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Article Excerpt
But how can we agree to let [woman] express herself when our whole way of life is a mask designed to hide our intimate feelings?--Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
Women's writing and women's art, like women's knowledge, begins to articulate the silenced voice of women, but it is obliged to do so in the context of dominant, alien, but ultimately enabling culture.--Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences
IN THE 1970s, TWO OF THE MANY NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS TO EMERGE IN MEXICO were the feminist movement and the "grupos" movement of politically oriented, conceptual art collectives. A core group of exceptionally talented feminist artists participated simultaneously in both movements. After briefly introducing several of these artists and their work within the context of Mexico's post-1968 social movements, this article examines what I call the labyrinth of silence that they encountered within the art world, the grupos, and the feminist movement. In each of these arenas, feminist artists ran into structural, aesthetic, and behavioral obstacles to full creative expression, participation, and recognition. The research presented here is intended as a modest response to Janet Wolff's (1990: 68-70) call for a more specific analysis and description of the mechanisms and practices through which women artists are silenced, excluded, and marginalized. Finally, the article describes some of the strategies deployed by feminist artists in Mexico to navigate their way through and around the labyrinth in order to "articulate the silenced voice of women."
Post-1968 Social Movements and Feminist Artists
The 1968 student movement in Mexico City was a watershed event and continues to be an important point of reference for social movements and their loosely affiliated artists today. (1) What began as a dispute very specific to the governance of the public university system was transformed into a broad social movement with a national agenda demanding social justice and the democratization of Mexico's authoritarian regime. Though the movement in its initial and particular form was smashed by the bloody massacre and massive arrests of October 2, 1968, the movement's legacy is difficult to overstate.
After the government's brutal repression of the student movement, hundreds of its activists immersed themselves in grassroots organizing efforts to end the long-ruling Party of the Institutional Revolution's undemocratic, corporatist control of labor and peasant organizations. Parallel to these class-based movements against corporatism, activist artists attempted to undermine the state's powerful influence over artists and other intellectuals and to reclaim an independent, critical space for art at the service of the popular classes. Some 15 art collectives--grupos as they were commonly called--were founded in the 1970s and came together briefly at the end of the decade in the Mexican Front of Cultural Workers. (2) The grupos movement was very much an outgrowth of 1968. Most of the grupos artists were born between 1945 and 1955 and were all, directly or indirectly, influenced by the events of 1968. Another important 1968 antecedent of the grupos was the formation of the "Salon Independiente" as an effort by rebellious Mexican artists to create an independent, alternative art space and to protest the government's dictatorial cultural policies. Indeed, a generation of artists influenced by the events of 1968 remains at the center of activist art today.
A feminist movement also emerged in Mexico in the early 1970s, influenced by the particular experience of the 1968 student movement and the general experience of its counterpart movements in Latin America, the United States, and Western Europe. Although the 1968 student movement did not include feminist demands, by challenging the regime's censorship and repression it opened the door for the cultural politics of the feminist movement, which today operates within a very different context. Mexican feminists have often been shunned by political parties and other movements, and have frequently been at odds with one another, despite a shared concern with gender inequality and sexual oppression (Lamas, 1998; Mogrovejo, 1999). Nonetheless, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the feminist movement increased its presence and built highly respected institutions, such as the journal Debate Feminista, which has been published regularly since 1990. Feminism's influence on Mexico's other progressive movements and on political culture and popular culture has been significant.
Mexico's first generation of self-consciously feminist artists, then, came of age politically, artistically, and professionally within an era of heightened social movement activism and rapid political, social, and cultural change. The following six women exemplify those who participated in the grupos movement as self-identified feminists:
Maris Bustamante (1949) is a sculptor, designer, performance artist, and founder of the Centro de Artes, Humanidades y Ciencias en Transdisciplina (CAHCTAS) in Mexico City. Her performances often incorporate sculpture and other elements associated with installations. Representative of her early work is "!Caliente, caliente!" ("Hot! Hot!"), c. 1982, in which she deconstructed Freud while wearing a penis-nose mask (see Figure 1). She was a member of Grupo No-Grupo.
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Lourdes Grobet (1940) is a renowned photographer, whose work is documented in an exhaustive, 500-page, bilingual catalog, titled simply Lourdes Grobet (Grobet, 2005). Representative of her work are her 1980s photographs of popular Mexican women wrestlers and of Zapotec women militants of the Oaxacan-based Worker-Peasant-Student Coalition of the Isthmus (COCEI). An example of Grobet's work as a member of the grupo Proceso Pentagono is a photo montage titled "La Dama" (see Figure 2) in which Grobet's photograph of the mother of a disappeared COCEI leader appears alongside photographs of women who appear to have been stripped in preparation for arrest and interrogation.
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Magali Lara (1956), a graphic artist and painter, has also worked in ceramics and textiles and has collaborated in performances with Bustamante. At the core of her work are themes of the intimate, the erotic, and human emotions, as in the 1997 mixed media on paper images, "Los dos hordes de una herida simple" ("The two edges of a simple wound") and "Miembro que lame" ("Member that licks") (see Figure 3). Lara was a member of the grupo Marco.
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Monica Mayer (1954) is a graphic artist and curator and archivist of women's art. She also writes a column on art for the Mexico City daily Universal. Representative of her early work on themes of women's sexuality is the 1976 "Ilusiones," which includes the text, "sometimes my own feelings and fantasies frighten me" (see Figure 4). Mayer, together with Bustamante, formed Mexico's first feminist art grupo, Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen's Powder). Bustamante and Mayer continue to collaborate, most recently in a massive public art project with five other women artists for International Women's Day in 2007 (Zuniga, 2007).
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Rowena Morales (1948) is a graphic artist, sculptor, and, today, primarily a jewelry designer. Representative of her early graphic work is a mixed-media collage, "Homenaje a Mariana Alcoforado" ("Homage to Mariana Alcoforado") (1981) (see Figure 5). She also collaborated with Lara on installations exploring women's issues. Morales was a member of the grupo Proceso Pentagono.
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Carla Rippey (1950) is a graphic artist and painter. Representative of her work, often centered on the body and sexuality, is the graphite on paper "Eva enredada" ("Eve entangled," 1995) (see Figure 6). Rippey was a member of the grupo Peyote y la Compania.
[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]
These artists expressed their feminism through both celebratory and deconstructionist work, to borrow Janet Wolff's (1993: 150-151) labels, as well as through denunciatory projects. Examples of celebratory art, which emphasized positive images of women, include Morales' homage to Alcoforado, a 17th-century Portuguese nun whose love...
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