by Ana Bastos and Kadma Rodrigues
Translated by Denise Pierrotti
The CNI SESI Marcantônio Vilaça award is promoted by industrial institutions which are interested in providing incentives for Brazilian culture. It is a prize directed to the fine arts, and a one-year scholarship is normally given to five students to develop their work, accompanied by reviewers and professionals from the field of Contemporary Art. The finished works are organized in an itinerant public exhibition which travels around six Brazilian capitals making the works of the selected artists known.
The second edition of the award, 2006/2008, had among its winners an artist from Minas Gerais, Laura Lima (L.L.), who developed the works of art named Galinha de Gala e Nômades (Gala Hens and Nomads). Her work Galinha de Gala, which is exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum in Dragão do Mar (Sea Dragon) in Fortaleza, raised a lot of questionings, astonishment and argument on the use of live animals, which is something recurring in Lima’s work.
To understand Lima’s work in Galinha de Gala e Nômades, the questions which give support to it and the polemics raised by it, are also to think of the relationship between human beings and nature and their turnabouts, its ethics and the lack of it, its convergence and disparity. Human beings integrate nature and it is impossible to dissociate them from it, even if our search for a rationality which differentiates us and asserts us in the world, tries to suppress our biological, animal and instinctive dimensions. The fact is that human beings interact and modify the environment just as any other animal does.
In Galinha de Gala, Laura Lima shows and thinks about the question of ornamentation: using the colorful plumage on the hen she causes astonishment, admiration and/or dispute. Thinking of animals by themselves as performers evokes a need for the revision of concepts, or even the creation of names to discuss on Lima’s works of art, as Luis Camilo Osório, who accompanied the development of Lima’s work during the Marcantônio Vilaça award, tells us.
Furthermore, we can still come across questionings about the ethics related to animals. There are some people who disagree with her work with living beings, due to the fact that she pasted plumes on the original feathers of the hens, which would be characterized as an abuse, besides the fact that the animals were exhibited in a museum, which is not their usual habitat. However, during the process of pasting the plumes there is no pain felt because the feathers don’t have any nerves. The artist told us that during the process of pasting the hens normally remain very calm. Although some people had complained about the use of hens in this work, in general, people don’t question the fact of how cruel it is to put a hen inside a battery where it will be killed and served as food. Why do they judge the fact that a hen can be sent dead to a kitchen and not live to a museum or to a gallery, where they can shed light on many discussions and perspectives that no inanimate object would be able to originate?
Lima’s work doesn’t evoke only the questionings related above. From it we can discuss and think beyond the aesthetics perception and a possible artistic experience by the observer or the admirer of the work as well as discuss the ornamentation of the subject.
In our perspective hens are not distinctive one from the other they don’t differentiate each other, whereas the dispositions of colors and feathers that Laura L. puts on the hens inserts in this context an element of differentiation. The fact that in the animal world plumages also have a stimulating character in the search for a partner to copulate turns it into an interesting stage during the construction process of L. L’s work.
When a different hen, due to its colorful feathers, was placed among the “normal ones” it was set apart. However, as the other hens were acquiring new feathers, the recurrent element fell upon the owner of the colorful and different feathers. Then the isolation which happened followed the same principle, but in an inverted way: the minority distanced itself from the majority; in this case the “without colorful feathers” were the distanced and excluded ones. There was yet another change evident in the hen’s behavior – the rooster showed much more interest in the colorful feathered hens, as well as the “without colorful feathers” were more interested in the “gala hens”, as the artist named them.
Keeping the proper proportions, the observation of these changes in the behavior of the animal world can lead us to a reflection on the universe of human attitudes. The adornments, clothes, ornaments in general and the use of the body as a support to the intervention of objects, as well as its transformation are part of our routine and they make up our “social corporal image”[1]. In each age of mankind we have developed clothes, different custom and usage that used to be historical constructions, in other words, they demonstrated values but not in an essentialist way, in a relational manner, from the point of view of the observer and the user. A dialectic process where each human being participates in the construction of the other’s image.
The importance of this dynamic which flows from the limits of the corporal image to Corporal Image Sociology is in evidence when we realize that, for social beings, an object is never just an object, but it is also always a mediator of a relationship. The process of attributing a meaning to the objects and to the actions is exactly the socialization process of these objects and actions, the process through which they emerge while strictly social. Therefore, the incorporation of clothes and objects and the lasting bond of the corporal excretions to the corporal image is socially relevant: by the fact that clothes and objects are never only pieces of material, and excretions are never only our biology, but they are as well always demonstrations of power and status, aesthetic options, abilities and conditions to certain activities, in the end, mediators of countless relationships. [1]
Let us think about the hat, very much in use at the beginning of the XX century as an important adornment for the “good head of family”, it also appeared in American Indian paintings, or even as body adornments, representative of differentiated occasions and status, in gold bracelets in Ancient Egypt and in the XVI century wigs which were used to demonstrate nobility. Finally, there are several examples which lead us to recognize that the adornment is a strong mediator among political, religious, social and personal relationships.
Studying Kayapó Indians[1] it is possible to realize how the objects and adornments used by them had a very ritualistic and mythological character, such as, for example, “Botoque is a term that designates ceramic, wood or seashell discs which the Kayapó (…) use inside their ear lobes or inferior lips. (…) they are used to represent the authority and maturity of a Kayapó man. They have the function of emphasizing the senses to which those organs refer to” [1].
About the paintings, this study shows that:
The jenipapo painting is a continuous activity and a daily routine of the Kayapó which is intrinsically related to the conception of who a Kayapó is and with their understanding of the cycle of life such as age, sex and social relationship. It is a painting essentially informative and it is related to socialization procedures. The word in the Kayapó language which refers to the color black is the same word they use to refer to death and to the forest site which surrounds the tribe. This shows the importance of the presence of the jenipapo paintings for their own human condition. The jenipapo prints are numerous and they obey some aesthetic rules such as symmetry, thin and regular parallel lines, closed texture and harmonic proportions among others. It is painted throughout the body.[1]
Even in our modern society it is possible to realize that in the customary way we are used to dressing and usage it creates social circles of inclusion and exclusion. We weave relationships of astonishment and identification also from ornaments and the clothes Reproduce, question patterns of beauty or the use of ornaments goes through the psychological dimension of each human being, working on acceptance, identification, differentiation, individuality and collectivity concepts. The urban groups are great examples of this. Each aesthetics that these groups assume is an ideological spokesperson, their appearance comes full of concepts, behavior and reveals their life.
Lima’s work evokes a Leonardo Boff’s book, named A Águia e a Galinha (The Eagle and the Hen), in which he presents a very beautiful metaphor on human conditions inside these two perspectives. When he describes the life of the hen, he speaks about how it puts down roots; it stays in the battery and lives in that world, different from the Eagle which doesn’t put down roots and is always flying away and making nests. Thus, the author metaphors about the excellence of human conditions. Here we raise as an interpretative possibility, a parallel between Boff and Lima.
When human beings put down roots and construct their social place (like the hen in the battery), they use ornaments. Politicians, for example, need to wear their suits to put forward a “good image”; when looking for a job people wear “appropriate clothes” the same happens during Christmas and New Year celebrations; then the thinking of such individuals who introduce themselves into society is also thinking about how their image is to be suited to established patterns before the group that they want to belong to. In the same way, the individual who wants to question and doesn’t want to copy is going to search for clothes and ornaments which contrast with the imagetic paradigms of the social space in which they are inserted. Clothing is always present in the construction of the groups and the individuals, as well as the social differences and it doesn’t matter if it is acceptable or differentiated. The stereotypes speak out. It is not our intention to be simplistic in relation to the importance of clothes, ornaments and adornments, thinking that only they, by a kind of automatic way, determine the composition of our personality and sociability. . As a matter of fact, this discussion is much more complex. Our intention is simply to give space to a discussion from a current and very incendiary work such as Galinhas de Gala, as well as thinking about this “social corporal image” and its role in the relation that are established in our daily routine.
Schilder (1999:266-7) cited by Ferreira[1] enumerates very relevant questions about the personal imagetic construction process:
1 – The corporal images are never isolated. They are always surrounded by the other’s corporal images.
2 – The relation with other corporal images is determined by the proximity factor or spatial distance and by the factor of emotional proximity or distance.
3 – The corporal images are found closer and more deeply bonded at the erogenous zones.
4 – The erogenous zones transfers will also reflect in the social relation with the corporal images.
5 – The erotic changes of the corporal image are always social phenomena and they are followed by corresponding phenomena in the other corporal images.
6 – Corporal image are, in the beginning, social. Our own corporal image is never isolated. On the contrary, it is always followed by the other corporal images.
7 – Our corporal image and the corporal image of others do not depend primarily on each other. They have the same importance and one can’t be explained by the other.
8 – There is a continuous interchange among the parts of our corporal image and the corporal image of others. There is a projection and a personification. However, as well as this, we can take hold of the complete corporal image of the other person (identification), or deliver our corporal image as a whole.
9 – Corporal images of others and their parts can be completely integrated into ours and turn them into a unity, or they can simply be added to our corporal image, creating a simple sum.
10 – We are always emphasizing that the postural model of the body is not static and that it is always changing due to the circumstances of life. We face it as a creative construction. . It is constructed, broken and reconstructed [...]. When we create a corporal image which is suitable to our needs and tendencies, it doesn’t remain unchanged – there is a continuous flux, and each crystallization is immediately followed by a plastic stage, in which it is possible to have new constructions and efforts, according to the emotional situation of the individual.
All these questions about the aesthetic experiences in the construction of the already cited “social corporal images” bring doubts on the ethic elaboration in contemporary society, from the segregation among individuals who recognize each other, or not, reaffirm then the social detachment that many times culminates in cultural difference and hierarchy, each group recognizing themselves at the top of this social ladder which enclose the different cultures. We believe that differences shouldn’t motivate segregation, but the dialog and respect inside that social diversity of reality and truth. Laura Lima’s work is not worried about the hen’s welfare or its opposite, such as it was highlighted by the local media and by some social groups. On the contrary, its core resides in its reflexive potential about the human condition, showing the way as, many times, we are so suited in ours “henneries”, repeating speeches and world’s points of view so deeply rooted that we don’t allow ourselves to rethink the world that surrounds us from the “gala hens”.
1 Referência ao texto Sociologia da Imagem Corporal de Pedro Peixoto Ferreira. Doutorando em Ciências Sociais no Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Unicamp. Desenvolve atualmente pesquisa sobre as relações entre as técnicas do êxtase na música eletrônica e no xamanismo (apoio FAPESP), dezembro, 2003.
2 Ferreira, Pedro Peixoto. Sociologia da Imagem Corporal. 2003. p. 9.
3 S/autor. A ornamentação corporal como representação social dentro do contexto indígena. Os índios Kayapó: um estudo de caso. PUC-RIO – certificação digital 0410910/CB.
4 Idem; ibidem, p. 49.
5 Idem; ibidem, p. 60.
6 Ferreira, Pedro Peixoto. Sociologia da Imagem Corporal. 2003. p. 11.
