Making Sense of Violence

Until relatively recently it seemed difficult to reach a consensus on the very existence in Peruvian art history of work that deals with issues of gender and sexuality. The paucity of local curatorial projects and critical writing that engage feminist politics and the gap between feminist movements and artistic practices—a gap that has begun to be bridged since the 1980s—make it appear that art has contributed little or nothing to feminist political debate. Similarly, male artists continue to outnumber female artists in the country's major art collections; more exhibitions of male artists are held and books on their work published. This ongoing imbalance is not happenstance but an effect of unequal opportunity and recognition for the work of women artists on a local cultural circuit that reproduces the exclusion, discrimination, and symbolic violence that characterize broader social life. Problems include obstacles to entering the labor market, unequal pay, prejudice and stereotypes about what women are capable of, poor pregnancy and maternity leave and benefits, and sexual harassment. Despite all this, many women artists have introduced other ways of envisioning art and addressing politics. With words, images, objects, and formulations, many of the artists discussed here have dared to reshape the patriarchal social order. Their determination to create ushered in the future.

Gender and Sexuality in Avant-garde Art

As part of a process of national modernization, the 1950s witnessed a series of debates that questioned male privilege and expanded the public sphere. In late 1955 Peru became the second-to-last country in Latin America to grant women the right to vote and thus to give them legal and political equality and to recognize them as full citizens.^# It is symptomatic that, over the course of the twentieth century, a large number of women educated as artists chose not to participate in the art scene, whether due to lack of opportunities to show their work, the decision to pursue employment that—unlike art—might allow them to support themselves financially, or the demands of the unpaid domestic work associated with marriage.

Starting in the 1960s, women artists such as Teresa Burga (b. 1935), Gloria Gómez-Sánchez (1921–2007), Yvonne von Mollendorff (b. 1949), and Cristina Portocarrero (b. 1943) participated in the experimental avant-garde art scene that revolved around environments, happenings, and works in a pop art aesthetic. While there have been general readings of that experimentalism, little has been said about the distinctive contributions of women artists. Burga and Gómez-Sánchez—the only women members of the avant-garde Arte Nuevo group (1966–68)—addressed concerns related to the body, gender, and sexuality.^# Their scrutiny of the regime of the male gaze and of the traditional rhythms of domestic life and of family dynamics is evident in works such as the environment Objetos (Objects, 1967; fig. 1), in which Burga painted the outline of a partly undressed female body vanishing into a bed's sheets, pillows, and headboard. In La corbata (The necktie, 1968; fig. 2), Gómez-Sánchez staged an unruly and undisciplined sexuality in a hyperbolic female body out of which surfaces a long tie that challenges the power of masculine culture. Both artists used furniture from their own homes to signal private spaces as places of control and exploitation, appropriating as well the codes of fashion to parody sexism in the representation of women. Most critics, however, discussed the work of women artists in formalist terms, demonstrating their inability to capture the spirit of protest and disobedience that a strident pop aesthetic concealed.^#