In The Archived Body, Priscilla Monge’s first solo exhibition in New York, the artist presents recent works accompanied by a selection of early pieces that allow us to see how, throughout her career, there has been a continuity in her “exploration of the indescribable.” The title includes two concepts that have been fundamental in her conceptual work: the body and the archive. The body as a possessed, violated, or forgotten organism, and the archive not only as a container of information but as a control and recognition tool. The show’s name also illustrates a measured use of the word and its weight in her work.
The exhibition begins with an iconic photograph from the 1990s, Trousers (Bloody Day Series) (1997), depicting pants made from sanitary napkins stained with menstrual blood on a red background. According to Monge, “From 1994 to 1996, I designed and made pants with my mother with sanitary napkins in different shapes and models. They were always exhibited as objects, but in 1997, I did a performance in which I walked through the streets of the city of San José wearing one of these pants that progressively absorbed my own menstrual blood. A garment generally used to protect or hide completely changed its function just by altering the material. It no longer served to hide or protect. It spoke of what is not spoken, of centuries of taboos associated with menstruation, with dirty or impure women who themselves became taboo. I was dealing with upbringing and my own bodily boundaries."1
Priscilla Monge began working in the early 1990s when Central America was just emerging from years of war and violence. This affected her work significantly. She always felt uncomfortable with the “neutral” position of her native Costa Rica in the face of conflicts that took place in neighboring countries. During the pandemic, she took up this topic again and began investigating the region’s armed conflicts: “I used the internet to investigate. I found testimonials from survivors testifying before Truth Commissions, news from the time, and a series of terrifying images that the algorithm suggested."2
Based on this research, she produced the series Los malos paisajes (Bad Landscapes, 2021), a hundred Polaroids scratched with graphite in which the images are completely covered. She only reveals texts belonging to testimonies of survivors of the massacres that serve as captions for the photos. The artist questions, as Susan Sontag does in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, who has the right to see these images of pain? Maybe that person can do something to alleviate what it’s seen. Rereading Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida reminded her that photographs are inextricably linked to death, a flat death. During the pandemic, she lost three of his pets. By burying them in her garden, it also became a cemetery, reaffirming the landscape’s complexity and nature’s capacity to hide or cover.
The song Strange Fruit, sung by Billie Holiday in 1939 and based on a poem written by Lewis Allan (n. Abel Meepol) criticizing the lynching of an African American man, inspired her to create the ceramic series Strange Fruit (2023), works that look like notebook pages on which he writes verses and makes drawings alluding to the lyrics of the composition. These are on display in the gallery in contrast to another early work, Cállese y cante (Shut Up and Sing, 1997-98), made with a black leather boxing helmet mounted on metal and wood and a music box that is activated by a hand crank placed on the hole that corresponds to the mouth. The piece, which was part of the installation presented at the Sixth Havana Biennial (1997), refers to the hidden identity of the boxer whose face is protected by the mask and to the expression “cantar” (to sing), used in Latin America when someone who is questioned by the police and who want a confession. In this context, the act of singing becomes a vehicle for physical violence and psychological abuse. It should be noted that the installation was conceived to be exhibited in La Cabaña. In this place, during the first days of the Cuban Revolution, prosecutions and executions of supporters of the overthrown regime were committed and later converted into a prison. In Havana and the exhibition in New York, the viewer had the opportunity to activate the music box and, when listening to the melody, metaphorically hear the voice of an anonymous being.
Physical violence and psychological abuse are also present in the Pensum Series (1999), a series of ten school blackboards written with white chalk with phrases such as “I must not bleed,” “I must not sleep,” “I must not hide in the closet,” and “I must not lose my sanity.” The blackboards are a repetitive element in Monge’s work, as are the school desks represented in the drawings entitled School Desk Drawings (2021-2022), which can be associated with an authoritarian educational system and “with a linear language that it is very different from art or dreams, which are freer. In the artwork, an activity such as admonishment ceases to be a school punishment to symbolize a penance that involves women or denounces child abuse, among others."3 Blackboards, desks, and notebook sheets become denunciation tools by serving as support for texts such as “I shouldn’t let dad touch me” [Pizarra (Blackboard), 1999] or “Representing death is a failure” (Representing Death is a Failure, 2021-2022).
Death and the images that document it are also latent in The Archived Body (2022-23), prints on Polaroid photographic paper intervened with oil in different shades of red. “These paintings enter another dimension of violence. Here, I speak of fractured or wounded bodies in literature."4 Words written by hand as a photo caption refer not only to war conflicts but also to wounds in general, to illness in literature, and to the female characters that inhabit it.
The texts, in some cases crudely descriptive and in other critical and even sarcastic, play a fundamental role in her work, as can be seen in two pieces engraved in marble as epitaphs entitled Art is Haunted (2022) and Poetic Justice (2022). The latter raises the possibility of a deserved retribution for so much suffering.
Faced with a violent and heartbreaking reality, Priscilla Monge proposes the healing option in the video titled Superficies curativas/Healing Surfaces (2022). If, according to psychoanalysis, speaking allows healing to the extent that the artist makes a public statement through art, that healing extends to other people. The small storytelling in the video enables her to go beyond her own experience and express the pain of others. It is up to the viewer to assume an attitude of empathy or to remain “neutral” or oblivious to the pain of others.
NOTES
1. Priscilla Monge, interview with the author, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
FRANCINE BIRBRAGHER-ROZENCWAIG, PHD