| HARAWAY's CYBORG |
FRIDA |
a cyborg is a cybernetic organism,
a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality
as well as a creature of fiction
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After the bus accident that "marked" her with a
handrail which went through her body from one side to the other
at the level of the pelvis, Frida has often
represented her body as a mix of flesh and objects (see
"The broken column" where her opened body allows us
to see the inside: the spinal column is substituted by a broken
ionic column). On the one hand she was totally immersed
in her contemporary social reality (exaltation of the Mexican
Revolution and of the mexicanidad against Americanization, political
passion shared with her husband Diego Rivera, active participation),
but we could say she was able to belong to reality only thanks
to her fantasy and her fictional world. In
the same way her paintings are hybrids of facts and fantasies.
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Cyborg replication is uncoupled
from organic reproduction,
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Frida was never able to have children. Abortion and the sufferings
created by this event are one of her recurrent topics (see "Frida and the abortion",
where she opposes her own sterility to the fertility of the earth,
"Me and My Doll" where she underlines her solitude
in front of a naked baby doll.) Sterile
as consequence of the accident, she reproduced herself in an
artificial way, endlessly replicating her image in her paintings.
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My cyborg myth is about transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities ...
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In many of Frida's works the boundaries of the body are completely
distorted, revealing her fascination for transmutations obtained
through fusions with the earth (bodies as plants that extend
their roots underground "Roots", "Portrait of
Luther Burbank") or with animals ("The wounded deer"
where Frida painted herself with the body of a deer).
Frida's bodies are always re-codified, in some cases assembled
and disassembled.
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The cyborg is resolutely committed
to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity
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partiality: I have formulated
the hypothesis that Frida was moved to represent herself and
her body with a deeply fetishistic attitude. According to Mario
Perniola's definition, fetishism "does not adore the world,
does not have any illusions about it, nevertheless declares itself
without reserve and with the greatest energy in favour of a part,
of a detail..."; indeed, Frida made fetishes of several
details of her body, through a real disintegration of her self/body
scattered in her paintings and drawings (see "What the Water gave me"
and nearly all the drawings from the Diary). In this way her
body ceases to be an object fixed and identical in the subject's
perception a determined shape to become a sort of "thing"
that acquires an "overflowing" abstract universality.
irony: humor and irony marked Frida'
s lifestyle. She wrote in her diary, "Nothing is worth more
than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself,
to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing."
intimacy: everything is intimate
in Frida's paintings, her intimacies are shown in such an "open"
way that they can become quite disturbing (see "My birth"
in which an adult Frida's head comes out from the vagina of a
woman in labour). She often showed her own body naked and tortured
by different kinds of wounds ("Remembrance of an Open Wound",
"The Broken Column"), or bleeding ("Henry Ford
Hospital").
perversity: in a certain sense we
could define Frida's active sexual life involving both men and
women in spite of her disease, her 32 surgeries and the impossibility
for long periods of having "normal" sexual intercourse,
as a perversion. On this point it is interesting to make a link
with Ballard's novel "Crash", where bodies' deformations
(wounds as new cavities, tattoos, scars) become new and exciting
instruments for the strange sexuality of the main characters,
victims and authors of car accidents, fascinated by a perverse
mixture of natural impulses and technology. Surely a powerful
sensuality permeates all her works, but it is paradoxically more
evident in her still lives (see "Flower of Life" where
an exotic plant is transformed into male and female sex organs).
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The cyborg is a condensed image
of both imagination and material reality, ...
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Many of Frida's paintings show the combination of real and
fantastic elements, like Diego's portraits with a third eye;
self-portraits with Diego's image or a death image on the forehead
("Diego and I", "Diego in my thoughts", "Thinking
about death"); Frida with a childish
body and an adult face in her nurse's arms ("My Nurse and
I"); internal organs and other meaningful objects placed
outside her body and connected to it by as many umbilical cords
("Henry Ford Hospital"). This is one of the features
that prompted Andre Breton to embrace Frida as a Surrealist,
but she always denied this connection. Indeed,
even in her most symbolic and fantastic work ("What the
Water gave Me"), reality wins against fantasy because every
dissociated detail of the painting refers to precise events/
emotions in her life and is the evolution of elements coming
from other works.
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