During the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American creative arts seemed pervaded by a political consensus in support of radical change in a socialist direction, against the evils of US imperialism, all shrouded in a sort of omertà which shielded the Cuban Revolution from criticism. That ‘atmosphere’ persisted, albeit with varying degrees of censorship, extending sometimes to persecution and worse during the waves of authoritarian rule in the region between 1965 and 1990. But when the tension subsided, there was no re-emergence of engagé politicised art and theatre. Artists and the public had lost interest in venerating cultural heroes as standard-bearers of political causes.
So where did the avant-garde go next? In Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra's words, referring to a certain set of tendencies, ‘confronted with an epochal sense of political disillusion, they explored new self-directed, if not self-reflexive, forms of aesthetic dissensus in which the political in art became fundamentally determined by a corporeal ethics’ (p. 223). Her highly original and daring book shows how dissensus has raised itself to the levels of aesthetics where the political is embedded in the relationship of a work to an artist's very own body. That body, of course, is not a body like any other, and readers will notice its resemblance to the emblematic, stylised and ritualised bodies which pervade the Catholic imaginary.
The performers featured in Polgovsky's book place the rest of us in the role of witness rather than viewer or audience. This is not ‘shock art’, though some of it is shocking, and it seems that the purpose of the phrase ‘performative turn’ in the title is precisely to avoid an assimilation into ‘performance art’. The works and the artists she presents to us are utterly undidactic: we are not being battered into ideological submission.
The book follows two intertwined paths to an interpretation of this aesthetic dissensus. One of these holds quite tightly to the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and the modifications which his ideas underwent at the hands of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Polgovsky makes a valiant effort at interpreting and harnessing Lévinas’ conception of a flesh-and-blood ethical subject encapsulated not in a person's moral agonising, or for that matter in their acts of generosity, but in the face – the face of another which is also my face. Deleuze and Guattari prefer to shift this to a more straightforwardly political level by stating that the face is ‘White Man himself’, ‘Christ’ and ‘the typical European’. For Polgovsky, Lévinas’ at once tantalising and labyrinthine writings offer a way of making humans’ vulnerability the starting point of artistic motivation and, less explicitly, of the response of witnesses.
Polgovsky's other path to the interpretation of the dissensus shows much of her determination to get between artists and their bodies, which is where they wrestle – sometimes literally – with their anguish. Is that not where Lévinas himself wants to be? She starts in Chile with two people who surely did mark a moment in that country's cultural history: Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita, who gave the finest artistic, literary and poetic expressions to the resistance culture of their time. Eltit filmed a reading of her first novel Por la patria (later published as Lumpérica) in a brothel in Chile and then combined it into a video, Zona de dolor (1980), in which she shows her arms bleeding after being burned and lacerated with a razor blade. Five years earlier her partner Zurita had ‘burned his cheek with a piece of scorching metal’ (p. 45); and a few years later he attempted to blind himself by throwing ammonia in his eyes. Zurita shed tears with Eltit, enacting a tortuous recall of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and regretting his failure – like them – to retain, or in his case to achieve, purity.
Religious themes continue with the Argentines León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca. Ferrari's production was more directly political and religious, including a crucifixion in which the figure of Christ is nailed to a US Air Force bomber diving from the sky. Some of his works bring the ‘touched bodies’ to the fore by grafting phrases in Braille onto visual images. Maresca, whose work was promoted by Ferrari, goes even further than Eltit in ‘actualizing […] continuity and complementarity between live and object-based art’ (p. 150). She apparently took little care to preserve an emblematic work of the generation of AIDS victims she was to join, namely her Cristo autotransfundiéndose (1988). This depiction of Christ on the Cross administering his own blood transfusion as an AIDS patient disappeared after being exhibited, as did the Ferrari work which it echoed, perhaps stolen by the merchants of indignation.
The account moves to Mexico, and to Marcos Kurtycz, who arrived there from Poland in 1968. In the twentieth century, Mexico's state had a record of sponsoring cultural heroes even though – and sometimes because – they proclaimed their oppositional politics. Kurtycz would have none of this. In 1979 he enacted a meticulously choreographed potlatch which mixed memes from the Day of the Dead rituals with an act of destruction using acid and an axe – all described in meticulous detail. Thereafter the book offers descriptions of acts perpetrated by the artist against his own body or against reproductions of it, including the surgical procedure he underwent in 1992 on one side of his face as a brain tumour was removed.
The detailed descriptions of the performances are masterful and faithful – often accompanied by illustrations and sometimes assembled from disparate materials and varied sources. The author is not content to dump an illustration on the page and leave the reader groping for a response. She describes one of Kurtycz's countless ‘letter bombs’ as follows: ‘the image captures each of the artist's facial traits, including his beard and thick eyelashes [and] also flattens the face, heavily deforms his nose and truly turns his eyes into black holes […]’ (p. 215). These scattered passages of curatorial prose contribute a dimension of classic scholarship in the art history tradition.
Polgovsky's book, which has already been shortlisted by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present for its 2020 Book Prize, brings to an international audience a series of artists who have broken the mould of Latin America's default posture of political protest and produced works which sometimes condense the cry of despair in its barest expression by breaking down the gulf between their bodies and their work. She has brought to the project a remarkable combination of philosophical erudition and descriptive skill, plus the unstoppable curiosity of the best researchers. The book marks a turning point.
