The relationship between art and today’s systems of power is determined by a game of seduction where these ambits feed from each other. The market wants art to be part of its game, art rejects it and at the same time becomes part of it. Many people would think that art should not be sold because it wears the mark of somebody’s soul or some kind of transcendental meaning that would be contaminated by the frivolous exchange of goods for money.

Nevertheless, there is an art market that, ironically, is fascinated by the idea of art as political subversion against the socio-political and economical system and its values. This contradiction allows the principle of reversibility in Baudrillard’s theory of seduction to work in favor of art as a paradigm shifter, since it enables art to question the cultural values embedded by the socio-economical system. In this way, art purpose surpasses the concept of rebellion or subversion to that of questioning meaning[1].

Art as a force of change could only be effective when it arouses questions within the audience and fulfills a process of inner transformation equivalent to the fairytale’s effect on a child, which is a process described by Bruno Bettleheim in The uses of enchantment:

“As with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest’ meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in his life. The child will extract different meaning from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment.”[2].

Thus, the audience gives meaning to the work of art by interpreting and adapting the meaning to their own anxieties and interests. The audience would overcome anxieties and experience an inner transformation that will affect their view of the world.

Isn't this the purpose that politically oriented art endeavors to achieve? Art may not be able to save the world but it can make you believe that your world could change. How is it that this happens? The inner transformation of a subject through art is or should be a particular preoccupation for many artists who want to influence people. Indeed questioning meaning should be a concern to any profession that strives to influence the world. But how is it that an artist can make people engage with a piece in the same way a child engages with a fairytale? How do works of art appeal enchanting and at the same time an experience of becoming?

Inner transformation by immersion and interpretation

Probably one of the most radical ways to explore this inner transformation was conveyed in the theory of Antonin Artaud on theater. He called it the Theater of Cruelty. Artaud was concerned with nonverbal communication of the actors and aesthetic elements such as sound and lightning as a way to express and direct the audience through a metaphysical journey of becoming where they would unconsciously understand and assimilate ideas of transcendental nature[3]. In other words, the immersion of the audience within the world created by the director allows them to blend within the story and identify with the struggles presented.

This exorcism is comparable to experience of a child resolving his or her anxieties through identification with a particular fairy tale plot and/or characters. Interpretation and imagination play an important part of how we perceive this artistic experience and give new meanings to it according to our own inner struggles. Thus, the more open, ambiguous or universal an aesthetic experience is, more likely it is to be assimilated by people in a level that reaches the symbolic language of their inner selves.

As it was posed before, art’s purpose is to question meaning. When the question is more open to reveal any kind of meaning by the audience, the easier it is for the audience to engage by interpreting whatever they are witnessing into whatever it’s important to them. Regardless of the possibility of a political or purely aesthetic agenda behind a piece of art, if this execution of a particular question turns out to be redundant, then the answer from the audience is limited to “oh, clever” or “oh, nice”, in other words, to a moment of dedicated attention and nothing more. It becomes inconsequential to the inner struggles of the subject, hence its lack of engagement and relevance.[4]

Art may exist within these already answered questions without much consequence. Art will only be relevant, generative of value and meaning when it allows the audience to be immersed in it. In other words, when the audience is allowed to wander and imagine. Artaud’s manifesto on the theater of cruelty reveals one way to do this. By being “less verbal and more physical”[5] the expression of gestures, sound and atmosphere are produced. In the theater of cruelty the space is designed to submerge the audience in the experience of the play and the gesticulation of the body as communication to provide meaning instead of relying on words. This is the basic principle that allows performance to become art.

Since the experience of immersion described by Artaud[6] makes the audience captive and allows them to exorcise their demons, making art into an experience of becoming and transformation, it’s only logical to analyze the work of a performance artist given the relation it has to theater or specifically to this way of creating meaning. Hence, from now on, the focus of this paper will be around the performance artist María José Arjona as an example of art as a successful experience of becoming. The purpose of this paper was to find out what makes an artist’s work successful and fascinating to the audience and the art world, and María José Arjona is one of the most successful artists from Colombia.

María José Arjona and the powers of horror

Born in 1973 in Bogotá Colombia, María José Arjona used to be a contemporary dancer. After a tragic accident that incapacitated her to continue dancing, she turned to plastic arts. She received her education in the National University of Colombia in Bogotá during the 1990’s. Her background as dancer led her to performance art. Her work is internationally recognized. She is currently established in Miami, Florida. She has performed in Colombia, United States, China and Europe.

We must first wonder what elements of her work have contributed to that success. For instance, her performances refer to violence, memory and power. The themes of her work are equally important, as the formal elements are to determine the success of her work as an engaging experience of becoming. Accordingly, we will analyze the conceptual and formal elements of ‘the white series’, which is probably one of the most engaging pieces she has produced.

It consists of five performances[7]. The first one, named ‘Untitled’ consists of a two week long performance in which the artist blows transparent bubbles against the wall, once the bubbles hit the wall they explode, leaving behind a red stain. For the second performance she tattooed the phrase ‘Remember to remember’ on her back. Evidently this would only happen once. In the third performance the artist traces over the bubbles with white chalk spelling out the phrase ‘remember to remember’ until there is no longer any trace of the red stains. Viewers will be stamped with the phrase as they walk into the space. The fourth performance is Karaoke, a passionate piece in which the artist performs the Edith Piaf song ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ in front of the projected words until her voice is completely gone. The viewers are invited to sing along, and toast the artist with glasses of champagne. In the days following the performance viewers are asked to return and see the memory left behind by the three previous stages of the exhibit. The fifth and last performance is called ‘Dear Dear I Shall Be Too Late’ where she uses large sheets of paper to fold origami rabbits, transforming the space into a fantasy world.

The work of María José Arjona involves the transformation of space through bodily action. The overall performance evokes a poetic catharsis where the audience is immerse into a ritual of obsessive repetition that dialogues to our history with violence. This experience that she submits herself into and invites us to be part of depends upon the fascination of other body being violated or the idea of blood and lacerated bodies.

We could dare to say that her entire work resides in bodily abjection, as theorized by Julia Kristeva. This bodily abject is more evident in her later performances called “Vires”[8] where she puts her body through a series of tests in order to make a consideration on the concept of power. As her identity, her gestures and voice are neutral through out the performances. She is not acting, or expressing herself through her body but rather using the body as medium, as the brush in the ‘white series’ and as the canvas in ‘vires’. This objectification of her own body in order to serve a concept and develop an idea resonates to the theory of abject because it allows the audience to identify with it, and the violence against it makes them reject and see it as “other”[9]. She doesn't actually cut herself nor her actions are in themselves aggressive, but the way she transforms the space through her actions do evoke traces of violence making the body fragile. This fragility of the body makes performance art even more suitable to the topics treated in the ‘white series’ and ‘vires’, for violence and power as she portrays it, are a corruption or perpetration of the body, disturbing “identity, system, order.”[10] Abject, as Kristeva posed in the ‘Powers of horror’, fascinates desire[11]. Arjona’s work couldn't be so powerful without our innate fascination-repulsion to horror.

Ironically, this dynamic of identification and rejection allows room for empathy to the other’s body because it’s a body like any other it’s not an identity, it’s not unthinkable, what is unthinkable is what she puts it through; it’s character of ambiguous identity makes it an open question and invitation. Particularly in the ‘white series’, Arjona blends with the white space. She could be anyone. Those dreams and innocent bubbles could turn into nightmares in any context. She is saying that violence and the way it’s created is independent from its context. This is a very powerful idea and it’s what makes her not only a successful artist but also a good one.

It is true that part of her success as an artist is due to the art world’s resilient effort to tag the relevance of a work by the context of the artist’s origin. It’s not a secret that Colombia has a history of violence and power struggle. She is neither the first nor the last of Colombian artists that gains recognition because of the topic she is expected to talk about. However, her work has a language of its own.

In comparison to other famous Colombian artists like Fernando Botero or Doris Salcedo, both internationally recognized and who have dwelt with violence, María José Arjona sets herself apart.

For example, Botero has dwelt with violence portraying scenes of Pablo Escobar’s death which makes it a lovely round body being shot but it doesn’t invite the audience to participate in it nor it gives them the chance to make something out of it. Nevertheless, it’s rather a good example of storytelling.

On the other hand, Doris Salcedo challenges the audience a little bit more. She uses furniture from local towns affected by the violence between military groups and ensembles them in a way that every blood stain and trace of destruction is exposed. It resembles Arjona’s ‘remember to remember’ because it invites people to recognize the consequences of the conflict. Nonetheless, the question that these pieces make to the audience are still narrowed by context and so for a foreigner it becomes a problem of some other nation instead of a matter of inner drives and struggles like Arjona’s work suggests. In fact, she describes the purpose of her work as “to transform a personal sensitivity to universal relevance.”[12]However, as we have already discussed her success is not only the universality embedded in her performances but the particular way in which the theatrics and the horror fascinate the audience.

Thus, she uses components of the theater of cruelty to make an experience of immersion and becoming where the audience is drawn to a conversation with topics that won't be easily digested but provokes fascination.

There is only one last component that has not been discussed and it is crucial to her work: the body in relation to time. Her intention behind the ‘white series’ regards memory and healing. Thus, her performance speaks of time conceptually and formally, as the resemblance of blood on the walls is only evident after a certain period of time. The marks of innocence turn to horror in time and so does the point of view of the audience towards the piece. The audience sees and experiences the transformation of the space as it bleeds and as it heals, from the bubbles bursting, to the erasing of its mark and the dream of a new kind of innocence.

The relation between space, body and time is exceptionally revealing for it states that experience requires time. Therefore, transformation, and art as an experience of becoming requires time. This is an element that Antonin Artaud didn't quite contemplated when he imagined the theater of cruelty but nevertheless performance artists like María José Arjona and her mentor Marina Abramovic continue to explore. More importantly, they are actually making a difference in the way people engage and think about art, allowing a true identification, engagement and enjoyment without disregarding art’s purpose to question and provoke meaning.