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Her first exhibition was closed
by the government. Understandably, judging from Carol Rama's
work of the period. Fascism may have fallen and Italy's first
free election in twenty years about to occur, the drawings of
men fucking dogs, women shitting and screwing snakes, a hairy
fat man stripped down to his spats jollily masturbating, and
latrines set off the censors, who policed Galleria Faber, Turin
in 1945. Today these works appear no less threatening-everyone,
including the fucked beasts stick out their tongues erotically,
aggressively; some women double the impact with forked tongues.
However, now exists a context so prevalent as to make Rama's
drawings of the 1930s and 40s, as well as her most recent ones-made
only yesterday and with no less scorch-absolutely permissible,
even popular. In welcomely rebellious terms, these works contribute
to an unofficial codex to be collected internationally and across
several generations in works on paper by such contemporary artists
as Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Kara Walker, Sue Williams.
Collectively, theirs is an imagery of pornographic violence and
intensity, a testimony of feminine experience within a patriarchy
of sexuality-sometimes maternal, sometimes the opposite- tragedy,
humor and rage. In this case it's being perpetrated by a woman
entering her seventy-ninth year, who will be, for most of us
who are seeing Rama's work for the first time, an arresting discovery.
These drawings are only one aspect of a career which figures
in the Italian school of European Postwar abstraction. Rama's
paintings and bricolages of the 1950s find a protagonist of Art
Informel, who participate in the Milan-based group, MAC, and
various Venice Biennales. Occasionally one discerns the image
of a highly stylized chair, but essentially all vestiges of the
body-lithe and light-have been eclipsed beneath thick slabs of
color and texture. Though not mentioned in a brief essay by Lionello
Venturi surveying the Italian scene in 1958, Rama appears stylistically
in step with her generation: "...the moment the barriers
(of fascism) were lowered our most gifted artists rushed to rejoin
the international art community. Abstraction was, as it were,
the bridge over which Italian painters returned from exile. Every
school of non- representational painting was probed and elaborated.
In a matter of months, the climate of art in Italy was radically
altered." 1
For peers like Emilio Vedova who left Venice for Paris and the
artworld at large, the bridge metaphor is apt. But for Rama,
who only occasionally ever leaves her hometown of Turin, the
span appears significantly shorter. For the past sixty years,
she's occupied the same apartment, where the main rooms serve
as both studio and living space, with a bed and worktable in
each. Art and life are further synthesized by the crowded presence
of her art and collection of artifacts-a circus-sized drum, African
fetish figures, her friend Man Ray's death mask. From the vantage
of such a self-contained and self-reflexive world, abstraction
may have served as a means of keeping up a discourse with public
culture, with the patriarch and twentieth century tradition.
In the meantime, her figurative drawing has continuously held
the most private and truly radical ground.
Meret Oppenheim said of this
dichotomy between abstraction and representation in her own work,
"If you work in the same style as an accepted master, ancient
or contemporary, success will not be long in coming, but if you
speak a new language of your own that others have yet to learn,
you may have to wait a very long time for a positive echo."2
Only five years older than Rama, Oppenheim's development and
reception as an artist overlap to a nearly uncanny degree. The
two women were friends; they were admired by the Surrealists;
both were photographed by Man Ray; as artists they participated
in abstraction; cultivated primitivism; festishized shoes and
other female sexual attributes; suffered from madness.3 In the
wake of the recent travelling retrospective of Oppenheim's work,
one cannot help but, with a bit of humor, see Rama's apotheosis
onto the international art scene as an Italian version of Oppenheim's
modern Swiss story, which breaks on the heels of a revision of
contemporary Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama's art. At the same
time, throwing this little phenomenon of "mad" women
artists back on the receiving end, what does it reveal about
us, the art audience at the end of the century? In its most constructive
sense, it confirms within the artworld's ranks the growing prominence
of women, who have whetted an appetite for evidence of their
own experiences and history inside the avant-garde, whose emblem,
ironically enough, has always been defiance.
In the 1950s having earned
herself a place in the Italian artworld, where her work has since
enjoyed sustained support, Carol Rama's work of the 1960s begins
to bridge its own chasms, between drawing and painting through
the introduction of anatomical sculptural elements. There are
abstract drawings with glass doll's eyes staring out of puddles
of ink and, later, works featuring bicycle tires (making them
was her father's industry) that hang in flaccid bundles, like
penises in repose, or her original sex-crazed serpents. (One
sculpture is a visual pun on Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel of 1913.)
The current drawing is, in turn, more abstract, glyph-like, with
a fluid language of bodily forms and activities-tongues, happy
wankers, evil eyes-lifted like a calligraphy out of her earlier
works on paper.
Initiated last year with the outbreak of the livestock disease
in Europe is the series of "Mad Cow" drawings, which
Rama remains very much in the midst of and discusses in the following
interview. She says she identifies with her subjects, represented
as rearing wracked beasts or simply swollen teats, not because
of their disease per se, but because of the death throes which
she understands seize their whole bodies in convulsive humping
motions. Likewise her own compulsions, which swell and fulminate
throughout the conversation: if five men came to look at her
art, she'd fuck them all, milk them, be the bullfighter, the
slayer of dicks. The mad cow. She is another revelation of Rama's
psycho-sexuality, explored with great delectation and unflagging
desire throughout a lifetime of drawing.
Ingrid Schaffner is an independent
curator and writer based in New York.
Endnotes
1. Lionello Venturi,
"The New Painting and Sculpture: The Emergence of Abstraction,"
Perspective of Italy: an Atlantic Monthly Supplement, 1958.
2. Oppenheim, "Acceptance Speech for the 1974
Art Award of the City of Basel, January 16, 1975," quoted
in Meret Oppenheim: Defiance in the Face of Freedom, Bice Curiger,
ed., Zurich: Parkett Publishers, 1989, p. 130
3. Oppenheim, who died in 1985, suffered chronic depression,
one bout starting in 1937 lasted 18 years during which time she
made little work, most of which she destroyed. In her essay for
the 1996 catalogue accompanying the exhibition Inside the
Visible (ICA, Boston; National Museum of Women, Washington
DC; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London), Lea Vergine identifies
that Rama's refusal to treat her own "insanity" as
an essential impetus of her art.
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