18.07.2022
Ana Segovia and the dismantling of a regime of signs
There is no suture; there is transfiguration of values. Ana Segovia’s painting rummages in the visual archives of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Hollywood movies of the forties, soccer, bullfighting, and in other boundaries that diagram a certain erotic configuration of masculinity in which the symbol is fixed, binary, delimited, and neurotic. If an archive exists, it is because those who dominate need to leave a trace of the essential gaze that recognizes them as such in areas like the patriarchal pact, love disguised as subjugation, the principle of identity linked to the border and the national, etc.
Attributes, motifs, gestures; an iconography where, supposedly, one appears as universal. But not only does the universal not exist (except as imposition and domination), but the patriarch sustains it insofar as he is incapable of returning the gaze of those with whom he relates, of making way for what happens in encounters: multiplicity.
In a despotic affective system, the person in power uses the person in front of them only as a receptacle and reflection of their own narcissism. The despot—the patriarch—perceives himself as great, while those of us around him know him to be ridiculous, violent, undesirable. In the essay “Sorties,” Hélène Cixous speaks of this domain as the great male imposture, in which:
Although Cixous situates her analysis in the male-female relationship, I propose to walk through her words to think about this and other power relationships where someone wants to be looked at, adored, satisfied, at the cost of the erasure of the one with whom they establish the bond. In this unequal relationship, the discourses that justify a person being in a position of submission under the neoliberal idea of personal choice and individual freedom, forget not only the singularity of each case but also that these positions stem from a collective agency, from a social group, which has validated and naturalized this type of interaction and violence: hit me but don’t leave me.
Logic where consent is displaced in favor of someone who believes oneself to be and establishes themselves as law: therefore, the others should obey and instantly annul the complexity of their desires, epistemologies, and images. Among the means of dissemination of collective agency (whether despotic or anarchic, etc.) cultural productions exist. Through them, grammars and syntaxes of the self are mimicked and distributed. In the case of the great masculine imposture, there is a seizure of the subjectivity of the other person, of their desiring flows, of their limits and anxieties.
Everything becomes a heliocentric system around the patriarch, the despot.
If the seizure of another person is not seen as serious, unusual, and reprehensible, it is partly because it is justified as part of a larger structure where such performativity not only happens repeatedly but even goes so far as to endow the parties involved with identity. This naturalization of an authoritarian desire is accompanied by a cosmological order, that is to say, by a reticular arrangement of the world with its landscapes, scenarios, objects, symbols, and motifs, which shape the relationship between the subjects, their bodies, and their spaces.
What does painting have to do with all of this? Needless to say, this medium has been a conduit for representations of the patriarchal world; for metaphorical productions that replace experiences and their affections with ideal images that erase contradiction and conflict in favor of coherence between meaning and subjectivity: classification of bodies and their functions. This is how the visual history of those in power has been told for centuries.
In addition to figures and narratives, the technical and aesthetic qualities of painting have contributed—often through beauty: the concordance of idea and form—to the production of fixed identities, among them the despotic. Portraits of the monarchy, national landscapes, women offered to the male desire of domination, the animal, the obscene image (without scene) of everything that does not agree with power, etc.
After painting, photography and cinema occupied this place of propagation of ideologies, of administration of images to be imitated, to be longed for, to the point where harmful processes are even desirable. Of course, not all paintings, not all photographs, not all films—we can even say that a medium or a work of art can contain both a conservative-despotic and a subversive side.
However, what I want to demystify is that art is naturally just, coherent, or political (as a space to question the political and discuss dissent).
Art, like any other meeting point, is susceptible to forgetting its layers of anachronistic times and flows to become a surface that is exhausted and defined by enumerating the recognizable elements on the plane. A surface that leaves aside what happens in the relationships between bodies, in gestures, and, above all, in what is outside the painting, in what did not manage to enter the regime of representation.
When I look at Ana Segovia’s paintings, I think of the power of suspicion when facing the flood of images in cinema and in painting that represent masculine desire, the surface that forgot its multiplicity and established a polar world. The paranoid suspicion which knows that something should be different, that something is out of place, what the great masculine imposture leaves out: everything that is not him and his desire. Potency becomes action when Ana returns to the images to paint them anew. Repetition introduces a critical commentary on the world that the masculine produced in its image and likeness.
Art, like any other meeting point, is susceptible to forgetting its layers of anachronistic times and flows to become a surface that is exhausted and defined by enumerating the recognizable elements on the plane.
The strategies to carry out suspicion in painting begin with a change in desire and eroticism. There is a cut and then a current: it is no longer about representation that dominates everything, but about a performativity where the act of painting is above all an action. A bodily and libidinal movement where one goes to the place where the body (the painter’s) suspects that it has tied a knot strong enough to organize the world to the point of turning the singular into an archetype. Ana walks all over painting, cinema, and the standardized images of a patriarchy that has drawn what is a man, a woman, an identity, a landscape, a love: a way of desiring.
The walk of Ana’s body, the painter’s body, dismantles the narrative by showing the distance between it and life, between the binary and the multiplicity, between the scene and everyday life. There is no suture, there is a transfiguration of values. That is to say, Segovia does not seek to propose a new order, to fall back into a valid narrative, but to point out how that which was proposed as love, as identity, as scenario, is a construction made from a regime of signs that must be dismantled. Impossible to invent a completely new language to do it, no one would understand it, but rather to go to the place where illusion became fact to underline—with paint—the joints of its staging. In repetition, the masculine reappears, but as an imposture.
Ana performs the operation of dismantling by using a strident color palette: harmonious, but at the same time far from the balanced contrasts of the images she refers to. A color jumps before the eye, leads it to an intensity that places it in front of the seams that unify the masculine: gestures and body postures linked to identities, phenotypical characteristics that make up an idea of beauty, scenarios that reticulate and hierarchize what each body must do in the scene. The imposture built from the figure of the masculine and its ornaments.
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I have been following Segovia’s work for some years now and I recognize the importance of the dismantling she proposes. So when the discomfort appears, it takes me by surprise. In her studio she tells me of a new suspicion, the classification of her work as queer:
The painter’s reflection leads me to think about how the regime of signs of masculine imposture can parasitize any kinds of themes and practices. I insist that here the masculine imposture is not genital, it is a heliocentric logical operation where everything is ordered from a limited number of properties, signs, and functions around the despot.
Throughout our conversation, Ana insists on queerness as performative. “Queerness is the being unintelligible to a system. There is something in doubt: male or female? In that question, something queer is already happening. In that lack of definition.”
Hélène Cixous and Catherine
Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Sally Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
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