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Since the 1980s adult comic books have been a great part of Mexican pop culture and cultural production. Targeting mostly the male working class, the "Sensacionales" or "Ghetto Librettos" as they are called in Mexico and the U.S. respectively, are a mixture of soap opera, fiction, romance, farce, thriller, melodrama and depictions of sex. Frequently while flipping through their pages, one encounters the usual, Western 'traditional' story: the submissive woman - almost always a bombshell - who is available for serving and 'catering' to the sexual needs and desires of the aggressive male. The question is whether these adult comic depictions constitute fake or real pornography and the implications of that question could be the subject of long, heated debates that bring to mind the passionate feminist debates of the 1980s, which focused also on pornographic issues. Despite the immeasurable gap between the inexpensive "Bellas de Noche" (Ladies of the Night) sold at newsstands and the museum residing, millions worth Aphrodites, the "Naked Maya" and "Olympia", the "Demoiselles d' Avignon" and the more recent caustic, thought-provoking art related to female sexuality by modern and contemporary avant-garde artists, all of the above are examples of artworks that prove the endurance, popularity and complex dynamics of the representation and treatment of the female body in art through time. Mexican-born female artist Blanka Amezkua has been using imagery from recycled "Sensacionales" in her art for the last 11 years, putting their visual vocabulary at her service and appropriating the genre to convey her messages. Like Roy Lichtenstein who has extensively borrowed his subject matter directly from comic books for his paintings, ironically mingling low and high art, Amezkua adopts the Mexican picture stories as a backbone for her mixed media works to comment on longstanding clichés about different aspects of female identity. The artist intervenes, appropriates and reworks the different imagery through the use of domestic techniques such as embroidery and crochet; and in her current mixed media pieces via the application of nail polish and enamels. In this recent series she has recreated the image by covering almost all female facial characteristics-except for the mouth- and adding diverse abstract motifs to complete the composition. The works' surface obtains thus also a marked decorative quality that is appealing to the eye, leaving what is 'lurking' under the surface to the quests of the mind. The slightly open mouth with its luscious lips remains intact, but it becomes now a medium for the expression of a variety of possible feelings beyond the realm of sexual pleasure: anger, despair, relief, psychological pain. By forever obscuring the initial sensation or intention of erotic excitement born when the viewer is confronted with the image in its original version, the artist maximizes the potential expressions, liberates the depicted woman from the bonds of her role as an object of desire and instead lends her a voice that speaks the sounds of her individuality. Taken away from the sex oriented context and the relevant sequence of narration of the "Sensacionales", these women now act on neutral territory and take their own stance toward themselves and their audience. At the same time, the viewer, male and female alike, is also left unaffected to roam in the space of his/her own imagination and create his/her own narrative. Another part of Amezkua's work constitutes her embroideries, their patterns again in the form of sexy female figures from the "Sensacionales", inducing a masterful play between medium and context. Interestingly enough, while the male illustrators of "Sensacionales" consciously and willingly define themselves as artisans and not artists, many female artists who choose embroidery as an art medium struggle to shake off the label of the "craftswoman". The main reason for this peculiar view of their artistic merit is that the textiles, the loom, the thread and the needle, all powerful visual symbols of their own, have a longstanding mythological, historical and social connection with the female gender: from the ancient arrogant spinster Arachne, the loyal epic Penelope and the tapestry manufacturers working in Medieval nunneries and Renaissance luxury workshops to today's countless female workers around the world who mass-produce all sorts of needlecrafts and knitted works. Embroidery is therefore strongly related to notions of 'female domestication' and domesticity, household and macro economics, females' hard work and personal offer. Amezkua's embroideries present images of modern, potent women who are aware of their sexual powers and strengths, needling the viewer with hundreds of colorful, long and short sewing threads that shape her outline. Each one of Amezkua's female figures is made up of the "stitches" of her identity, following the course of life choices, healing old and new wounds and bridging the opposite, often contradictory, shores of the female existence. By alterating and disrupting the original intention of the "Sensacionales" as vehicles of male visual- sexual pleasure and light entertainment, Blanka Amezkua' s artworks free the female form from the troubled politics of sexual preferences, attitudes and prejudices and offer a more clean, open ground for thinking anew about associations of desire.
Vassiliki Athena Vayenou |
