The Kiss of the Spider Woman: Ftima Mendonas Art of Seduction

A prosthesis is a facsimile, a replacement, a completion. A chimera and an ideal, the perfect prosthesis passes for something it isnt. Standing in for the real and mimicking its functions with greater or lesser verisimilitude, it is a simulacrum and a facilitator, the triumph of artifice over biology. It is in its alliance with technology that the prosthesis comes to be understood as reaching beyond the capacities of human agency: uncannily life-like, the artificial body exceeds our own, and in this excess, signifies. Whether porcelain tooth or carbon-fibre leg, microphone or contact lens, car or computer, prosthetic extensions of the body substitute, modulate or augment our sensory, motor and intellectual capacities. Their simulacral potential not only endows such objects with a charisma that breaches the gap between the material and the metaphysical, but also grants both fabricator and user the hubristic thrill of animated invention. Freud recognized this when he called civilized men prosthetic gods who, with every tool, perfect their own bodies, [removing] the limitations of their functioning. Ships, aircrafts, spectacles, telescopes, cameras, gramophones and telephones are all enumerated by Freud as auxiliary organs which, if troubling, also render man truly magnificent.1 But perhaps less predictably, more subtly, Freud suggests that the prosthesis is a sign, something that stands for an object that is absent from the scene of representation. For he elicits two more unrelated fields as prosthetic: writing, and the home, each serving, like a fetish, to rehabilitate a lost organ. Writing thus becomes inherently melancholic, for at its origin lies the desire to substitute the voice of an absent person, while the dwelling-house serves to repair an originary exile, standing as a substitute for the mothers womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease.2 If, for Ftima Mendona, the house is both the locus of safety and the cause of the greatest estrangement, the most acute unheimlichkeit, this is because her works
1

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (henceforth SE), transl. James Strachey translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, 2001, (1964),) XXI, p. 91-2.
2

Ibid. p. 91.

invoke an impossible relation of subjects more precisely, of female subjects to that first maternal dwelling. Fierce attachment and identification are slashed by rivalry and resentment; nurturance and holding turn into entrapment and control. In turn, the domus as refuge, castle, bunker, nest or cage, the egos corporeal container and the centre of the subjects empire, has marked an insistent presence in Mendonas obsessional and obsessively compelling pictorial universe. It becomes the stage upon which the awkward, vulnerable girl-protagonist rehearses her role as the woman she both wishes to become and longs to replace, fantasmatically performing both the murder that would make this possible and the seduction that might finally prove her lovability to be absolute. Mendonas grand and suffocating new works (2004-5) disavow the artists own contention that her pictorial concerns have nothing to do with the mother: theyre more about lovers. this business with mothers is absolutely of no interest to me.3 Such denial prods us to ask that old vexed question: to what degree is the artist author of her own pictorial and verbal enunciations? It thus exposes the extent to which the unconscious of art is in excess of the individual consciousness of its maker, drawing its concerns from a bank of anxieties that are both psychic and cultural. Indeed, to stand surrounded by these vast paintings and intense drawings is to be cast terrifyingly into a fathomless and impersonal bodily maternal. While some of Mendonas earlier work represents the domestic residence as a discrete and hermetic container a childs schematic version of a house here it is the pictorial surface itself that becomes home, the place to which the viewer is not so much invited as impelled to return. In turn, that home is figured as unequivocally maternal. The paintings, in their overall vermilion bloom, with their visceral, striated surfaces and their quality of edgeless enclosure, are pictorial evocations of a uterine envelope: tough, moist, carnal. And, as if to emphasize the quality of corporeal containment and organic function, Mendona fills her abodes with bags and sacks, pods and sheaths that, like so many internal cells or vessels, squeeze out all emptiness. We travel along lines that fold, crease, coil; we lose the thread and pick it up again elsewhere, to be led through a series of small retinal events into labyrinthine spaces that appeal not to the eye alone but to a bodily investment at once oral and tactile; that serves as a reminder of a primordial narcissism, a time when the world was not yet parcelled into discrete objects.

In conversation, March 2005.

The home, then, is a prosthesis standing on the site of a formative expulsion, a constitutive breach. But it is also charged with symbolically rehabilitating the lost object, healing the wound. Prteses correctivas, curativas corrective, curative prostheses: these words appear in the artists controlled, cursive script in the large diptych Casa-Fbrica Tapada /Covered House-Factory. Elsewhere on the surface, written twice as if to reiterate this necessity and underscore the incantatory and prosthetic nature of writing itself, para no ter medo so as not to fear. A lullaby, an amulet. If the house is remedial, a salve to lesions incurred on the wild path leading away from our maternal lodging, its purpose is to hold terror at bay, symbolically redressing the founding loss by offering a simulation of that inaugural protective circumference. However, in its maternal analogy, the home also, Mendonas work suggests, confronts us as terror: the intricate, tightly woven surfaces of these works establish a sticky web from which there is, apparently, no escape. In the diptych Para Ganhar o Cu /So as to gain heaven, for instance, separate skeins of scorching black, red and orange are pulled across one another, stretched or slackened, tangling and weaving an arachnoid vortex around a central gap towards which the viewer is dizzyingly propelled. While evocative of numerous of Mendonas earlier works constructed along similarly centripetal lines Gosto da Minha Casinha /I love my little house (1999), or the series Para te fazer no tem nada que saber /Theres nothing to making it with you, (2002), this painting, with its transparent and empty centre, unusually suggests a tear in space, much in the way that baroque vault compositions such as Giovanni Battista Gaullis frescoes at the Church of Il Ges in Rome, open up an illusionary hole in the ceiling, through which celestial light cascades onto the flanking figures. Mendonas line, emphatic here, flailing there, traces the panicked trajectory of thousands of flimsy wings, surely suggesting that to gain the heaven of an eternal and cyclical return to originating matter is also a kind of disabling hell. To be caught in this work is to wish to ward off the danger that is also the seduction of the already-known (for what greater certainty than the uncanny familiarity of the maternal body, with its threatening and inevitable exit?). Indeed, the interlocking of a space of claustrophobic plenitude with a menacing void is a powerful invitation to both metaphysics and rationality. Pascals famous spatial phobia, a terror of an abyss which he always glimpsed at his bedside and which, so the story goes, was caused by a traumatic accident while driving in his carriage, precipitated his second

religious conversion but also prompted the writing of De lesprit gomtrique, his theoretical examination of the geometrical understanding of the void.4 Increasingly over recent years, Mendona has confronted emptiness not with the desire for sublime contemplation, but rather with the frantic geometry of a palpable horror vacui. In her rare excursions into landscape in the series Gosto da Minha Casinha /I love my little house, the vast panoramic extent is undisturbed by any horizon line and, skyless, also offers no air. Like the enamelled cells of cloisonn work, the repeated pattern of the sectioned land has about it the crazy ordering of an obsession. The works constituting the exhibition Ftifashion Vestidos de L e Bolo /Ftifashion Dresses of Wool and Pastry (2003) push this fear of the void to an ecstatic extreme. Drawing together anatomy, knitting and intricate patisserie, Mendona inundates the constraining pictorial rectangle with the rush and swell of tiny, multiplying mounds and furrows, links and loops. This overall mesh binds together the vertical plane the plane of vision, the traditional axis of the picture surface with the horizontal, which is tipped forward to meet it (the beds in the recent works, for instance, are not foreshortened but lie parallel to the framing edge). Independently of the orientation in which an object might be encountered empirically, if the vertical is, traditionally, the plane of beauty and recognition Lacan, for instance, identifies it with the mirror that grants the child its first sense of separateness, coherence and centred individuation, securing subjectivity through its position in the visual field the horizontal is the plane of the informe, of animality and re-absorption into amorphous matter. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois have argued that horizontality, as the guiding principle of works by artists as diverse as Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Ed Ruscha, Lygia Clark and Cindy Sherman, is the axis along which the formless a concept first elaborated by Georges Bataille is exercised. For the formless, Krauss and Bois argue, is neither a theme, nor a substance, nor a concept but is, rather, an operation, and whats more, an operation that [brushes] modernism against the grain [] insulting the very opposition of form and

See Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, Cambridge,

MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 2001, pp.17-24.

content5 that is its hallmark. If modernism masters the flesh through abstractions, the formless floods unbound matter with meaning. With the exception of the single appearance in these works of Mendonas signature naked girl with her pathetically rouged cheeks and arms akimbo, or a cinch-waisted female bullfighter or, in the drawings, a donkeys head announcing how stupid the girl feels she has been, these works dilacerate form and spill onto the viewer a vertiginous proliferation of fibres and filaments, meandering lines drawn into eddying vortices and tightening, tentacular curlicues. A calligraphy of stitches pulverizes the gestalt of recognizable contour and performs, so it seems, an operation of horizontality. In their spread of markings so dense as to become almost undifferentiated, in their intensity and repetitiveness, these scribbled marks knit the pictorial surface into a unified, shallow space. Yet if such manual vigour and spatial cohesiveness invoke the overall surfaces of drip-pictures, its effect is entirely different. For one, the use of oil-stick together with oil paint exerts, from the outset, a greater and more purposeful manual control over the pictorial surface than does the deployment of viscous or liquid paint. Working upon the surface positioned vertically rather than horizontally (i.e. against or along the wall rather than on the floor), Mendona clearly is not seduced by the idea of painting as pure action; the notion that, as Harold Rosenberg said of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hartung, there is nothing worth painting. No object, but also no idea, so that a course of production may, but may equally not, produce an image worth seeing.6 And while in Pollocks work, the skeins, constituted of pure line, the very stuff of drawing, managed to undermine the goal of drawing, which was to bound an object by describing its contour,7 Mendona unravels her webs of line only to relocate shape and significance within them. Eu and tu I and you we read, as if embroidered in white and blue amidst carmine and marigold chains and hoops that gather together into penile fingers, shoes, plump pastry.

Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A Users Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997, p. Harold Rosengberg, The Concept of Action in Painting, Artworks and Packages, New York: Dell Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism,

15-16.
6

Publishing Co., 1969, p. 213-4.

7

Antimodernism, Postmodernism, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004, p.357.

If, then, in the majority of these recent works, a palimpsestic space delivers us to the edge of an engulfing abstraction from which the artist withdraws by the inclusion of mesmerizingly repetitive words or of images that have become iconic in her formal lexicon hands with flaming talons, hearts, vaginas, mouths shaped into kisses, shoes, cakes, meringue-like turds in Casa-Fbrica Tapada /Covered HouseFactory, we are confronted with, and excluded from, a self-contained shape with a clear gestalt. A house that has mushroomed and grown, sprouting excrescences, stuffed with goodies, bloated. Here, as in the other large-scale paintings, there is inspired madness in the detailed execution. Composition gives way to excess, a disturbance of anything that might be called the decorum of painting. Covered in a red and black tarpaulin of intricate weave, the house and its inhabitants threaten to disappear, whether through asphyxiation or detonation. Bulging with internal excitation, it seems to be grounded by nothing more robust than delicate rigging, its knots closer to macram than to the sailors craft. This home is a teeming factory of feminine activity, typically, in Mendonas picture-world, of baking and pastry-making. Order of strawberry-finger cakes: ready Encomenda de bolos de dedinhos de morango, pronta we read. Alguns dedidnhos queimam-se, mas no faz diferena, cobrem-se, totalmente, de doce de morango ou chocolate, a gosto. Some of the fingers get burnt, but never mind, they can be completely iced in strawberry or chocolate, to taste. The injured part is replaceable, more or less, and the prosthesis stands in panicked fantasy as the thing itself, at once a denial and affirmation of damage. As a disclaimer to the wisdom supposedly garnered through experience, getting ones fingers burnt doesnt much matter, the harm can be painted over, or indeed prosthetically replaced by the painting itself. Knitting, crocheting and embroidery; baking, pastry-making and icing: the activities that constitute Mendonas metaphors of pictorial facture are traditionally gendered and are here deployed not in order to provide sustenance or warmth, but as strategies of seduction. A room is covered from floor to ceiling with the variegated chocolate and vanilla streaks of marble cake so as to receive you and to please you (para te receber e te agradar). Another chamber is entirely lined in woollen blankets and sweet dough shaped into mouths. In one of the drawings, the walls and floor constituting most of the surface are dotted with lamp bulbs all the better to see you (para te ver melhor). The myriad lights ensure that we find neither seclusion nor relief in this enclosure, while the words echo those of the wolf before proceeding to eat Little Red Riding Hood. A bed is fabricated out of marble cake or

covered in soft, breast-like madeleines or stuffed with fanciful, invented pastries (strawberry fingers, bulls kisses). These entice the targeted lover and equally threaten him with glutting, with an unbearable surfeit of sweetness and fuggy warmth. The tangle of sticky secretions must excite the prey in order to ensnare him. Farpas de bolo de morango, para por mim te apaixonares, we read in one of the works. Shreds of strawberry cake, so as to make you fall in love with me. But farpa is both something shredded or torn and a barb, a hook. For Mendona, the painting itself becomes that snare: a place of enchantment, a trap. The materials of domestic activity, deployed as tools of allure, are not only mutually transmuted a yarn of wool metamorphosing into a filament of chocolate or a dribble of red jam but are equally transformed into the viscid substances of picture-making itself. A fairytale become both promise and nightmare, Mendonas world is filled with unstable material granted the emphatic concreteness of her medium. Cotton, wool, flesh, chocolate, jam, rubber, resin, dough, excrement all mutually transfigured, all finally subservient to the viscosity of oil paint, the purposefulness of the oil-stick. If she is crippled by loss, if she camouflages her void with excess or disavows it by the accumulation of fetishes (shoes, bags, jewellery, pastry fingers) Mendonas female subject makes seductive the very signs of her submission and lack. She longs for nothing more than to lure the chosen lover into her space. The bed occupies the whole room, an overwhelming invitation to a procedural intimacy both dreaded and desired. Its a closed space that is just yours, the artist remarks, from which you can achieve your conquest and display your womens things. To show your womans thing is also to make a spectacle of your want, while fetishistically disavowing lack by luxurious surfeit. Such a display is as tantalizing and enraging as a red rag to a bull, its intended object stirred to both lust and rage. Its a sort of bullfight you perform, she says. Its not by chance that you see here a pair of bullfighters shoes, there a female bullfighter, as if drawn on the wall.8 Embodying the ritual structure of gender relations, the traditional figure of the bullfighter is ambiguously gendered, bringing together stereotypes of macho bravado with feminine seductiveness. Mendonas girl-bullfighters dance is a sinuous, eroticized flirtation with danger, with death. Inviting the man to plunge into inextricable entanglements, she hopes his affect will be lavished upon her, yet her desire is both to love and annihilate him. In this choreographed seduction in this bid
8

In conversation, March 2005.

simultaneously to provoke and pacify that which inflames desire she replays an old family plot: the seduction of someone whose attention is also somewhere else. For what happens when, raw and unprotected, newly arrived in the world, we are confronted with being engulfed by the very love that sustains us? When the very one who nurtures us threatens to overwhelm and extinguish us? Ideally, the dependency on, and helplessness in the face of the ascendant mother is tempered by the attention she lavishes upon another. It is not merely that the powerful and phallic father saves the child from either omnipotence or impotence. It is rather that, in triangulation, in being the other object of desire of the one who lavishes care upon us, the paternal place-holder saves us from being both stifled and eternally indebted. And so, the rival that was our father, observes Gerard Pommier
deprives us of a part of the attention that we demand, but our fear of being overwhelmed by the monster of debt is thus transformed into gratitude toward the virile hero who is in a stoic standoff with love. Escaping from one danger, we assuredly run into another one, and our sexual preference is formed at this moment; either we are seized by love for this savior, and as a consequence feminized []or else we engage in combat with this rival who came nevertheless to our rescue. For both women and men, everything proceeds from this decisive moment. 9

Indeed, if we choose to identify with the female position, our gratitude and love are also injected with a resentful sense of the fathers overreaching power, for it is he who, after all, also caused our first injury, our earliest sense of a fractured world. Without him, mother love would have been all ours. Caught in this double bind, Mendona pictures heterosexual feminine desire as a mixture of gratitude and vindictiveness, healing love and punitive anger. The seduction her work performs is directed at a male object gesturing towards a paternal agent as both saviour and enemy, from whom her vulnerable protagonist must obtain exclusive attention and exact reparation. Re-enacting a classic scenario of female lack confronted with the fantasy of male prowess the fantasy of an enabling structural position and the access to choice that it offers the implicit female subject of these pictures stages a series of ritual moves. To lure, to be desired and possessed, and then to strike.

Gerard Pommier, Erotic Anger: A Users Manual, transl. Catherine Liu, Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2001, p. 13.

First, she shapes the paths that will lead the man to her. Here, amidst all these cakes, you manage to force the person [you want] to follow the path you have made, Mendona proclaims. Like Hansel and Gretels trail of crumbs, the droppings of cake take the errant man to his lithe and lethal prize. A path so that you dont get tired, my love. A path so that you dont get lost, my love. Then she confects prostheses. Hundreds of them. A pillow bursts with bags which are, in turn, crammed with legs of strawberry cake. Proteses perfeitinhas de massa de bolo perfect prostheses made of cake-dough are visually itemised in Casa-Fbrica (Mostrurio) /House-Factory (Show-case), a collection of samples of Mendonas obsessional motifs: the house, airborne whether by balloon or bomb; the limbs and organs, disarticulated fragments of a shattered body, enumerated like so many items on a bakers check-list. In the fecund and sinister proliferation, the body is torn asunder, its constituent parts, still bearing the bloody evidence of amputation, reconfigured as sweetmeats. The prosthesis, allowing Mendonas hungry, scheming protagonist to have longer legs, to be a perfect, unscarred capsule of desirable womanhood, enables her to comply with the wishes of the other. For someone like her, someone who is lacking something, the prosthesis offers the possibility of transformation, a supplement, something you can change and add on so as to please the other.10 And what would please that other more than to know that the being whose neediness is so terrifying should in fact be not wanting but complete? What more soothing than the unimpaired, flawless image that holds in place the illusion of maternal plenitude and that prevents the confrontation with difference from being comprehended as lack? The prosthesis follows the logic of the fetish, a symbolic object through which, as Freud described it, a boy disavows the possibility of castration as displayed by the female body, perceived as incomplete, fantasized as maimed but once integral. missing maternal phallus. was lost in the first place. But as elegiac token, as memorial to a loss, the prosthetic fetish both rehabilitates the missing object and stands as a perpetual reminder of it. In the classic schema,
10 11

Fetishism, in other words, is a perverse form of Such a simulacrum satisfies a narcissistic fantasy that

symbolic transposition,11 furnishing the male subject with a surrogate of the losses are not irrevocable, that lost objects can be retrieved or indeed, that nothing

In conversation, March 2005. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, ibid. p. 55.

neither men nor women triumph in their relation to lack. Indeed, the encounter between women and men, Mendonas paintings tell us, is destined to spectacular impossibility, for each reminds the other of real or potential loss. In accordance with the traditional masculinization of the fetish, Mendona shapes a woman whose desire is to be complete: so prosthetically perfect as to represent no threat to the unsuspecting male. (That she falls short of such a desire that we are able to pinpoint both her objective and its failure is one of the feats of Mendonas work.). Indeed, the tight weave of the pictorial surfaces themselves covering all gaps and cavities, bandaging over all wounds acts as a fetishistic disavowal of lack. But from the centre of her web, the spider as apparently phallic mother has another stratagem, a ruse to ward off her own irremediable injury by claiming its cost. Women only go to the trouble of provoking men, writes Pommier, in order to obtain a greater degree of enjoyment so that men can get what they deserve.12 Mendonas works perform, in other words, mens worst fantasies in relation to women: their endless, carnivorous voracity, a need whose outcome is revenge and whose effect is nothing short of fatal. Ive always been greatly affected by those creatures that, after mating well, he has to flee very quickly, or shell eat him, she has commented.13 It is, then, not by chance that Mendona has chosen food as a central image and a binding metaphor. The abundance of food in this work is, in the first instance, a materialization of the fantasy of the maternal as endless provision, for it is the satisfaction of the oral drive that first binds child to mother. Existing between the external world that has generated it and the bodys interior into which it will soon be integrated, the things we eat, our hunger for them and our satiation are also emblems of our conflicting desires for both autonomy and assimilation. In other words, if the ego is formed through a series of identifications with objects external to it, food presents itself as the physical badge of such psychic incorporation. As the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person (its enunciation would be to be someone at all, I must be like you), identification attempts to rehabilitate a lost, original object (if I eat you, you will both disappear and, by becoming a part of me, be memorialized by my very being.) This was the logic of the totem meal described by Freud in Totem and Taboo, in which the cannibal sons eat the father in order both to vanquish him and embody his power. But the most primal of

12 13

Gerard Pommier, op. cit. p. 48. In conversation, March 2005.

10

identifications, as Diana Fuss has pointed out, [restage] in fantasy the childs infantile relation to the mother, a relation of need and demand based on oral gratification.14 Mendona represents male desire or rather, she represents her hope of what male desire might be, a vision that justifies her strategy as an infinite, if cautious, availability to the appeal of maternal bounty. Contrariwise, she represents female subjectivity as offering such plenitude as a ruse, a covering that masks not only want but also an annihilating rage. The coupling of sex and death implicit in these works in their gory colours, in the sustained evidence they offer of the artists intensely physical assault on canvas or paper exposes the extent to which the transmission of power is predicated upon a fantasmatic murder. The mutuality of desire and aggression, harking back to earliest investments and entanglements in the family, erupts in Mendonas work as an inevitable condition of subjectivity. Submerging the viewer in a smothering enclosure, these paintings and drawings invite a synaesthetic dissolution of discrete sensations. In the catastrophic seduction they stage, in their blending of pleasure with abjection, in their saturation of all voids and their playoff between the materiality of trace and the obsessive repetitiveness of motif, they provocatively perform antagonistic operations, for they both draw together and unravel the threads that bind desire to its expression.

Ruth Rosengarten July 2005.

14

Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 38

11