marina font psychological constellations

By Lisa Volpe | Anatomy is destiny monograph

2018

The female body is an agent of discourse. In art history, it has traditionally been a sign for constructed meanings -the result of a long history in which women where mere tabulae rasae upon which men projected fantasies and messages. The art historical cannon is filled with examples, from Raphael’s La Fornarina, in which the artist takes possession of the mode’s body by signing his name on it, to the many Pre-Raphaelite paintings in which Elizabeth Siddal served as useful muse for male genius, to Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in which women, reduced to body parts, are reassembled for a modernist (male) eye.

Marina Font defies this history, declaring, “The idea of femininity is mine to explore and re-write.” This is well-trod territory in the lineage of feminist art deconstructing authority and rethinking cultural and psychological “female” spaces. Artists such as Darja Bajagic, Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneeman, and Cindy Sherman have created work that disrupts the cultural and visual legacies that ignore or abuse women. But Font also ventures into less-familiar terrain. Through her work, she attempts to connect different aspects and experiences of being identified as a woman in this world. This is not to say that Font advocates a single definition of “the feminine” based on biology or psychology; rather, she theorizes a constellation of elements that constitute the feminine. In our time of expanding debates about gender identity, gender equality, consent, and representation, images of women -testing the traditional formula of “women-as-image”- are timely and essential.

“Is that the artist?” This question is often posed to Font’s gallerist by fans, critics, patrons, and curators when they have viewed Font’s “Mental Maps” and “Dark Continents”, the two series that comprise this book. They are referring, of course, to the black and white photograph of a naked woman that repeats through both projects. It is a persistent question and a revealing one. The viewer’s desire to level the work as the artist’s self-portrait rather than as a conceptual example —a subjective rather than an objective statement—moves the work into ideologically safe territory. But the artist is not literally depicted, and her work is by no means ideologically safe.

Font’s ongoing explorations, which translate the often hidden experiences of women into visible form, recalls Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator.” In it, Benjamin argues that no text can have a singular meaning. Translation, he observes, are nor aking to a copy of an original. Rather each articulation adds new meaning and brings the whole closer to something “higher and purer.” It is only through various articulations and translations that an “interlinear version” of art takes shape. What Benjamin describes, in essence, is a constellation—an assemblage of work more rich and compelling because of its diverse elements and iterations.

Font is a creator of constellations. She writes, “The central axis of these…works is the approach to the female body perceived mainly through… the biological, the psychological and the social.” Her compositions, like individual stars, address issues of culture, the body and the mind. She often displays them arranged in complex installations and groupings, creating interlocking experiences, constructing a complex and meaningful definition of the feminine experience.

The central concepts of mind, body, and transformation are reflected not only in Font’s art but also in her personal development and creative process. The artist was born in Argentina in 1970, into a “very patriarchal country and family,” a personal albatross that she would later confront in her art. Font’s long history with psychoanalysis is apparent in her work. She notes, “In Argentina, we are very influenced by psychoanalysis. I studied it for a while. But in my courses, I was always disgusted with Freud’s quotes about female sexuality. His use of colonialist language—like “dark continents” to describe adult female sexuality—was wrong and dangerous.” She studied design at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Martin A. Malharro in Argentina, then photography at the Speos Ecole of Photography in Paris, eventually earning and MFA in Photography from Barry University in Miami. Font’s training in photography took place in the darkroom, where she learned analog techniques that included labor-intensive chemical processes.

Font’s objects challenge the photograph’s long held association with “straight” representation. using the same photograph on linen and paper at varying scales—

from palm-size to life-size—and showing a female figure in a decidedly unnatural pose, she then pierces the surface of the photograph. Hand-applied fabrics, yarns, and shapes are not only disguised portions the image, but also defies its conceit as a window on the world by emphasizing its two-dimensionality.

The photograph Font made and selected as the basis of this series is of a particular person, with a particular psychology and history. A mother of six children and friend of the artist, the model is described by her as having “perfect imperfections.” The specific details of the woman’s body—her shape, her proportions, her inverted nipple—are unique to her, and yet, reproduced in a photograph and presented in works of art, symbolizes larger concepts of “giving life, feeding, and being a mother,” as the artist puts it. Yet this model is of course not confined to the symbolic role of nurturer-mother; her multiple incarnations in Font’s work demonstrate a range of physical and mental experiences of the feminine.

Although the model’s posture has some resonance with religious iconography of the Virgin Mary—an ultimate symbol of motherhood and religious transformation in the Western world—her pose also references the physical body as an object of study. Her full-frontal stance is known in the medical community as “the anatomical position:” a straight forward template utilized in scientific context to map the relation of the physiological parts and systems to one another. Thus the figure in Font’s photograph is at one a specific woman, a generalized body, and a symbol of motherhood, and a place of connections. Font builds upon this polysemous sign to present multiple points in her constellations.

Many writers have referenced the “domestic” or “traditional” aspects of Font’s applied materials—embroidery, doilies, curtains, sheets and house-shaped patches of faux gold leaf—and their placement on the body as metaphors for rigid conventions imposed on women. This reading, engrained by feminist critique, cannot be avoided. Yet to categorize the artist’s materials and construction in this way is too simple: it reinforces timeworn cultural dichotomies and hierarchies of male vs female, and art vs craft. Font’s choice of materials confronts both gender roles, and artistic stereotypes. “The act of embroidery is a silent, performative act,” Font says. In her hands, embroidery thread is utilized in a manner similar to paint, and her intuitive application of it stands as a challenge to high-modernist painting—and the implicit masculinity of its production and history. Additionally, in wielding a needle like a paintbrush, Font critiques the percieved hierarchy of materials, and the related gendered hierarchy of artists. The artist’s embrace of “women’s work” (as its often termed) is a radical act of remembering, celebrating, and elevating the feminine.

The tactile elements aded to the photograph also serve as symbols of the connections between mind and body, the physical and mental. As Font describes it, her interventions “unearth things that have been not seen, but felt… bringing them to light and to the surface of the body.” If the artist claims, the applied materials represent the result of psychological excavations, they are given visible form as symbolic representations. As signs, these interventions are both denotative and connotative and often evoke essential experiences of the feminine. In some works, remnants of old sheet fabric cover the body of the photographic figure, but also reference the intimacy of the home. Threads, embroidered onto the figure’s breasts, trace the biological path of lactiferous ducts, revealing powerful capacities inherent in the feminine body.

In her larger works, the artist utilizes a thread that is a combination of cotton and hemp. For Font, this medium represents a meninine duality: the cotton equals softness, the hemp equals power. Although these adjectives might be used to describe the physical body, often in Font’s works the thread originated in the figure’shead, pionting to the menatl and psychological processes of this female subject.

While some of Font’s constructions celebrate the powers of the mind, others revel in the pleasure of the body. Colorful displays of multicolored thread or ondulating gold waves seem to emanate from the figure’s sex, connoting the experience of orgasm. In these works, Font makes visible the often unseen, feared, or denied pleasures of female sexuality. Others suggest the possibility of reproduction, or the cessation of that biological phenomenon, with tangles of fabric or crocheted nets placed squarely over the women’s torso. In so much of contemporary visual culture, sex and reproduction are disconnected, but Font offers a fluctuating range of visuals articulating the shared physical and mental aspects of sexuality and motherhood.

Just as gender and sexuality are not fixed acording to anatomy, but are part of a complex constellation that shifts and changes, Font’s expression of the essential feminine dynamic, varied, and open. “We have for so long had a male gaze on a female body”, Font notes. “I am trying to give a female perspective both of the body and mind.” Font’s work engages the female psyche as well as the latger issue of feminine representation as a whole.

“Is that the artist?” There persists at least one well-established space for a woman in the art world, and that is on the canvas. Images of women have been so systematically oppressive and repressive that the idea of a female-centered artistic practice that engages the female as a subject matteris, in the twenty-first century, still suprisingly difficuly for many viewers to accept. But that only makes Font’s work more necessary.