Page 118 - ARTE!Brasileiros #40

EXCLUSION, ART AND THE PLACE OF SPEECH ENGLISH VERSION

Two women, contemporary with Simone de Beauvoir, who think that unfolds into a second turn, transforming her into a mummy,
art with their bodies, but who also use their bodies in a way that prisoner of her own thread. A mummy that transforms into a knot,
seems to be disturbed by the stability of their representative which imprisons and closes the circuit. Finally, a knot that ends in
images. The opposite of this can be found in Wanda Pimentel. She the symptomatic “gift wrapped” metaphor, with a beautiful bow
holds a different constructive record for the same displaced feet at the end. A descriptive process of how the infinity of a thread
and hands. The same strategy, of asexuation by subtraction, of transforms into the finitude of a compact unit. A process that
the entire body. The same cuts, angles, perspectives that produce reveals how we begin in the infinite and ambiguous series, going
this effect in fantasy, of which the absent part, we must complete through fantasy and arrive at the visage. The Gift Woman, the
ourselves, with our own fantasy. At the point of intersection Gift-Wrapped Woman... but not quite, because it is precisely the
between the formalist tradition and the pop tradition we have Absent Woman.
this common issue of approaching the reality of sexuation by A homologous process emerges in Shirley Paes Leme and her works
way of its production as a hypothesis of fantasy, conjecture or on grooves, twigs, filaments, as in her 2015 Fumaça Congelada
parody, as Judith Butler would put it. As if here we approached sobre Tela [Frozen Smoke on Canvas], where the texture and
a critique of sexuality as a display of visages. Let us recall John serialization of letters give materiality to the book, not as an
Berger’s simple remark that the screen is, first and foremost, a expressive form but as a string of letters arranged as an aesthetic
1
coffer where the bourgeois practices his art of possession and form. If male sexuation can be written as a line of natural numbers,
the accumulation of lost experience. in which we can count {1,2,3, ... n} the sexuation of female pleasure
Lygia Clark, drifting from art into psychoanalysis and the practical is a line of real numbers, in which we cannot count on its rules
correlation of invented experiences, just as Lygia Pape with her of formation { 0, 1}. The binary is absent because the line of
approach to graphic art and design of the widely known Piraquê natural numbers represent an anomalous element, which is zero,
biscuits, added to the feminine, as a problematic of the visages of and the line of the real numbers represent unpredictability and
their own selves, the subjectivation of fantasy as a task. impossibility of closure. With this, both the closure of the visage
Again, what we find here is less the display of a raw sexuality in its and the proportion of the fantasy are subverted by an experience
demand for full exercise and event and more the thematization of of non-identity, of counter-identity. The malaise of the non-whole
an asexuation, that is, of how we fail to talk about sexuality, both can be identified in the Elida Tessler’s work, mainly in the rewriting
because the object hinders the visage and because it introduces process of objects historically linked to the female experience:
the fantasy of asexuation. Both aesthetic forms, which walked clothespins, keys, hand towels, silk stockings, magnifying glasses,
hand in hand in the 1920s, now appear separate. On the one hand, cork stoppers, nail polish. Repeated indefinitely and scripted, they
the perspective tries to leave the canvas’ two-dimensional space lose their support of suffering and symptom, becoming a way of
(with triptychs and giant Moebius surfaces). On the other, the denominating the malaise.
deformation seems to become aware of the concealment systems:
the mask, the dress, the wrapping. 4. CONCLUSION
If the visage produces the gender, fantasy makes the species. I brought here three chapters of an infinite line. Chapters of a story
This is the reason why there is always a mismatch between our that subverts its own segments, since it does not have to be told
collective experience of gender and our uniqueness of fantasy. this way, chronologically or serially. Thus we have other stories of
In this case this can be shown by the opposition between social sexuality to tell, since each moment we experience recreates a story
contradiction, in a moment of silencing of the word, and mainly that makes it at the same time possible, bringing us to a universe
the redoubling of the silencing of women and the aesthetic form of truth in a structure of fiction, but also to the impossible and
that reverses this process by placing it in a language specific to unthinkable of each instant, which is the impossible instant of the now.
this woman. So we can tell new stories, we must free ourselves both from
visages and fantasies and from our identities of pleasure. This
3. FEMALE PLEASURE would produce non-concentric stories, stories that would not
We thus arrive to the third moment of these stories. Starting be contemporary with themselves, nor anachronistic in regards
in the 2000s, many Brazilian female artists began to take an to the Other. Contingent stories. This is what could be expected
interest in the outline. As if in this minute difference, and in its from the arrival of infinity as a critical concept for the experience
repetition, something is written about female pleasure. This is in of gender and its fantasies. Stories that would not be necessary,
Mira Schendel’s poetic alphabets, in the compositional varieties not even possible, for representing a point of view or perspective
of Leda Catunda’s patchwork, in Teresinha Soares’s hyperintense like any other.
graphism. Our time of competing narratives, of stories made in a rush, of
To Lacan, the female pleasure has an interesting property in its post-truth scraps, needs to take more seriously what offends its
difference in regard to the male pleasure, insofar as they are unit of fixed chapters. It needs to take into account that madness,
formalizable through two distinct types of infinite. When I say misery and vulnerability produces thousands of rejects. The
formalizable I mean the possibility that pleasure can be written history of sexualities is tension between aesthetic form and social
and, in this respect, it has this first characteristic: once it starts, contradiction. It serves to remind us that using human bodies,
we are always afraid that it will never cease. As it is said, if I give treated merely as raw material for the parade of social cleansing,
the finger, he it wants the arm, and if I give the arm, it will want is not only a hygienist crime and a tolerated segregation, but it
to take the legs. Pleasure is dangerous because it always wants also invents and reproduces political grammars that will later
more, including the oppressive pleasure of the superego. We are stick onto our eyes, making us unaccustomed to strangeness in
situated in the anthropophagic arena of malaise. One of its most the face of suffering.
fruitful supports is precisely the metaphor of writing.
This problem of the infinitude of pleasure emerges vigorously 1 | A BOBA,(1916), ANITA MALFATTI
in Anna Maiolino. To her, Everything Begins by the Mouth, the
mouth that infinitely devours a thread, or rather the mouth that 2 | LÍNGUA APUNHALADA, (1968), LYGIA PAPE
infinitely regurgitates a thread in In And Out2. Threads that hold
the artist’s hair, like a tiara, making her young and childish. A tiara 3 | VOCÊ ME DÁ SUA PALAVRA? (2004-2014), ELIDA TESSLER

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