星期一熬夜看了Salma Hayek演的Frida，所以把幾年前跟著舊部落消失的賞畫心得翻出。電影裡的費達沸騰著女性的熱情與生存的堅強。痛楚又溫暖。"I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to return - Frida".
Tango in the movie Frida
Chavela Vargas - La Llorona
Viewing Frida Kahlo, Tate Modern – 24 Sept 2005
Y.C. Liu
The orangey Tate Modern posters raised along the over-ground Northern Line platforms. She is in town and I spot Frida Kahlo by her notorious knitting, dark (Werewolf) eyebrows.
The familiar Cubisme and Gauguin-ique tinge appealed to me with its vividly exotic colour brush. “Frida Kahlo” is the very icon of herself that there is fine distinction between her artistic presence and her canvas.
To many passers-by, this poster of “Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1939” obscures the artist’s gender with her solemnly stern stares and fine streaks of moustache. The almost masculine-hormonal Kahlo, in the painting, is fended by the lavish velvet greens with the monkey arming the artist’s shoulders in a companionship manner.
The choice of object, together with the touch of brush, endows Kahlo’s strong earning for the primitive: lust and bodily comfort –carefully themed and constructed by the prevailing furriness across the surface.
Through the Tate Modern exhibition rooms, Kahlo’s paintings were swarmed by admirers and art lovers. The scale of “My Birth, 1932”, relating to Kahlo’s own birth and miscarriage, is surprisingly petite with melancholic earthy tones. The clinical pale sheets rest flat, like cold marble slates, whilst the recorded action (the birth) wrinkles the covers in diameters, rippling the refrained, un-pronounced pain around the most private area. The adult head between the blood stained thighs and disguised identity of the sufferer questions the self-identity of motherhood. The slow brutality in an indifferent setting screams the most ironic puzzle of life and death, like the water under deep currents.
Despite that some may view Kahlo’s paintings blunt, disturbing or even painful, her agonies, as a matter of fact, were not designed to be emotionally expressed. Kahlo transformed her life experience to pictogram-like, blatant visual signifiers so that the traumas are often “referred to” instead of articulated in the artist’s personal voice. Same, her self-portraits are often facially expressionless as a result of disassociation. As many artists endeavour to convey the transcendental beauty, Kahlo’s exposition of flesh and blood displays the “nature of being” crudely. This surrender permits her arts to the larger than life.
“Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, 1932,” “My Dress Hangs There, 1933” and other political series demonstrate Kahlo’s masterpieces talents, yet more her attempt on the main stream inclusion. The strong female notion, and almost obsession, of the self, prior to the post-modern era, was often an undermining act of an artist who wishes to set her footprint in the history. In a world of post-modern marketing, personal branding and iconism, “Kahlo” translates to the cult culture.
Viewing Frida Kahlo, the transformation of an artist’s womanhood is mirrored in a way that I echo with her egoistic, stubborn and candid manner. I felt for her passion for her roots and country, her ambiguous sexuality, her desire for love as well as lust, and her sufferings and pride of simply being who she is in a life of such. Nonetheless, I am no Fridamanic, as I have greater aspiration to true talents veiled by folkloric romantic mysticism, inviting me to further decode the, perhaps over, beautified.
Self-Portrait with Monkey 1938
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY Bequest
of A. Conger Goodyear, 1966.
© Banco de México and INBAL, Mexico, 2005
My Birth, 1932
Oil on sheet metal, 12 ½” x 14”.
Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, 1932
Oil on metal panel
310 x 359mm
Manuel and Maria Reyero Collection, New York
© Banco de México and INBAL Mexico, 2005
My Dress Hangs There, 1933
Oil and collage on masonite
460 x 500 mm
Private Collection
© Banco de México and INBAL Mexico, 2005
