Feliza Bursztyn: Medusa in Colombia

Feliza Bursztyn: Medusa in Colombia Lynn Zelevansky “Sex” . . . is also said to be a natural thing, a thing that exists outside politics. Feminism shows that this too is a fiction, and a fiction that serves certain interests. Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing. The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world. Amia Srinivasan1 In 1968, the Colombian artist Feliza Bursztyn mounted the exhibition Las histéricas (The Hysterical Ones) at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota (MAMBO). It covered three floors and was packed with kinetic sculptures. They were hanging off the ceiling and the walls, sitting on pedestals and on the floor, shaking and creating a clanging, and in some cases a shrieking, a noise.2 Dramatic light enhanced the reflective qualities of the works’ stainless steel and cast powerful shadows. The sound of metal touching metal was inescapable.3 The show simulated, and perhaps induced, an encounter with hysteria. This was a shocking exhibition for the average Colombian museum-goer at the time. Bursztyn maintained that she didn’t create her work to send messages beyond its formal impact,4 but it’s hard to imagine that the implications of the term “hysteria” escaped her. Indeed, the physical and emotional experience of the exhibition was its most impactful aspect, but there were also the implications of, and associations with, the word itself. 1. Feliza Bursztyn, Medusa, 1974, c. 13 in. high × 8 in. diameter Courtesy of the Archive of Pablo Leyva. Photo: Pablo Leyva 100 Since ancient Egypt, hysteria was considered a female disease. That notion travelled through the centuries, appearing in Greece and Rome, and making its way into modern Europe. Most often the cause of the “disease” was thought to emanate from a “wandering” uterus, an organ foreign to men with the awesome power to give life. It needed to be controlled and for centuries the most common cure was thought to be 101 more sex and more children. That, doctors believed, would bring the uterus back into line, and not incidentally, it would keep women in their place, which was at home serving the family. Mark S. Micale, who specializes in intellectual history and the history of medicine, notes that hysteria has been “a dramatic metaphor for everything men found mysterious or unmanageable in women”,5 and according to the historian and theorist, Cecily Devereux, it was also used as “evidence of the instability of the female mind and body”.6 Bursztyn’s exhibition gave visitors a taste of hysteria as men had imposed it on women for millennia. 2. Louise Bourgeois, Fillette, 1968, latex over plaster, 59.7 × 28.0 × 19.1 cm, Gift of the artist in memory of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. 386.1992, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). New York © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Firenze Today, Bursztyn is respected and admired in Colombia as a pioneer of post-World War II art, but in her lifetime she was a Jew working in a very conservative Catholic country, far removed from the international art world. She was harassed by the government for her leftist views, and her art, which often freely invoked sex as a “public thing”, in Srinivasan’s terms, drew antagonistic and sometimes aggressive responses.7 She was worldly, having studied for four years in Paris and lived in New York. She travelled often to the United States and Israel to see family members, to Cuba, where she admired the values of the revolution, and to Paris, where she had many friends, but she always returned to Colombia. She said it was because she loved the Colombian people.8 Bursztyn’s films show her as unconventional and daring, with a theatrical nature. She seemed to enjoy flaunting her difference. Asked to explain her occupation, she once replied, “I am a worker and a welder”.9 A woman defining herself in those terms was unheard of in Colombia at the time; these were men’s occupations. Bursztyn was shattering established gender roles, and people didn’t take it well. They thought she was mad, and her response was, “In a sexist country, pretend to be the Mad One!”.10 She explained, “I took advantage of the whole ‘madness’ thing, and played it up, so that I could really do what I wanted. Because I do believe that we’re living in a male chauvinist world. And to be a sculptor and not be a man is very difficult. I resorted to this trick so that people would take me seriously, because they thought, ‘maybe that crazy woman does interesting things’. And I think it worked”.11 Being strange was the best way for her to live and work in Bogotá. Bursztyn was among a group of women artists internationally who, in the 1960s, took on the dynamic between sex and power in their search for agency. Making art at the cusp of second wave feminism, before there was a theory and a movement to support them, they were harbingers of things to come. In each country, they fought for recognition on a level with their 102 male counterparts. Like Bursztyn, they made unorthodox, subversive, and often fascinating work, powerful expressions of their condition. They investigated their own alienation in their exploration of sexual dynamics. Working in New York in 1968, Louise Bourgeois created Fillette (Little Girl) (fig. 1), a two-foot-tall penis with testicles wrapped in a protective blanket and made of Latex covered plaster. Hanging from the ceiling on a large meat hook, it is essentially a castration. The title of the work, Fillette, further undermines male genitalia. Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan into an environment that she describes as “exceedingly conservative”.12 Eager to escape it, she flew to Seattle, Washington in 1957 and had her first US exhibition there.13 She moved to New York City the following year, determined to gain recognition. By 1962, having garnered some renown for her “Infinity Net” paintings, she turned to sculpture, working with found objects. Her first three-dimensional piece was a discarded armchair that she covered 103 with stuffed phallic-shaped forms and then painted white. The fringe at the bottom of the armchair remained. It is a surrealist object not dissimilar in conception from Meret Oppenheim’s fur lined teacup;14 each makes the familiar strange by imposing alien materials on a household object. She followed Accumulation No. 1 (fig. 2) with many pieces of furniture, ladders, and cooking utensils similarly covered with phallic projections. A burlesque of male sexual obsession, these works are both compelling and amusing, but for Kusama, who was phobic about sex, they were an expression of her need for control over male desire. That concern is more baldly expressed in a collaged photograph that she had taken of herself lying naked on Accumulation No. 2, a couch covered with phallic protrusions.15 Like a pin-up, she poses on her stomach, knees bent, wearing only high heels and the polka dots that cover her body. The message is, “This is my world. You can look but you can’t touch”. 4. Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, six screenprints on paper, 658 × 459 mm each, Tate Gallery, London © Tate; London Like Kusama and Valie Export, Bursztyn performed for the camera, though not nude. The art historian Gina McDaniel Tarver published a newspaper clipping from 3 August 1964 showing Bursztyn in an attractive dress, standing by one of her Chatarras (Junk Sculptures) (fig. 4), which was made of rusted steel and old machinery. She slouches, with a cigarette dangling from her lips. With both hands she holds a hammer below her waist. The “unusual accessory” and casual pose, apparently captured mid-shrug, together with her fashionable dress, create dissonance.17 She looks as though she is about to smash her sculpture, or already has. Either way, there is the sense of rebellion and maybe even incipient violence. A related but more aggressive expression of the desire for control is Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) (fig. 3) by the Austrian artist Valie Export. It is a set of six screen prints baring identical images that were made to commemorate a performance that she did in a Munich art cinema the year before, just as second wave feminism was emergent. In the poster she is sitting outside on a bench. Her feet are bare, which connotes both danger and vulnerability; who but a mad person would go barefoot on city pavement? She sprawls on the bench, her legs apart, wearing a tight leather jacket and a pair of crotchless pants that expose her genitals, and 3. Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation No. 1, 1962, padded and sewn fabric, upholstery fringe, 94 × 99,1 × 109,2 cm, Purchased [?], inv. 1182.2012, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Scala, Firenze 104 she holds a machine gun. This is a bare-faced challenge to the notion of “woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men”.16 It says, “Just try and take me”. A dare that no one is likely to take. In the photograph, Bursztyn is of course defying norms in a way that probably seemed comical to her friends but was designed to provoke. According to Marta Traba, the director of MAMBO when Bursztyn showed Las histéricas there, people were not so much against the art as they were against the woman who made it. Years after the chatarras were first exhibited, she would recall, “From the first moment, a moral sanction, much more than an aesthetic sanction, weighed upon junk”.18 Bursztyn used film as well as photography as a performance medium. Las camas de Feliza Bursztyn (Feliza Bursztyn’s Beds, 1974), for example, though directed by someone else, is obviously a manifestation of her vision.19 It is an expressionistic piece, named after Bursztyn’s kinetic sculptures, Las camas (The Beds) (1970–74), although the works only appear towards the end of the film. The lighting is dramatic, the images and sound repeat and superimpose on themselves. A voiceover tells us that she is the most important sculptor in Colombia. She walks through the house and garden naming objects, as well as the cat and dog. She laughs a lot, for no apparent reason. 105 Her installations with kinetic sculpture constituted her primary form of performance. Her sculptures were actors in full mise en scènes. Movement encourages the human tendency to anthropomorphize and it made Bursztyn’s objects seem alive. The definition of kinetic is, “the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith”,20 and her installations were filled with that energy. The theatrical potential in kinetic art perfectly matched Bursztyn’s theatrical nature. 5. Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body Portfolio, 1963–2005, gelatin silver print, 61 × 50.8 cm each, Gift of the artist, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Credito. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Scala, Firenze Her art could be disturbing and subversive, but also funny. Las camas comprised her second solo exhibition at MAMBO in 1974, and it was more explicitly sexual than Las histéricas. It included thirteen sculptures that used life-sized beds as supports. Unlike Las histéricas, the moving parts of the sculptures were hidden beneath large swaths of fabric, many of which were brightly coloured with a satiny sheen. The beds shook or undulated in ways that made sexual references unescapable. Clearly, coitus was going on under the covers. This time, instead of the metal sculptures making their own noises, the works were accompanied by an original electronic music score by the Colombian composer, and friend to Bursztyn, Jacqueline Nova. Las camas pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in Colombia. Traba described it as “an attack on the passivity of the public”, and they responded negatively.21 In making her art in conservative Bogotá, Bursztyn affirmed the strength of women and bore witness to their potential for independence, but she also knew that her kind of provocation could be problematic in her country. She joked around when asked about the meaning of Las camas, but the exhibition’s message clearly was that a liberated woman was entitled to express herself sexually as much as any man.22 In the early to mid-1960s in the United States, it was possible to push the limits further in order to send a related message, and a few women expressed their independence through nudity and eroticism. Carolee Schneemann was prominent among them. Her work has been called “kinetic painting” because she mixed her movements with expressionist art.23 The first work in which she used her own naked body was Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963) (fig. 5), in which she created “a series of physical transformations” of her body within her installation. A photograph shows her lying naked on the floor of a large painted structure. She is covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, and plastic. A protest against the way women were treated in the art world, the work was meant to “challenge and threaten the psychic power lines by which women were admitted to the Art Stud Club, so long as they behaved enough like the men, did work clearly in the traditions and pathways 106 107 hacked out by the men”.24 Like Bursztyn, Schneemann was creating art that was indisputably and even aggressively female, and it was powerful. Bursztyn and Schneemann made extremely provocative art for their respective environments. Schneemann later realized that making her work before there was a fully formed and widespread theoretical underpinning to support it was profoundly difficult. The same goes for her willingness to appear nude in a performance by a man. In an ode to the artist Robert Morris, written after his death in 2018, she explained the problem to him, recalling her experience of playing Manet’s Olympia naked in his famous 1963 performance piece, Site: “There has been too much retroactive criticism of Site as lacking in feminist principles”, she wrote. “In 1963, such principles were barely emergent – the immense gender transformations were just ahead of us.” But she also wrote, “Site both historicized and immobilized me”.25 This was the price of being objectified, treated as an ideal rather than a functional, intelligent, and creative human being. The objectification of women impacted Bursztyn in the opposite way. Having been placed on a list of the ugliest women in Colombia, she fought her enemies with awareness and humour. Acknowledging the stupidity of the list, she responded, “I have a petition with a thousand signatures that claims that I am NOT the ugliest woman in the country”.26 Women who are threatening to men suffer this kind of offensive characterization. In the United States, Betty Friedan, the author of the groundbreaking book, The Feminist Mystique (1963), was frequently called unattractive. The inference is always that only women who can’t get a man would be feminists.27 Despite this treatment, Bursztyn did not hesitate to rub her critics’ noses in the fact that she lived freely, and welded scrap metal, insisting that there was nothing anomalous about that. Among the ways she delivered this message was a photograph of herself soldering (an activity she loved) wearing a dress with pearls, and welding in a fur coat in the film Las Camas de Feliza Bursztyn (fig. 6). These images, like the picture of her in a party dress with a hammer, are amusing, but they also created discord. She reaches out to the public, however, with her Minimáquinas (Minimachines, 1969–74) (fig. 7). Made from welded scrap metal and parts of disassembled typewriters and other machines, these sculptures can be as small as four inches and as large as twelve. Some of the Minimáquinas look like insects while others resemble prehistoric creatures. One walks on tall skinny legs, which support a square body made from a machine part with rows of small buttons sticking upward. Having chided the public 108 on its passivity with her major installations, these works have a lightness and humour to them, and they can engage viewers directly, as some have moving parts that can be manipulated by the public. They are an invitation to participate in art making, for by moving the parts the viewer creates something new. Countering the injunction that art can be seen but must not be touched, it makes viewers essential players in the creation of these works. There are challenging aspects to the Minimáquinas, too. In one, a circular form with openings in it is mounted on a pole that sits in a base like a tiny shower head. Curly wires resembling hair frantically jut out of the circle in all directions. Perhaps it is a look back at the notion of hysteria. In another, a long, hollow, skinny poll leans at an angle out into space and spews metal threads, suggesting an ejaculation. Bursztyn must have enjoyed the reference. The Minimáquinas also star in the 1971 film Azilef (Feliza spelled backwards), which has a trippy atmosphere.28 The setting is dark and the objects shake and shiver before they take off, floating into view like celestial bodies and then floating away. Marijuana leaves float by, too. A Colombian rock band sings a cheerful song in English about a voyage into space, promising a “lovely trip”. The film ends when a hand grabs one of the floating pieces, stops it in mid-air and locks it in a cabinet. It is Bursztyn. She is the wizard that makes everything go, but Azilef also expresses fear of being locked away. In 1974, the same year that she is showed Las camas, Bursztyn made an extraordinary work of art, one that is wholly unique but was, unfortunately, ephemeral. It was made for La Feria Industrial de Bogotá in payment to a man who had helped her to create other works. More than 13 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter, it had a bell-like structure that supported long strands of curled tubing that covered the support and trailed below it. Hanging from a crane many feet in the air, with its curls blowing in the breeze, it closely resembled a disembodied head and quickly acquired the name, Medusa (1974) (fig. 8).29 As with Las histéricas, there is meaning to the title that impacts the work itself. Once beautiful, the mythical Medusa became a monstrous creature at the hands of a jealous Athena. She had venomous snakes for hair and could turn anyone she looked upon to stone. This was one powerful woman. Unfortunately, she was mortal and Perseus, who was a “hero,” was able to behead her using a mirrored shield given to him by Athena that allowed him to see Medusa without actually looking at her. (The 109 in Bogotá on 5 April 1979. In it there were seven figures, each with a motor that attached to the ceiling and allowed it to dance, accompanied by twelfth century liturgical music. They were shrouded in fabrics that were old, stained, and wrinkled, giving the impression of poverty. The performance was very possibly a response to an election the previous year that brought a regime to power that was increasingly autocratic and guilty of human rights abuses.32 In 1981, it would force Bursztyn into exile. 1 myth has different iterations but it always pits woman against woman.) Even in death, however, Medusa’s power was such that Perseus had to keep her decapitated head in a special sack strong enough to contain it.30 English professor Elizabeth Johnson notes that “in Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority”.31 Bursztyn’s Medusa, her head free of Perseus’s sack is, in contrast, a statement in support of the strength and power of women. Bursztyn’s ability to move from very small works like the Minimáquinas to the enormously ambitious mise en scènes of her installations and to her huge sculpture, Medusa, shows the breadth of her talent and sophistication over the course of her short career. As much as any woman working anywhere at the time, she had a profound understanding of the power dynamics vested in sex. She fought a battle for her rights as a woman and for other Colombian women, as well. Bursztyn created one last major installation work titled La baila mecánica (The Mechanical Ballet), which she showed at Galería Garces Velázquez 110 6. Feliza Bursztyn, Medusa, 1974, c. 13 in. high × 8 in. diameter Courtesy of the Archive of Pablo Leyva. Photo: Pablo Leyva Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021), 12. 2 José Roca, “Feliza Bursztyn 1933–1982”, in Tate Americas Foundation Annual Report 2014 (London: Tate Americas Foundation, 2015), 11. 3 Ibid. 4 See Luca Ospina’s text in this book page xxx 5 Mark S. Micale, “Hysteria and Historiography” (320), quoted in Cecily Deveroux, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave”, ESC 40, no. 1 (March 2014): 20 TBC 6 Deveroux, “Hysteria…”, 20 TBC 7 One evening Bursztyn and her husband, Pablo Leyva, were returning from a party when they saw some men with a tow truck trying to bring down her public sculpture, Homenaje a Ghandi (Homage to Ghandi). Leyva got out of the car to hit one of them but when they saw that the couple had stopped, they left. She was terrified. See Ospina page xxx 8 Ospina page xxx 9 Ospina page xxx 10 Maritza Uribe de Urdinola, “En un país de machistas, ¡hágase la loca!”, El Tiempo: Revista Carrusel (Bogotá), 30 November 1979: 15. 11 Uribe de Urdinola, “En un país de machistas”, quoted in Manuela Ochoa Ronderos, “The Uninhabited Stages: Stepping into Feliza Bursztyn’s House”, master’s thesis, San Francisco Art Institute, May 2013, n.p. 12 Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, translated by Ralph McCarthy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 61. 13 Kusama, Infinity Net, 14–15. Kusama’s first US exhibition was at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle. It included 26 watercolours and pastels. 14 Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, inv. 130.1946.a-c 15 The photograph was by Hal Reiff. The collage is no longer extant. 16 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in The Feminist and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones (London–New York: Routledge, 2003), 49. 17 Gina McDaniel Tarver, “The Art of Feliza Bursztyn: Confronting Cultural Hegemony”, Artelogie: Recherche sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique Latine, 17 October 2013: 2. 18 Tarver, “The Art of Feliza Bursztyn”, 5. 19 The film was directed by J. M. Arguaga, with an original score by Jacqueline Nova. 20 https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/kinetic 21 Quoted in Tarver, “The Art of Feliza Bursztyn”, 5. 22 Ospina page xxx 23 Carolee Schneemann was trained as a painter and was always an expressionist. See Sabine Breitwieser, “Kinetic Painting: Carolee Schneemann’s media”, in Sabine Breitwieser, ed., Carolee Schneeman: Kinetic Painting (Saltzburg, Munich, London, New York: Museum der Moderne and Prestel, 2018), 13–25. 24 Carolee Schneemann, “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera”, in Breitwieser, Kinetic Painting, 116. 25 https://www.artforum.com/print/201902/ carolee-schneemann-on-robert-morris-78376 26 Ospina page xxx 27 See for example Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, “The Focus of Feminism: Challenging the Myths about the U.S. Women’s Movement”, Amnis, online, 1 September 2008, https://journals. openedition.org/amnis/634 28 Azilef was directed by Luis Ernesto Arocha. 29 Email from Carlos Leyva, 19 September 2021 30 Madeleine Glennon, “Medusa in Ancient Greek Art”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Greek and Roman Art, March 2017, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ medu/hd_medu.htm 31 Johnson brings Medusa up to date: when Hillary Clinton was running for US president in 2016, she was often equated to Medusa in right wing publications and online. Elizabeth Johnson, “The Original Nasty Woman”, The Atlantic, 6 November 2016, https://www. theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/ the-original-nasty-woman-of-classicalmyth/506591/ 32 Tarver, “The Art of Feliza Bursztyn”, 11–12. 111