Booth F18
The Wounded Eye
Written by Clara Astiasarán
Priscilla Monge in Focus
A visit to the studio of Priscilla Monge (Costa Rica, 1968) reveals a series of works that take the form of large-scale polaroids. In them, the color green has covered what might—or might not—have been their contents: “green covers it all” reads one inscription in the artist’s handwriting. This tension between nature and discourse in Monge’s practice as a visual artist makes her one of the sharpest voices in the construction of Central America's post-war imaginary. In these recent works, Monge transcends human nature—and the nature of what is inherently human—shifting her questioning to that indomitable principle of creation: Is nature moral or amoral?
If we understand the concept of morality itself as a set of laws or customs associated with social, political or ideological behavior, we would conclude that these cannot be reduced to mere “nature.” Neither naturalism nor materialism have been capable of explaining the existence of morality, and yet Monge’s questions unsettle us: what is the “all” that the green covers? What emotional, psychological, spiritual (that is, human), surfaces end up covered by the weight of what is considered “natural”? When we accept the fact that time, despite itself, does have a certain ability to heal “all” wounds, are we talking about the same “all” that the green covers?
The exceptional nature of Priscilla Monge’s work as an artist has always resided in her way of saying things with both simplicity and brutality. This is no easy feat; the premises she works with are significant and they alter her subjects, superimposing values where there were none in a particular form or substance. Green, and nature, have “taken root” in the principle that nature does not need art. That it is unable to be domesticated whether as object or metaphor; it is beyond metaphor, and covers it without determinism, taking away its value as beauty—the same beauty sold on postcards by Costa Rica—and giving way to its capacity to be forgotten, to be uncannily human. Under it, death is revealed, rural life bereft of the anomalies we know it to be full of, all that which human beings let nature cover with its terrible neutrality.
Monge ́s body of work has been called intimist and feminist, within a values system that most often looks at the world through the male gaze. In conversing with the artist, she herself has felt that her recent years’ work has moved from personal to collective exploration (perhaps influenced by other factors in her private life such as maternity). And yet, I believe that her work has only expanded in the eyes of the other. It is a matter of perception that personal stories have become less of a metaphor, taking on a more appropriate nature as testimony. Monge does not choose violence (there is no passion, no snobbery), violence has chosen her to tell her version of the facts; this decision is not in the object of discourse, but rather in the opportunity to position herself with apparent distance. You can’t narrate violence from within; when our life is part of the narrative we end up “naturalizing” it. And when nature is a verb, we should call into question its imminent principles of neutrality.
Priscilla Monge has worked for years with the testimonies of war in Central America compiled by the Truth Commissions. She uses these fragments in the polaroids she then covers in scratches. This covering up is not a manic exercise nor is it random. No, Monge’s work leaves no room for banal accidents. She conditions our gaze, and when we look, we see precisely with parts of our bodies not designed to see with. We see children taken from their mothers, and we see mothers watching their children be killed. We see men looming over girls or women and we see the eyes filled with rage and horror of the person watching. We see spears piercing sides and Christs too small to suffer a passion so big. Priscilla Monge has built a heaven for them, a last glance, a place of redemption. But such a space, even in this possible ending, is reverted, denied to them, turns its back on them. On one of these polaroids, Monge writes: we were not neutral. She means, of course, Costa Rica; she means the complicit nature of silence, she means one who, having decided not to look, believes they have decided not to see. And her handwriting (her signature) has always seemed to me like that of a person who is delivering bad news: it is a letter without a body.
The artist ́s work has taken up suspicion—that bastard daughter of complicity—as a central theme. She sows that syndrome of doubt that is the unsaid, but what it suggests often makes you the guilty one. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes: "Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.” When Monge excerpts phrases from testimonies charged with such terrible elegance of brevity, she arrives at these same conclusions. In her series of delicate loose-leaf in ceramic, the lightness of the material exalts the gravity of its sentences. Her work always exhibits this softness, this restraint and this brutal gesture in equal parts. It reminds us of the words of Clarice Lispector: “I am meek but my function in living is fierce.” One of Monge’s pieces bears the phrase: This is a haunted text, this is unspeakable. It is not an open text and that is its complexity. The unspeakable is not a scenario filled with probabilities. In her work everything takes on that tone of testimony, of irrefutable truth, even when humor is brought into play as a possible response to fear. These pieces have weight, uncalculated densities, not different from her work in marble. The texts she writes or quotes are always a crack, a wound, a detour. She never makes too explicit the distance between the text, the drawing and the calculated action. The unspeakable is the sensation of a phantom limb after an amputation.
But beyond that death, through the lapidary nature of her words and her use of marble, through the eloquence of the materials she works with, Priscilla has broken the timeline. That is why it is complex to state that her new work is different from the old; because on many occasions her past work is better understood from the future. I look back at her makeup tutorials, her drill-ballerina, her music boxes with boxing gloves, and I understand that twenty years ago she was speaking to who we are now. Monge hasn’t changed her language or her audience, she has changed us, or at least has understood how our context has changed us as an audience. When I insisted that our gaze had expanded, I don’t mean our perception or understanding of the world has grown, but rather that we have outmaneuvered our own contemplative character. As a region, as a society, as a principle, we are the audience watching the woman in the opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929), whose eye has been cut out, for us to keep watching.
Translated from Spanish by Andrea Mickus
