Querying and Queering the Virgin - Iconography and Iconoclasticism in the Art of Frida Kahlo

8/13/2019 Querying and Queering the Virgin - Iconography and Iconoclasticism in the Art of Frida Kahlo

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identity or identities: woman; daughter; mother; lover; wife; Mexican. Her paintings

embrace opposites and dualities — the private and the public, the individual and the

collective, the immanent and the universal, christian and pagan, the occidental and the

oriental — resulting in a body of art work that is mythic in construction. Mythic,

because meaning remains enigmatic and unforeclosed: at play. In creating works that

remain enigmatic, that investigate the meaning of meaning, Kahlo’s works, I suggest,

reveal that the centred subject doesn’t exist; that it is the notion of the centred subjectwhich is itself a mythical construct.

2. Queering the Norm

This paper was initially intended to primarily address Kahlo’s subversive use of the

iconography of the virgin, hence the title ‘Querying and Queering the Virgin’. However,

in the course of writing the paper, my focus has developed to include a more expanded

consideration of her use of religious and spiritual iconography. The reason for this

pertains to some of the concerns with contemporary analyses that I have alluded to

already. Concentrating specifically on her subversive use of ‘feminine’ iconography runs

the risk of further delimiting the free play of meaning in Kahlo’s oeuvre as the religious

iconography that she draws on queers our received notions of gender identifications. I

do not wish to elide, or negate, the profound interrogation into her own sexual and

gendered identity that is evident in Kahlo’s work. Rather, it is an attempt to rescue

Kahlo from being perceived, in the first instance, or in the only instance, as a ‘female

artist’. Whilst her work critiques gender and sexuality from the situatedness of being a

woman, I wish to suggest that her paintings can be re-situated as provocations to an

enquiry into the potentially deterministic or essentialising discourses that adhere to

codifications of the categories ‘female’ and ‘feminine’, indeed to the category of

‘womanhood’ itself, and consequently, to the concepts of self and selfhood. In

provoking such an enquiry her works institute a critique into the codes and signs which

inform our concepts of gendered identity, questioning the foundations upon which suchcodes and signs are founded. Her paintings reflect a complex concern with gender but

they also offer a subtle analysis of the problematics inherent within the representation of

identity per se, ‘queering’, I would suggest, the possibility to manifest or affirm any

identity as stable or centred. Queer theorists highlight the role of performativity in

creating and maintaining identity, focusing on the failure of the individual to manifest or

lay claim to identity as an ontologically stable category. David Halperin explains queer

theory thus:

Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.

There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an

essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis thenormative.1

According to Halperin, Queer interrogates the ‘normative’, the centre, of which I have

already spoken. Sexual and gendered identities are embedded within a web of social,

cultural, historical, political and ideological fabrics. In order to queer sexual identity it is

important not just to ask questions regarding the centrality of sexed identities but rather

to extend this inquiry into the frameworks of the entire social order itself . In 2004 L.

Edelman posited an epistemological move from the deconstruction of the subject

towards a deconstructive analysis of the social order in its entirety. His psychoanalytic

deconstruction of the social order reviews the means by which modern humanity is

inflicted by a fear of mortality that, he claims aims to ‘suture over the hole in theSymbolic Order’.2



I wish that I had more time to discuss Edelman’s insight at more length but it is

relevant to refer his suggestion to an analysis of Kahlo’s paintings as her work is infused

with symbols of life and death.3 Suffice to note that Kahlo uses such symbols to create a

cosmology of transformation which conflicts with and critiques the varying occidental

symbologies of mortality which are melancholic; I will return to this point later. Kahlo’s

interrogation of subjectivity is in accord with Halperin’s claim that queer is ‘whatever is

at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant’. Her enquiry into thephenomenology of subjectivity encompasses an investigation into the performativity

inherent in the categories of normativity and centrality that are embedded in notions of

identity, and hence in the fabric of the social order itself.

3. Kahlo the Postmodernist

Whilst there is an undoubted synthesis of modernist devices in Kahlo’s work which

have been widely evaluated by other scholars, I suggest that her paintings are

profoundly proto-postmodern in spirit. Many contemporary post-structuralist theorists

have posited that it is impossible to reveal or fully manifest the subject as the subject is

only a construct of discourse. Kahlo’s subject is acknowledged as de-centred, unfixed,

dynamic and in-process. Being an attempt but ultimately a failure to articulate, to reveal

the subject, Kahlo’s paintings attest to the impossibility of revealing a stable identity. By

demonstrating the ellipses that are inherent in the articulation of subjectivity, her

paintings testify to a subject in a continual process of becoming; a subject in poiesis.

This subject questions the veracity of a centred, stable subject, revealing the centred

subject as a mythic construction.

In recent years Frida Kahlo has become a modern icon. The advent of ‘Fridamania’,

concurrent with the generic phenomenon of the cult of the celebrity in contemporary

culture, has contributed to a reification of Frida Kahlo’s life and image at, I would

suggest, the risk of a serious evaluation, or re-evaluation of her art. Emanating from theintense scrutiny focused on her personal life — her marriage to Diego Rivera, her

sexuality, her ill-health — much contemporary analyses of her work have fetishised the

autobiographical elements of her life and situated Kahlo as emblematic of female

victimhood, an effigy of particular prevailing stereotypes, mistreated wife, childless

woman, narcissistic self-obsessive, and alienated daughter, to name but a few. This

interpretative tendency is evident even in the texts that accompany many contemporary

exhibitions.4 In perceiving Kahlo primarily as a confessional artist, there is a failure to

address the subversive, transgressive and transformative nature of her work.

Undoubtedly her life informed her art. My point here is not to deny this. Kahlo always

claimed that she painted ‘her own reality’ but hers is an aberrant reality; a reality in

which fact and fiction coalesce, indeed become indistinguishable. But painting orrepresenting reality is not the same as revealing a life. Therefore, interpretations of her

work which rely on Kahlo’s biography as a means of interpreting her work fail to

distinguish facticity from mimetic mediated artistic expressions.

(SLIDE 2: The Broken Column 1944)

4. Theatricality and Performativity in the Art of Frida Kahlo

In Exposed by the Mask:Form and Language in Drama, theatre director Peter Hall asks

the question ‘what is theatrical truth?’, to which he answers:

[...] clearly it is not the same truth as everyday life [...] The actor is asked to pretend — to

simulate — many things which he may know about: love, anger, jealousy, happiness,

merriment.5



Hall then adds:

[...] both actor and audience experience the emotion, but remain - as they might not in life -

in control. Lack of control never produces art; and lack of control is never capable of

appreciating art.6

Implicit in Hall’s suggestion is the presence of a certain limiting restraint within

theatrical dramatic technique and device. The same can be said of art. Aesthetic

techniques and devices require simulation but also require control. Many critics have

pointed to an unrestrained outpouring of emotion, an emotional ‘blood-letting’ within

Kahlo’s oeuvre. Whilst it is clear that in her work Kahlo does not shy away from

representing the terrible, the traumatic, such critics fail to take into account, as I have

suggested earlier, that in her paintings Kahlo offers an aesthetically mediated

representation of her experiences. A detailed study of her work evidences her

considerable restraint, both in the composition and the execution of her canvases. Finely

painted, with an eye to delicacy and detail (there is a labyrinthine breadth of

signification at play in her compositions), Kahlo’s paintings are also theatrical; they area staging in which experience is simulated, modulated and controlled. Kahlo seemed to

have understood that art is theatre. According to Hall theatre, and myth, are privileged

modalities that help us to grapple with the most enigmatic mysteries of life: birth and

death, love and loss, desire and despair, revenge and forgiveness. Kahlo, in using the

artifice of braiding fact and fiction, history and myth, the personal and the public, the

individual and the collective, the everyday and the theatrical, critiques ‘identity’ through

performance. In this performative enactment she draws attention to a hiatus between life

and art as performing the role of a victim or martyr is not the same as ‘being’ one or the

other.

Kahlo was pre-occupied with death and the fragility of her body (her childhood and

teenage years were afflicted by an early bout of polio which affected her right leg, and

the tramcar accident which she was involved in as a teenager in which a pole cut

through her back and her vagina, resulting in many operations and health

complications). Her work testifies to her life experiences and can be seen as an

ontological and phenomenological enquiry into life, death, pain and suffering. But this

enquiry is made through the mediation of art and is thereby experience is transformed

through art.

5. Queering and Queering the Sacred and the Profane

I will now survey Kahlo’s radical deployment of religious and spiritual iconographies inorder to suggest that her paintings can be re-evaluated as a phenomenological enquiry

into the ontology and metaphysics of subjecthood. Born in 1907, three years prior to the

Mexican revolution, Kahlo grew up in postcolonial Mexico amidst a cross-fertilisation

of cultures — Hispanic, American and indigenous — and surrounded by socialist,

liberal, anarchist and populist movements. Raised as a Catholic, she was also well-

versed in the multifaceted aspects of the belief systems of the Aztec culture, and in

indigenous and popular beliefs and folklore. This painting


demonstrates the synthesis at work in her painting. We see the corset that is holding her

body together. Her flesh is cleft and her spinal column exposed, but replaced by a

fractured Ionic column. The scarring of her flesh is reflected in the scarred landscape in



which she is situated. The fabric covering her lower torso is reminiscent of the cloth

draped around the crucified christ

(SLIDE 3: Crucified Christ)

seen here in paintings from the Italian and Spanish Baroque period and the nails in her

body are reminiscent of the multitudinous paintings of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

(SLIDE 4: Saint Sebastian)

thus echoing recurrent motifs in christian iconography. However, there is none of the

pathos or homoerotic subtext of such representations. Whilst iconographically indexing

these paintings, the figure and face in The Broken Column remain impassive and

implacable.


In addition, whilst also referencing the female nude, Kahlo’s naked body defies theconventions of the female nude in the canon of Western art, being neither exhibited as a

spectacle for scopophilic viewing pleasure, nor observed as a contained, safe and

passive declaration of feminine virtue.7

Kahlo’s face, mask-like, enigmatic, expressionless, nevertheless weeps fountains of

tears, alluding to La Llorona whom is an Mexican folklore archetypal ‘outsider’ woman

— the antithetical ‘Other‘ — of the wife and mother ‘insider’ woman ideal. La Llorona

is sexual and maternal like the wife and mother, but her sexual and maternal energy are

deviant and subversive, a threat to the dominant patriarchal order. La Llorona is a social

outcast, unmarried, and abandoned by her lover and, like Medea, she kills her own

children in a fit of rage after being abandoned by her lover. Employing La Llorona —

the ‘Other’ of the normative construct of woman — as she did in many of her self-

portraits and in referencing Christian symbology, Kahlo fuses the sacred and the

profane. This allows Kahlo to interrogate the symbolism of Christian sacrifice. The

symbolism of Christian sacrifice — the divine martyrdom of the saint and Christ’s

sacrifice and death on the cross — as a universal allegory for all human suffering is

disturbed by Kahlo placing of herself, the individual, in the frame.

In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry suggests that personal pain is ultimately

untranslatable, yet experienced intensely by the psyche and body of the sufferer. 8 Scarry

argues that physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the human world,whereas conversely human creativity has the potential to transform of pain and

contribute to the making of the world. The Christian symbolism of martyrdom

allegorises pain from the universal to the personal, whereas in The Broken Column

Kahlo synergetically weaves from the personal to the universal. The phenomenological

experience of private pain is transformed into an allegory that demonstrates the

ultimately untranslatable, enigmatic nature of pain, whilst still paying testament to the

experience of the sufferer. Kahlo undertakes an iconoclastic move from the personal to

the collective rather than the converse dynamic demonstrated by traditional Christian

symbologies.



6. Retablos and Ex-votos

(SLIDE 6: Examples of Ex-votos)

In her paintings of the 1940s Kahlo adopted the characteristic format of Mexican

retablos and e x-voto paintings. Both emblematic Catholic traditions, retablos and ex-

votos were devotional paintings usually painted onto tin by lay people as an offering ofgratitude to a particular saint, the Virgin, or Christ, in thanks for salvation from illness, a

calamity or an accident.

(SLIDE 7: A Few Small Snips)

A Few Small Snips, 1935, is executed in the medium of an ex-voto. Kahlo had read a

news report of a drunken man who had allegedly stabbed his female companion twenty

times but who later defended his actions to the judge by claiming that he had only given

the lady ‘a few small snips’. This painting, a humor noir, addresses the destructive

nature of love. Unlike the visual representations of Jesus in his Passion and in numerous

images of the Pieta in which Jesus is shown bloodied and wounded, in Kahlo’s paintingit is the woman who is bleeding and tortured whilst her tormentor — reminding us of

the Roman soldiers regularly depicted in scenes from the Passion — stands over her. I

mention this painting because Kahlo once again utilises the sacred in order to draw our

attention to the everyday, to the profane. She employs the format of the religious ex-voto

(she owned many herself) and uses parody as a Bakhtinian liberatory device to critique

the imbalance of power relations evident between the two genders in the painting.

Theorists who interpret Kahlo’s work as, primarily, an emotional ‘bloodletting’ often

fail to take account of the highly self-conscious black humour evident in much of

Kahlo’s work.

Similarly the ex-voto device is utilised in this painting

(SLIDE 8: Henry Ford Hospital 1932)

which details the miscarriage that Kahlo had experienced earlier that year, 1932. Again

the Catholic format of the ex-voto is used to express a dramatic event, or as Kahlo

herself claimed ‘a closing of a critical event and [a] continuing with life’.9 This painting

can be viewed as an anti-nativity scene. In this painting Kahlo represents another side to

the reality of motherhood: the loss of a child rather than the birth. Again, Kahlo deploys

the image of the weeping La Llorona, the marginalised one, to disrupt conventional

Mother-Child roles and to suggest herself as outcast and marginalised due to the loss ofher child.

(SLIDE 9: Birth or My Birth 1932)

There is no precedent for such a frank depiction of childbirth in the history of Western

art. This painting, another anti-nativity scene and a radical representation of the female

body, departs from the tradition of the female nude. Executed and completed shortly

after Kahlo’s miscarriage and her mother’s death, it relates to two deaths, a birth and

possibly a re-birth. None of the three figures visible in the painting are apparently alive.

The mother’s head is shrouded beneath the sheet and could reference Kahlo’s own

mother or Kahlo herself. The birth could reference Kahlo’s recent miscarriage or herown birth. But equally the painting could reference the ‘re-birth’ of the artist after the

trauma of her recent experiences. The play of meaning within this painting remains



enigmatic. Employing the ex-voto format and positioning the devotional image of the

Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin of the Sorrows, over the bed10

(SLIDE 10: Mater Dolorosa)

this painting once again depicts through allegory, personal pain and trauma. By

referencing the humanity of the Virgin’s suffering offers Kahlo a means to convey theintimacy of extreme bodily and psychological pain.

(SLIDE 11: Birth or My Birth 1932)

Even though the iconic Mater Dolorosa is positioned over the bed, her image is reduced

in importance in Kahlo’s use of pictorial space in which the woman’s genitalia, the

marital bed and the child’s head which are placed in the centre of the frame. Kahlo

seems to parody the symbolic Christian manifestations of motherhood and femininity

ascribed to the Virgin. In depicting the bloodied act of childbirth — which,

iconographically is abject, forbidden, taboo, foreclosed — and in allowing the genitalia

and the bed to take centre stage, Kahlo desacrilises the iconography of the virgin birth.This image of the Aztec goddess Tlazolteol in childbirth

(SLIDE 12: Goddess Tlazotel in the Act of Childbirth)

was known to Kahlo. Kahlo’s referencing the Goddess in this way brings other

symbologies of motherhood within the frame. In this image the Goddess seems to be

giving birth to a child with an adult’s head and the child in Kahlo’s seems to reference

the image of the Goddess.11 Tlazolteol was a goddess associated with fertility, but also

with filth, sexual excess and disease but also with purification and curative properties.

Thus Kahlo may be re-claiming the act of childbirth from abjecthood but also

referencing her own creative artistic ability too.

(SLIDE 13: My Birth 1932)

Again, Kahlo deploys a syncretic weaving of multiple iconographies in a move from the

personal to the universal experience of pain and suffering, employing both the Goddess

and the Mater Dolorosa as creators of life and redeemers of humanity, the Mater

Dolorosa by virtue of her suffering with her son Jesus and the Goddess by virtue of the

act of childbirth.

My Nurse and I (SLIDE 14: My Nurse and I 1937)

once again re-configures the Madonna and Child format. This painting is often

interpreted through Object Relations theory. Such interpretations suggest that this

painting evidences Kahlo’s psychological alienation from her own mother. The infant

Frida was not being breastfed by her own mother who was ill when Frida was born.

Instead she was breastfed by a wet nurse who was a local indigenous woman. However,

there are other symbologies at work in this painting that inform a more nuanced

dialectical interpretation.

Here we have an adult-faced Frida in the arms of an indigenous woman whose breastsare leaking milk and whose face is obscured by a mask (and we can recall to mind the

image of the Goddess Tlazteol in the act of childbirth and Carl Jung’s suggestion that



such images and deities are universal archetypes that demonstrate the psychical kinship

of all humanity). Here in this painting we see Frida being fed from the breast of a

woman who was not her mother but whose milk is providing her with nourishment. The

woman’s left breast is decorated with white vines or veins through which the milk

oozes. In pre-Columbian cultures the celestial Ceiba Xcache tree was the tree which

gave eternal succour to infants who died prematurely or in childbirth so this painting

possibly references to this celestial tree. Ritualistic masks were used by the Aztecs atsacrificial ceremonies. The device of the mask suggests other alternative interpretations

of this painting other than a representation of alienation. Perhaps this painting is a

homage to the sacrifice of the indigenous woman whose milk kept Kahlo alive when she

was an infant? This painting may also reference the archetype of the Universal Mother

(in the Aztec tradition of the Goddess) so it could be perceived as creating another

dialectic between Pre-Columbian and Christian symbologies of motherhood and

childbearing.

In Aztec culture, which practiced human sacrifice, to be sacrificed was an honour for the

chosen individual. This work recalls the observation I noted earlier when speaking of

Edelman (who claimed that the West is haunted by a morbid fascination with death, the

‘hole in the Symbolic Order’ which we strive to conceal). The attitude to death in Aztec

culture was entirely different as they believed in a more cyclical relationship between

life and death; death being culturally elaborated as simply the transit from one

manifestation of being to another.12 Thus by using the artifice of fusing varying

ideologies, Kahlo seems to question the West’s morbid fascination, and denial, of

death.13 This work is infused with a symbolic reciprocity between life and death, death

and sacrifice being situated in terms of a means of exchange, a transition or

transformation, between states of being, rather than an end in itself.

7. Blood and the Sacred Heart MexicoThe Ecce Homo — the flagellation and mortification of Christ in his Passion — is a

popular theme in Spanish Catholic art. The Ecce Homo took on a bloodied bent in

Spanish painting but even more particularly in Mexican religious art which depicts a

profoundly bleeding and brutalised Christ figure. Being morbidly fascinating the

hispanic Ecce Homo is an allegory of death which perhaps permits a sublimation of

death rather than a confrontation with it.14 Blood figures prominently in Kahlo’s

paintings but for her blood signified a double theology: the sacrificial blood of the

Christ of the Eucharist and the blood of the human sacrifices to Tezcatlipoca. In both

traditions blood is symbolically elaborated as the quintessential symbol of life. Both

traditions elaborate the ingestion of blood (in the Catholic tradition in the Eucharist and

the Aztec tradition of drinking sacrificial blood) as a means to bring the spiritual world

closer to the relative world. However, there is a distinct difference in the significance of

blood in the two traditions. The Catholic faith elaborates heaven as the site at which

man is returned to a state of grace (before the fall) whereas for the Aztecs the spiritual

life is not so much the afterlife, as another dimension of life and being that co-exists

with the relative world.

In this painting

(SLIDE 15: Roots 1943)

Kahlo’s naked body is covered by what appears to be a traditional Mexican skirt with

roots that grow into the soil of her native land. In the place of her heart is an open



wound and it is from here that Kahlo’s roots spring. The roots growing are from the

Calotropis Procera, the death plant — known as the Apple of Sodom — which

contained a toxic substance that Mexican people used to commit suicide. Here Kahlo

transforms the toxic substance into blood (a life-giving substance) which appears to

nourish the earth. This painting references another ‘outsider’ woman in the Mexican

symbolic lexicon: La Chingada. La Chingada (literally meaning ‘fucked one’) is a trope

found in popular Mexican song and folklore who the archetypal woman who has beenraped and brutalised through colonial invasion. The term also refers to La Malinche, the

‘mistress’ of the conquistador Hernán Cortés.15 The ‘open wound’ in Kahlo’s paintings

references La Chingada, this forced open, screwed and violated woman, yet in Kahlo’s

painting she depicts her roots as springing from this open wound and the roots are

nourished by Kahlo’s blood. The symbolic inference of the chingada as victim is re-

enacted but transformed by the suggestion that Kahlo as a mestizo Mexican woman can

heal and sustain herself and her cherished homeland.

(SLIDE 16: The Sacred Heart)

Kahlo also deployed the symbology of blood and the allegory of the Sacred Heart in oneof her most noted paintings

(SLIDE 16: The Two Fridas 1939)

which was painted during her separation and divorce from Rivera. This painting depicts

two Fridas, one in traditional Mexican costume, dressed the way that Rivera admired

most. In her hand she holds a photo of Rivera and her heart is exposed but whole. On

the left, dressed in colonial wedding dress is the unloved Frida, with a heart that is

broken and dripping.

Though Kahlo represents herself as a split subject, the image on the left seems to be

gaining sustenance from the transfusion taking place from the image on the right. The

Sacred Heart, a universal Christian symbol for pain and suffering is connected to the

personal by Kahlo’s iconographic appropriation, the artist receiving nourishment from

herself, perhaps symbolising the unequivocal, untranslatable, nature of personal pain but

also the ability to attempt to heal the self within oneself. In this painting Kahlo creates a

dialectical conversation between the reference to Catholic collective symbolic imagery

and her own personal and relative situatedness by provoking the multiple elements and

co-existent antagonisms within her own identity — indigenous and colonial, personal

and collective, sacred and profane — which echo the conflict within the mestizo race

who were neither fully European nor fully Mexican Indian, neither entirely pagan norCatholic. Acknowledging the co-existent dualisms that reside within herself, and

allowing these dualisms to remain unresolved but always in poiesis, in a process of

transformation or becoming something else, attests to the instability and undecidability

of the normative identity tags: Mexican, Indian, pagan, Catholic.

(SLIDES, 18, 19 & 20)

These paintings re-work symbologies of the Sacred Heart also, but I am not going to

have time to go into them today. I pass over them in order to demonstrate the

multiplicity of approaches that Kahlo employed to re-enact and thereby, re-script, the

symbolic allegory of the Sacred Heart.





rouse the interest of an unrequited love or to provoke the return of a lover gone astray.

Here Kahlo is accompanied by a cat and a spider monkey, a symbol of lust. Thorns

signify grief, tribulation and sin and the crown of thorns placed on Christ’s head was a

parody of the Roman Emperor’s festal crown of roses. Once again, Kahlo weaves and

synthesises pagan and Christian iconographies in an attempt to testify at once to the

experience of pain and the profound inability to fully articulate the experience of that

pain externally. Kahlo’s mask-like face which stares directly at the spectator, out intothe world, compares to the suffering Christ who gazes heavenward for spiritual

salvation.

9. The Love Embrace of the Universe

(SLIDE 22: The Love Embrace of the Universe,

The Earth (Mexico), Me, Diego and Mr. Xólotl 1949)

In her diary, written towards the end of her life, Kahlo continually drew and re-drew

both the Third Eye motif and the Yin/Yang symbol. The Third Eye becomes a recurring

motif in Kahlo’s self-portraits and later works and is evident here in the Third Eye that

she places in the middle of Rivera’s forehead. Though depicted as an adult, Rivera is

naked, and Kahlo holds him in her arms like a baby. Kahlo herself is held within the

embrace of the embodied Mexican earth, and it is this figure which grounds her in the

landscape. The painting is divided in half by the dark of the moon and the light of the

sun which signifies that the cosmos is a union of opposites, a belief held by pre-

Columbian peoples.

The breasts of the Mexican Earth mother, who embraces Rivera and Kahlo, drip milk

and she in turn is enclosed in the arms of the cosmological goddess who is formed out

of light and dark, the sun and moon. The cacti evident in the background enhance thefeeling of protection around the couple and attest to Mexico, as perhaps, their spiritual

home. The dog resting on the arm of the goddess is Dr. Xólotl, Kahlo and Rivera’s pet

dog. In Aztec belief this breed of dog accompanied the dead to the afterworld and was

considered to be both the shamanic alter-ego (nahual) or animal daemon of the goddess

Quetzacoatl and the ancient Chichimec warrior Xólotl who was the ancestral warrior-

precursor to the Aztecs. Both Frida and the goddess are connected by their slashed

necks. The omnipresence of life and death infuses this painting. A symphony of

dualisms, attesting to the simultaneous presence of seeming opposites, this painting

announces a profound interrogation into the dualistic philosophies of the Enlightenment

which situated matter into binary opposites. Here we have the sun and the moon, night

and day, male and female, child and adult, wife and husband, mother and child, but noneof these dualisms are represented within a traditional iconographic framework. The

dualisms are placed in conversation rather than in opposition and the varying imagery is

at play in an infinite, un-hierarchic and unresolved dialectic.

10. Conclusion

If anyone remains unconvinced of Kahlo’s anarchic stand with regard to the ‘normal,

the legitimate, the dominant’ demands of the centre, and her willingness to embrace and

inhabit the margins, the undecided and liminal space, then this explanation she offered

of her depiction of Rivera in The Love Embrace of the Universe may help to illustrate

her convictions:



Diego’s form is that of an affectionate monster, which the grandmother, the Ancient

Concealer, the necessary and eternal matter, the mother of men, and all the gods invented

by them in their delirium, out of fear and hunger, THE WOMAN, and among all of them - I

MYSELF - would like always to hold in her arms like a newborn child.

HIS CONTENT: Diego exists to one side of all personal, limited and precise relations.

Contradictory like everything that moves life, he is at once an immense caress and a violent

discharge of powerful and unique forces.

He is experienced within himself, like the seed treasured up in the earth [...] Probably some

of you expect a very personal, “feminine” portrait of Diego from me, anecdotal,

entertaining, full of complaints and a certain amount of gossip, of that “decent” gossip that

can be interpreted and used in accordance with the morbidity of each reader. Perhaps you

expect to hear laments from me of “how much one suffers” living with a man like Diego.

But I don’t believe the banks of a river suffer from letting it flow between them, nor that the

earth suffers because it rains [...] For me everything has a natural compensation [...] If I

have prejudices and am wounded by the actions of others, even those of Diego Rivera, I

accept responsibility for my inability to see clearly [...] I have to accept that it is natural for

red blood cells to fight against white ones without the slightest prejudice and that thisphenomenon only signifies health.

He has an absolute lack of prejudices and, as a result, of faith, because Diego accepts — as

Montaigne did — that “where doubt ends, stupidity begins”, and that whoever has faith in

something admits his unconditional submission, without the freedom to analyse or to vary

the course of events.19

It would seem that far from situating herself as a victim, it was Kahlo’s belief all along

that ‘everything has a natural compensation’ as pain is a part of growth, just as the earth

doesn’t suffer ‘because it rains’. Alluding to Rivera’s scepticism in the faith required by

enclosed belief systems, Kahlo’s work demonstrates an inquisitory interest in manydifferent belief systems, a synthesis of different belief systems, and yet no hierarchical

value is attributed to any one system of belief in particular. Her paintings are an

enactment of her own mestizaje inheritance, in which conflicting elements, and here I

have spoken specifically about religious and spiritual elements but there are others, co-

exist without being determined.

These conflictual elements not only co-exist but they produce what Victor Zamudio-

Taylor has termed a ‘third space’. 20 This third space, a liminal, hybrid, dynamic space

of becoming, which is at once public and private, individual and collective,

monotheistic and pantheistic, invites an interrogation into the phenomenological,

ontological and metaphysical categories that have helped to create and inform our lived

and experiential realities. I would suggest that Kahlo’s radical aesthetic, her fusion of

ontological, epistemological and metaphysical categories is a demonstration of a

profound phenomenological investigation into subjectivity that demonstrates that

identity, whilst performative and experienced, is ultimately impossible to fully evidence.

This is not a denial of the subject but rather a celebration of the subject’s

unboundedness. And it is a reminder that artistic expressions are always addressed to

and assume the presence of the ‘other’; art needs the other.

Her iconoclasm is, then, profoundly ‘queer’ as it contests the ‘centre’, the normative, the

culturally hegemonic iconographies and categories of subjecthood. Her work paystestament to the performative nature of identity, whilst attesting to an ultimate failure to

fully evidence, manifest, represent or capture the subject. The margins from which



Kahlo’s art speaks articulate a new and personal mythology of the subject. A mythology

because meaning, whilst present, remains enigmatic, and in an open play of

signification. In a declaration solicited by the Institutio Nacional de Bellas Artes in

Mexico, Kahlo wrote:

I do know [that] they [my paintings] are the frankest expression of myself, without ever

taking into account the judgements or prejudices of anyone else. I have painted little,without the slightest desire for glory or ambition, in the hope, first of all, of giving myself

pleasure [...] From my travels, seeing and observing all I could, magnificent painting and

very bad painting as well, I have drawn two positive things: to try to be myself as far as

possible, and the bitter realisation that many lives would still be insufficient to paint as I

would like and all I would like.21

In Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Richard Kearney suggested that narrative imagination

may help us to move beyond past traumas in order to prevent them from becoming

fixated, pathological and melancholic frozen objects.22 Constructing a narrative that is

coherent with the subject’s future intentionality is the bedrock of success in Lacanian

psychoanalysis. Kahlo’s claim to have painted ‘the frankest expression’ of herself canbe interpreted as a retrospective narrative construction of her own situated experience

(our own personal narratives of ourselves are always partly fabricated as they are

constructed retrospectively, historically antecedent to the event). However, she also

claimed that ‘many lives would still be insufficient to paint as I would like and all I

would like’. This is where a phenomenology of poeisis resides in her painting. As she

continually paid testament to experience, she continued to witness herself as a subject in

the process of becoming, thus allowing personal experience — pain, suffering, trauma

— to be released from melancholic repetition.

In 1947, informed to some extent by the insights of Heidegger and Husserl, but

outlining her own phenomenology of being, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity in which she claimed that all individuals are ‘situated’ and it is from our

situatedness that we interact with the world.23 Acknowledging our situation, exposing its

enframings, is what she called the ‘ethical project’. For Beauvoir the ethical project is a

project of intent; an intent which must be perpetually self-reflexive for human beings,

and the situations they find themselves in, change through time. But the ethical project

is laden with difficulty for, according to Beauvoir, the subject is ambiguous. Being

caught between immanence (the brute facticity of existence) and transcendence (the

exercise of freedom), her subject can never fully reveal, or disclose themselves, even to

themselves but aiming towards ‘disclosure’ is, for Beauvoir, the ethical venture. My

suggestion is that this aim towards disclosure — an aim forever doomed to be anincomplete project but nevertheless a project worth undertaking — characterises

Kahlo’s work. If Beauvoir is correct and the aim towards disclosure means embarking

on a journey without aiming towards an end destination, then this is no ordinary

journey, it is a peregrination (peregrination is etymologically derived from from the

Latin peregrinationem for journey but also from peregrinus which means to be from

foreign parts, a foreigner). The subject of herself that Kahlo repeatedly returned to is a

subject who is not and cannot ever be entirely revealed or stabilised. It is a subject who

continually travels towards disclosure without ever fully attaining it. I suggest that

Kahlo’s attempt at disclosure is a phenomenological journey in poiesis; a journey which

is an ethico-aesthetic peregrination.



It would seem that Frida Kahlo aspired to live her life as she made her work. Both her

work and her life can still make a contribution to a critical investigation and re-

conceptualisation of the subject of modernity, and as I have attempted to suggest, of

postmodernity. The queries that she institutes regarding the politics of identity — the

multiplicitous identities, of subjects of all genders, nationalities, ethnicities, and

sexualities — and her peculiar ‘queering’ of the normative constructs of identity (and

the impossibility of these normative constructs of identity) still invite potent questionsregarding the re-invention and re-evaluation of the identities of ourselves — how we are

identified and how we chose to identify ourselves — and, just as importantly, the

identities of others.

(SLIDE 25)

1 David Halperin. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford University Press,1997, p.62.

2 L. Edelman, No Future, Duke University Press, 2004.

3 This would involve an analysis of Western interpretations of Kahlo’s work which have viewed her work through the

lens of Kleinian ‘Object Relations’ theory. I would offer an alternative analysis through Freudian and Lacanian

psychoanalysis, specifically the Freudian concept of the death drive and the Lacanian notions of desire, lack and

jouissance.4 Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: Masterpieces of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, Irish Museum of

Modern Art, Dublin, 6 April-26 June 2011.

5 Peter Hall. Exposed by the Mask: Form and Language in Drama, Oberon Books, 2000, p.16-17.

6 Ibid .

7 Compare, for example, to Jean August Dominique Ingres, Le Grand Odalisque, 1814 or the Sleeping Venus by

Giorgione, 1510, a nude available for our visual pleasure but whose hand still modestly covers her pubis.

8 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World , Oxford University Press, 1985.

9 M. Drucker. Frida Kahlo, New York, Bantam. 1991, p. 68.

10 The Mater Dolorosa being the iconic image of the weeping Virgin in the Pieta.

11 Carl Jung claimed that such deities were universal archetypes that demonstrated the psychical kinship of all humanity.

12 The Aztecs mummified the bodies of their dead and carried them around with them, thus instituting a link betweenancestral energy (still potent) and bodily lived experience in the world.

13 It would be interesting to review this painting through Sigmund Freud’s account of the death drive in his essay

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, first published in 1920, in which he gives an account of the drives and claims that the

human death drive (sometimes referred to as Thanatos) which is a drive towards self-destruction and a desire to return

to the inorganic is an opposing drive to Eros, the tendency towards survival, propagation of the species, sexual alliance,

and other creative drives.

14 Both Spanish and Mexican depictions of the flagellated Christ regularly depict the opened and flayed back of Christ

in graphic detail. Similarly, both Spanish and Mexican depictions of the weeping Madonna often depict the Virgin

weeping tears of blood.

15 La Chingada and La Malinche are reviewed in detail by Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico,

Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre, Grove Press, 1994. Pazoutlines the importance of La Chingada and La Malinche in the Mexican post-colonial psyche. He claims that La

Chingada represents the colonised and ravished Mexican land and that La Malinche represents the shadow side of the

post-colonial Mexican psyche which both resisted and colluded with their Imperial aggressors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Halperin

http://books.google.com/?id=o9ct-YPs66UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Saint+Foucault:+Towards+a+Gay+Hagiography&q=queer%20odds







16 Hall, p.24.

17 In ancient Greek Classical tragedy both the main actors and the chorus wore masks throughout the entire

performance. Greek tragedy drew on classical myth for inspiration and the Greek tragedian playwright continued to re-

interpret the Greek mythic inheritance. Both Sophocles and Euripides wrote tragic dramas about the Oedipus, for

example. Greek audiences would have been well-versed in the myth itself (of which their would have been many

versions and multiple significations). It was the task of the playwright to confer a particular interpretation on his own

staging of the myth. For example, in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Queen Jocasta hangs herself but in Euripides’sstaging of the Oedipus myth, in The Phoenician Women, Queen Jocasta is still alive and married to Oedipus despite

knowing he is her son.

18 Hall p.24 & P.26.

19 From ‘Portrait of Diego (sometime between 1948 and 50)’ in Frida by Frida, Selection of Letters, Texts, Forward and

Notes by Raquel Tibol, 2nd edition. Editorial, Mexico, 2006, pp. 346-7.

20 Victor Zamudio-Taylor. ‘Frida Kahlo: Mexican Modernist’ in Frida Kahlo. Walter Art Centre, Massachusetts, USA.

P.17.

21 Frida by Frida. P.315

22 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Routledge, 2003, p.182

23 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Citadel, 1947.

Documents

Querying and Queering the Virgin - Iconography and Iconoclasticism in the Art of Frida Kahlo