Beth Moysés’s latest performance, Red Bed, sets a new direction in her career as a performance artist – one of the media she uses besides installations, video and photography. Since l998 she has been working in Brazil, where she lives, and in different cities in South America and Spain to organize parade-like performances with local battered women, many of whom live in local shelters. These silent processions have involved as many as 100 low-income women dressed in worn-out wedding gowns, walking silently through busy city streets denouncing domestic violence. The pedestrians and cars stop and the women take over the public space.
In Red Bed, however, there are no faces of women who have endured a hard life. In contrast, she has invited six young and attractive women to sit in a circle and to concentrate on their own heart. She has done this performance twice: in Brazil where they were naked and in Spain where they were wrapped in a white sheet. Each women gazes intently downward at the red lump she is moulding in her alternately quickly and slowly moving hands, taken from the 30-kilo pile of red lipstick at the centre of the circle. Unless you know, this red substance bears no resemblance with the lipstick one buys inside a designed case. It just looks like a kind of material, perhaps sensual because of its bright colour, and related to the body and the senses as opposed to the mind or the intellect. Against the white backdrop of the sheets, the women’s hands manipulate the red paste as they systematically explore the material’s plasticity. The red hearts that the women form seem to evince alchemical transmutations, since to make them they spread the paste over their bodies or the white sheets.
The erotic frisson of the performance is unmistakable. In its theatrical delivery, the moulding of these shapes resembling a heart or maybe just the representation of feelings contains a moment of grace: only the women can feel the thick, slippery substance on their bodies and only they are able to transmit, through the movement of movement their hands, aggressions of every kind. Some make figurative heart-shapes, others are nonrepresentational yet this highly mannered ritual is obviously charged with emotion. In the progression of the performance – it lasts 60 minutes – their hands as well as the white sheet are stained by the red of the soft mass; the setting’s atmospheric mood is emphasised by the ambient sound that according to the artist is a short of mantra which directly affects the heart’s chakra. The performance ends when each participant presses her heart/object on her own skin and – after feeling the contact of the greasy material – puts it back at the centre of the circle where it was originally.
Although most of the artist’s earlier performances were held in the public setting of the city’s streets, this time she has resorted to the structure and concept of a more formal setting: a clean space offering no distraction for the viewer observing the women sitting in the circle and manipulating the greasy paste. The change in setting is consistent with a shift in her aim: this time, rather than publicly exposing the result of an intimate suffering, Moysés proposes to reveal what goes on in the individual’s inner world. Even though it takes place in an exhibition space, Red Bed manages to resonate far beyond the venue’s confines. It highlights a perception of what happens previous to the external marks of physical or psychological pain and distress. This latest work is certainly a new direction that involves the rational, the emotional and the poetic while keeping its roots in the essence of Moysés’s work: the cycle of life, death, and regeneration.
Berta Sichel