THE PROTAGONIST

Frida Kahlo, Fruits of The Earth (1938)

[This is the fourth excerpt from my review of the book Frida Kahlo Face to Face by Judy Chicago and Frances Borzello, for which I interviewed Chicago on 17 June 2011.]

            Speaking of empathy, popularity and politics, I often found myself seeking out gossip within the pages of the book Frida Kahlo Face to Face. Certain passages provided more joy than others; one of the best examples is on p. 188 where Chicago infers that Kahlo experienced ‘near-unending sexual orgasms’ because of her depiction of Fruits of the Earth (1938). Having read Chicago’s autobiography Through the Flower and its description of her sexual awakening and concomitant multiple orgasms, I am familiar with the themes that occupy her mind and the language she uses to describe them. Reading her refer yet again to sexologists Masters and Johnson in the Frida Kahlo book, I thought to myself ‘typical Judy’ and was about to conclude that her interpretation of the still life was pure projection. A few pages later, however, another of Kahlo’s still lives is reproduced entitled The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened (1943), seeing that painting I was forced to recognise that Chicago’s perception of sexual metaphors in Kahlo's gourds might be more apt than it had at first appeared.

            It’s undeniable that private matters spur curiosity, but can I find a political motivation behind such prying? When Chicago repeatedly distances herself from Kahlo, shocked by the way she put up with husband Rivera’s philandering and takes this as evidence of ‘a disparity in [their] personalities’, I wondered if what she claimed to be a matter of psychology was really a result of the different places in time they occupy.[1] How do you separate the two? It may be fair to assume that had Kahlo been alive today, she would have reacted differently to Diego’s infidelities.[2] There is also the view that Kahlo gave as good as she got because she did, after all, have a few extra-marital affairs of her own. In Borzello’s words, yet another of the painter’s paradoxes was: ‘[s]exual adventuress yet undying love for Diego’.

            Relatedly, Marlo Thomas’ Huffington Post article “Men Behaving Badly… It’s a Good Thing” focuses on the recent trend of American women in the public eye refusing to ‘stand by their man’ after they’ve been cheated on. Thomas commends these women along with the hotel maid who reported that she was raped by French politician Strauss Kahn. Masses of women protesters outside Stauss Kahn’s arraignment hearing illustrate Thomas’s statement: “We are seeing the end of a tradition and the beginning of a revolution.”[3] I would argue that the revolution already happened; it is because feminists challenged the boundary between the personal and the professional that legislation protecting women against sexual harassment was introduced.[4] When Chicago discusses Kahlo’s self-depiction as victim, she quotes art historian Paula Harper, stating: ‘women artists were more inclined to present themselves as victims rather than to portray men as perpetrators’.[5] Not only women artists, but women in general failed to get angry or point the finger – that is, until now – as Thomas’ article highlights. Chicago goes on: ‘the absence of anger in [Kahlo’s] work might have contributed to her immense popularity in that the expression of rage in women, in both art and life, is still unacceptable.’ Rage turned inward (self-blame), was the accepted (and popular) response and one that women are now rallying against. SlutWalks are one example of such protests, as expounded on by Judy Chicago during the interview and afterward at her talk in The National Gallery.[6]

            ‘Sisterhood is powerful’ because recognising that you are not alone in your experience makes you feel better as an individual, bolstering you to forge ahead. More awareness of shared experience means more change, not just personally, but politically.[7] That said, I am conscious that while feminism claims to address all women across borders of space and time (whether they call themselves feminists or not), it is at best anachronistic to say that all women share something fundamental. Like a good ‘post-feminist’ I get a little uncomfortable when Chicago uses the word ‘universal’, yet I read the Face to Face monograph wanting to find commonalities between Kahlo’s, Chicago’s and my own experiences. Towards the end of the book, when Chicago admits to struggling with ‘internalising the needs and persona of a male partner till they overshadow one’s own’, I felt satisfied; now I shared yet another intimate thing with these two women.[8]

[This is the third excerpt from my review of the book Frida Kahlo Face to Face by Judy Chicago and Frances Borzello, for which I interviewed Chicago on 17 June 2011.]
 

Frida Kahlo’s focus on personal subject matter is one of the ways her work ‘prefigured [… and] ‘intersected with the fundamental conviction of the Feminist art movement – that “female thoughts, female ideas, female ways of seeing were every bit as valid as their masculine counterparts who had set the standard for so long”.’[1] In line with this conviction, authors Chicago and Borzello reappraise Kahlo’s paintings on their own terms, that is, in light of the themes inherent within them as well as (to a certain extent) in relation to the work of other female, Mexican and queer artists respectively.[2] In this way the authors help to (re)define Kahlo’s aesthetic agency as active rather than reactive or derivative. The painter’s work and the way it is written about in Frida Kahlo Face to Face bring to mind the feminist catchphrase ‘the personal is the political’ and provoke questions about how autobiographical art can become political.

            As Borzello argues, Kahlo’s popularity is due to the way in which her paintings reflect the macrocosm in the microcosm; her story is undeniably her own and yet it resonates in the minds of millions of viewers who empathise with her experiences. This is due to the visual language she employs; ‘like any great poet, [Kahlo] works from the particular to the general, finding a vocabulary of imagery and a direct style that enables the viewer to share her emotion.’[3] Pointedly, the Face to Face book itself is geared to a mainstream, non-art audience, a cynic would say for purposes of profit, but I would argue, just as importantly, for political ones. They want to get the feminist message out there! The texts are written without art jargon and Chicago’s essays in particular are decidedly anti-elitist; she explains certain art historical movements such as Modernism and Abstract Expressionism in layman’s terms. When we discussed this in the interview, she said that she and the editors belaboured the decision to keep these descriptions in the book. Beyond the considerations of this one publication, Chicago positions herself in opposition to the elitism of the art world.[4]

            During the book tour discussion between Chicago, Borzello and Colin Wiggins (curator) that took place at The National Gallery in London, Chicago shunned the label ‘political artist’ for herself, stating defiantly ‘all art is political’. To her, art that is made by so-called ‘political artists’ illustrates time-bound political ideas without skill/aesthetics and without opening a dialogue about the human condition, which she by contrast always strives to accomplish with her work. What interests me about this statement is Chicago’s emphasis on ‘the universal’ and the idea of communicating with a broad audience who may not have first-hand knowledge or experience of the personal and political circumstances that have inspired the work. As Borzello noted, this is where Kahlo has succeeded; the sheer popularity of her work makes evident that the imagery she used to tell her story is legible to and appreciated by the masses. During the interview Judy Chicago and I discussed this populist aspect of Kahlo’s work and how this connects with Chicago’s own work.[5] Funnily enough that is probably the most compelling point of comparison between the two artists, yet it is one that Chicago only realised after the book went to press.

Frida Kahlo, The Dream (1940)

[This is the second excerpt from my review of the book Frida Kahlo Face to Face by Judy Chicago and Frances Borzello, for which I interviewed Chicago on 17 June 2011.]

Frida Kahlo Face to Face is at ‘once deeply personal and brilliantly perceptive’ perhaps because the authors both embrace and question the use of personal reflection as a tool for making and evaluating art.[1] Throughout the first chapter for example, Chicago compares her life and work to that of Kahlo on quite an intimate level, citing their relationship to the men in their lives, their love of animals and use of colour to represent emotions as points of connection and departure. However, at the same time Chicago criticises previous writing on Kahlo in which ‘biographical information… become[s] a substitute for rigorous analysis’.[2] She also derides contemporary artists and culture more generally for its faddish and sensationalist reliance on the confessional ‘from the touching to the banal’.[3] I therefore find myself tempted to relay my own relationship to Kahlo (and Chicago) in this text as well as to question my impulse to do so.[4]

            When I think of Frida Kahlo, I think of my early adolescence when I was obsessed with her, much like how in my graduate school years I became fixated on Chicago. Back in those post-pubescent years, I thought art was best when it expressed raw emotion and told personal (and tragic) stories, so Kahlo’s work and biography struck a chord with me. I devoured every book I could find about her and my mother took me to a play centring on her life and work. I remember being disappointed by the play, that it didn’t shed any new light on Kahlo for me. Little did I know back then that her presence as an art historical icon was indebted to the feminist movement of the 1970s. When Chicago did her slideshow (which gave rise to the Face to Face book) virtually no one had heard of Kahlo. Given how ubiquitous her imagery is now, it’s hard for me to imagine a world where she was not widely acclaimed and those who did know of her, probably most often thought of her as merely ‘Diego Rivera’s wife who dabbled in painting’. Moreover, it was a startling realisation that yet another aspect of my love of art, that is my hormone-fuelled admiration of Frida, was also indebted to 70s feminism.[5]

            This fact is only one of the many insights into Kahlo and her legacy this new book has given me. The entire introduction by Chicago (and much of the rest of the publication) is dedicated to re-contextualising Kahlo’s oeuvre in terms of both the feminist movement that brought it to light and an alternative set of formal and theoretical considerations outside what Chicago refers to as ‘the mainstream […] male-dominated modernist art narrative’.[6] For example, I had been educated to believe Andre Breton’s claim that Kahlo was a ‘natural Surrealist’, but Chicago and Borzello have made me question this assessment. Surrealism relies on Freud’s conception of the unconscious and the artists working in this mode sought to unearth this hidden level of the psyche through free association, automatic writing and the depiction of dreams. By contrast, Kahlo claimed to be a realist.[7] No matter how dreamlike the subject matter or paradoxical the content of Kahlo’s paintings, they reflected her lucid thoughts, feelings, experience and context; as Borzello wittily points out in a commentary on the painting The Dream (1940), Frida actually did sleep with a skeleton above her bed.[8]

On 17 June 2011 I had the pleasure of sitting face to face with Judy Chicago, one of my favourite artists. Fittingly, the reason for our meeting was to discuss her 2010 publication Frida Kahlo Face to Face in which Chicago and art historian Frances Borzello reassess the work of the iconic painter.[1] When I read the press release before receiving a copy of the book, I thought ‘Why another book on Kahlo and why Chicago as the author?’ The answers were staring me in the face; in my own performance lecture Performance Art Can Change Your Life For The Better I refer to Chicago as ‘my role model with role models’ and show a still of The Dinner Party (1974-9) as evidence of her efforts to find heroines from Western history to identify with and emulate. As she herself articulates in the introduction of the Kahlo book, in the heyday of the second wave Chicago was one of a slew of women who searched the archives to excavate overlooked women who they could take up as mentors and write into a new narrative of art herstory.[2] In other words, writing this book is in tune with Chicago’s lifelong goals, in this case re-examining a woman’s work in ways that have been ignored by patriarchy.

            Back in the 70s at The Women’s Building in Los Angeles, Chicago gave a slide lecture (that she had since forgotten about) which was witnessed by the now chief NY editor for Prestel, Christopher Lyon. That lecture was the first time Lyon was introduced to the work of Frida Kahlo, so it seemed fitting to him that Chicago pen this monograph, the first in a series of books that will have an artist writing about another artist who influenced them. Reviewing this publication has not only provided me with the opportunity to sit face to face with one of my art idols, but also gives me a chance to think about role models more generally and to reflect on the relationship between the personal, the populist and the political.