TINA MODOTTI

“I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art and I especially feel that the problem of living deeply engraves on the problem of the artistic creativity”.

A radical photographer, a beautiful and charismatic woman, a theater and silent film actor, and a political activist. She was born in Italy and lived in San Francisco and Hollywood, then in Mexico City of the 1920s, Berlin of the early 1930s and Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Her photographs were political symbol, emblematic monuments and masterpie-ces of art. Tina was all of these, a woman whose life, loves and death were controversial turmoil. A personality that goes further than the scandal, the distortion of the myth and the rumor that surrounded her.

Her life

Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti was born in Udine (Italy) in 1896 from a humble family. She emigrated in Austria when she was a small child than, back in Italy, she started working in a factory at the age of 12. Four years later she followed her father in San Francisco, where she works in a dress-makers during the day and she acts in the theater of the italian quarter during the night. She learned her craft first from her uncle, Pietro Modotti, than from her lover and photographer Edward Weston, a pioneer of photography as modern art who was, by the way, artistically very different from Tina. She moves to Mexico in 1922, after the death of her actual lover, the poet Roubaix del’Abrie Richey and she starts a long  relationship with Weston, from whome she’ll also have a child. Artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Manuel Bravo, Miguel Covarrubias, Jean Charlot and David Alfaro Siqueiros were among their friends.
Her silver gelatin prints of people, architecture and still lives reveal an acute personal vision that had sifted Weston's precision, the Mexicanidad movement's celebration of native culture and the muralists’ credo of art as a social force.

For her highly public and personal connections to the international Communist party and its leaders the government had kept her under surveillance and in 1930, suspected of conspiring to assassinate the president, she was deported and forced to leave Mexico.  She therefore migrated to Europe and spent her last period in Berlin and in Spain. Later on the United States refused her asylum, but Mexico allowed her to return. She died just two months later (1942),  in Mexico city, at age 45. Some said she was assassinated by one of Stalin's agents and the poet Pablo Neruda, against these polemics, writes a strong poetry in Tina’s memory that will be published on all newspapers.
Since recent days, most of documents concerning Tina Modotti were scattered in archives from Russia to South America.



Analyzing her work

Her research, first involved with Weston’s influence, mainly esthetically oriented, began more and more interested in social problems and human conditions. She observes the people on the road, workers in rest, and women with their babies.


Campesinos

They are agrarian and evoke the romantic guerrilla heroes of the Mexican revolution that began in 1910. The light on the hats is intense, the absence of the men's faces glaring, the arrangement startlingly geometric. The hats suggest, with their circles within circles, the mechanism of industry, the wheels of progress, the industrial rather than rural proletariat, a symbolic transformation of reality into Marxist myth similar to that violently carried out in the Soviet Union during this period.  Above all Tina associates the destiny of the people with abstract art. In the intense, more-than-real poetry of this image, we glimpse the revelation, the apocalypse of historical inevitability as she sees it. There is something mystical about this picture.


Roses

Passion and romance materialize and capture your eye, and you cannot help being wrapped into that beautiful, pulpy presence. These roses clearly represent how Tina was a deeply passionate woman, in her relationships as well as in art and politics.  Using the camera as a tool for social change, her photographs extol Mexico's poor and disenfranchised - its indigenous working
class-more boldly than anyone before her. At an auction a few years ago, a photograph of roses by Modotti sold for the highest price to date for any photographic work.


Her ideas

“Always, when the words "art" and "artistic" are applied to my photographic work, I am disagreeably affected. This is due, surely, to the bad use and abuse made of these terms. I consider myself a photographer, nothing more. If my photographs differ from that which is usually done in this field, it is precisely because I try to produce not art but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations. The majority of photographers still seek "artistic" effects, imitating other mediums of graphic expression. The result is a hybrid product that does not succeed in giving their work the most valuable characteristic it should have, - photographic quality……. But, for us who use the camera as a tool just as the painter does his brushes, adverse opinions do not matter. We have the approbation of those who recognize the merits of photography in its multiple aspects and accept it as the most eloquent, the most direct means for fixing, for registering the present epoch.

To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is meant that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations. Such work gives the impression that the photographer is almost ashamed of making photographs and tries to hide what there is of photography in his work, superimposing effects and falsifications that can only please those of perverted taste. ..Photography, precisely because it can only be produced in the present and because it is based on what exists objectively before the camera, takes its place as the most satisfactory medium for registering objective life in all its aspects, and from this comes its documental value. If to this is added sensibility and understanding and, above all, a clear orientation as to the place it should have in the field of historical development, I believe that the result is something worthy of a place in social production, to which we should all contribute.”
(Tina Motti on “Mexican Folkways”, vol 5 No 4 Ottobre-dicembre 1929. )

The life of Tina Modotti incredibly concentrates a consistent number of several aspects of the political, social and cultural history of the first half of the XXth century: the emigration towards the New World, to escape from misery; the beginning of the silent film in the United States; the development of a new culture in the post-revolutionary Mexico, trying to survive to 15 chaotic years; the fights between nationalist and communist ideologies; the problem of the politically involved artists, between Stalinism and Fascism; the second emigration towards America, which seems to be the only place for free-minded individuals who cannot find their place in Europe.

The disordered and ardent life of Tina cannot be separated by the chaotic historic path of that period. The miracle is the worth of an important artistic work which, in just seven years in Mexico, entered the history of the photography.

Yet the memory of this exceptional artist, inheritance of two continents, cannot find its due and noble recognition. The Comitato Tina Modotti in Udine, Tina's native town, has been fighting for years for employing Tina's native home for cultural purposes and for creating a small museum dedicated to her life and her work. This would also help in improving the fortune of the quarter, otherwise degraded. But the local administrations chose to give space to the empty and to the silence, in keeping desert and abandoned the house were Tina Modotti was born.

By Simona Cappellini, with a special thank to
the Comitato Tina Modotti
(www.comitatotinamodotti.it)

VALIE EXPORT

“I don’t believe that Art can directly change political situations […], art practice helps to create cultural sensibility”.

What impresses of Valie Export’s work is the provocative strength, the will to astonish and even shock a public drugged by the cultural and social dominant system. A more accurate look, however, reveals also a communicative power and the ability to handle – with different modalities of expression such as photography, video and performance - difficult themes for the Viennese society after the Second World War. Woman, identity, body, sexuality are only some of the concepts analysed by Valie Export and no doubt the most relevant in the representation of a society more and more objectifying, where everything from the body to the artistic work has a price and an utility. A work, that of Valie Export, to be set in its historic and cultural background  in order to appreciate its originality and the importance for the following generations.

Her life

Waltraud Lehner Hollinger was born in 1940 in Linz, Austria. Valie Export was born in 1966. It is the same person – no doubt about it – but it is not merely a change of name, rather a declaration against a society which imposes women the names of the father or of the husband as the only possibility of self-identification.

The Second World War has finished and in a conservative and bourgeois Vienna a group of artists known as Viennese Actionists shocks the public with extreme “actions”, which challenge physical resistance and touches physical and psychological cruelty. We are in the wider stream of the Body Art (which includes all the physical experiences during the Sixties and Seventies) while, on the background of Austrian expressionism, Egon Schiele, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud develop their own theories. The Viennese Actionism cannot be regarded as a real group, rather a together of individualities joined by the need to abolish any separation between art and life and to artistically reproduce the dishumanisation caused by modern life. In so doing, Otto Muehl, Gunter Brus, Arnulf Rainer, Herman Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler chose the way of cruelty, an artaud-style cruelty aiming to rise extreme reactions in the spectator and thus to “de-bourgeoisies” him.
Valie Export starts her own artistic career very close to these experiences and with an eye to the American contemporary scene, on the work of Carolee Schneeman, Trisha Brown, John Cage. Her performances and videos directly address the spectator in order to force him to take a position and, in so doing,  the artist immediately raises the antipathy of the Viennese society.
Beyond the many inputs received, her artistic path has been independent ever since. In particular, it focuses on the analysis of women conditions in the contemporary society and on the search for a personal vocabulary able to translate her idea of the body as a ground for the self-determination.
The work of Valie Export ranges from photography to video and performance and numerous are the international events she participated to, such as the Art Biennial in Venice in 1978 and 1980; her works have been shown in many exhibitions, as the recent retrospectives in Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin and New York.


Analyzing her work

Unlike the contemporary Viennese Actionists – with whom she still shares the intentions – Valie Expert’s work immediately characterizes itself for the feminist flavour. The aim is to trigger a social reaction against the exhibition of sexual clichés and to provoke a change in some of the most eradicated discriminatory attitudes against women. The use of her own body, the experimentation of different artistic modalities and the employment of technology will be the tools used by the artist during her whole career to build a new image of woman and to evoke what she calls “the age of Menschenfrauen”.
More significant than any theoretical explanation in revealing Valie’s aesthetic is the choice to change her name, in what the critic Robert Heck defines “ a political, social and aesthetic act”. A packet of the Austrian Cigarettes Smart Export becomes an icon of the feminist movement during the ‘60s, in the famous picture of the artist with a cigarette in her mouth and a packet portraying her face among the writings “Valie Esport. Sempre et ubique. Immer und überhall” in her hand.
Exporting. Exporting oneself, one’s body, female body. The reference is to the social structures and the repression of sexuality which characterizes the contemporary society, the fil rouge of all her following creations centred on the representation of female body as a symbolic surface and as a bearer of signs, information and projections.
“Body Sign Action” and “Genital Panic” are some of the examples of her provocative soul. In the first performance (dated 1970), the artist has her leg tattooed with a garter, “sign of the past slavery” and representation of the process of construction of feminine symbols in a objectifying society. In the second one, Valie Export seats legs open wide, a rifle in her hands and a leather tracksuit with a cut on the genitals.

Typical of Valie Export is also the mediatic critic. According to her, cinema, video and photography are not “neutral” media rather tools to diffuse cultural constructions and reproduce social balances. The “technological” media as well, indeed, would strengthen the patriarchal regime which stands behind the images of femininity, especially for what cinema is concerned because of the voyeuristic situation which characterizes it.

In the text “Mediale Anagramme”, of 1970, the artist defines her works as “notebooks in which the 'pages,' sketches and images, can be put into different orders and make possible new meanings and a new context. The medium is not the only message, or to put it another way, the medium is just one of the messages”.

It is the concept of anagram, of the combination of a few elements in different ways in order to generate new messages. Particularly interesting is the application of this idea to technology, where the superimposition of different audiovisual representations of an object makes the artificiality of things visible and makes us wonder about the permeability of boundaries between image and reality.



She said:

“Export means always and everywhere. It means exporting myself. I didn’t want to use the name of my father nor of my husband. I wanted to find my name”.

“The Austrian society was against me. I did everything alone. I had to fight them, they were really against me”.

“I don’t believe that Art can directly change political situations, it can not stop people from going to war – that is another point. Art and culture, however, can sensitize people to the kind of behaviour that creates war  - that is culture… and art practice that incorporate these considerations helps to create cultural sensibility. In this way, the function of political, social and cultural content can be incorporated by Art”. 

“The view of reality is transformed through the intervention of the media. Photographs are not blueprints of nature, each image is a construction”.

The work of Valie Export is a continuous challenge to the limits imposed by the society and to the constructions built by cultural habits. Her artistic research aims to destabilize symbolic orders and the power balances by unhinging their own foundations. In so doing the artist uses first of all her own body, the first medium of expression and battle field of the alienation induced by social codes, while the use of technology allows her to experiment discontinuities and space-time convergences.

After the difficult débuts, in a conservative society as the Viennese one was during the ‘60s, today Valie Export has brought her art all over the world and has finally received a wide acknowledgement even in her own country, being also regarded as a model for many other artistic experiences


By Giulia Guerrini,