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

The horror of spoiling is even stronger than the anxiety of losing.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

The Emancipatory Kiss¹

He patiently waits (Is he waiting? Or is he just petrified?) for her two hands to appear on scene, to approach him, to touch his (metallic, cold, golden) face. They do so quietly, slowly, provocatively: her fingers caress his (epic) chin, move on to feel his (epic) ears and his (epic) hairline, then land on his (epic) nose and slide down to trace the contours of his (epic) lips, which remain closed – an unusual feat for the lips of a man who, even after dying, continues to talk, his incendiary words traversing temporal borders and penetrating presents and futures with the cocky nonchalance of the divine. Having touched his face – having made sure it is, in fact, him – she then kisses him, her hands leaving the scene to never return, to linger somewhere we cannot see, somewhere beyond and below the frame, where for the next two minutes and fifteen seconds, they will do… something (What, you ask? We will never know). Meanwhile, her lips will gently brush against his chin, then his (still closed) lips, then his nose: a pas de deux une, chin-lips-nose, chin-lips… TONGUE. Her tongue. A wet tongue that twists and turns, that licks and licks some more, salivating over every corner, every fold, and every bump. Does he like it? (Do we care whether he does?) His eyes, frozen, reveal nothing; they just solemnly stare at whatever lies up her nostrils.

Two minutes have gone by, and they feel like two centuries. She will not stop (we want her to stop). We, who have been there all along (with them, uncomfortable), look around trying to find something for our eyes to hold on to, something other than her tongue. There is nothing: nothingness in the form of a black hole that sucks us in and spits us back into the scene, a vertigo-inducing non-vacancy that refuses to distract us from the glimmering thread of saliva that bridges the gap between him and her, between metal and flesh, past and present, death and life, History and tongue, icon and iconoclast. So we stay, impatiently waiting for an end that promises to be spectacular, orgasmic. Will she make his head explode? Will she decapitate him? Will she slap him, punch him, or tear him down? She has to, does she not? She is, after all, an iconoclast. But she does none of these things (Bad iconoclast!). After one last taste of his nose, and with her eyes closed, she slowly steps back, leaving us there, alone with him, for ten seconds. We look at him, and he looks the same. But we know he is not the same, he cannot be, not while he remains covered in her saliva (Will anyone clean him up?).

“Is that all?” We want to ask. But we will not, because she might hear us, and she and her tongue might come back. So we tell ourselves that it is enough; that it is, in fact, more than enough.

Iconoclasm gone wrong

Deborah Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss (2013b) (Figure 1) will not be found in any of the several studies and compilations that, originating in different disciplines,² strive to define what a kiss is and categorise its seemingly infinite manifestations.

Figure 1 Sequence of Deborah Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss (2013b). Courtesy of Deborah Castillo.

A kiss between a man and a statue of a woman (or between a man and a woman made to appear like a statue) is of course not unheard of. The well-known kiss between Pygmalion and his ivory statue that we encounter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been reproduced, reinterpreted, and reimagined so many times across history and across the arts that we have become disastrously numbed to the hordes of men kissing dead/sleeping/immobile women.

A kiss between people and a figure of authority – known as a “kiss of veneration” – is also not unheard of. As Christopher Nyrop reminds us, the kiss of veneration “is of ancient origin; from the remotest times we find it applied to all that is holy, noble, and worshipful – to the gods, their statues, temples, and altars, as well as to kings and emperors; out of reverence, people even kissed the ground, and both sun and moon were greeted with kisses” (1901, 114). The old bronze figure of Saint Peter in Saint Peter’s church in Rome has in fact been kissed on the right foot so many times that the metal has worn away, toes disappearing to blend in with the rest of the foot, forming a stump that, nowadays, most visitors (though not all) choose to touch rather than kiss.

A gluttonous, lengthy, and deep kiss – a “French kiss” – between two people is not rare, featured repeatedly and in every imaginable scenario in the film industry, in the porn industry, and in art practice. We cannot think of cataglottism – the truly unfortunate and unsexy term used to refer to “kissing with tongue” – and not think of Andy Warhol’s famous Kiss, the 1963 silent experimental film where various couples – man and woman, woman and woman, man and man – kiss for three and a half minutes each. Fifty minutes of kissing in total (for them, the kissers); fifty minutes of staring intently and looking away, of blushing and sweating, of searching for the wristwatch and wishing time away (for us, the embarrassed and aroused audience).

Even the idea of Simón Bolívar – Liberator of Five Nations, Hero above All Heroes, Father of the Fatherland, Venezuela’s Eternal Golden Boy, and the man-statue Castillo kisses in her performance – kissing a woman is not entirely perplexing. “You want to see me, at least with your eyes. And I want to see you and see you again and touch you and taste you and unite you to me through all available points of contact” (Cacua Prada 2012, 93, my translation) wrote Bolívar in a 1826 letter addressed to the Ecuadorian revolutionary heroine Manuela Sáenz, with whom he had an intimate relationship that lasted until his death in 1830.

But a gluttonous, lengthy, and deep kiss between Castillo (Venezuelan performance artist born in Caracas over a hundred years after Bolívar’s death) and a statue of Bolívar, a statue that, unlike Pygmalion’s Galatea, is not even granted the right to live (again) after bearing Castillo’s kiss, is not only unheard of: in Castillo’s homeland, it was intolerable. So intolerable, in fact, that it won the artist the title of “profanadora de la patria”³ “desecrator of the fatherland] in 2013, a title that came with accusations and death threats that ultimately forced her to leave the country in 2014.

In Venezuela, the year 2013 was marked by the death of Hugo Chávez Frías on 5 March. Chávez had been the president of the country since 1999 and was responsible for literally bringing Bolívar back from the dead⁴ and for transforming him into an adjective that would be used to anchor and legitimise his political project and brand anything the government touched with its revolutionary hands. In fact, only a few months after Chávez became president, the National Assembly changed the name of the country from “República de Venezuela” to “República Bolivariana de Venezuela”, a change that was deemed essential for the (also) Bolivarian Revolution led by Chávez and indisputable in a country where “the Liberator’s name caresses the entirety of the Fatherland” (“Hace 20 años Venezuela fue declarada Republica Bolivariana” 2019, my translation). But the compulsion to “Bolivarise” did not stop there. As Venezuelan historian Elías Pino Iturrieta points out, Bolívar went on to baptise everything from social programmes (“misiones bolivarianas”) to food products (“cultivos bolivarianos”, “caraotas bolivarianas”, “plátanos bolivarianos”), thus making literal the metaphor “el héroe está hasta en la sopa”, for Bolívar was in fact in the ingredients used to make soup, “and we consume him every day with the help of our ordinary spoons” (Pino Iturrieta 2003, 249, my translation). This overuse of Bolívar was not entirely out of place in a country where a social, political, and religious cult around the figure of the Liberator has been firmly in place since the repatriation of his remains in 1842.⁵ However, for Chávez, honouring and respecting the hero’s memory, dreams, and wishes the way his predecessors had done was not enough. Chávez had to talk to him, for him, and (most importantly) with him, he had to appear always in his presence – rarely did Chávez make a public announcement on television without a painting of Bolívar near him –, and he had to resemble him in ways that went well beyond imitation and into the realm of necromantic mimesis.⁶

It is thus not surprising that Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss, included in her exhibit “Acción y Culto” that took place in Caracas’s Chacao Cultural Centre from February to April 2013, would generate outrage among supporters of the government like Miguel Pérez Pirela, host of the now-defunct government-sponsored television show “Cayendo y corriendo”. In an episode broadcast in March 2013, Pérez Pirela showed the audience a still image of Castillo’s performance that captured one of the moments in which the artist’s tongue caresses Bolívar’s chin (Figure 2) and asked:

Is this art? This is a blatant act of disrespect of the memory and the image of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, the Father of the Fatherland (…). If there is something that Chávez taught us, it was to love the figure of Bolívar. What we have here, children (…) is a lack of respect (…) this is not art, it is a lack of respect for the figure of the Father of the Fatherland, the Father of the Fatherland.⁷

Along with the Emancipatory Kiss, Pérez Pirela also showed an image from Castillo’s video performance Sísifo (2013a) (Figure 3), where she uses a chisel to simultaneously destroy and rebuild – though Pérez Pirela strategically ignored the rebuilding part while he was describing the piece – a clay bust of Bolívar. More than his words, what stands out from Pérez Pirela’s commentary is his anger, rendered visible by his brusque gestures and long, dramatic pauses. He is angry because Castillo’s performances are considered art, angry because the children of the nation – he primarily addresses the children he imagines are watching him – have to witness her disrespecting their Father, angry because she is ignoring Chávez’s command to love Bolívar, and angry because the opposition, which he immediately associates with Castillo’s exhibit, had at that time dared to name one of their political groups after Bolívar.⁸ However, what is perhaps even more noteworthy is Pérez Pirela’s choice to show the Emancipatory Kiss and Sísifo together, treating them as if they were doing the same thing: kissing/disrespecting/destroying Bolívar.

Figure 3 Pérez Pirela discussing Sísifo (2013a), included in Castillo’s Censura (2015a).

It was as if, in order to make sense of what Castillo’s kiss meant – in order to pinpoint what made it so outrageous – he had to associate it with a performance where the destruction of the face of the Liberator was explicit and unmistakable. However, kissing Bolívar is not the same as chiselling off his face, making it explode, or slapping it until it separates from the neck and falls to the ground.⁹ Furthermore, inasmuch as kissing is often a sign of love, Castillo’s kiss seems to follow to the letter Chávez’s instructions to love the figure of Bolívar. Why, then, was Pérez Pirela so upset by Castillo’s kiss? And, is it only he who is upset or are we also oddly disturbed by Castillo touching, kissing, sucking, and licking Bolívar’s face?

Figure 2 Pérez Pirela discussing the Emancipatory Kiss (2013b), included in Castillo’s Censura (2015a).

A statue that has been torn down, a monument covered in graffiti, a vandalised memorial: these and other acts of iconoclasm have always been part of history. Whether we agree with them or not, whether we participate in them or not, they are familiar; we have come to expect them each time the need to render visible the separation between “before” and “now” arises, or when the anger toward an act of injustice reaches a point that demands the sacrifice of what (or who) was once deemed sacred and everlasting. As Katherine Verdery points out,

Tearing [a statue] down not only removes that specific body from the landscape, as if to excise it from history, but also proves that because it can be torn down, no god protects it. As it is deprived of its timelessness and sacred quality, the “sacred” of the universe in which it had meaning becomes more “profane”. The person it symbolizes dissolves into an ordinary, time-bound person. Raising up new statues reverses the process, (re)sacralizing persons who had gone for some time unremarked. Both actions signal a change in the universe of meaning that hitherto prevailed. (1999, 5)

Tearing down statues and erecting new ones thus dictate how we relate to and make sense of landscape and history and, through them, of political order, for “changing the political order, no matter where, often means changing the bronzed human beings who both stabilize the landscape and temporally freeze particular values in it” (Verdery 1999, 6). In the context of Venezuela, popular discontent toward the government of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, who has been incapable of either replicating the charismatic performance Chávez was known and loved for or efficiently handling the country’s current multidimensional crisis,¹⁰ led in fact to the tearing down, burning, and hanging of statues of Chávez in different cities around the country¹¹ during the protests that took place in 2019. The fate of these statues is shared by other monuments and memorials around the world, a number of which found themselves removed, destroyed, or vandalised¹² in light of the horrifying acts of racial injustice that occurred in the United States in 2020. Once again, regardless of how we position ourselves in relation to the fairness of these forms of destruction, we are not confused by their meaning, nor do we doubt their iconoclastic nature. But how does Castillo kissing and licking the statue of Bolívar fit in this iconoclastic scenario? Is it an act of iconoclasm, or is something else? What is her tongue doing to Bolívar – and to the nation named after him – as it chooses to lasciviously caress his face rather than to destroy it?

In what follows, I engage with these questions by proposing that we read Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss as an act of erotic iconoclash: a term that borrows from Bruno Latour’s conceptualisation of “iconoclash” as what happens when “one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive” (2002, 16). I linger in the hesitation Latour identifies and underscore the eroticism that, in the context of Castillo’s performance, materialises in it. 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, I aim to address what makes the golden statue of Bolívar glistening with the traces of Castillo’s saliva stand out as “weird” – as that which “does not belong” (Fisher 2016, 13) – amidst an iconoclastic landscape populated with ruined monuments, severed golden limbs, and pieces of broken marble. I also aim to contribute to a more global debate on practices and narratives of remembering and forgetting by considering the possibilities that erotic iconoclash opens up when it comes to the relationship we establish with the dead and their many and varied afterlives.

Iconoclasm, revisited

An all-encompassing definition of iconoclasm is, as Rachel F. Stapleton and Antonio Viselli remark, “unreasonable and impossibly dependent upon the socio-historical, political, and religious contexts wherein one studies the icon’s symbolic value and its destruction” (2019, 9). There is, however, one element that recurs throughout iconoclasm’s varied iterations: the need to engage with the materiality of the object/icon in order to engage with its power and value, which we always feel as being “tantalizingly out of reach” (Stapleton and Viselli 2019, 9). In fact, for Michael Taussig, it is essential for iconoclasm to be a physical affair:

Of course what’s important here is that even in this digital age, iconoclasm must be a largely physical affair with the human body in close proximity to the icon. It seems that no amount of ferocious blogging or vile, anonymous online commentary can get even close to the impact of human bodies marching down streets or tearing down a statue. How strange, you say, that even today the human body could assume such presence! Could it be that the power of the icon, like the power of iconoclasm, depends on this presence made intimate? And what could be more intimate than destruction? (2019, 22)

In Taussig’s view, the power of the icon and the power of iconoclasm depend on the same thing: the intimacy afforded by an act of physical destruction. The icon, he argues, begs “for a little bit of iconoclasm” (2019, 22) because its aura makes itself present the moment in which the statue is torn down amidst the cries of outrage of some and the praises and encouragement of others. This act of destruction takes the icon outside of its taken-for-grantedness; in fact, the fate of most monuments, statues, and memorials is the sort of visible invisibility that results from their blending in with the landscape, remembered only in special days of commemoration, noteworthy only to the eyes of wandering tourists or of those looking for directions. Iconoclasm interrupts this; destroyed and humiliated, the icon “resurrects”, “bursts into consciousness” (Taussig 2019, 30) to then enter into what Taussig calls “a fascinating fourth stage, a moment of animation and animism in which the damaged icon comes alive in a most disturbing way (as objects are not supposed to have a life like this), bred of violence and death now mixed with sacred or magical emanation” (2019, 30).

In the context of iconoclasm then, destruction is paradoxically – and, some might point out, frustratingly – tied to the icon’s rebirth; even more so in our technology-savvy society where no statue ever falls quietly or privately, for there is always an eye and a screen ready to capture the moment for posterity. These images and videos of the fall are as important as the fall itself; they prove that the icon can in fact be removed and that the sacred can be broken, and they allow us to relive that moment of realisation as often as we want to. Yet, they also “save” the icon, capturing it along with its destruction so that, even if its statue is successfully removed, even if something else – a different, better icon – takes its place, the void is never empty: it remains haunted by the ghost of what was once there and could be there again. Scenes of iconoclastic destruction thus give us a glimpse of a potential subversion of the structures that ground and legitimise the power the icon represents, a glimpse that stays just a glimpse because it – like the icon – gets absorbed into the realm of the symbolic. We tear down statues because of what they symbolise, which is in itself a symbolic act; after all, nothing prevents one fallen statue being replaced by a thousand new ones somewhere else, nor does one fallen statue erase the icon’s stubborn survival in narratives of history and collective memory. Furthermore, there is always the risk that the damaged icon will come alive, like Taussig notes, “in a most disturbing way”, its power not just restored but confirmed and increased after its destruction. Thus, if power trembles but does not collapse when a statue is torn down, vandalised, decapitated, or burned, what is the point of becoming an iconoclast?

Perhaps it is not iconoclasm we should concern ourselves with, but iconoclash. Coined by Bruno Latour in a text included in the catalogue for an exhibit of the same title, the term distinguishes itself from iconoclasm in its emphasis on and relishing of uncertainty, hesitation, and confusion. In Latour’s words, “Iconoclasm is when we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations for what appears as a clear project of destruction are; iconoclash, on the other hand, is when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive” (2002, 16). In Latour’s conceptualisation, this hesitation materialises in a hand whose role in relation to the icon is not clear:

Thus we can define an iconoclash as what happens when there is uncertainty about the exact role of the hand at work in the production of a mediator. Is it a hand with a hammer ready to expose, to denounce, to debunk, to show up, to disappoint, to disenchant, to dispel one’s illusions, to let the air out? Or is it, on the contrary, a cautious and careful hand, palm turned as if to catch, to elicit, to educe, to welcome, to generate, to entertain, to maintain, to collect truth and sanctity? (2002, 20)

Latour’s description of the iconoclashtic hand places it in contrast to both the iconoclastic hand that destroys the image of the icon and the iconophiliac hand that creates it and vows to protect it. Rendering the latter visible – re-presenting the icon as “handmade” or “human-made” – has the potential to weaken the icon’s force, sully its origin, and desecrate it, particularly in the case of religious images (faces of Christ, portraits of the Virgin, Veronica’s veil, among others) thought to have fallen from heaven without any intermediary. Yet, for Latour and for Taussig,¹³ this is rarely the case: “We could say, contrary to the critical urge, that the more (…) images, mediations, intermediaries, icons are multiplied and overtly fabricated, explicitly and publicly constructed, the more respect we have for their capacities to welcome, to gather; to recollect truth and sanctity” (Latour 2002, 20). It is thus in the hand that hesitates, that is still deciding what to do with the icon, where Latour reads a potential interruption to the “cycle of fascination, repulsion, destruction, atonement, that is generated by the forbidden-image worship” (Latour 2002, 17).

But, we could ask, how long can this uncertainty about the hand holding the hammer last? How long would a hand hold a hammer before it decides to put it down forever or use it to finally tear down the icon? These questions underscore the fact that, ultimately, neither Latour nor Taussig looks beyond the connection between iconoclasm and destruction, and the oscillation between destruction and reconstruction/resacralisation. Iconoclasts are always icon-smashers, icon-destroyers; facing them are the iconophiliacs, the protectors; in between them (and looking at them, according to Latour), there is a moment of iconoclash, an elusive gesture that suspends conviction and the urge for debunking to open up an equally elusive space for a better, deeper understanding of the power of and the war on images. It then appears that, ultimately, there is no escaping the icon and the reach of its power: it will keep rising from the dust of its own destruction, perhaps even stronger than it ever was, more compelling, and more in tune with the times.

But what if there were no hands at all in the encounter with the icon? What if, instead of hands holding hammers – whether with destructive determination or with shy hesitation –, or hands clasped together in prayer, there was a tongue leaving on the icon’s surfaces an invisible stream of saliva? What if instead of destruction or defacement there was a kiss that would place the icon’s body outside the array of the needs, functions, services, and purposes that shape the urgency of the iconoclast and the faith of the iconophiliac? It is likely that, faced with this scenario, we would feel the ambiguity and puzzlement that Latour associates with iconoclash; it is also likely that we would feel something else: a visceral address, a gut reaction oscillating between attraction and repulsion, the suspicion that, as witnesses of this kiss, our vision has become compromised, uncomfortably embodied. Unsettled, but also aroused, we would find ourselves in a weird, affectively charged space of meaning-unmaking and mystery, of surfaces and times inappropriately rubbing against each other, of iconoclasm gone wrong (or, perhaps, gone finally right): a space of erotic iconoclash that would grab us “by the eyeballs”.

Erotic iconoclash

Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss – and Castillo’s performance work overall – invites us to confront what Rebecca Schneider calls the “explicit body” at the centre of an ever-expanding corpus of feminist performance work¹⁴ that interrogates “social cultural understandings of the ‘appropriate’ and/or the appropriately transgressive” (1997, 3). This explicit body makes itself visible and present through an explosive literality that collapses symbolic space, making apparent “the fetishistic prerogatives of the symbol by which a thing, such as a body or a word, stands by convention for something else” (1997, 6), and literalising “that which such symbolism excludes, secret(e)ing that which such symbolism secrets” (1997, 16). It is a body that often renders the work of art that made it explicit “difficult” in the sense that Jennifer Doyle gives to the word; that is, unbearable, unpleasant, and even painful for an audience that, faced with things “that ‘feel’ like life and therefore cut too close” (Doyle 2013, 4), must grapple with the slow collapse of the boundaries that define that which we deem tolerable in regard to art and in regard to everything else.

In the case of Castillo, the literalising operations Schneider refers to take place through the artist’s “inappropriate” engagement with materiality, both with the materiality of her own dynamic, secreting body, and with the materiality of an Other whose body – always male, often made of bronze or clay – symbolises the sacred body of power in Venezuela and elsewhere.¹⁵ Throughout the years, Castillo has given this Other different faces, though in Venezuela the artist’s sculptures always evoke the figure of the caudillo, be it Bolívar himself – explicitly featured in several of her pieces – or any of the men that governed the country after him and that further solidified the link between political authority (and political agency) and the figure of the military man that remains an iconic pillar of the nation’s collective identity.

In Lamezuela (2011), for instance, Castillo kneeled down to lick the shiny black boots of a soldier; a live action that she performed publicly in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and that she repeated eight years later with the boots of two soldiers in Sao Paulo, Brazil.¹⁶ In 2013, the shiny leather of the boots was replaced by the shiny face of a golden statue of Bolívar in the Emancipatory Kiss. Then, in 2015, the artist’s first solo exhibit in New York, titled “RAW”, showed Castillo masturbating the nose of a nameless military man made of clay, using the severed limbs of another one to caress her naked body, and slapping a bust of yet another caudillo until the clay head fell to the ground.¹⁷ In all these performances, an amalgam of flesh, clay, saliva, leather, water, and dust materialised to make apparent the depth of the national anxiety that polices how we engage with the symbol of authority: the conditions, permissions, and modalities that dictate if and how we can touch it, and that guarantee that no boundaries are crossed that would inadvertently (or advertently) collapse “obscenity into sacrality and sacrality into obscenity” (Schneider 1997, 16).

These boundaries seem to be most clearly drawn and most solidly built when the symbol of authority is actually a familial – and not just familiar – figure. Bolívar, as Pérez Pirela so emphatically pointed out in his critique of Castillo, is the Father of the Fatherland,¹⁸ our father, which means that the respect owed to him is a family obligation that far exceeds the respect owed to the past, to history, or to authority understood in general and abstract terms. This collectively shared, deeply felt, and necessarily chaste intimacy with the Liberator – the affective current that underlies the social, political, and semi-religious cult developed around his figure – is what demands that he stays close but never too close, never obscenely close, certainly not close enough for our lips to caress his and, in doing so, irremediably spoil him. The fear then is not that Bolívar would be destroyed – he cannot be destroyed, two hundred years of cult have ensured that – but that he would be spoiled: soiled by the secretions and the indiscretions of the undeserving bodies of his ordinary children. This fear comes through in an anecdote from El beso (1993), Rubén Monasterios’s humour-laden novel/treatise on kissing:

Viniéndosenos encima la noche, compartíamos besos y otras tiernas caricias en un rincón sombrío de la antigua placita del Panteón Nacional; de súbito interrumpe nuestro idilio un encolerizado energúmeno que dice ser vigilante del sitio; acompañando su encendido discurso con gestos, desplantes y muecas expresivas de su pudor lacerado, el individuo nos increpa, invocando “la moral y las buenas costumbres”; termina exhortándonos a ser más respetuosos de la “egregia figura del Libertador de la Patria”, cuyos restos mortales, al lado de los de otros próceres militares y cívicos, en efecto, yacen en ese monumento caraqueño. (233)

[As the night fell upon us, we shared kisses and other tender caresses in a dark corner of the National Pantheon’s old plaza; suddenly, our idyll was interrupted by a raving lunatic claiming to be the security guard of the place; accompanying his fiery words with gestures, affronts and grimaces that revealed his wounded modesty, the individual scolded us, invoking “morality and good manners”; he ends up urging us to be more respectful of the “illustrious figure of the Liberator of the Fatherland,” whose mortal remains lie in fact next to those of other military and civilian heroes in this Caracas monument.]

The nameless man with his “gestos, desplantes y muecas expresivas de su pudor lacerado” [gestures, affronts and grimaces that revealed his wounded modesty] seems to foreshadow Pérez Pirela and his outrage toward Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss twenty years later. In Monasterios’s story, however, the trigger of the outrage was not even the act of kissing Bolívar, but of kissing someone in his presence, “presence” itself a complicated word-choice considering that, in this scenario, Bolívar – his remains, to be exact – would not have been in the plaza the narrator and his partner were in, but inside the Panteón Nacional, behind a fence, and safely guarded by pounds of marble and the surveilling gaze of three statues. In other words, untouchable, and yet somehow rendered vulnerable by the echo of a kiss taking place somewhere in the vicinity. Perhaps this echo of a kiss is dangerous because it deviates from the respect that must be shown to Bolívar whenever he is around, threatening to displace and/or replace it. Put differently, kissing someone near Bolívar means purposely turning your face away from him, not looking at him, letting him become just another blurry, ordinary, insignificant part of the landscape; and that, when it comes to none other than the Liberator himself, simply cannot be. But what if it is Bolívar whom you are kissing and giving – as Castillo does – your full, undivided, attention? Why is that so intolerable?

The critical work developed around Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss has read the kiss as “a gesture of revolt against a virile notion of power” that also disenchants and makes Bolívar “descend to the free use of men” (Rodríguez Lehmann 2019), as a critique of the obsessive/excessive adoration of Bolívar in the Chavista rhetoric that reveals the degree to which “the body has been mediated and controlled by the state and its heroes” (Pineda Burgos 2019), and as an act of absurd veneration that, through mimicry, “undermines both popular rituals of devotion and state repertoires to the point of rendering absurd the over-monumentalization of the figure” (Garzón 2019). These readings re-present the kiss as a symbolic gesture: something that stands for something else, namely a critique of the various forms of power and control that ground themselves in the cult of the Liberator and, most recently, in the ways Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution have rewritten it and – some might argue – abuse it. They all touch on the discomfort the performance generates but do not explore it in too much detail, with the exception of Pérez Pirela’s discomfort, which Pineda Burgos expertly discusses in her article. Without putting aside this connection between Castillo’s kiss and the cult developed in Venezuela around the figure of Bolívar, I would like to propose that the discomfort the performance triggers goes beyond the peculiarities of the Venezuelan case: it is a universal feeling of discomfort that has to do with what we can and cannot tolerate when it comes to the past and its representations.

In A Lover’s Discourse ([1977] 2010), Roland Barthes describes this tolerance in terms of anachronism and obscenity: “Whatever is anachronic is obscene. As a (modern) divinity, History is repressive. History forbids us to be out of time. Of the past we tolerate only the ruin, the monument, kitsch, what is amusing: we reduce this past to no more than its signature” (177). These “signatures” that Barthes mentions – ruins, monuments, kitsch – suck the “pastness” out of the past: an act of temporal exorcism that ensures that the past afterlives, that it lives after itself, and thus not as itself, that it inhabits the present as present (and also, optimistically, as future), hygienically, properly self-contained, allowed to decay (the way ruins do) but never to rot (the way corpses do). Destroying a monument, tearing down a statue, removing the ruins: these actions might be disturbing but they are not obscene. There is nothing obscene, nothing anachronistic, about the present doing some decluttering, making space for new objects and the past that they commemorate, for new and shiny mirrors where we can see our (updated) identity reflected – a side-effect of, or, perhaps, the main reason for using glossy marble and polished bronze in so many statues, monuments, and plaques.¹⁹ A kiss that renounces veneration in favor of seduction; a kiss that acts as a “threshold unto mucosity” (Irigaray in Ives 2013, 62) where the solidity of the past and its narratives gets tested/tasted and where the icon is not an icon but a (metallic, gross) flavour… that is anachronism, an obscene encounter, a temporal faux pas. Castillo herself underscores this when she describes the Emancipatory Kiss as being “about the impossible (…) an erotic act where time expands and contracts”²⁰ and where, we can add, the icon finally merges with the material structure supporting it, allowing us in the process to discover and feel – us too – the materiality of which it is composed.

We are able (or, rather, forced) to feel this materiality because Castillo’s performance intensifies our vision’s capacity to touch: that palpating quality of the gaze that, Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposes, clothes what we see with its own flesh.²¹ This intensification occurs through the suspension of any element that would distract from the different textures and surfaces meeting each other.²² There is no sound accompanying the performance, there is no explanatory text, and there is no background. Everything that is not Castillo’s tongue and Bolívar’s golden face seems to have been swallowed by the black hole that surrounds them and cannot be fully imagined, interpreted, ignored, or spelled out in a formula: not emptiness but the site of an excessive force that sucks us in, that “grabs us by the eyeballs”²³ and that confirms our suspicion that we are also part of this kiss, that we are another surface/time that rubs off against the others. We thus do not look at but look with: our vision compromised because it has become embodied, unable to unstick itself from the scene to adopt an objective and safe distance, trapped in a slippery web that is not a dusty cobweb but a web of saliva (Figure 4).

Figure 4 Still from Deborah Castillo’s Emancipatory Kiss (2013b).

Precariously bridging the gap between Castillo’s tongue and Bolívar’s lips, the thread of saliva that stands out partly because of how slowly Castillo kisses Bolívar’s face – an intentional slowness that, like every other element in this performance, pulls us in and makes us feel we are somehow part of it – turns desecration into secretion: into the viscous encounter of germs and traces of food and metal and paint, a solution that is a dissolution of the icon’s aspirations of both transcendence and immanence. No sound accompanies the apparition of this thread of saliva, and yet the rip in the smooth envelope of the icon deafens us, alerting us to the failure of the body of power to flawlessly hold itself together, and to its (because He is now an “it”) inability to go beyond its own materiality, beyond the most banal of acts and the most ordinary of substances. And yet, for all that this means, Bolívar’s face remains the same; the saliva that undoes him erases itself as mark and, if anything, leaves the surfaces of the epic face more polished, shinier than before. So, was this kiss just a short-lived fantasy? Has anything changed at all?

These questions echo the uncertainty at the centre of Latour’s definition of iconoclash. However, unlike Latour’s iconoclash, the uncertainty in this case is not about what will happen – whether the hand with the hammer will finally destroy the statue or not – but rather about something that happened and did not leave any noticeable traces. This absence of a visible trace is unsettling because it places the burden of change not on the icon, but on us: Bolívar stayed the same after the kiss, but we did not. We walk away from the performance with a metallic taste in our mouth, a taste that we cannot not imagine and that, once imagined, feels intolerably real. So much so that we have to wonder whether we will ever be able to walk past another statue, monument, or memorial without fantasising about kissing and licking it, or whether we will ever be able to encounter another icon again without wondering what he/it would taste like – a question that, in its simplicity, threatens to do more damage to the icon than a hammer ever could. What Castillo did with her Emancipatory Kiss is thus something that cannot be undone, something that escapes the circle of destruction and construction at the centre of iconoclasm: she spoiled Bolívar for us. No amount of new, shinier, and bigger statues of him can successfully fix that because there is nothing there to fix; because the damage is not in the statue, but in our perverted/perverting eyes.

Spoiled

Fantasies, Castillo notes, are central to her work.²⁴ Her performances repeatedly return to the erotic desires that mediate our relationship to power and authority, embodying them in order to, as Juana María Rodríguez proposes, imagine potentialities “beyond and before the now” and “step across the borders of the possible” (2014, 27). Seeing her performance in the Emancipatory Kiss, we realise that this “stepping across the borders of the possible” is a group effort. The visceral and excessive modality of the kiss grabs us, charges us with an energy that blurs the boundaries between our body/her body/his body, contains us, frees us, and then spits us back into the outside of the image, where we stand still but also shaking, semi-confused, traces of saliva still dripping from our eyes. When we compare this with tearing down the statue of Bolívar (or anyone else), decapitating it, burning it, or simply removing it from the landscape, we realise how, behind iconoclasm’s loud smashing of icons, there is a deep sense of comfort; that destruction is, perhaps, the safest thing you can do to an icon.

Safe, of course, for us. In arguing this, I am not overlooking the several and terrible acts of violence that have followed the taking down of icons all over the world and that have ranged from incarceration to terrorism. What I am proposing, however, is that destruction always leaves the door open for reconstruction. The icon will come back, we can be sure of it, and we will get another chance at the hammer: that prosthetic arm that touches the icon but that also ensures that the icon does not touch us back. But Castillo renounces the hammer in favour of her tongue and destruction in favour of seduction, engaging in an act – in a form of erotic iconoclash – that is always reciprocal and that traps everyone under and in between the layers of their materiality: saliva, metal, flesh, cold, heat, nails.

After the kissing and the licking, the icon thus re-appears, not as dead – you cannot kill someone twice – but as something that lost its shape, that lives now “without contour in the realm of the Shades” (Barthes [1977] 2010, 113) that is actually the inside of our mouths, where it lingers, thanks to Castillo, as the banal taste of metal. “The horror of spoiling is even stronger than the anxiety of losing” ([1977] 2010, 28), said Barthes, and we cannot help but agree with him. Faced with a spoiled icon, though, our gaze moves sideways, welcoming the encounter with whatever (or whomever) else was there, hidden in the shadows of the statue or the monument, hoping to be ignored or waiting to be acknowledged: the call of the chaotic, flawed, rough present, which we can only hear when we look past the glorified past and away from the shiny future. In the context of a contemporary Venezuela that has been torn apart, that is currently made of hungry bodies, migrating bodies, and disillusioned bodies, and where (the) Bolívar – hyperinflation tells us – “no vale nada” [is worth nothing], this gazing sideways, this looking around and beyond the Bolivarian past/future, might offer us a new sense of agency and the possibility of imagining a truly new political future.

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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.

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).