People can be uprooted or displaced by birth or by destiny. I prefer to think of myself as a nomadic subject. Nonetheless, and despite the many years in which it has been an everyday situation, this identity—hybrid, perhaps, and quite artificial, as are all identities—leaves a strange aftertaste. It is without any postmodern individualist intention, and only with the purpose of introducing myself, that I write here a few autobiographical reflections from the tropics.

I am a daughter of Catalan refugees from the Spanish Civil War, who—forced to exchange one land for another—found themselves in Mexico. In this country, by constitutional right, every person born in its territory is a citizen; and so I am one.

But the fact of belonging to a family with such a strong cultural identity as the Catalan—with its own language, quite distinct from Castilian—resulted in my mother tongue being Catalan. I am of lower middle class origins, but here every one who doesn’t have a dark skin immediately comes to be a member of the class of “güeros”, which is a synonym for foreigner, someone from outside, and by implication, of a higher social caste. As in many other parts of this planet, the color of one’s skin seems to determine both national identity and class in Mexico —except that here, where the ideology of miscegenation reigns, neither whites nor blacks nor Indians are admitted. This is a country of mestizos and everything that is not mestizo doesn’t quite fit. At times, during the twentieth century, there has been an attempt to “sublimate” the indigenous peoples, but this has never gone beyond “pious thoughts”—a demagogic public policy without any real material underpinning. Since skin color and social class are so closely related, someone who is dark-skinned, but incontestably of the well-to-do classes, will also be magically transmuted into a “güerito”.

So it was that I was raised and educated in Mexico… but as my parents happened to be foreign, during the presidential “reign” of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976), I was obliged to acquire a certificate of nationality certifying that I was Mexican by birth, which is in any case both absurd and unconstitutional. Of course it really doesn’t matter very much here because, as in the imperial past, the catch-phrase is “I obey, but I do not comply”. However, there was no other way it could have been, because my parents, during their thirty years of exile, had no passport and thus no nationality; they only had an identity and travel document—issued by Mexico—which had been given them as officially stateless persons. Nevertheless, a fatherland, or motherland, was something they had very clearly defined, though their exile led, with the passing of the years, to their also becoming to some extent hybrid persons.

As soon as I really established contact with Mexican society—from the age of about three, I suppose—the process of Mexicanization began. But, on entering school the process acquired a Spanish stamp since I studied in schools that were opened by the refugees. There they taught us Spanish pronunciation, and so I spoke with a lilt proper to Mexico City but with somewhat Castilian phonetics. That came to a stop when, aged 19, I made my first visit to Spain; I got off the plane in Madrid, took a taxi, and after pronouncing a few words, the driver turned and said to me “You’re not from here, are you?”

Time and time again throughout my life I’ve been asked “What are you then? Mexican or Catalan? What do you feel you are?” During my childhood and youth I experienced a certain problem of national and ethnic identity. What was I really? Certainly, the question is from the outset a trick one, since it implies that one can only be one thing. With the passing of the years, and after trying to get inside this problem that other people create for you, I had to arrive at the conclusion that I am both things at once and that I have no need to choose. In some questions I am Mexican, in others Catalan, and in yet others I am a bit of a hybrid. There is a Chicano song that goes, mistakenly: “My home’s not here, nor there neither”; but I would say, rather: “My home’s here and over there too”. After all, it turns out that in Mexico I’m “from somewhere else”, whereas, in Catalonia, my speech makes me seem—how awful!—a foreigner. In truth, I feel I’m from both places and it no longer gives rise to any conflict in me to recognize myself as bi-cultural or even hybrid.

Many people seem to think that everyone must have a single “pure”, hundred percent, national identity, and that this “identity” is given you by the land you are born in, the origin of your parents or the place where you decide to live. And all this is contingent upon each country and each particular circumstance.

Nowadays, as if by magic, the appropriate passport is issued at the appropriate place. My parents had no passport at all; I on the other hand have two. Ironies of destiny.

In the last resort, this question of national identity is as complicated (or as simple) as the question of gender identity. In this case, too, according to the hegemonic ideology, one can only be of one gender (and look like it, in accordance with the corresponding stereotype).

And so, after these digressions around the theme of identity, let me enter into the area of my professional and other interests. Since my youth I have been interested in art, all kinds of art. I liked the art of the theatre as well as the visual arts and literature. It wasn’t quite so in my early adolescence, when, to show my independence in a family of writers, I read little, and big museums put me to sleep. But as a university student I had the chance to work in a museum and that was decisive for my future. In philosophy I preferred aesthetics, and in sociology, the sociology of art. In 1968, I found myself working for the Cultural Olympics in Mexico City, and nearly ten years later I was employed by the journal of the Modern Art Museum, where I soon became interested in folk art and art produced by women. It was precisely as a result of those experiences that I was able to get an intimate knowledge of what women were doing in the visual arts during the 1960s and 1970s.

Before the mid twentieth century, women artists were seen as an exception and were never taken as seriously as men—not even Frida Kahlo, who in her lifetime hardly exhibited or sold a painting. In Mexico, during the mid twentieth century, however, exhibitions by women painters or sculptors became fashionable, and there was at least one each year. In 1975, in celebration of International Women’s Year, one was mounted with the very best of female plastic arts of that moment.

The first time I tried to bring together feminism with my interests in the field of art was when I was invited to give a lecture at the Goethe Institute in Mexico City. No one came to hear me speak and so I went back home without giving the lecture. Nearly thirty years have gone by since then.

I should like to take the opportunity, now, to think aloud about what would be the seven most interesting questions to ponder in relation to this link—which can be highly problematic for people of either sex, whether creative artists or not—between art and feminism. For some time, I have been making constant inquiries throughout Mexico into the question of whether women artists think that they are treated differently on account of their sex. The answers I have received have been constant. There are some who perceive that they are treated differently—and often in a discriminatory way—while others state that this is not so, that they have never felt any difference of treatment. In general, this seems to bear a relation to whether they have a feminist consciousness, whether they are alert to sexism; and in fact the situation is the same as with women in other occupations. The Mexican visual artist Yosi Anaya, who lives in Xalapa, also a displaced subject —who at the time of the student movement of 1968 was a young art student and also worked for the Cultural Olympics—says in this respect: “For many years I had not realized that there were differences, but at a particular moment I reflected”.

In this context it was very important—and it still is—to set up programs of women’s studies in the universities (mainly as graduate programs, which we decided was the best modality). We made the first moves to establish a women’s research program at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, in 1982—the first such program at Mexican universities— with the idea of “contaminating” the other disciplines, which continue to be eminently androcentric, and also, of course, to continue with the task of “consciousness raising” but then we took this to another arena and to another level. The Graduate Program “Maestría y Especialización en Estudios de la Mujer” was set up at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Xochimilco in Mexico City in 1994, after many years of persistent struggle.

It seems to me that in Europe and the United States people worry a lot, on a recurrent basis, about the question of the famous lost generation. In Mexico, however, there is no sense at all in thinking in those terms; even less so with reference to the generation born in the 1940s and 1950s. Why lost? Nobody could be regarded as belonging to a lost generation; here this question has no meaning.

One of the reasons may be that the feminist movement began later and has yet to become—unlike in Europe and the United States—an important but already historical period. Women artists of that generation here are at a mid-point in their struggle and just beginning to gain broader public acceptance.

This is an opinion shared by Yosi Anaya. She says: “I don’t understand this. I don’t consider my generation to be ‘lost’ (a closed concept, perhaps originating in the United States?), nor myself for that matter”.

I have also been interested in investigating to what point Mexican female artists think that their own creations, their own work, is political in a feminist sense, and to what extent they see it simply as art, something completely apart from politics; and, once again, what I have discovered is that there is no consensus. When I put the question to Yosi of whether she believes that such a thing as feminist art exists, and whether hers is an example of such, she answered somewhat meditatively: “Well now, Mónica Mayer and Maris Bustamante could be considered exponents of a feminist art in their performances in the 1990s, because in itself that was their direct and militantly militant message. […] But to my way of thinking, the feminist movement in art has taken a variety of different paths and in many cases is implicit in the artistic statements. […] And whether there is feminist art in Mexico or not is something to be gauged from the subjectivity of the exponent as well as that of the person who is thinking about it.

“To define this categorically is something I cannot do, something foreign to me. Like many other fields, feminism in art is full of crossovers, mixtures and adaptations. As far as my production is concerned, in general it moves in a field relegated to women (textiles) and is concerned with those activities; it comes from the soul of women—it has a feminist message, but a subtle one. There is that message, hidden for those who know how to—or perhaps rather those who want to—read it.” And thinking about it, Yosi adds: “A single feminism, no. But a multitude of feminisms, yes; and many ways of making art; and so there can be many arts that are feminist, but don’t necessarily belong to that category—‘a feminist art’. And at the same time, they can be many other things and belong to many other currents. If it’s art, it must be like that.”

On various occasions, over the years, I have pondered on the question of what have been the most important transformations in the visual arts practiced by women in recent decades, and in truth I believe that the answers are very complicated and require a detailed analysis. As regards art that could be properly described as feminist, there are a certain number of creators who have been making a kind of art that has changed little.

Maris Bustamante and Monica Mayer, for example, have always worked with the performance medium that they originally called “happenings”. Often they developed works with a similar basic feminist approach that referred to the female body and female erotics. In the 1980s they created the group Polvo de gallina negra (lit. “dust of a black hen”) and they stated that their aim was: 'to create images out of the experience of being a woman in a patriarchal system, based on a feminist perspective and with an eye to transforming the visual world so we can change reality'.

In 1987 they created a performance titled ¡Madres! (lit.“Mothers!”, but as an exclamation it could be understood as something like “Deamn!”), and as part of it they both actually got pregnant and carried out different actions in order to make a critique of pregnancy in our patriarchal society, for example, they went on a TV show, where they fashioned a big belly on the famous host and declared him “mother for a day”.

Of course, 30 years later their work is more sophisticated and more complex but not basically different. There can be no doubt that new female artists are appearing who take their place in different artistic fields and bring a new vision to bear on old themes, and this is quite refreshing. They are more confident, less dogmatic, less “militant”; their feminism is taken for granted, and this enables them to be more creative, more inventive.

Raquel Tibol, for example, believes that an evolution is taking place in the arts practiced by women, since 'one has to give its due to this rising presence in both numbers and quality' that has taken place during the second half of the twentieth century (Tibol, 2002, 9). I wonder if this conception is not overly evolutionist, incorporating the notion of “progress” in the field of the arts; one might rather think that the first half of the century was richer as regards the contributions of women to the visual arts than the second. It seems to me that, although there were less of them, those women attained very high peaks in all the arts. This statement is, of course, not meant to denigrate the works of high value that have been produced in the last few decades. I was surprised by the precise and synthetic quality of Yosi’s answers, because I was already tearing my hair out in an attempt to answer it, and she simply said: '(a) we have proliferated; (b) we have diversified; (c) there are, besides, woman artists, writers, curators, museologists, editors.'

It is the enormous, complicated, and even perverse, theme of evaluation and comparison between works of art that opens the question of thinking in terms of whether the Mexican plastic art produced by women today is better or worse than that of thirty years ago. And once I had put this question to myself I saw the absurdity of asking anything of the sort. What I did get out of Yosi was this significantly laconic opinion. Her response allows us various readings: 'In general, the means of artistic expression have diversified and varied much in the last thirty years and new spaces are still being opened. Therefore, the participation of women in art has increased (or at least has made itself felt to a greater extent) and has thus become more varied. How can one compare the qualities of production at different moments and in different historical contexts? I can’t do that. At any moment there are and have been things of value.' That’s how it is. But I wonder for the nth time who is it who decides what things are “of value” and which are not? That is the problem. And when political questions become mixed up in art, in other words when works are “politically correct” but “artistically incorrect”, how is one to express it?

Women were (and are) systematically excluded from the art distribution circles (museums and galleries) directed by men and women alike. Therefore, in order to “solve” that problem, the place of women always has to be the ghetto. We are in the ghetto in women’s studies programs in the universities; we are in the ghetto when we stage a women-artists’ exhibition—as well as today, in Mexico, in the virtual museum of women artists. I think these ghettos are extremely useful and necessary. They share the “downside” of the ghetto, which is exclusion (or self-exclusion), marginalisation. The museum of Mexican women artists, for example, is necessary because Mexican artists, by virtue of their national and/or ethic origin are excluded from mainstream art circuits. Therefore, it is indispensable to create something to compensate for that fact.

The question of the collective exhibitions by women has always been the object of passionate comments in favour and against. Yet nobody has ever been vehement about the fact that the overwhelming majority of works exhibited everywhere are by men, and often, by men alone. When one talks about artists it is automatically taken for granted that one is referring to men, and so if we want to make the contrary clear it is necessary to specify that we are talking about women artists; as Griselda Pollock puts it: 'The myth of free, individual creativity is gender specific; it is exclusively masculine. We never talk of men artists or male art; but if you wish to specify that the artist is female the term must be qualified with the feminine adjectival prefix.' (Pollock, 1988, 203). So I asked Yosi whether she was in agreement with exhibitions of exclusively women artists, and she said without hesitation:

'Well why not, when all the time there are, and always will be, exhibitions by just men. It seems to me there must be something of everything. […] I would love to see in the next Venice Biennale a selection from Mexico consisting solely of women artists as a reply to the curatorship of Gabriel Orozco in 2005, who only chose works by his friends (all of them men)—he didn’t choose a single Mexican woman, as if there were no women artists in Mexico!'

It seems that the idea of plurality is finally permeating the social fabric and what is now referred to as the “collective imaginary”. Or perhaps I’m being too optimistic. The fact is that the last question I should like to consider is about the existence of feminist visual arts in Mexico.

Yosi Anaya, alert to what is happening in the world, says 'There’s something of everything, although not all these feminist visual arts have achieved a path of technique and production of their own. Some are based on patterns of exhibition and methods proper to patriarchal arts. And some present themselves in such a way as to achieve a transcendent excellence. There’s no doubt about it.' Thus it seems ever more evident that as regards the relation between art and feminism, things are neither easy nor clear.

In conclusion, there would seem to be no doubt at all that feminism came to the rescue of the art of women and has brought them out of their underground or outcast condition. If women have lived, in many senses in a sort of rootless state, like other kinds of displaced subjects, feminism has been creating for them a geography of their own.

This paper was presented as part of the Symposium Geteilte Zeit: Kunstgeschichte als Internationaler Dialog / Shared Times: Art History as International Dialogue, at the European Academy in Berlin, 25 - 28 March 2008. The book Gisela Weimann (ed) Geteilte Zeit: Fragen und Antworten (Edition Eselsweg, 2008) is available in German.

Copyright © : Eli Bartra, 2007

N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 20, 2008