legacy of the beautiful. The change of scale that transforms the minuscule into the all-embracing gives theoretical penetration to the object represented and means not letting oneself be defeated by the mere representation. The gigantic flowers and petals of nickel-plated steel produce a sensation of levitation, a cross between inspirational motives and theoretical motives.

For the issue of monumentality, and also of the theoretical review (with regard to the British artists and, by way of a certain circuit of influences, to Susy Gómez too) Michael Craig-Martin is an obligatory reference. In Craig-Martin’s walls, in his ‘environment’ paintings, the represented meets the other great topic, the experience of the representation. In the tenuous act of contemplation our being is submerged in a half light, in a translucent opaqueness. Only our discursive capacity can cure us of the slight dizziness we feel when looking at an outsized rose by Susy Gómez in an interior by Craig-Martin.

Not only does it seem obvious that Susy Gómez’s photographic ready-mades should not be hung, but that her sculptures, her three-dimensional objects, should appear to be scattered quite casually on the floor. Personal garments, meteorites, images of loss through slippage. As winged elements, they immediately suggest a paradox, a risk. Susy Gómez’s sculptures include the enormity, the accident and the fall. We will not ask ourselves who has brought them there, to the celebratory centre, the core of existence, the last limbo of the gallery’s white interior. There is a defiance of the laws of physics. The object abounding in beauty, generator of theoretical assertions and metaphors can at times be the genesis in itself: a lingam, a phallus, and the sculpture rises, survives. In the other cases this condition of being exhibited on the floor is not made apparent (in contrast to Barry Flanagan’s sculptures of the 1960s) through a sequence of illusory actions, by a pleasing telekinesis.

To be brief, the idea of buoyant self-propulsion from one room to the next, from one gallery to another, of this object that after being deposited on the floor will effect the synthesis that Wallace Stevens asked of modern poetry, this idea that at first sight seems hopeful, implying as it does an endless, cosmopolitan dérive, drags in its wake a dark principle. This prone object points, in a painful and distracted way, to the concept of passivity; that is to say, to the destructive impulses one directs against oneself.

The sculptures Durante un tiempo [For a Time] and Por amor [For Love] enact a terrible charade; they are the support for a libidinal exchange in the context we considered in the paragraph above. They are not situated, then, in the field of social critique, nor in that of fetishism. They at first appear as happily acritical entities, and as far as fetishism is concerned, they present themselves as too strident, as objects impossible to pressgang into any operation of symbolic substitution. That said, it is essential to note that in both sculptures there prevails an oppressive nexus of Sadean drama, materialized on the exterior in a rhythm, a flotation, a leap in the dark, a stoppage without really having stopped, a silent and premonitory lying on the floor of the gallery space. They have something of the air of a monument to the kidnapped heroine so fervently sought by the Surrealists, bound, gagged, dead-alive, whose travails are in the last resort no more than the staged materialization of the extremisms of love. We see, then, that For a Time and For Love fulfil this dual function of transport and confinement, and are, as such, trunks that fly.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about For a Time is the capacity its sheets of glass of reproducing in full, at life size, the human body, and in the case of For Love, of retaining it (and the handles, the bellows, the repertoire of the world of fashion accessories converted into a repertoire of paraphernalia). The prestige of the brands covers everything in a smooth patina, creating the illusion of a happy end.

‘Grandeur nature’: the natural scale demands, in Susy Gómez, a coda: ‘Grandeur nature humaine’. Pursuing this logic, the human body is present as support of the work, and For a Time and For Love should accomplish the terrible feat of including our corporeal totality. Terrible feat: without it, neither the individualization of the work nor the individualization of the being would be possible. This is something that recalls to mind Lacan’s Mirror phase. Without asking us at what price we have finally obtained the unity of the work and the integration of the body. And, with a dramatic and jocular pace, the appliance is described to us, presented to us, rotates and moves away, and, whether it be a mirror or a coffin, while it draws energies from the tradition, lives the dream of the body beautiful.

One’s own body and the desired body are extended into others, into a multitude. In principle the video Father Mother explores this multitude: in front of the camera series of figures, of groups of persons, draw together and drift apart. What is it that moves these actors, what kind of sorcery? There are the bodies of the living and the bodies of the dead, the lying down or laid out (Susy Gómez is known for her sculptures representing life-size beds). A midday sun streams through the windows into the room in which this ceremony commemorative is performed, and since the dead seem to outnumber the living, the prevailing atmosphere is that of an open grave, of the Valley of Jehosaphat.

A kind of meticulous, reasoned, interior trance drives the bodies of the participants. This trance could be compared, perhaps, to the pure current that constitutes the most ephemeral form of art, the performance. These groupings, these conclaves, project, over and above the pact of harmony, of good manners, a profound chill. For our desire without centre, for our floating consciousness as spectators of art, this interior as bare of impedimenta as a face washed by tears gives those present the air of mourners at a burial, of community in pain.

(At the other extreme would be the modern repertoire of Bataille, of Pasolini, of Salo; that is to say, of community in vice. It is produced, in this sense, a circular grouping reminiscent of the ring of voyeurs in Duchamp’s Grand Verre.)

There is, at the same time, a superation of a certain cinematic realism. Thus chairs, people, zigzagging superposition of colours, of typologies of bodies… everything ends up ordering itself according to some elemental atavistic figure. This is not done by following choreographic directions. In a kind of conscious sleepwalking the actors, the film-still as synthesis, end up adapting to a totalizing signified. Given that the atmosphere is that of the interior of a Balthus picture, many things can be assumed by reference to French culture. These persons, these bodies come to us by way of an adult cinema, by way of investigative history documentaries. The form never manages to impose its sway: there is a heavy undercurrent of stories, of bodies, of elements pertaining to the realm of the unreal. There is a temptation to place this experience on the fringes of all experience; Claude Lanzman’s Shoah presents itself on our horizon. Dress, shroud, nakedness; having been stripped of their everyday pragmatism these bodies summon up a weak, inert spirituality. The clothes (like Susy Gómez’s clothing-sculptures) hang like robes. Living or dead, standing or lying, they suggest a goodness from beyond the grave. Father Mother is an unfinished work, for the time being a ‘work in progress’.

Translated by Graham Thomson

Opening: february 27, 2007

Galeria Soledad Lorenzo
C/ Orfila, 5 28010 Madrid

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