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Abstract
This article focuses on the dance/performance art of La Ribot in order to conceive her work as a ‘theoretical object’ that articulates and reformulates key conceptual concerns in visual culture, enabling us to engage with questions that relate directly to the medium of dance/performance art and to think in a trans-disciplinary manner about other visual media. Through an exploration of La Ribot's formal and conceptual concerns in relation to embodiment and subjectivity, including sovereign power and resistance, language and silence, movement and stillness, repetition and difference, choreographic commands and contingencies, horizontality and verticality, gender ambivalence, or presence and erasure, La Ribot's dance/performance art transforms our perceptions and reconfigures our way of relating to our own and other bodies, potentially leading to the capacity for political action in an unpredictable futurity. Finally, I argue that La Ribot embodies the significance of dance/performance art for reformulating and putting pressure on critical and theoretical interpretations of visual cultural practices. Her performative pieces encourage us to mobilise theoretical and critical concepts, so that they can travel, to use Mieke Bal's term, across disciplines and media, thereby potentially causing to emerge new ways of interpreting visual cultural practices.
Notes
1 I borrow this term from Mieke Bal. See Mieke Bal, ‘Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois' Spider As Theoretical Object’, Oxford Art Journal, 22:2 (1999), 101–26.
2 See Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema (London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008). See also Susan Suleiman, ‘Dialogue and Double Allegiance: Some Contemporary Women Artists and the Historical Avant-garde’, in Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, ed. Whitney Chadwick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 128–54.
3 Essays on Piezas distinguidas by these authors are included in La Ribot, ed. Claire Rousier, 2 vols (Pantin: Centre National de la Danse, 2004), II. This volume is part of a two-volume book on La Ribot written in collaboration between the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin and the Galería Soledad Lorenzo in Madrid, the gallery that represented La Ribot. The first volume, compiled by La Ribot herself, includes all the visual and textual references that inform her thirty-four pieces. It also includes her notes and sketches. The second volume focuses on academic essays on her dance/performance art. The book is a testament to the productive connection between practice and theory. They mutually constitute La Ribot's dance/performance art. In fact, during a presentation of the book at the Centre National de La Danse in Pantin, La Ribot claims that this two-volume book could be seen as another way, not so much of documenting as of ‘re-performing’ her Piezas distinguidas.
4 See, for instance, Paul Julian Smith, The Theatre of García Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1998). Although this study focuses on text-based theatre, namely the theatre of Lorca, Smith brilliantly focuses on pertinent questions related to performance studies, including the re-presentation of the body or mise-en-scène. Two of his other books which cover performance art or even flamenco dance are Contemporary Spanish Culture: TV, Fashion, Art and Film (Cambridge/Malden: Polity, 2003) and The Moderns: Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2000). Another sophisticated study of contemporary Spanish theatre which also focuses on specific questions related to performance and theatricality is Maria Delgado's ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2003). For an interesting analysis of the connections and disconnections between theatre and performance, see Hans-Thies Lehmann, ‘Algunas notas sobre el teatro posdramático, una década después’, in Repensar la dramaturgia: errancia y transformación, ed. Manuel Bellisco, María José Cifuentes & Amparo Écija (Murcia: CENDEAC, 2011), 309–29.
5 I am inspired here by Bracha Ettinger's work on philosophy, psychoanalysis and aesthetics with which I have engaged in my work on Spanish and Latin-American cinema. Ettinger uses the artwork as a way of accessing what she names the ‘matrixial borderspace’, in which a shift from subjectivity and intersubjectivity to transubjective encounters takes place. See Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006). See also Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, ‘Filmar desde/en lo femenino. Realismo subjetivo, desintegración social y afecto corporal en La ciénaga de Lucrecia Martel’, in Imágenes del Eros, ed. Fran A. Zurian (Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 2011), 11–28.
6 Bojana Kunst, ‘How Time Can Dispossess: On Duration and Movement in Contemporary Performance’, Maska (2010) <http://kunstbody.wordpress.com/author/kunstbody/> (accessed 26 September 2014).
7 Cited in Kunst, ‘How Time Can Dispossess’.
8 Adrian Heathfield, ‘Then Again’, in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones & Adrian Heathfield (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 27–35 (p. 29).
9 Rebecca Schneider, ‘Performance Remains’, in Perform, Repeat, Record, ed. Jones & Heathfield, 137–50 (p. 139).
10 I hyphenate this term to think about the tension between presentation in performance and representation in visual cultural practices, such as film, painting and photography. As we shall see later, I problematize the association of the concept of presence with dance/performance art. We could also rethink film, painting or photography less as representational forms than as cross-temporal events encountered by the spectator.
11 I am foregrounding the tension between visual perception and embodied perception here.
12 La Ribot was part of Bocanada, a group that epitomized what Sánchez has defined as ‘la nueva danza’ in Madrid. Although La Ribot has consistently collaborated with other choreographers and dancers, the Piezas distinguidas are characterized by her solo performance. These pieces are divided into three series: 13 piezas distinguidas (1993–1994), Más distinguidas (1996–1997) and Still Distinguished (2000). The first two were initially shown in alternative theatres. For instance, Más distinguidas were shown at Desviaciones, a festival in Madrid co-organized by La Ribot herself dedicated to experimental dance in Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s. La Ribot moved from Madrid to London, and she is now based in Geneva. Still Distinguished were conceived to be performed in art gallery spaces, which deeply conditions the phenomenological relationship between the spectator and the performing artist. Although non-tangential artworks, all the pieces have a ‘distinguished’ owner whose name will remain associated with that particular piece when it is ‘re-performed’. Ephemerality becomes itself a commodified product in the art market. In 2003, La Ribot presented the thirty-four pieces in several art centres, including Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, under the name Panoramix. For a historical study of the new dance in Madrid in the 1980s, see José Antonio Sánchez, ‘La nueva danza en Madrid’, in Artes de la escena y de la acción en España: 1978–2002, ed. José Antonio Sánchez (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Univ. de Castilla-La Mancha, 2006), 319–50. For a useful summary of La Ribot's ‘Piezas distinguidas’, see Amparo Écija, ‘Danza distinguida, las piezas de La Ribot’, Boletín de Arte, 32–33 (2011–2012); the text is available in the Archivo Virtual Artes Escénicas, <http://artesescenicas.uclm.es/index.php?sec=texto&id=371> (accessed 16 July 2014).
13 I borrow this term from Diana Taylor. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
14 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter (London: Routledge, 1998).
15 Heathfield, ‘Then Again’, 31.
16 Schneider, ‘Performance Remains’, 140.
17 According to La Ribot (correspondence with the artist by email), the soundtrack used in this video is from Carles Santos' Belmonte (1988), also used in her Number 26 (1997), as we will see below. The excerpt used in Number 26 is excluded from Pa amb tomàquet. Therefore, with the authorization of Santos, La Ribot's ‘mutilation’ of Santos' music resonates with the emphasis on cutting in this video piece. I would like to express my deepest thanks to La Ribot for her invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this article.
18 André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (London: Routledge, 2006), 6.
19 See Briony Fer, ‘Poussière/peinture: Bataille on Painting’, in Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Gill (London: Routledge, 1995), 154–71.
20 José Antonio Sánchez, ‘Llámame Mariachi (2009)’, Archivo Virtual Artes Escénicas <http://artesescenicas.uclm.es/archivos_subidos/textos/347/LlamameMariachi.En.pdf> (accessed 16 July 2014).
21 See Jill O’Bryan, Carnal Art: Orlan's Refacing (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press), xvi.
22 Sánchez, ‘Llámame Mariachi (2009)’.
23 La Ribot has an official Vimeo site where one can actually watch the separate recordings of the three series of her Piezas distinguidas.
24 Catherine Fowler, ‘Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and the Vertical Time from Maya Deren to Eija Liisa Ahtila’, Screen, 45:4 (2004), 324–41. See Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, ‘Becoming a Queer Mother in and through Film: Trans-Sexuality, Trans-Subjectivity, and Maternal Relationality in Almodóvar's All About My Mother’, in A Companion to Spanish Cinema, ed. Jo Labanyi & Tatjana Pavlović (Malden/Oxford/Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 563–80.
25 Heathfield, ‘Then Again’, 320.
26 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia U. P., 1994), 144.
27 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Patton.
28 See Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (Toronto: Toronto U. P., 2002), 8.
29 I use this phenomenological term to propose that, if the subject is constituted through language, she/he is never outside her/his own phenomenological and bodily consciousness of ‘being-in-the-world’.
30 For Catherine Malabou, ‘plasticity’ can imply the destruction of previous traces as a reconfiguration of new traces takes place. See Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Millar (New York: Fordham U. P., 2012).
31 María Bordonaba, ‘Entrevista con María Ribot, Premio Nacional de Danza’, El Cultural, 3:1 (2001), 34–36.
32 In a conversation with La Ribot by email, she explains that in her pieces one often has to think of two bodies in one body: the body that paints and the one painted, the body that gives instructions and the one that executes those instructions, or the body that verbalizes the imagined dance and the one that performs the dance. I am deeply grateful to La Ribot for her invaluable suggestions.
33 Anthony White, ‘Industrial Painting's Utopias: Lucio Fontana's Expectations’, October, 124 (2008), 98–124 (p. 109).
34 See Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Remaking Art after Modernism (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2004).
35 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3 (1975), 6–18.
36 John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: Chicago U. P., 2002), 67.
37 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1998).
38 My profound thanks to Jo Evans for making me aware of the complex positive and negative implications of this action and to Sherry Velasco for making me aware of the connections between this piece and the main character in Cervantes' novel.
39 Adrian Heathfield, ‘In Memory of Little Things’, in La Ribot, ed. Rousier, II, 21–27 (p. 22).
40 Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996).
41 Écija, ‘Danza distinguida, las piezas de La Ribot’.
42 For a fine discussion of Agamben in relation to theatre, see Óscar Cornago, ‘Dramaturgias para después de la historia’, in Repensar la dramaturgia, ed. Bellisco, Cifuentes & Écija, 263–85.
43 I find here resonances and disjunctions between La Ribot's politics of embodiment and Almodóvar's complex reflection of human and post-human embodiment in La piel que habito (2011). See Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, ‘La piel del horror, el horror en la piel. Poder, violencia y trauma en el cuerpo (post)humano en La piel que habito’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 14:1 (2013), 70–85.
44 See the fascinating study of performance art by Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1998).
45 Briony Fer, ‘The Work of Salvage: Eva Hesse's Latex Works’, in Eva Hesse, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2002), 78–95 (p. 93).
46 See, for instance, Susan Martin-Márquez, ‘Isabel Coixet's Engagement with Feminist Film Theory: From G (the Gaze) to H (the Haptic)’, in A Companion to Spanish Cinema, ed. Labanyi & Pavlović, 545–62. See also Jo Evans, ‘Icíar Bollaín's “Carte de Tendre”: Mapping Female Subjectivity for the Turn of the Millennium’, in Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference, ed. Parvati Nair & Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2013), 252–63.
47 Fer, The Infinite Line, 20.
48 I am indebted to Francisco José Martínez Martínez's excellent study of Deleuze's book on difference and repetition and, more broadly, on Deleuze's philosophy. See Francisco José Martínez Martínez, Ontología y diferencia: la filosofía de Gilles Deleuze (Madrid: Orígenes, 1987).
49 I am drawing here from Derrida's distinction between future, which implies a level of predictability, and futurity or avenir, which implies an unpredictable future yet to come.
50 Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, 80.
51 Hamid Naficy, ‘Situating Accented Cinema’, in Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader, ed. Elizabeth Ezra & Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2006), 111–29 (p. 113).
52 Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, ‘Children of Exile: Trauma, Memory, and Testimony in Jaime Camino's Documentary Los niños de Rusia (2001)’, in Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, ed. Ann Davies (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 129–50.
53 See Laurent Goumarre, ‘Die Another Day’, in La Ribot, ed. Rousier, II, 60–70.
54 Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 70.
55 See Kaja Silverman's discussion of Lacan's concept of the gaze in Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996).
56 See Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1997).
57 I am indebted to Briony Fer's problematization of phenomenology in The Infinite Line.
58 I am borrowing this term from Bojana Kunst. I shall come back to Kunst's association of duration with dispossession shortly (see Kunst, ‘How Time Can Dispossess’).
59 Fer, The Infinite Line, 172.
60 See Fer, The Infinite Line, 8.
61 Although I am focusing on some of the most dramatic pieces by La Ribot, some of them draw highly on humour, parody or irony. Therefore, La Ribot's dance/performance art resists any fixed categorization or association with a specific mode. For a fine discussion of humour in La Ribot, see José Antonio Sánchez, ‘Distinction and Humour’, in La Ribot, ed. Rousier, II, 39–50.
62 Sarah Wilson, ‘Fêting the wound’, in Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. Gill, 172–92.
63 See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
64 For a fine study of the poetics of dance, see Laurence Louppe, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, trans. Sally Gardner (Alton: Dance Books, 2010).
65 Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's concept of ‘kinetic modernity’, Kunst also notes how movement has been expropriated and appropriated by flexible, mobile capitalism in our contemporary neoliberal society. In the same way as capital, subjects are socially divided by those who have the ability to move freely across the globe and by those who cannot move. In the case of migrant and refugees, movement becomes a form of material exclusion and psychic dispossession.
66 Kunst, ‘How Time Can Dispossess’.
67 See Lepecki, Exhausting Dance.
68 Kunst, How Time Can Dispossess'.
69 See Fernando Castro Flórez, ‘Still Life. Una aproximación (excéntrica) a La Ribot’, in La Ribot (Madrid: Galería Soledad Lorenzo, 2002), 41–51. See also André Lepecki, ‘Introduction/Dance As a Practice of Contemporaneity’, in Dance, ed. André Lepecki (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012), 14–23.
70 Maria Walsh, ‘Intervals of Inner Flight: Chantal Akerman's News from Home’, Screen, 45:3 (2004), 190–205 (p. 200).
71 Fer, The Infinite Line, 99.
72 Rosi Braidotti, ‘The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible’, in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2006), 133–59 (p. 134).
73 Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, 8.
74 Suely Rolnik, ‘The Body's Contagious Memory: Lygia Clark's Return to the Museum’, Transversal, January (2007) <http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/rolnik/en> (accessed 22 July 2014).
75 Suely Rolnik, ‘The Geopolitics of Pimping’, Transversal (October 2006), <http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en> (accessed 22 July 2014).
76 Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art’, Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 2:1 (2008), 1–15.
77 I borrow this term from Adrian Heathfield, ‘Alive’, in Live: Art and Performance, ed. Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 7–13.
78 For a fine study of the ethical and political implications of our encounters with the other's body in theatre and performance art, see Óscar Cornago, Éticas del cuerpo: Juan Domínguez, Marta Galán, Fernando Renjifo (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2008).
79 The crucial difference between ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ is that the former cannot be defined as an intentional act, whereas the latter is defined as intentional. However, these two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Performance art can be considered a performative act which has an effect on the spectator.
80 According to La Ribot, Another Bloody Mary is an enactment of the death of a transvestite who was killed in a park in Barcelona (cited in Goumarre, ‘Die Another Day’, 62).
81 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17.
82 I cannot do justice here to all the Hispanist colleagues in the Anglo-American academy whose work on queer theory has been a unique source of inspiration for my own work. The work of Paul Julian Smith, Chris Perriam, Gema Pérez Sánchez, Jill Robins, Enrique Álvarez, the late and deeply missed David Vilaseca, Alberto Mira, Santiago Fouz-Hernández, or Brad Epps should be seen as a fair representation of the research on queer theory in Spanish visual culture.
83 Judith Butler, ‘Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1999), 336–49 (p. 338).
84 For a discussion of the concepts of performance and performativity, see Geraldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1999). For the relationship between queer theory and Deleuze's notion of becoming, see Amy Hequembourg, ‘Becoming Lesbian Mothers’, Journal of Homosexuality, 53:3 (2007), 153–80 and Mikko Tuhkanen, ‘Performativity and Becoming’, Cultural Critique, 72 (2009), 1–35.
85 Sudeep Dasgupta, ‘Words, Bodies, Times: Queer Theory before and after Itself’, Borderlands, 8:2 (2009), 1–16 (p. 8; emphasis in original).
86 I have developed these ideas in my article on Mi querida señorita: Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, ‘Reframing My Dearest Senorita (1971): Queer Embodiment and Subjectivity through the Poetics of Cinema’, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 12:1 (2015), 27–42. I would like to thank Marsha Kinder and Marvin D'Lugo, co-editors of this issue, as their pioneering work on Spanish cinema has been instrumental in developing the field of Spanish cinema in the Anglo-American academy.
87 Heathfield, ‘In Memory of Little Things’, 23.
88 See Susan Leigh Foster, ‘The Ballerina's Phallic Pointe’, in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–24.
89 I am inspired here by my work on torn surfaces as symptoms of individual and collective traumatic experiences in Almodóvar's La mala educación (2004). See Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, ‘Inscribing/Scratching the Past on the ‘Surface’ of the “Skin”: Embodied Inter-Subjectivity, “Prosthetic Memory” and Witnessing in Almodóvar's La mala educación’, in A Companion to Almodóvar, ed. Marvin D'Lugo & Kathleen Vernon (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 322–44. See also Parveen Adams' discussion of Orlan's performance art: Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences (London: Routledge, 1996).
90 Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed., with an intro., by Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt & Donald M. Leslie Jr (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1985), 79–90.
91 Georges Bataille, ‘Le Gros orteil’, Documents, 6 (1929), 297–302; reproduced in Documents, ed. by Bernard Noël (Paris: Mercure de France/Éditions Gallimard, 1968), 75–82.
92 I am inspired here by Rosalind Krauss' discussion of Surrealist photography. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, in L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 56–112.
93 I borrow this term from Margaret Iversen, who brilliantly discusses minimalism's obsession with the horizontal space. See Margaret, Iversen, ‘The Deflationary Impulse: Postmodernism, Feminism and the Anti-Aesthetic’, in Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics, ed. Andrew Benjamin & Peter Osborne (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991), 81–93.
94 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, 8 (1979), 30–44.
95 See the pioneering book on Spanish cultural studies, Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995).
96 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, 25:2 (1995), 9–63.
97 See also Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). Griselda Pollock's work on trauma, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and visual culture has deeply informed my interest in memory and trauma debates through a queer and feminist psychoanalytic perspective in Spanish visual culture.
98 My profound thanks to Paul Julian Smith and José Antonio Sánchez for our inspiring and helpful conversations about La Ribot and to Jo Evans for her invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this piece. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to La Ribot for engaging so enthusiastically with my article, her helpful suggestions and for generously providing me with the photographs of her pieces.