French Kissing the Icon: Erotic Iconoclash and Political Subversion in Deborah Castillo’s The Emancipatory Kiss (2013)

Abstract

This article explores the obscene’s potential to become politically subversive through the analysis of the performance video The Emancipatory Kiss (2013) by Venezuelan artist Deborah Castillo. Drawing from a theoretical corpus that brings together pornography studies and media studies, memory, and materiality, and that engages with iconoclasm as defined by Bruno Latour and Michael Taussig, I discuss the operations that enable Castillo’s piece to perform an act of what I call “erotic iconoclash”, which, I propose, makes visible and palpable the fragility of the power attributed to hypermasculine military figures of authority. I argue that Castillo’s act of erotic iconoclash generates a residue—an intolerable secretion—in the image that resists being absorbed into symbol or narrative, that arouses and moves the audience, and that is not concerned with making sense of the world, but rather with un-making the world as we know it. In doing so, it opens up a way for us to rethink the relationship we establish with the dead and their many and varied afterlives outside the suffocating circularity created by acts of destruction and reconstruction.

Keywords:

• Deborah Castillo
• Venezuela
• iconoclasm
• performance
• obscenity
• Simon Bolivar

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The video of the performance can be watched on Deborah Castillo’s Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/deborahcastillo.

2 See Nyrop (1901), Perella (1969), Monasterios (1993), and Harvey (2005).

3 See Tiniacos and Alvarado (2013).

4 For a discussion of the exhumation of Bolívar’s remains, see Duno-Gottberg (2016).

5 For a discussion of the cult of Bolívar in Venezuela, see Carrera Damas (1969), Torres (2009), Pino Iturrieta (2003), Salas de Lecuna (1987), Castro Leiva (1991), Sánchez (2016).

6 In El divino Bolívar (2003), Pino Iturrieta discusses an anecdote from the early years of Chávez’s militancy with the party MBR-200 where, during the meetings with the other members of the party, Chávez would leave an empty chair for the spirit of Bolívar to sit and watch over them. While this might be the most literal example of Chávez’s semi-necromantic relationship with Bolívar, it is not the only one: throughout his presidency, Chávez would often quote and paraphrase Bolívar and make sure that his portrait was always nearby. Furthermore, after the exhumation he ordered of his remains in 2010, a new portrait of the Liberator was created using Photoshop that, for many, made Bolívar’s facial features resemble those of Chávez (see Guerrero 2012).

7 Castillo reproduced Pérez Pirela’s critique of her performances in her video Censura (2015a), available on her Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/deborahcastillo

8 The new portrait of the Liberator that circulated after the exhumation of his remains in 2010 triggered a debate over which portrait (the new or the old one) was the “real” portrait of Bolívar, the new portrait being associated with Chávez and his supporters, and the old one with the opposition. This fight over Bolívar’s face continued even after Chávez’s death; portraits of “Chávez’s Bolívar” were thrown out of the National Assembly’s building when Henry Ramos Allup, a member of the opposition, became its president in 2016, and were marched back in when Jorge Rodríguez, a Chavista deputy, became the new president in 2021. See Torrealba (2021).

9 Castillo performs these actions in Slapping Power (2015b) and Parricidio (2017).

10 For an overview of the Venezuelan crisis, see Scheer (2018) and López Maya (2013). For the latest report on unlawful executions, forced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and torture in the country since 2014, see the report published by the United Nations-backed fact-finding mission on Venezuela on 15 September 2020: https://cepaz.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/A_HRC_45_CRP.11_SP.pdf.

11 See “Manifestantes en Venezuela queman estatua de Chávez en rechazo a Maduro” (2019) and Urrutia (2017).

12 In the United States, the death of George Floyd in May 2020 led to protests that included the destruction of a number of monuments and memorials associated with racial injustice and the genocide of Native American people. Similar actions occurred in the United Kingdom, where removal efforts and vandalism targeting memorials to figures involved in the transatlantic slave trade, British colonialism, and eugenics took place.

13 See Taussig (1999).

14 The “explicit body” Schneider theorises has been central to a group of Latin American female artists who, like Castillo and since the 1960s, have confronted patriarchy, racism, and repressive government regimes and challenged brutality and corruption through acts of desecration grounded on the unsettling power of shameless bodily secretions. The work of a number of these artists was featured in the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Gil and Andrea Giunta, which debuted at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2017. It is also the subject of the volume Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (2003), edited by Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino.

15 Castillo has also incorporated in her performances statues, busts, and other visual representations of non-Venezuelan male political figures such as Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and Donald Trump.

16 The video of LameBrasil can be watched on the artist’s Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/deborahcastillo.

17 For a discussion of the performances in “RAW”, see Troconis (2019).

18 “The word ‘father’ might be the word that most frequently appears in the discourse surrounding Bolívar. The Father of the Fatherland, the eternal father, the children of Bolívar, the heroic people of Bolívar, are phrases that repeat over and over again in texts and images. (…) The relationship with the mythical hero is, without a doubt, filial” (Torres 2009, 77).

19 Rafael Sánchez offers a compelling synopsis of Bolívar’s role as a mirror that reflects, contains, and controls the unruly bodies of the nation: “The ongoing goal is the saturation of Venezuela’s public spaces with as many Bolívar-mirrors – busts, equestrian monuments, oversized portraits – as possible, so that, whenever the need arises, the nation’s heterogeneous majorities may be wrested from their dangerous wanderings and, through reflection, made to coalesce in front of those mirrors as mobilized Bolivarian ‘people’” (2016, 294).

20 See Tiniacos and Alvarado (2013).

21 See Merleau-Ponty (2012).

22 In Castillo’s words: “I do my nails, I put on black tights… The idea here was that nothing would distract you so that the erotic act would only be that one” (Tiniacos and Alvarado 2013).

23 I borrow this expression from Susanna Paasonen’s work on pornography and carnal resonance, where she quotes Mark Dery and his description of porn sites as aiming to grab the users “by the eyeballs” through the showcasing of images that stand out and amaze because of their “novelty, eccentricity, or extremity” (2011, 39), all qualities that, we could argue, also characterise Castillo’s kiss and performance work overall.

24 See Tiniacos and Alvarado (2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irina R. Troconis

Irina R. Troconis is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from New York University and an MPhil Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK). She is the co-editor of the digital volume Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience (HemiPress, 2019) and the co-organiser of the interdisciplinary virtual series “(Re)pensando a Venezuela”. Her research has been published in Revista Iberoamericana, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, Akademos, Latin American Research Review, among others. Her current book project, The Necromantic State, explores through the lens of spectrality the memory narratives and practices developed around the figure of Hugo Chávez in the ten years following his death.