The Contemporary Ex-Voto: Reenchanting the Art World? (2018)

twelve Place, Shrine, Miracle The Contemporary Ex-Voto: Reenchanting the Art World? Mechtild Widrich In the December 1980 issue of the Italian design magazine Domus, French critic Pierre Restany made public what is perhaps the best-known contemporary votive artwork: Ex voto a Santa Rita by Yves Klein, dedicated in 1961 in the convent of Santa Rita da Cascia in Umbria (fig. 12.1). As if to underline the eruption of a different context for the understanding of Klein’s offering, the journal’s table of contents was overlaid with a small pencil drawing of a burning candle and a small seashell (fig. 12.2).1 When the note was translated into English in the September 1982 issue of Studio International, it was placed alongside features on Joseph Beuys and James Turrell under the rubric “Art into Time: The Presence of the Past.”2 Before even delving into Klein’s work, then, the presence of the votive seen through the eyes of the art world around 1980 involves us in questions of belief, temporality, and their interrelation. 2 Widrich Detail of ig. 12.5. 3 Fig. 12.1 (EX-407) Yves Klein. Ex-voto dédié à sainte Rita de Cascia, 1961. Pure pigment, gold leaf, gold ingots, and writing in Plexiglass. Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY. © Yves Klein c/o Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, 2017. Fig. 12.2 (EX-408) Table of contents with Yves Klein, Ex-voto dédié à sainte Rita de Cascia, 1961. From Domus 612 (1980). Courtesy Editoriale Domus S.p.A. Temporality has been central to both the theory and practice of contemporary art since the 1960s, at a time when concepts such as Umberto Eco’s opera aperta led to a consideration of art not merely as inert objects but as processes involving producers and recipients, open-ended and as such including acts of interpretation, criticism, and the afterlife of the artwork.3 What makes votive practices pertinent to this aspect of contemporary art is the lexibility of address they allow: from offering thanks for hardships overcome to asking for future favors. Klein’s Ex voto, an object in honor of Santa Rita da Cascia, the saint of impossible and desperate cases, is a perfect example: “Saint Rita of Cascia, Saint of impossible and desperate cases, thank you for all the help so great, decisive and wonderful that you have given me so far. Endless thanks. Although I am not personally worthy, help me now and forever and in my art, and protect all that I have created which, despite me, is all, always, of Great Beauty. Klein’s complex act comprises not only the box and the dedicatory invocation, which in a way functions as a speech act, but also the three pilgrimages Klein and his wife, Rotraut Uecker, made to Cascia between 1958 and 1961.6 Against Restany’s hagiographic reading of Klein as a true mystic, Thierry de Duve has drawn attention to the self-promotion of the “prayer to Saint Rita,” plausibly suggesting that Klein has substituted the art market and the success of his own art for the spiritual goals of religion: “When the mapping of the aesthetic ield onto that of political economy attains perfect congruence, Saint Rita takes the form of the representatives of art-as-commerce.”7 On this view of Klein’s offering as only precariously a religious object—it could point back to self-promotion, art-as-commerce, or something that would be stated differently so as to make the source of doubt clearer (and which might then point toward the performance/photograph illus- 4 Widrich Y. K.” ends Klein’s dedication. Before getting there, though, he asks for some further assistance as well: “May my Krefeld exhibition be the greatest success of the century and be recognized by all.”4 The plexiglass box, containing compartments with pigment (“le bleu, l’or, le rose, l’immatériel” in Klein’s usual style) and the folded dedicatory manuscript (often erroneously called a scroll), was given by the artist, as he had done with a 1958 blue monochrome, to the cloistered Augustinian nuns of Santa Rita da Cascia, who guard the saint’s reputedly intact remains and apparently only became aware of the aesthetic value of Klein’s donation much later.5 Klein, a Rosicrucian and admirer of the saint’s storied light from her home in Roccaporeno to the monastery in Cascia, asks her to protect his art; thus, it makes perfect sense to exemplify his wish with a mimetic miniature of the essence of his art: the blue, the gold leaf, immateriality, and his playful reiication of the ineffable and the absent. tration)—it might seem that it is doubt rather than certainty that characterizes the use of the ex-voto in postwar art. The relation between a performance and its photograph, which claims to preserve it but just as often constructs a particular view of a fugitive event, resembles the ex-voto by virtue of its assumed “indexical evidence and clarity of intent,” as Irene Small has argued: it promises a direct relationship between event and image that is mimetic (the one looks like the other) and yet must be taken on faith. 8 Take Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, originally performed in 1964 in Kyoto and Tokyo, in 1965 in New York, and in 1966 in London.9 Ono published the “score” for the event in 1966, which called for a performer to sit motionless on stage while audience members cut small pieces of the performer’s clothing to take with them. 10 The well-known photograph from the irst venue, the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto (fig. 12.3), while by no means the only known document of this series of events, might be taken to stand for an extraordinarily tense confrontation that the majority of its viewers did not experience. But it also serves as a stand-in for the sequence of quite different iterations of that performance through the sixties and as a compelling visual paradigm for Yoko Ono’s restaging of that performance in Paris in 2003 as a protest against the war in Iraq. 11 The document is thus not simple proof of the reality of an event or performance but rather refers to a network of action, intent, and context, making for a somewhat unstable performative act, one that will often assert, as Small puts it, the “impossibility of verifying the essential nature of the ‘documented’ event.”12 Just as the practice of the ex-voto involves doubt whether the saint will deliver the desired outcome, the document opens a discursive space more complex than the before-and-after of a miraculous effect. Such skepticism is a welcome and familiar feature of recent scholarship on performance art. But the space opened between the reality of a body and its visualization could also be connected to an ongoing process through the notion of the fragment. Not that the visual document is a literal fragment of the event; rather, photographs are, as in Ono’s case, one of many tools allowing us to imaginatively enter the relationship The Contemporary Ex-Voto 5 Conti silo Fig. 12.3 (EX-409) Yoko Ono. Cut Piece. Performed by the artist during “Farewell Concert: Strip-Tease Show,” Sogetsu Art Center Tokyo, August 11, 1964. © Yoko Ono. Fig. 12.4 (EX-410) Jasper Johns. Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surmounted by four tinted plaster casts in wood box with hinged front. Private Collection / Bridgeman Images. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. between body, notation, and durational event, a practice as characteristic to the art world as it is to traditional votive practice. The photograph—and its possibly multiple relations not just to bodies but also to events in the past, present (in the case of ongoing actions), or future (in the case of reperformance)—is, like the traditional votive object, a dense site of meaning for its public.13 The interplay between private speciicity and public display remains a pivotal element of the ex-voto’s appeal to postwar artists. The exchange value of traditional ex-votos often manifests itself in a mimetic quality of the object offered in exchange for the wish to be fulilled, or, in the case of a response to illness, the mimetic exchange of ailing body parts for good ones. Rather than expecting a miraculous cure, many post-1960s artists turn the implied exchange of the votive offering into a call for political action: a demand for involvement from the worldly spectator rather than from an absent or transcendent one. In part, this development has gone hand in hand with what we might call a “resacralization” of photography. If, early in his career, Roland Barthes presented the photographic image as an ideological cipher to be decoded, the publication of the melancholy, autobiographical Camera Lucida in 1980 drew readers’ attention to “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”14 Around the same time, the sculptural practice of casting body parts, such as hands and feet, and simulations of internal organs in transitory materials such as wax but also in durable metal picked up in response to the renewed attention to the late work of Marcel Duchamp, who cast many enigmatic fragments in preparation for his posthumously opened Étant donnés (1966). Though few got to see Duchamp’s objects, casts of body parts appeared in the boxes of Jasper Johns (fig. 12.4), suggesting in their primary colors and ana- 6 Widrich Fig. 12.5 (EX-411) David Wojnarowicz. Tommy’s Illness / Mexico City, 1987. Collage. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P•P•O•W, New York. tomical imperfection a world beyond the disembodied forms of abstract painting. 15 That many of these artists, from Johns to Bruce Nauman, have worked both in sculpture and performance art is signiicant, for it implies a beholder not simply of an object but of a process, one who accepts that the object seen may have links to actions outside the art gallery. The processual reception of such artwork-fragments becomes more forcefully a call for ethical response in the 1980s. The return to the body as fragile and mortal, which remains only implicit in these works, became central to the practice of artists working in New York during the AIDS epidemic, often with overt reference to popular religiosity. The votive as a paradigm for illness and mourning, and thus also a symbol of reality in contemporary art, informs the work of David Wojnarowicz, whose paintings and performances drew directly from the continuity of Mexican ex-voto traditions. In his 1987 The Contemporary Ex-Voto 7 work Tommy’s Illness / Mexico City (fig. 12.5), the vignette portrait of an ailing man in a hospital gown is surrounded by mass-produced images of popular devotion still current in Mexico and throughout the Catholic world: a pierced heart, a Virgen de Guadalupe keepsake, but also by more idiosyncratic if equally ready-made imagery: a knife and fork, a cactus creature, an earthquake-destroyed building, a hand clutching a family photograph, and “Los monstruos de Hollywood,” all clustered around a Frankenstein’s monster identiied with the medical establishment (asistencia medica), all of it set against a white painted ground that does not wholly occlude snatches of collaged comic-book illustration and newspaper headlines.16 In Tommy’s Illness the ex-voto has entered the subject matter of contemporary art along with a great variety of heterogeneous popular forms and techniques, but in another way the ex-voto is the form or vehicle of this entire collage painting, which offers these heterogeneous fragments and itself in an impossible exchange for the life of a friend.17 In the work of Wojnarowicz’s friend and colleague Kiki Smith, the ex-voto enters contemporary sculpture implicitly. Her casts are not just a private exploration of bodily affect, as has sometimes been claimed in the literature on “abject art.” Rather, Smith’s attention to humble parts of the body, its interior, and bodily luids, and even in the assimilation of scale and other mimetic elements of the objects portrayed, is not just formally linked to votive tradition. Womb (1986, fig. 12.6) is a bronze cast of an oversized (or perhaps gravid) uterus with fallopian tubes for handles—though obviously, as Christopher Wood notes of traditional wax ex-votos, it is not cast from a uterus. 18 Though Smith does not make the purpose of the object manifest in any way (except perhaps by the very literal title, and the provision of hinges), the implication of a private intention, much like that of a body-part ex-voto dedicated in a church, endows the sculpture with an imagined agency in the mind of the spectator, which at the same time polarizes the gallery space, assumed so often to be a neutral, disenchanted “white cube.” Other objects, such as Tongue and Hand (1985, fig. 12.7), a pair of painted plasters of roughly the same size, playfully explore 8 Widrich Fig. 12.6 (EX-412) Kiki Smith. Womb, 1986. Bronze. © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery. the body’s ability to communicate silently, whether by gesture or erotic insertion. Smith’s art has been discussed in relation to religious practices and votive forms, but we need to look more closely into the potentials for exchange that are set up through her art. 19 Smith herself insists on a transformative power of her sculptures based on an exchange value of desires or expectations she ascribes to them. The way Catholicism has employed artistic practice to allow for an emphatic exchange of feelings is important to her work. 20 Smith locates the connection not in the supericial resemblance of some of her works to traditional ex-votos but in their functioning as sites of exchange. This might be seen most concretely in the works about illness and hope for relief that do not feature body parts but evoke the body intensely. The installation Untitled (1986, fig. 12.8) consists of twelve clear glass bottles resembling the ones used in pharmacies, with inscriptions such as blood, vomit, semen, mucus, oil, and urine. Because the jars are empty, the labels allow Fig. 12.7 (EX-413) Kiki Smith. Tongue and Hand, 1985. Painted plaster. © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery. for multiple readings: are microscopic samples or spiritual essences of these bodily luids contained therein, or are these containers destined to receive them? Smith tends to express this open-endedness in religious terms: “[My work is] about giving space so that other people can enter. It can be a prayer, like the center of a mandala. You plant the seed and other people can come water it or take the lower away. . . . You make a situation and other people can ill it up,” the artist claimed in a 1992 catalogue. 21 How does this emphasis on spirituality and the spectator’s contribution connect with what Smith at other points acknowledges as a crucial context for her work, the ongoing AIDS epidemic and debate over how to address it? The tradition of votive offerings and healing can also be reclaimed as proposing a more empathetic, caring relation to the body and its parts: in an era in which AIDS victims were still frequently blamed and demonized by the political right, abject art thus proposed a new way of thinking about the body in pain that interestingly connects with earlier Western and non-Western belief systems. The ex-voto, after all, often resembles a humble body part marvelously turned relic: from a foot or a liver to a shiny metal object, which, whatever its eficacy, has the potential to outlive the lesh. The way in which certain “abject” body parts are transferred into precious objects also allows a psychoanalytic reading of the ambivalence we have toward certain parts of ourselves that we refuse. “I like to see that people put their own love into things—that they take energy out of their bodies and put it into other things, that it’s like a transformation,” Smith observes. 22 The Contemporary Ex-Voto 9 Fig. 12.8 (EX-414) Kiki Smith. Untitled, 1986. Etched glass bottles. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Leonard A. Lauder, President, in honor of David W. Kiehl, 2006.78a-l. © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery. Ex-votos are always more than just the interaction between the one who makes the wish and the authority addressed: they are made visible to a larger audience, whether the semipublic context of a religious space or that of an art gallery. If it comes to performative exchange, Yoko Ono’s ongoing project of the Wish Trees, her “number one most successful artwork,” as she proudly put it in 2008, makes clear that the ex-voto needs more than the side that offers and that which receives (fig. 12.9). 23 In its various iterations, a tree, or more, is presented in the exhibition space or outdoors, and audience members can afix their wishes to the tree on paper labels. Taking up a votive tradition found with variations from Britain to Southeast Asia, Ono does not transform the practice so much as gain it entrance into the art gallery with its own rituals of participation. Ono claims she does not read the wishes, as there is a mythical component, a conversation between the person making the wish and the unknown entity receiving (possibly granting) it, and she does not want to interfere. Ono, who came of age artistically in the context of John Cage and the anarchic performances of the New York Fluxus group, has long challenged audi- 10 Widrich ence expectations of passivity: in Grapefruit, her 1965 book of instructions, the artist issued curt commands, such as “Fly Piece: Fly.” Another, “Card Piece II,” reads: “Cut a hole in the center of your / Weltinnenraum. / Exchange.”24 Though the young Ono did not conceive these poetic commands-cum-imaginary performances in terms of traditional devotion, her emphatic act of delegating the private work of leshing out the performance to the public and even the invitation to exchange these experiences indicate that her later work builds on a central demand of contemporary art. But that is not to say that immediate experience is all there is to this fascination with symbolic exchange. In a 2008 interview, Ono expressed the desire to put the wishes, once they reached one million, into a capsule to loat into space. The wishes were in fact put into the base of the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland (fig. 12.10). “The wishes that we make, even if they are just written on paper and nobody sees it, I think they do affect the world and the universe.”25 These words, like Kiki Smith’s, may not require an explanation for readers familiar with contemporary art’s claims to participation and democratic involvement. 26 While there is something contractual about the contemporary reitera- Fig. 12.9 (EX-415) Yoko Ono. Wish Tree, installation in Yoko Ono: Half-a-Wind Show. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, June 1–September 15, 2013. © Yoko Ono. tions of ex-votos and wish exchange in general, the contract is between two unequal beings: humans and cosmic powers that are not easily anthropomorphized. What is being renegotiated in them, in small steps, is the very concept of the audience. That audience, which avant-garde artists have been trying to emancipate for more than a century now, has concerns that extend beyond its taste in art: political and moral concerns, to be sure, but also less clearly articulated ones, which extend to life, death, and embrace but do not end with the world of objects. The Contemporary Ex-Voto 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Fig.12.10 (EX-416) Yoko Ono. Imagine Peace Tower, 2007. Public art project on Viðey Island, near Reykjavík, Iceland. © Yoko Ono. 12 Widrich Pierre Restany, “Ex Voto a Santa Rita,” Domus 612 (December 1980): 44. The sketch may have been drawn by Austro-Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass Jr., the journal’s graphic designer. Pierre Restany, “The Votive Offering of Yves Klein,” Studio International 195, no. 996 (September 1982): 44–45. The issue’s subtitle comes from a photo-essay by John Berger, “The Presence of the Past,” which took up most of the issue (pp. 3–39) and touched on many votive and commemorative themes. Restany expands on Klein’s votive offering in his Yves Klein: Le feu au coeur du vide (Paris: ELA, 1990), adding an account of how he “discovered” the work with the help of the cloistered nuns and painter Armando Marocco in 1979. See also Alain Buisine, “Blue, Gold, Pink, the Colors of Icon,” in Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial!, exhibition catalogue (Nice: Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, 2000), 21–34. See Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Eco, writing in 1962, took Jackson Pollock as a pictorial example: “The disorder of the signs, the disintegration of the outlines, the explosion of the igures incite the viewer to create his own network of connections” (103). Quoted from Restany, “The Votive Offering of Yves Klein,” 45. On its homepage, the cloister claims its recognition of Ex Voto’s aesthetic value in connection with the irst public viewing of both the 1958 and 1961 artworks, which were lent to a 2015 exhibition at the Guggenheim Venice and the Museo del Novecento, Milan, “Ex Voto by Yves Klein in Venice and Milan,” http: //www.santaritadacascia.org/news/notizia.php?id=257. On the speech act dimension of votive practices, see Robert Maniura, “Ex Votos, Art and Pious Performance,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 409–425. On Klein’s pilgrimages, see Nicolas Charlet, Yves Klein (Paris: Adam Biro, 2000), 236. In his personal library, Klein had a copy of Agostino Ruelli’s Notizie biografiche di Santa Rita di Cascia, 2nd ed. (Rome: Sansaini, 1943). See Yves Klein, Les écrits d’Yves Klein, ed. Nicolas Charlet (Paris: Transédition, 2005), 343. Thierry de Duve, “Yves Klein, or The Dead Dealer,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 49 (Summer 1989): 89. De Duve is critical of Klein but believes he both enacted and unmasked the modern conlation of the art market and religion. “Klein shows this despite himself, and it’s the only indulgence his ex-votos will have gained him” (90). Irene V. Small, “Believing in Art: The Votive Structures of Conceptual Art,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (Spring–Autumn 2009): 298. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono Cut Piece,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 101–123. Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30, no. 3 (September 2008): 81–93. The score was part of a January 1966 document that Ono titled Strip Tease Show (81–82). Ono performed a very different Cut Piece, in which she cut the clothing of a professional model, for W magazine in April 2015, on the eve of her Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Small, “Believing in Art,” 301. See Christopher Wood, “The Votive Scenario,” R ES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (Spring–Autumn 2011): 294–307. Wood compares “the votive scenario” with photography for its unusual density of reference: “To behold a display of wax hands and feet and organs is something like coming across a box of unlabeled nineteenth-century photographs. They are portraits even if we don’t know the names of the portrayed” (223). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Robert Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 9. Félix Gonzales-Torres’s “Untitled” (Bed)—consisting of twenty-four uncaptioned billboards in New York showing an unmade bed, the folds in the sheets suggesting two bodies—is a classic example of photography as an image of the indexical trace. 15 The classic interpretation of Johns’s heterogeneous objects remains Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art” (1962); reprinted in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 17–54. 16 It is interesting that the sole discussion of modern votive offerings in Eco’s Open Work is in the chapter on kitsch (188). But as Wood has noted of cheap woodcuts reproducing ex-votos, the mass-produced votive imagery in Wojnarowicz is “a lattened pictorial ield with unexpected depths,” the subjectivities of those making such offerings (“Votive Scenario,” 226). 17 In many of his ilms and texts, e.g., “Post Cards from America: X-rays from Hell,” his contribution to the catalogue of Nan Goldin’s exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (New York: Artists Space, 1989), 6–11, Wojnarowicz made it clear that religious, political, and medical authorities were as responsible for AIDS deaths and suffering as the virus. The ilmmaker Tommy Turner, friend and collaborator of Wojnarowicz, is still alive; his illness, to which Wojnarowicz refers, was heroin addiction. See Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 296. 18 Smith also produced “small organs,” e.g., Untitled (heart), 1986, which measures 5 × 4 × 3 in. The material itself is important: “The medium of wax was the preferred medium for the ex voto because it symbolized the tight link to individual experience that no painting, poem, or ritual could ever have” (Wood, “Votive Scenario,” 223). 19 For discussions of Smith’s work as a contemporary form of ex-voto, see Madeline Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 138; Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 6–9. See also Margaret Randolph Wilkinson, “Making God: Incarnation and Somatic Piety in the Art of Kiki Smith,” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 2006). 20 Claudia Gould, “But It Makes You Think about What You Think about It Too . . . : Conversation with Kiki Smith,” in Linda Shearer and Claudia Gould, Kiki Smith (Columbus: Williams College Museum of Art and Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 1992), 71. On Smith’s connection to myth, see Ilka Becker, “Traces of Contact: Motifs of Impression and Contact in the Art of Kiki Smith,” in Kiki Smith: Small Sculptures and Large Drawings, ed. Brigitte Reinhardt, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 30–55 . 21 Gould, “But It Makes You Think,” 68. 22 Ibid., 73. 23 Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series: Yoko Ono (Cologne: König, 2009), 51. 24 Alexandra Munroe with John Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono, exhibition catalogue (New York: Japan Society and Harry Abrams, 2000), 145–147. The date Ono gives for “Fly Piece” is summer 1963; presumably this is a date of composition, not performance. Weltinnenraum (world interior) is a term from Rilke, as Kristine Stiles points out in her essay, “Being Undyed: The Meeting of Mind and Matter in Yoko Ono’s Events,” Yes Yoko Ono, 146. 25 Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono. 26 See the very different conceptions of participation gathered in the texts of Claire Bishop, ed., Participation, Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). For criticism of the democratic model of participation, see Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), and the introduction of Mechtild Widrich and Martino Stierli, eds., Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Interaction and Occupation (London: Tauris, 2015). The Contemporary Ex-Voto 13