Paço das Artes

Critical text

Juliana Monachesi February 2004

Index / Juliana Monachesi

The performance Memória do Afeto [Memory of Affection] bears similarities to a bride’s wedding day, as it lasts only a few hours. It has the same impact as the meteorite that felled the Pope in Maurizio Cattelan’s famous installation. Something similar takes place in several of Beth Moysés’ ephemeral works. The comparison with the Italian artist is intentional: in Ausência de Alma [Lacking Soul] (1998), on display for only two days at Independência Park, in São Paulo, a bridal gown molded in resin enacted a fallen body, contorted with pain. The astonishment caused by this irreparable fall of an icon bears similarities to that of Cattelan’s sculpture La Nona Ora [The Ninth Hour].

In a description of his work of 1999, the artist stated that, on his first attempt to install the wax sculpture, it took him two days to finally lay his hands on Pope John Paul II’s “body”. At first, the idea was to place it standing up in the middle of a huge space, but then Cattelan realized he had to add something else. So it was that a purportedly cynical gesture suddenly became a challenge: to confront a “sacred” symbol by inducing the collision of religion and blasphemy as a means of addressing an everyday life dictated by contradictions.

The bridal dress that Beth Moysés manipulated is inscribed in the same ideology. When confronted with the test of reality that follows wedding ceremonies, the symbol ends up assuming the opposite stance: the bride’s ghost felled in the square is the negative image of the commanding posture of the woman slowly walking down the church aisle, framed by an aura of hope that will be unparalleled for the rest of her life. This “body”, which was hollow in Ausência de Alma and ethereal in Forro de Sonhos Pálidos (1996)—when the artist populated the ceiling of the Morumbi Chapel, in São Paulo, with interlocked bridal gowns—acquired concrete substance in the performance Memória do Afeto (2000).

There were more than a hundred women dressed in bridal gowns. The white fabrics set a contrast with the grey coloring of the city, while the nonchalance of the women, whose wedding dress trains swept the sooty streets, contrasted with the care with which such garments are usually handled. Silently, the women paraded down Avenida Paulista, plucking the petals of white roses and dropping them along their way. All the gowns used in this performance were “impregnated with memory”; they had been gathered from the artist’s friends and thrift shops. “It’s the encounter of retained time and lived time,” in the words of Beth Moysés. This statement conveys the contradiction in women’s lives. At the end of their path, the “brides” enacted a symbolic burial of the past: what remained of the bouquets (the thorny stems) was placed in a hole dug in Oswaldo Cruz Plaza and covered with earth poured by the women themselves using heavy shovels.

This performance took place on the International Day of Non-Violence Against Women, and most participants were victims of domestic violence. A large number of them were members of the Organização das Mulheres Independentes do Jardim São Francisco, an organization of independent women operating on the outskirts of São Paulo. Used as raw material, wedding dresses emerged as a natural fit in an artistic production that has always taken violence as its theme. “It is as if I took the gown from its box and recovered the affection retained in it, the happiness felt by a woman on the day she commits to sharing her life with someone. I recover this feeling and seek to confront it with the daily lives of these women and with the suffering they experience within a patriarchal society,” the artist affirmed, referring to the history of violence against women that is the subject of her master’s thesis.

In her research, Moysés collected some alarming data, such as the fact that 85% of the victims of the Holy Inquisition were women. “The Church condoned this violence; it is an institution that for a long time dictated the rules that enslaved women,” she said. In 1925, confession became compulsory, and the Church began to control marital relationships. This control continues to be exerted to this day. At the precinct, I heard testimonies from women who had first gone to their church to report domestic violence, only to find that the clergy’s discourse had not changed: “You must accept with resignation.” When one of the victims mentioned that she was thinking about paying a visit to the women’s precinct, the priest told her instead to pray a lot and ask for forgiveness every time she considered separating from her husband, for her role was to help him.

Beth Moysés’ exhibition, now featured at Paço das Artes as a guest in the Project Series, loosely stitches together the timeline of an oeuvre that has shifted from personal history to a socially oriented group experience. Her oldest work on show is Luta [Fight] (1998), which consists of satin-lined boxing gloves embroidered with pearls and sequins used in bridal gowns. The object foreshadows the moving scene of a bride handling a shovel in the photograph taken during the Avenida Paulista performance; it foreshadows the fights that take place within four walls, but which the artist brings out of the intimate, private environment and into the public arena. Yet it retains the character of Moysés’ more reserved art-making, which is no less liberating. In the words of Louise Bourgeois:

“I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness.”

The shift from individual to group participation in Beth Moysés’ production is more evident in the work Almas Prematuras [Premature Souls], consisting of an incubator that holds 200 clay hearts. The piece is set up in an environment built with a white fabric taken from a wedding dress, which functions as a passageway leading to the room where Despontando Nós [Dawning Knots] was being presented. This video features women from the Jardim São Francisco group, whom the artist has regularly included in her works since the Avenida Paulista performance. The backdrop is made up of rose stems, and in the foreground there are calloused hands breaking off thorns. The artist asked the participants to recall the violence they had been subjected to while breaking off the thorns. The only sound, which was treated in the studio, is the crack of snapped thorns. At times, it sounds like a gunshot; at others, like heartbeats.

The choice of an incubator as raw material adds a rescuing character to the work: “In this piece, it is as if I were speaking of a soul in progress. For there to be a work, the hearts had to be in an incubator. If the souls were not in progress, that is to say, if they had not evolved to the point of fully developing their capacity for love—one who loves does not hurt others—my work would make no sense at all,” the artist said. This work indicates maturity; it speaks of the present as a transitory phase, as a phase that tends to improve.

The work Rainha [Queen] (2000) consists of a chessboard with monochrome squares, on which the queen has been pierced by the king (while the king piece is missing). It addresses this same utopia, bringing into question a potentially reversed power. This work allows multiple readings: Does the symbol of the Feminine contain its opposite, or does it convey the memory of its opposite, as a void that cannot be filled? The notion of maturing, which would make men more sensitive, is also at issue in the photograph from the series Noivas do Carandiru [The Brides of Carandiru] (2000), which depicts a group wedding that took place at the penitentiary. It shows the wretched figure of a woman who, nonetheless, chose to dress up as Cinderella so she could live her fairy-tale dream—as long as her husband remains in confinement.