DOLORES AGUILERA'S 9,000 DRAWINGS by Max Torregrossa

01/10/2008

Looking at a drawing, painting, print or photograph might be a rather delicate act if the viewer tends to use what he or she knows as the frame of reference. That is quite natural.

The trouble is, today we “know” so many things. In other words we have seen so many things that the mechanism is more complicated. In most cases these visual proto-concepts [what one knows] are helpful because they steer us to a category like a shortcut and help bring us straight to the point. But in Dolores Aguilera’s case, they can drastically disrupt our approach to the work.

Before going on, I would like to recall how Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending A Staircase, which met with such success at the 1913 Armory Show, had been rejected at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants in Paris [in particular by Albert Gleizes]. The painter’s friends asked him to change the work’s title, thinking the committee would change its mind. Of course Duchamp refused, but it is clear that the viewer’s eye “expected” something because the word “nude” is in the title. That something did not occur—or occurred in such an odd way that the artists on the selection panel objected to the painting. There were certainly other criteria, but the title was decisive in their rejection.

Thus, a work’s name can affect the way we look at it. A 2002 study on oculomotor exploration by the CNRS-Collège de France perception physiology laboratory demonstrates the point.

Fernand Leger’s The Alarm Clock, a Cubist work bordering on abstraction, was the painting used for the experiment. Researchers split the participants up into three groups and asked them to look at the painting. The first group received no particular instructions, the second had to come up with a title for the work and the third was given the title.

A complicated device tracked their eyes’ movements as they scanned the image. The findings showed how semantic interpretation clearly guided oculomotor exploration, the eye seeking in a way to “justify” the title.

The problem is even more challenging in Dolores Aguilera’s case because her work’s title, Cuerpo 9000+999 Drawings, is esoteric and involves a set of drawings that cannot be seen all at once because there are so many of them.

When asked to describe the series as briefly as possible, she says it comprises 9,000 charcoal-on-paper drawings of the human body in three different formats and made over an approximately ten-year period.

What Dolores fails to mention is that the bodies are nude and the drawings are of just a “part” of them. Limbs and heads are unseen; the viewer cannot really tell the difference between an abdomen and a groin, although the upper thighs, a thorax or a rough sketch of a shoulder are sometimes recognisable.

When a few of the drawings are shown to several people, it is impossible to overlook the fact that their spontaneous perception comes down to a more or less graphic view of a female sex.

That brings us back to the issue I brought up at the beginning. In our “mind’s eye” all of us have images of nude bodies, based on our social or cultural environment, that point to a kind of prototype image endowed will all the semiotic considerations. According to the retentional consciousness process, that prototype image necessarily causes a modification of the immediate impression. In other words, at first, the persistent standard-image from the past filters the images we look at now, which has an effect on how we perceive the present.

That idea of time is particularly important in Dolores’s work because a clear desire for continuous change from one drawing to the next is inscribed in a perception that is retentional and immediate at the same time, with an intentional discontinuity to avoid creating a serial effect. One drawing does not come after another; there is neither beginning nor end.

If viewers persist in seeing nothing more than a sexual image in Dolores’s work, they must become accustomed to the idea that she drew a vulva 9,000 times over a ten-year period. That would obviously be too easy and inconsistent with the title she gave the work [Cuerpo 9000+999 Drawings], the amount of drawings and the systematisation of the technique used.

Let me come more to the point by discussing the photography and images of Bernd and Hilla Becher, a couple of German artists who since the 1950s have been photographing industrial sites in much the same way 19th-century artists/census-takers compiled images of plant or animal species according to a “method”. These two artists from the “objective photography” movement in Düsseldorf seem to have been obsessed by buildings with the same function but a wide variety of forms. They photographed series of grain silos, water towers, blast furnaces, refrigeration towers and pipe systems, treated very precisely and identically each time: the same light [even if that meant having to wait a long time], composition, format, black and white technique and point of view.

The result is impressive. The pictures show many structures whose overall alikeness to one another supposes—if not imposes—an obvious common destination. Variations in form make each photographed object unique, but the sum of that individuality, instead of watering down the whole in diversity, emphasizes a common character, as though there were an invisible “function” unknown by the simple visual perception that eventually becomes apparent. In a way, all of that can be found in Dolores’s work: the same apparent function of the object [that of part of a human body], same basic technique applied to every image, same concern with “compilation” or inventory and same result with regard to a certain particularity of forms.

Neither the Bechers’ nor Aguilera’s work follows a sequence or chronological order. Above all I would add that there is probably little or no determined aesthetic desire.

But these are nevertheless drawings of nude bodies and it would seem necessary to set aside what we know before trying to understand the artist, who rejects that proposition.

In a way, that seems to contradict my earlier comment but the comparison must be made because there is necessarily a relationship between Dolores’s act and what we recognise as depictions of “nudes”, which are far from commonplace in art history.

From painting to artistic intent, from news item to photography, Dolores has looked at, collected and classified all sorts of images of nude bodies. That must be taken into account.

In fact, from the Venus of Lespugue to Lucian Freud’s “ordinary” bodies, we almost instinctively know most of the intentions of the nudity depicted throughout history. But without necessarily skimming through the long catalogue of gymnology, I have noticed a difference in how artists have “treated” two sexes. From Raphael’s Judgment of Paris to the 19th century, they have usually “preferred” the female body, whereas artistic or scientific manuals emphasized the male body.

The anatomical plates, cut-away drawings and dissections that science or fine arts students have been poring over for centuries show male bodies, whereas the Surrealists focused on the few available images of dissected female bodies [see L’ange Anatomique [The Anatomical Angel]].

The phenomenon is still with us. In 2008 Maria José Barral, a professor at the University of Saragossa medical school, showed that anatomy books still distinguish between male and female for reasons other than anatomical considerations alone. In a sampling of 16,329 images from 12 textbooks at 20 of the most prestigious universities in Europe, the USA and Canada, depictions of men still predominate.

Furthermore, anatomically “neutral” male parts outnumber images of women, which appear only when the female sexual organs are depicted. The nervous system also tends to be male, unlike the circulatory system, which is female. Roughly speaking, thought is a male attribute and food a female one.

A closer look, then, suggests that the issue is not just a trivial detail but probably based on a certain conception of the human body.

When Paul Richer, Charcot’s student at the Salpêtrière in Paris, drew writhing, twisting bodies of women in the throes of hysteria, he was observing a pathology considered at the time to be typically female. His sketchbooks show female bodies, often scantily clad, strictly for the purposes of scientific research and the higher needs of medicine. But their gestures and poses oddly resemble those that Rodin was sketching at the same time for his erotic drawings. That brings us to the point of the representation of the nude: the eye’s erogenous power [or how the eye becomes an extension of the sense of touch], Freud’s famous scopic pleasure. It is no coincidence that the doctor from Vienna attended Charcot’s clinical examinations for a long time.

In the end, sexual curiosity, kept awake throughout centuries by depictions of [usually female] nudity, can be fairly well summed up by images of Eve, who seems interesting for artists only when she is shameless and tempting.

She will not join man in shame and hide her nudity until after the fall. Then we see those women with protruding bellies and narrow shoulders of the Gothic period cringing in the awareness of sin.

Then came the 19th century, when artists stripped away historical and metaphysical justifications to show the female body in moments of the most intimate abandon. Artists in every period obviously did not lack the imagination to show what was not supposed to be seen.

Paintings of Susanna and the Elders, Diane, Leda, Venus, Judith, odalisques and Bathing Women were so many pretexts to show the desired yet scorned female sex—I am talking about the organ—which is a place of expulsion and engulfment at the same time. Those images reached a climax in The Origin of the World, which undeniably illustrates the title in both senses of the term.

I have only mentioned depictions of women because they alone, in principle, are connected to more or less explicit sexual desire, but, looking at Dolores’s drawings, there is also the impression that they are of vaginas and not penises. Consequently, disregarding them is unthinkable.

Now that we have established the need to put Dolores’s work in the perspective of nude images, let us turn to her technique, charcoal drawing, whose characteristics include making the flesh look more abstract. That is significant, if one bears in mind that the body’s rosy pink flesh tones are seldom neutral in the mental construction of the prototype image. Giorgione is said to have been quite upset about people going into rapture over the vibrant flesh of Justice [in the guise of Judith] painted on one side of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. The Master of Castelfranco was commissioned to decorate the whole building, but young Titian is the one who painted the Judith in question and his skill in rendering flesh tones was already well known.

In any case, the flesh that is absent in Dolores’s drawings can be identified by the nuances of grey she obtains rubbing her hand on the charcoal. Manual contact with the paper models, in a way, an abdomen, crotch or side, revealing a pure creative act, in the sense that everything depends on the gesture. This is a far cry from Seurat’s rubbings, for example, where apparition plays an important part. Here, nothing appears. Everything is directly projected. Thus, Dolores does not seem to be an intermediary or a mediator whose vision is retranscribed. She does not show: she does.

Thinking more about it, in this act of creation, its subject, technique and number, I find a certain analogy with the Golem of Jewish lore. That creature modelled out of clay [Adama, Adam] was brought to life by writing a sacred text on his forehead, and wiping off the first letter of the word “truth” was all it took to kill him. Once that aleph was erased, truth became death and the Golem returned to clay.

The body, which Dolores ceaselessly created [9,000 times+999 more times to come], has been modelled with hands, fingers rubbing the paper to give the flesh shape grey. To give it life, she “wrote” around that flesh with black lines that are nothing less than calligraphic signs. Those traces of charcoal are not fixed, as if the artist wanted to leave open the possibility of making them disappear, destroying the body depicted.

Dolores’s far-reaching goal of creating rather than showing the human body is obvious and in her nature I perceive something akin to that of Ignatius of Loyola and the Japanese samurai.

Ignatius wanted to wrap his arms around the world and include it whole in his doctrine without adapting that doctrine to the world. In Shodô or Kendô the brush or the sword, the Japanese samurai sought to make the entire body as efficient as possible and improve the gesture to the point of perfection: the impossibility of starting over.

In Dolores’s drawings the line, drawn with a single stroke, has the suppleness of calligraphy and the steady self-assurance of a word: lively when it shows a solid side, sometimes trembling to suggest the curve of a hip. In the literal and figurative sense, that line contains all the elements of the Being, and Dolores says it with force: they are bodies, Cuerpo.

So, what did she seek to create? Did she want to roughly sketch a certain humanity devoid of reason, like the Golem before Adam, or to conceive another humanity as Zarathustra saw it—“Body am I entirely, and nothing more”?

Dolores never wanted to clearly say whether she used a model. “I work with a body,” she told me repeatedly without adding anything else, and I took that as another clue leading me to affirm that she did not seek to “reproduce” or “copy”. That is why I do not think she tried to make a rough sketch 9,000 times.

And then there is the sex that the viewer sees.

That sex would appear to be the deep-black “bar”, clearly located between the legs, visually impenetrable, sometimes striped-over with lines, that can easily be identified as the sexual organ or rather its vestibule: pubic hair, to be exact. If I am that graphic, it is because hair, both pubic and otherwise, is strongly connected to many anthropological concepts spawning taboos and therefore desire. Courbet’s painting clearly would not be so disturbing without that dark tuft of hair, confusingly perceived as a ritual protection of an orifice, placed on a crotch that we are used to seeing, hairless, in paintings, sculptures and drawings.

Instead of suggesting introspection, that vision, which is quite different from what we have known—and expected—actually invites us to witness an act: the sexual act, obviously, which would have either already been performed or is about to take place. In both cases, the viewer is no longer insignificant.

Let’s imagine that when we look at Dolores’s drawings we are indeed witnessing an act, just as we are when looking at the Bechers’ photographs.

The “function” the German couple sought through the diversity of forms, and that shows through rather than appears, implies the existence of an expected superior state, in other words: what is that function and what purpose does it serve?

The object shown can therefore be considered as an intermediate “state” leading to the final function and viewers have no other choice than to find themselves in that mediating movement.

That is why the crotch of Courbet’s woman is so suggestive. The gaping hole he presents to us as The origin of the world is actually an accurate view of the intermediate state, in other words coitus, while the title answers the question asked above: what is this function and what purpose does it serve?

In Dolores’s drawings, the intermediate state does not depend on what she shows in the drawing, because the viewer actually sees nothing and academicism is out of the question. The artist saw no point in showing anatomy that has not been hidden in art for a long time, nor does she by any means have an erotic or pornographic motive, as Picasso did in some of drawings. So the drawings have nothing to do with the sexual act, despite the impression that everything seems to focus on the black mass identified as the organ in question.

From there, grey [the flesh] rises in fire or smoke, liquidly spreading or vibrating with organic life, avoiding or misshaping the charcoal lines that seem to quiver, twist, spin, come and go, appear and disappear from one drawing to the next. Sometimes the artist’s hand suddenly appears and stops this dance with a wide, oblong stroke that erases the flesh.

Dolores shows us humanity without really telling us what its function is. The only clue we might have is that everything goes and comes back to the body in an endless variety of identical and different diversities, at once and not successively. Since each drawing contains “all” and each is also different, we find ourselves facing a philosophical paradox or a mystical impossibility. Perhaps that, in the end, is the solution to the problem posed by Dolores’s drawings.

Christian theologians teach us that the incomprehensible possibility of being two opposite essences at the same time [and not successively] exists. Thus, Christ was God and man.

Islam tells us that man can know just 99 names of God and that only the mystic who reaches illumination will know the hundredth.

Perhaps that is the response to the title: 9000+999. This series of 9,999 drawings does not have room for one more body.

Unless it is disembodied.

Max Torregrossa
November 2008

Traduction : Glenn Naumovitz