ESPACIO
TANGENTE
Víctor Vázquez
Elizabeth Ferrer
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Over the last
decade, artists working in the Caribbean have witnessed unprecedented
recognition from the international art
community, seen most visibly in the unabated interest in young Cuban
artists as well as in the worldwide attention now paid to the Havana
Bienal, which has shed significant light on scores of innovative artists
from the region. Moreover, several large survey exhibitions of contemporary
art from the Caribbean have been presented by museums in the United
States and Europe, and critical notice has been shown by way of new
scholarship and publications, all devoted to exploring once neglected
artists and national movements. Puerto Rican artists, however, have
held a marginal place within this activity. Puerto Rico holds political
status as a commonwealth of the United States but culturally, it has
more in common with other Caribbean islands and even with some Latin
America countries than with most of the
U. S. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico is often seen simply as “American,” leading,
for example, to Edward Lucie Smith’s exclusion of its artists
in his 1993 book, Latin American Art. He cited the opinion that “it
is difficult to draw an absolute line separating 20th century Puerto
Rican art from that of the United States.”1 And yet within the
United States, it is not uncommon for curators and critics to view
Puerto Rico (if they view it at all) as a place apart, one separated
from the mainland and the from mainstream art scene, whether by geography,
language, or cultural influence. To complicate matters, many artists
born on the island are based in the United States, primarily in New
York, meaning that the Puerto Rican art scene has two disparate geographic
centers. In fact, fully one-third of Puerto Ricans living on the island,
at some point in their lives, have resided in the New York area. It
is hardly surprising then, that Puerto Rican artists are motivated
by what scholar Marimar Benitez has termed “a neurotic imperative” to
produce art that speaks to issues of personal and collective identity,
cultural duality, and indeed, cultural survival.2
One of the most significant artists to emerge out of the Puerto Rican
art scene in the last decade is Víctor Vázquez. Born
in 1950 in San Juan where he is now based, he spent his formative years
as a student and young artist in New York. Vázquez’s work – principally
photographs of the nude body, but also installations, sculptural objects,
and, most recently, videos – can be read as an eloquent statement
on the nature of Caribbean identity at its most fundamental level.
Evident in his work are symbols and ideas drawn from ancient traditions
as well as from popular culture on the islands – animist concepts,
indigenous forms, and the still vital Afro-Caribbean religious practices
that epitomize the cultural syncretism that has marked nearly every
aspect of life in the region. In addition, Vázquez photographs
his subjects with masks, plants, or other natural elements that evoke
the culture and environment of Puerto Rico. While this island, and
more broadly, the Caribbean, has provided him with much inspiration,
his goal is to express universal concerns and the most primal aspects
of the human condition.
As a photographer, Vázquez takes a highly fluid approach to
his medium and its presentation. His works are typically large-scale
black-and-white photographs that he tones with oil and hand paints
with acrylics; he also sometimes tears and reassembles prints and exhibits
completed works in elaborate, handmade frames. Vázquez also
reuses imagery. One powerful if frightening photograph of the back
of a man’s bald head pierced with long nails, for example, has
been shown as a single large iconic work, imprinted on a devotional
candle that is part of an altar-like installation, and as the center
of a polyptych containing other images that themselves have been seen
in other contexts. And in his most recent exhibitions, he has presented
photographs as components of large multi-media installations.
Vázquez articulated his themes and approach to photography from
the very beginning of his career, in great part as a result of a crucial
event in his life. In 1983 while living in New York, the artist’s
close friend Santiago Barreiro died of AIDS. In a time when the disease
did not even yet have a name, witnessing the agonizing death of such
a vital young man was emotionally unnerving. It compelled Vázquez
to produce a visual chronicle of Barreiro’s last months and eventual
death, of the progression of the disease, and the wasting of the young
man’s body. El reino de la espera (The Realm of Waiting), the
title of book of these photographs published in Puerto Rico in 1991
as well as a subsequent exhibition, offered an emotional narrative
exploring the relation between life and death. Vázquez presented
the individual works of the series in varying manners, as grainy, sepia-toned
prints, photographs of negative images, and compositions that are the
result of other kinds of darkroom manipulation, such as a hauntingly
dreamlike image of Barreiro’s disembodied face hovering over
a hospital bed. Most poignant is a disarmingly direct photograph of
the soles of the dead man’s feet, with no other part of his body
visible as a result of the camera angle. The composition recalls the
elegiac power of Mantegna’s Dead Christ; as in the painting,
Vázquez’s photograph captures the sense of the body’s
gravity and of the stark quality that the human form assumes in death.
Other photographs in the series also portray the fragmented body, such
as close-up views of Barreiro’s neck and chest, his face, and
torso. With such images, Vázquez delineated the human body as
essentially corporeal and natural; death then, can be understood less
as a frightening finality than as an inevitable extension of life’s
continuous cycle.
Following the completion of El reino de la espera in the early 1990s,
Vázquez, now living in San Juan, began to produce the carefully
staged photographs of human subjects for which he has become best known.
The nude models with whom he works assume poetically elegant poses
that express such broad themes as the duality of life and death, the
relation between nature and culture, and how we, as humans, discover
and define our essential selves. Once a student of religions, Vázquez
has drawn from Caribbean spiritual practices like animism, spiritism,
and Santería (the latter of which is still widely practiced
in varying forms by Caribbean people) for this body of work. But rather
than creating literal interpretations of these traditions, he acts
to decontextualize symbols and to endow forms with new layers of meaning.
Clearly, however, his work manifests a sensibility fundamental to indigenous
cultures, in which the spiritual dimension is integrated into every
aspect of quotidian life. This is most vividly seen in an image symbolic
of ritual like La Ave María I, 1996, a photograph of a woman
bearing the claws and heads of chickens upon her shoulders and breasts.
The animal parts conjure Santería and the acts of ritual sacrifice
associated with this faith, just as the small cross hanging from the
picture frame refers to Catholic devotion. In fact, the title La Ave
María carries dual meaning; it can be read literally as “Bird
Mary” or translated from the Latin as the prayer, “Hail
Mary.” Such a work is emblematic of the syncretic nature of Caribbean
culture, but Vázquez adds yet another layer of meaning by suggesting
the value of private ritual, liberated from meanings ascribed by any
particular belief system. The woman’s closed eyes and serene
countenance signal a transformative moment brought about by a deeply
intimate, recuperative communion with nature.
The related themes of offering and sacrifice are recurrent in Vázquez’s
oeuvre. He is keenly aware of the meanings conferred to the performance
of such rituals across time and faiths throughout the world – they
are enacted to petition a chosen deity in a time of urgent need, to
give thanks, provide nourishment for the earth, or to acknowledge humankind’s
dependence on the divine for survival in a fragile world. Many of his
works take the form of offerings, whether through the portrayal of
parts of chickens (as in La Ave María I, or, in another work
from 1996, Communion, containing the repeated photographic image of
an open hand offering a chicken head), the use of lit candles (photographs
and, in installations, actual candles), or depictions of the human
form in a pose suggesting that it, itself, is the object of sacrifice.
In Falling Feathers, 1996, a reclining female figure appears to ready
her own body for sacrifice. She lifts her arms upward to caress both
the tree branches that symbolize rootedness to the earth and the feathers
that evoke the heavens. Here, sacrifice becomes akin to catharsis;
it is a figurative cleansing, a personal rite of purification that
leads to a clearer revelation of one’s humanity.
Vázquez underscores the complex nature of spiritual practices
in the Caribbean in Bodegón de Yemayá (Still Life of
Yemayá) of 1994, a key early work. At the center of the piece
is a photograph of a man’s foot pierced with nails is outlined
with thickly applied paint, the color of dried blood. The image is
further enframed by dark red asphalt roofing shingles. The nails evoke
the crucified Christ and the Christian concepts of the crucifixion
as the ultimate sacrifice and an act of profound love. Vázquez,
however, dedicates this work to Yemayá, a Santería orisha
(a guardian and deity) who is ruler of the seas and lakes, and the
embodiment of maternal love and protection. In transforming a visual
symbol so powerfully resonant of the Christian faith into an offering
to the Afro-Cuban Yemayá, the artist again refers to cultural
syncretism, but he also provokes us to consider how we perceive symbols
and ascribe our own meanings to them. Indeed, such a rethinking of
symbolic languages reflects how Christian symbols and iconographies
assumed new meanings over time as they were incorporated into Afro-Cuban
beliefs.
Throughout his career, the human form has been central to Vázquez’s
photography; he expresses it as a symbolic form and as the site of
ritual, but also, as sensual and the embodiment of human desire. Vázquez
relies on the body as his prime subject matter because of its infinite
capacity to convey meaning: it can be read as a map of individual experience
and emotion, as an expression of a collective history, and as a reflection
of both the spiritual and physical aspects of our being. Some of his
images show the body fragmented; his camera will focus on a single
hand or foot, a pair of downward falling arms, or the organs that connote
the senses – the eyes, ears, or mouth. Especially in his more
recent photographs, he displays the body whole, whether in momentary
frisson or supine. In some works, the figure seems unaware of the camera
as it experiences the pure sensation of being. In others, the subject
gazes intently at the spectator, as if to offer a forthright declaration
of his or her presence. All of his photographs portray a solitary individual;
human interaction is absent, but intentionally so. For Vázquez,
the individual and the private acts undertaken for the camera are metaphors
for society and for culture; they also become mirrors for the viewer,
upon which we can project our own desires, fears, and attitudes.
Vázquez’s models typically wear or hold such items as
parts of chickens, feathers, or in one highly erotic work, the phallic
stock of a banana plant, forms that point to the body as an extension
of nature, closer to the untamed animal than most of us would comfortably
acknowledge. In La Ave María II, 1996, he depicts the double
image of a woman whose head is covered with chicken claws. Her gaze
is insistent, challenging the viewer to confront both the fear and
desire implicit in the image. Similarly, Untitled (Lady with a Bone),
1998, portrays a crouching nude woman who clenches an animal bone with
her teeth; she seems to simultaneously sneer and laugh. Vázquez
printed the image as a double exposure, making her body appear to be
in agitated movement. Her feral image signals a literal shedding of
propriety and of one’s demons, and an invitation to the spectator
to do likewise. But even when showing the body stilled and contemplative
as in Falling Feathers, he suffuses it with a tangible undercurrent
of vitality. In expressing the duality of human nature – our
spirituality and physicality – Vázquez endows the body
with a spark of tense energy, a sense of humanity in a never-ending
process of reflection and renewal.
Víctor Vázquez’s work has been seen in the United
States, the Caribbean, and several Latin American countries, including
at such major exhibitions as the 1994 and 1997 Havana Biennials, and
the watershed 1994 Fotofest exhibition, American Voices: Latino Photography
in the United States, the first major exhibition to document the achievements
of Chicano, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican photographers in the twentieth
century. In his most recent exhibitions – dramatic installations
combining constructed photographic imagery with sculptures, mixed-media
works, and videos – Vázquez’s interest in depicting
the human body remains readily apparent, but his work has gained greater
complexity as he examines other issues as well. In 2000, the Museo
de las Américas in San Juan presented Natura–Cultura,
a solo exhibition that examined the very means by which visual representation
takes place. In it were actual objects used as components of art works
(assemblages of everyday belongings such as a pair of shoes, a table
setting, all set in dirt-strewn boxes), objects and materials displayed
to underscore their symbolic value (feathers, nails, the earth, a roomful
of lit candles), and artworks suggesting the range of communicative
modes devised by humankind over time: paddle-like forms inscribed with
pictograms, piles of books, fragments of photographs, and videos. An
array of totemic forms, altar-like constructions, and natural elements
lined the walls. And amidst these objects were photographs. Some were
small framed portraits hanging from cords that evoked the kinds of
pictures that are left by the faithful in Catholic churches as votive
offerings. He presented others as sculptural objects, such as a photograph
of the artist himself, blindfolded, enframed in a long box filled with
feathers. In incorporating photographs into installations, and juxtaposing
photographic works with sculptural objects, Vázquez infuses
his medium with a powerful sense of physicality not typically associated
with photography. He also reminds us of the myriad ways the medium
has been put to use, to preserve memories and document our lives, as
a means of creating art, and even in religious offerings. With an installation
like Natura-Cultura, Vázquez also ties photography to the most
basic, earliest impulses of picture making, to visually manifest the
supernatural or the divine, and most fundamentally, to denote one’s
presence in the world.
Two decades ago, the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta wrote, “I have
thrown myself into the very elements that produced me” in order
to explain both her themes and creative approach.3 Similarly, Víctor
Vázquez continually draws from a world close at hand, from those
elements that have formed his identity, to produce his work. He reveals
his physical surroundings, his cultural sphere, in nearly every element
that he photographs or employs in his installations. He uses the local
not so much to describe this world (although his images richly perform
this function), as to show from his perspective what is at the core
of the human psyche, and what binds us over time and place. And above
all, it is the human body that expresses the experiences we all share – what
it is like to feel fear, pain, or desire; to dream; to be sexual; to
feel rooted to the earth. Through photography, Vázquez creates
transcendent spaces that in essence, allow the body a place to simply
be, and by extension, he provides us with a means to most deeply sense
our selves and our relation to the world.
© 2003
Elizabeth Ferrer
1 Edward Lucie Smith, Latin American Artists
of the 20th Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), p. 8.
2 Marimar Benitez, “Neurotic Imperatives: Contemporary Art from
Puerto Rico,” Art Journal (Winter 1998).
3 Ana Mendieta, grant application to the New York State Council on
the Arts, March 17, 1982, published in Bonnie Clearwater, ed., Ana
Mendieta, A Book of Works (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1993), p.
41.
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