Paloma Navares. Al filo

Perhaps it is in the project of learning how to represent ourselves – how to speak to, rather than for or about the others– that the possibility of a ‘global’ culture resides.
Craig Owens, Art in America, July 1989

It seems to me that Paloma Navares has chosen to make art in order to represent herself and what is close to her. Navares comes from a performance, teaching and installation background, and working with the subjects of the self, identity, memory, disease and with dualities such as dark / light or mobility / imobility, her work is wide-ranging and leaves many doors ajar for those who desire to enter into it.
This artist suffers from a rare disease of the eyes, which forces her to undergo a transformation every time she is immobilized and blind-folded in a hospital bed waiting for her retina to reunite with her body. On these occasions she is led to depart from the exterior world of images, from daily reality, to find a refuge inside her body and self. The only images she can see are those inside her. With her eyes closed, the world’s facts become a remembrance. The act of remembering is the mold for new stories. When all the secrets that she keeps inside for months are revealed to the public, mediated through a work of art, they have already become one more emblematic project of self-knowledge. Her own character takes center stage with her body, her eyes, and her thinking. She is also keeping an eye on us. Since the creation of the perspective system, visual culture has relied on a distinction between external reality and the subjective interior where perceptual judgments about reality are made. From a somewhat similar framework, Navares articulates a variety of visual and emotional experiences.
The hospital bed becomes a particular kind of studio, rather like the hills near Oaxaca or the wild environs of Havana became sites of creation for the later Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta’s works were made mostly outdoors and Navares make them indoors, in a certain way both artists work out of peripheral locations: landscape and hospital beds.
The works Mendieta created in such peripheral areas were originally intended by her to remain there, out of the mainstream, After her death, however, many of her self-in-landscape photographs began to circulate among more traditional art venues, thus to some extent running counter to the artist’s original intention. 2 In Navares’ case, comparably intimate footnotes from the hinterland of life are immediately, deliberately recast for public consumption. Her medium-size color prints are an exercise in fact and invention. While reproducing a real situation, they are also a concoction of dreams and memories. When you are dreaming, you are driven by it yet subsequently it is only always a memory.
The present exhibition includes, for example, an installation placed on the first floor titled “Tránsito: el color de la memoria” (2001-2002). In this piece, black and white videos project some of the images which Navares has salvaged from the memory of those departures from the exterior world, those entrances inside herself. Passive, helpless, like a Coppelia undergoing mechanical repairs, she responds to the suspension of autonomy by treating it as a liberation from the world around her. In introverted darkness, she rewinds and fast-forwards the mementos of her life.
The way we experience things is intimately tied in with the way memory works, in particular with the way memories are recovered to consciousness. As we live through a certain episode of life, the events are being constantly stored away in memory. As each event is made into a memory, we file with that memory a variety of latent links, associations that can return us to that memory in a blinding flash. These links are like signposts, left for your mind to navigate by later on.
For the sake of simplicity, an “event” is an abstract unit. Each event is made up of complex combinations of sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste, language, emotion and thought. The path of our memory is not just one straight line; rather it is a complex cord or twine of braided threads, with small strands peeling away from the main group all the way along. As we remember, we tend to follow only the central “twine” of the memory we are recalling. Given all the branches leading off from this main trunk to allied sensory information and peripheral associations, it would be very time-consuming if we were to remember every detail we had stored away. So we don’t. Skipping along the main “twine”, we remember a few vague thoughts and a very few sensory details; most of what we remember is in terms of concept, and the simple pieces of mental activity which are the building blocks of structured thought. One could say that we tend to remember our thoughts about an event, rather than the event itself with all its sensory detail. Normally as we pass along the twine of a scene of memory, the threads that branch off each lead to completely different events and experiences. These are not enough to distract us from where we are going along the main twine, and so these associations rarely intrude into our consciousness. However, sometimes an anarchic, spontaneous link can trigger “forgotten” memories.
Here, the shapes of memory are mixed in with an imagery derived from the immediate present. Abstract or pictorial, controlled or spontaneous, Navares incorporates a long list of ready-made daily objects – even if they are not part of most people’s usual environment. They belong to the world of hospitals, spaces that we don’t experience every day. Spaces that fall into the category of what Victor Burgin defines as “between the unconscious and consciousness”. Spaces that are also a location of cultural experiences: the Western attitude towards the management of illness and death, and how the patient is encouraged to interpret that experience. Our quasi-moral segregation of sickness from health enables Paloma Navares, lying between the two, to mount a discourse of fragments that “simultaneously face onto two dimensions of meaning–public and private, conscious and unconscious.”3
Unlike many works currently shown as “installation” which are, in many cases, merely an accumulation of objects with an obtuse and totally hermetic meaning, Navares establishes a reciprocal relationship between the works, between them and the viewer, and between the space and the viewer. A woman representing women, she is interested neither in giving thought systematic form nor in developing a linear narrative. On this level, Navares’ installations and objects are somewhat enigmatic, yet allusive to both a generically oppressed status and to her own confinement. Her work is a “search for position” – an inquiry that according to the French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, should make it possible for women to find their own voice.
Even though personal experience is a fundamental reserve visible at first sight in the works of Paloma Navares, she is not interested in fully handing over her lived experiences, nor in the exclusive construction of a self-portrait in the traditional sense, but as a “blurred field” within the changing genre of autobiography. To tell one’s own story does not imply the display of an objective vision of the facts, but rather the authenticity of experience mediated by one’s own language. The result is a polyphonous self-portrait of great intensity, that simultaneously touches on a welter of issues before which the spectator feels immediately and personally involved.
You are invited to be personally involved even if this “already seems a kind of demand.”

1. Interestingly, and maybe because she is a biography write, and traditonally biography as history books implies the idea of truth, she mermared in a recent interview published in the cultural section of The Financial Times, that the “readers stills have the rights whether they are being presented with fact or invention.” October, 12, 2002.
2. See Iriti Rogff “Other’s Others: Spectatorship and Difference.” In Vision in Context. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sit.
Edes. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. (Routlege, New York, 1966), 1994-1995.
3. Victor Burgin. In different Spaces. California University, Berkeley, 1996, 272.

A window to the soul
The new works of Paloma Navares
Barbara Wally

“Sight represents neither a particular way of thinking nor a particular present. It is my way of going beyond myself, of being present from within, from within that division in the Human Being which makes me aware of my own division.”1

Paloma Navares’ body of work flows from the decade of the 70’s in the form of a broad current that continually addresses both the physical and spiritual questions affecting the human condition. She touches upon each and every one of the existential foundations of the Human Being which affect all of us. She even specifies those conditions related specifically to women’s existence within all of human history taking us up to our times. She continually examines the situation of the Ego, of our individual essence, of our intimate being and “the chances for survival” in a future where humans control and standardize themselves more and more through their scientific and technical resources.
A number of collateral themes flow both from within and towards this series of themes such as man’s ideal appearance and the question of physical beauty, of ageing and our attempts to keep it at bay. Navares analyses the growing influence of genetic research on the human race, the loss of individuality, and the mutations suffered by our biological foundations at the hands of genetic manipulation and organ banks. In this respect, one of her key themes is the role of women as a mirror for all attempts by humans to perfect their bodies, attempts in which the body increasingly represents humanity in its totality (pars pro toto). Within this series of themes the ideas come together, split up again, and overtake the main theme at varying rates of speed and in differing aspects. Throughout her work Paloma Navares explores the detaching of the body and the soul since spiritual components are freer and less measurable than the material or physical aspects of man’s life which due to the discoveries of the last 50 years, above all in the field of medicine (for example the birth control pill, organ transplants, genetic research, cloning, cosmetic surgery, DNA analyses) have suffered enormous changes. The consequences these changes have had are reflected in the way human existence is now perceived and particularly in the collapse of the humanistic tradition. The idea of the uniqueness of the individual, the ethics governing reproduction, and the ideology based on the so-called “natural right” of men to control women’s bodies have turned out to be a romantic, even absurd, thesis.
In Paloma Navares’ work the separation of the body and soul is reflected in the choice of means employed and the forms of expression. While those contexts related to the soul are represented in artistic expressions, preferably in video or visual projections, in movement, dance, music, warm flickering light, mystical language and pictures or images of bodily processes taking place inside the body, contexts related to the body are represented by a world of cold and artificially rigid objects. The body (women’s bodies that is) is subject to harsh disciplinary measures imposed by the prevailing standards of beauty, is corrected, is operated on and subjected to processes designed to improve it or at the very least maintain the status quo. A display of a series of cosmetics, incubating laboratories for the artificial reproduction of babies, shelves filled with organ prostheses, a cold staring light, tempting artificial materials, optical illusions, pictures of body parts on transparent sheets, dolls in shop windows, advertisements, all form part of the repertoire of this frozen hell where Sisyphean attempts are made to stay eternally young and attractive, to keep age at bay, to stop the clock, to freeze oneself. A host of profitable economic sectors – the fashion world, medicine, pharmaceutical companies, the cosmetic industry, physical fitness, and well-being in general – live off this desire for bodily perfection represented by eternal youth and beauty while at the same time tying up our creative energy, freedom of thought and action, through these very desires.
The reason why this subject is of continuing interest to Paloma Navares can be found in the fact that the soul cannot be seen but the body can, and the proof of the body’s existence is linked to its measurability and comparability. The quality of evidencing, copying and representing is fundamentally an artistic quality. The eye, the observing look and the transformation of what is seen into an artistic medium are part of what could be called the prerequisite for all artistic activity, of the interaction between perception and representation. Nevertheless the portrait of man was never less a mirror of his soul than in today’s times.
In 2000 Paloma Navares suffered a deeply dramatic experience in her vision, and by extension her existence as an artist. Since childhood she suffers from a disease affecting her sight, ocular degeneration, which throughout her life has brought on time and again stages in which she was left almost blind. She failed to see colours “correctly” or what she saw was distorted, reticulated. Between these stages there were always times in which her sense of sight functioned “appropriately” in terms of what is normal. As a result of these experiences she has developed a special sensitivity for our sense of sight. Time and again her work reflects the power of visual perception, the creating of images, the relationship between seeing and representing, between what is seen and what is represented. Through her constant fear of becoming blind someday she has learned to keep in her memory pictures and pictures in movement as if they were films. Medical treatment she received and the fact that her disease led to a series of operations alternating with prolonged periods of rest resulted in a series of works where the eye as window on the world was replaced with an interior eye. During her periods of convalescence she remained immobilised for weeks at a time while not being able to see anything. She documented this state in a series of king-size cibatrans photos titled “Unity” and “From the fragility of being”, taken from what could be called the “outside”, and using the eye of the camera to show her body with her eyes covered with bandages lying on a bed or in a bathtub. These large colour photos contained by boxed that light up create an impression of a peculiar type of self-absorbed rapture through the joining of the elements of warmth and strangeness. The element of warmth is present because resting in bed represents a feeling of withdrawal, peace and quiet; on the other hand the bandage-covered eyes give rise to a sense of fear. When this warm and familiar context become invisible, then an element of strangeness, of impossibility and of neglect returns. Other works have also been inspired by the various stages of her “motionless blindness”; these are images created from within, in a state of melancholy, almost like that of death. The artist herself refers to the body of her works in their totality as the “Passage” from life to death. During these lengthy weeks of a dream-like state similar to death she examined in depth the concepts of freedom and death finding their reflection in artist who committed suicide. Once she was in better health she created works that she dedicated to Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolf, Alexandra Pizarnik and Paul Celan. This particular series of works includes, among other aspects, text fragments, primarily lyrical in nature, written with a silver pencil on black and white photographs or on strips of paper rolled up in glass heads (“The Feelings and Emotions Regenerator”). These are visual words, images turned into words, images that superimpose each other in our memory. Whereas her cibertrans, which are a reflection of her state of being at the time, use bright colours to document an “external reality”, the “blind” images product of her memory and her imagination, the videos and three-dimensional objects are in black in white with drawings and writings in silver. One of the more typical features of her “blind” works is the placing in layers of various shots of texts, drawings, and images that are squeezed together superimposed. The series of works known as “Dreams of Memory” includes videos where fragments of colour are mixed, within a collage, with black and white, in other words, reality, dreams, and memories, interior elements with exterior elements, all melt into each other in images of sleep and wakefulness. We also find situations that produce claustrophobia (tunnels, oppressed peoples) alternating with movements filled with happiness in country scenes, beach scenes, and dance scenes all mixed together in a fantasy-filled essence of the both the remote and recent past.
Generally speaking Paloma Navares has always displayed an interest in eyes and it is clear that they are a favourite theme in her work. Her prosthesis warehouses combine pictures of “perfect” eyes taken from adverts for eye cosmetics with pictures of the “normal” eyes of members of her family. A series of hanging objects are placed next to these pictures forming a sort of mobile made up of pictures of eyes on transparent sheets. Also present are a series of sculptures that touch upon the idea of “tears” as an expression of our feelings that burst out from our bodies but also as hidden undercurrents of femininity. Due to her personal situation she is painfully aware of her dependence on her sight, on her eyes. For her the eye is not only a window on the world but also a receptacle for communication leading to harmony between the soul and the body, between the outer world and the inner world and her existence as an artist.

“The eye (…) which allows us to contemplate the beauty of the world, is worth so much that if we were to accept its loss we would be deprived of coming to know all those works of nature whose vision makes it possible for the soul to remain content in the prison of the body since the eyes offers the soul the infinite variety of Creation: Those who lose their eyes encage their souls in a dark prison where all hope of seeing the sun again, the light of the world is lost.”2

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Das Auge und der Giest. Philosophische Essays. Rowohlt Paperback, 56, Hamburgo, 1967, p. 39. Original: L’oeil et ‘esprit, Editions Gallimard, París, 1964.
2. Rainer Maria Rilke: Auguste Rodin. París, 1928, p. 150.

The dark and happy attic of our memory
Ángela Molina

Roger Fry who, like the rest of the members of the Bloomsbury clan, understood contemplation as something completely rational and scientific, as a division of experience in logical moments, wrote to Virginia Wolf after spending an afternoon in the Louvre: “I tried to forget all my ideas and my theories in order to be able to see things as if I were seeing them for the first time (…) That is the only way discoveries can be made…. Each work should lead to a new unnamed experience.” For Fry, this impassioned timeless state of contemplation and communion with the fact freed his powers of observation from continuous functionalism. Wolf points out the transition from that “logical moment” to the pleasure induced by “art forms” when she offers the following description to a friend trying to “rescue those unimportant matters” : “Everything was taken in, assimilated, investigated. Intelligence increased and took hold of any detail however insignificant : a new stitching, a new zipper closing, a shadow on the ceiling. Everything had to be investigated, examined, as if by salvaging those insignificant details from mystery their perception could cling tight to life and squeeze one more drop of civilized and rational pleasure.
Paloma Navares’ work brings to mind the complicated relationship between the Ego and those “insignificant details” perceived as a beautiful “discovery” made from the confinement of her hospital room, a enchanted interior that helps her escape from that unavoidable prison we know as our (rational) sense of sight, but one which at the same time leads her to surpass the implicit weakness its absence means.
The protective uniform that Navares puts on in order to embrace this “civilized pleasure” is a magic dress for patients made from the cloth of imagination. Like the main character in Christina Rosseti’s sonnet (A Soul) Navares choose to remain “as pallid as the statue of Paros”, like a marvellous white effigy “indomitable in its weakness/ With both face and will eager to fight the light.” Only a tenuous ray of light allowed her to make use of her loom, thread, and needles in order to speak in silence of herself and other women. She has sown hands, eyes, feet, and heads. Like Ariadna, Penelope, and Filomena, like Mary Shelley, like Mrs. Ramsay, like Mrs. Dalloway who sowed “hems too fine for a lady to show”, Navares mends in order to heal the wounds inflicted by history, but also to hide her pain. Through this metaphor the artist is multiplied in her perceptions and thanks to her memory she enters them, “she hold on tight to life”, she lusts for herself and finally discovers that “she is, indefinitely, another person within herself.” (L. Irigaray) The sculptures, photographs, and videos that Navares produces go beyond the terms created by Charcot, Freud and even Lacan to talk about women. They do not represent the hysterical women offered up men to scrutinize and watch over. They are not “ the body as the symptom” but rather the body as “a place of desire.”
The bodily fragmentation that Navares offers us, her poetry reading and dictated writings done during her convalescence fall within the framework of the desire to rediscover in the loved one – the body of another – a first love that is never differentiated. The artist’s hands are open, her eyes, although buried deep in bandages, see, and her feet being so slight appear to fly. Paloma Navares’ body is an open body, because she feels, unlike psychoanalysis, the feminine symbolism is never limited.
Imagination and desire, these are the white wings that lift the work of Navares above the “devouring darkness” of her illness and take her to a state of otherness where creativity flows, as in that extraordinary piece of writing, almost surrealistic, produced by Emily Dickinson : I felt a Cracking of my Mind- / As if my Brain has split in two- / I tried to put it together–Piece by piece– / But I couldn’t make the pieces fit. / I made great efforts to join the thoughts from within / With the thoughts from before – / But the Creation became unravelled from Sanity / Like balls of yarn – on the floor.”
Whereas the seams of suicide only bring together a poet’s broken I’s, the stitches of art are providential and curative. Let us see how we can explore the “hidden vision” (Dickinson) to be found in Paloma Navares’s secret place.

The story of the other eye
Bataille thought of the eye as an object whose main function was to de-idealize, de-rationalize, and de-stabilize. In his L’Histoire de L’Oeil he describes the transmutations the organ suffers taking the place of other globular objects in a series of metaphors. The eye propels a human being upwards; it draws him to the sky (the heights) and looks directly at the sun. The result is either insanity or blindness.
Navares’ particular vision is achieved through a critical eye that searches for the substitution of meaning laden symbols in symbols themselves (the trunk of a nude female body on a nude male body in
“From the house of oblivion”), in emotions (a dream containing the memory of a bicycle ride through the forest of the city “A orilla del Salzbach”, 1999, her childhood memories of the beach, in the video “Els Banyets”, 1997; “Playa de San Juan”, 1997 Containing her impressions of vitality, loneliness, and fear.) Her vision is provocative because it eliminates differences. Nevertheless, as opposed to Bataille’s “flaccid luminosity” (soleil pourri), the eye she uses does not act as a “destroyer” of shapes but instead serves to create intimate spaces belonging to a sense of time as a circle. In Navares’ work space and time are dialectically structured but the resulting negation does not represent a vacuum. There is a desire which is a call for reception, the reception of these “small details.” Her video, always subtle, leave a great deal of room for thinking about the personal implications of her ideas; nevertheless, they actively involved the public in her journey through her memories.
In those pictures where the sea (the History) traps us with its waves, we can see this passage between the Ego itself and the past, far removed from those open windows where Wolf placed women looking over everything. Navares’ sea is an announcement of the fantasy of days already lived, days that reappear like waves in the darkness of a hospital room. Here is where the artist makes public her vulnerability, her fragility, as in the glass and resin heads that hold drawings and fragments of poems – the power of the written word – (“Apuntes de la oscuridad”, 2000; “Unidad de Sueño”, 2001 y “La Illeta”, 2002)-. Navares relinquishes her body, bit by bit, and at the same time warns us of something horrible : what it means to be a slave to your body (her series from the mid-90’s ranging from “Artificios plus”, “Toilettes” and “Botequines” to “Casa Cuna” and “Luz del pasado”), an incomprehensible and uncontrollable body, capable of subjecting itself to the destructive servile spectre of the perfect woman.
In another of her dreams / memories (the video of the tunnel and the outing “De Overalm a Hallein”, 1999; “A Pirineos”, 2000) the artist sets off on journey through lost groves and paths. She enters into the darkness of a tunnel and searches for light while at the same time pedalling away dedicated to the pleasure of freedom, the pleasure of controlling her life. We can also see photographs of the artist in a bathtub with her eyes bandaged, or on a bed, immobilised, with her hair arranged in the shape of a leafy tree: she looks like a sick woman, but she could also be a goddess. This image leads us to another: a glass head hanging downwards like a jellyfish with some strips of cellophane for hair and which solve the enigma of the writing.
Paloma Navares’ whole body of work is a painful passage from innocence to experience. When she puts her open hands together leaving a small window between them so we can secretly and magically enter her memory we realize that she experiences nature’s protection, that of her own carnality even though later it is split and divided into pieces of extremities – the fragmenting of hands and feet – and she finds herself trapped in the horror or her intimate soul searching, that which speaks of her condition of both woman and artist, a horror which is both camouflage and revelation. Delicate but strong, light as a child, surrounded by the cold frost of a hospital, Navares succumbs to the tomb of darkness filled with the hope of the spring thaw.
Her latest works are less obvious in their intentions. Instead of subverting patriarchal art – that series where she questioned with sweet irony the limiting images conferred upon women by the canons of behaviour as dictated by history (goddesses, virgins, passive lovers) – she offers something a bit closer to qualified experience. Her insistence on making art asexual turns her works into symbols of her power of imagination in defining her own truths and intimate emotions. The dance done by the two nude bodies – in the small box, masculine and in the methacrylate cylinder, feminine, (“Laura”; “Habitat”, 2002 y “A Agi”, 2002) – is a beautiful metaphor for the schism of a woman who hesitates in telling all, and who gives free rein to her fears to the rhythm dictated by the dance. It is a form of imagining that has gained, from within deep depression, the minimum signs of life offered by a body that lives and moves within a spiritual abode. The dance, like the thread is another metaphor for the creative act. Navares is an invisible ballerina, private, subtle; the movement of a body that has foregone its sex is the secret triumph of her commitment to art. Here we have the silent pirouettes born of experience which in their silence stripped away the body’s disguises, from the dark and happy attic of her memory.