Carol Rama

Chakaia Booker

Sculpture is an ongoing dialogue between past and present, a form of ritual bonding between generations whose finest manifestations reach backward and forward. It is an art, first, of the very stuff of the earth- its clays, its minerals, its blocks of granite - and later, of the forge- and factory-made, meticulously planned fabrications or the detritus of daily life placed in uncanny and quickening juxtaposition.

In August of 2018 I acquired the Chakaia Booker Papers for the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art. The newspaper clippings, magazine articles, magazine ads, postcards, exhibition catalogues, and announcements of public programs document the myriad residencies, commissions, outdoor installations, a and gallery exhibitions that span Booker’s almost thirty-year career.

Like many artists of her generation, Booker, born in 1953, distribute museums and galleries to promote herself and her work in the period prior to gallery representation by Marlborough, New York, from 2001 to 2012. The thick gray binder was filled with photographs, slides, and statements on key compositions.

 (1995), twenty-two silver gelatin prints that feature Booker walking in an abandoned graveyard in Queens, New York, where only urban detritus remains. In one shot, the statuesque sculptor is seated on a discarded computer tower. Gazing directly into the camera, she wears a crown of wrapped textiles and a crucifix made of two crossed bones that hangs from her neck, covering her chest. Standing in some shots, squatting in others, the artist moves meditatively through sanctuary of decomposed cans, bones, leather, rope, inner tubes, wood, wire, and glass, as her gloved hands intimately interact with the tires that would become her primary material This image of Booker encapsulates the effects of transportation, urbanization, technological innovation, and globalization on Black populations; it is both tragic and triumphant.

Booker, who earned a BA in sociology from Rutgers University, has referred to herself not only as an abstract and conceptual artist but also as a “narrative environmental sculptor. Her artistic practice encompasses the environment, ecology, and economics. Her experimentation with discarded materials began in the 198os. In a passage titled 

, she writes: “Tires are used for economic, environmental and aesthetic reasons.. They are malleable and beautifully textured. Environmental, every tire used in our work is one less tire to be discarded in some landfill.”

Composing sculptures that measure up to sixty feet long and ten feet high, Booker manipulates tires to create an immersive, ambulatory viewing experience. Walking in and around these tyre structures is a multisensory encounter. They smell of charred rubber, as she retrieved some in the aftermath of car fires on the streets of New York. These “treads” have retained the residue of their past lives -from the assembly line to the sales floor, on the streets and in junkyards. Unlike the materials of classical sculptures-wood, bronze, or stone- the tires Booker employs are tools of mobility. The tire is a symbol of mobility. Yet these tires, detached from their larger system, damaged and discarded, are rendered immobile. While that detachment, damage, and discard refers to these obsidian tires in the “graveyard“, it also refers to Black people, unable to move out of the class to which they are constricted by systemic racism, segregated, and discriminated against, thus rendering them unable to access opportunities to generate and accumulate wealth. Through the act of cutting, shredding, slicing, and shearing the tires, Booker deconstructs the powerlessness and poverty projected onto the Black body in the public domain. Empathetically embracing the color, curvatures, and surface contours of the tires, crossing, curling, and coiling her “treads” as a seamstress does with thread, Booker creates new geometries with each gesture.

Booker’s own words offer some insight into the ancestral origins to which these metric compositions allude. In a passage titled “Tire Sculpture,” Booker writes: “Versatility is vital to the survival of Africans in the diaspora. ... The designs and patterns of tires are abstractly African; their color is the blackness, the skin color of Africans. The tire tread patterns are similar to African motifs used in fabrics and other artwork. Tread patterns also symbolize the patterns of body decoration. These patterns also suggest symbols of scarring which result from the life that Black people are forced to live?*

In many West African societies, scarification is a rite of passage, an indication of transition from childhood to adulthood. Parallel lines, perpendicular lines, and pointillist designs applied in patterns on the face and back, in perfect symmetry on each side, are beautiful, permanent markers of belonging to a specific society. It is a spiritual process, a ritual often performed in private, as it involves pain and bloodshed. Scarification indicates survival. Whereas other scholars have focused on the sexual connotations poker’s sculptures, I am interested in their spiritual references. As the grandchild of African American Baptist minister and a student of political science, African African American studies, and poststructuralism, I will here provide context for an interpretation of Booker’s sculptures that honors the information systems that have inspired her ideology and artistic practice. I am interested in not only historicizing the physicality of the ready made she deconstructs, but also in interrogating the material composition and psychic conditions under which the readymade itself was constructed. An investigation of these abstract forms must first consider their conceptual frame-works. A focus on form and comparisons to her contemporaries would be incomplete without an examination of the ethnographic, economic, political, and cultural conditions that created the objects that Booker resurrects and revolutionizes.

Booker draws divine inspiration from African and African American spiritual practices. Her sculptures operate within the lineage of West African power objects, living mediators between this world and the other world, containers for magical medicine that transmits supernatural powers. Often these totemic structures refer to royalty and are used in ritual contexts. Specifically, these works draw on the architectural properties of African royal dwellings and shrines. 

 (both 2003), for example, elongated, erect tire sculptures, exude the elegance of figurative African carved wood sculptures that adorn the facades of chief’ compounds or shrines. Resting upon a rectangular base, these hard-edge, geometric abstract carvings symbolize the chief’s body or founding-warrior ancestor. Booker’s vertical structures, composed of curved, woven inner tubes, resemble those that stand parallel to one another at the threshold of spaces of ritual, not merely adorning private entrances but spiritually guiding and physically guarding chose within. The space between the two parallel sculptures constructs a contact zone, a portal through which one passes from one dimension to the next, between the physical and nonphysical, the living and the nonliving.

 both refer to African spiritual practices, specifically pertaining to transcendence.

Booker invokes the presence of her African ancestors, whose tribal scars, like the treads on tires, are demarcations of origin, function, duration, and location. She also summons her African American ancestors, their whip lashings leaving raised keloid scars, etching the date and time of an oppositional encounter with a slave master.

Through her own meticulous, methodical, and mathematically calculated manual labor, Booker makes contact with the residue of remnants of objects constructed by the hands of powerless Black laborers converting torn tires into power objects imbued in the rubber itself, the physical and psychic residue of Black laborers communes with Booker’s own repetitive movement. Recalling their rituals of resistance, the artist internalizes and releases the energy of the tires, creating new geometries with each gesture. As sculptures within museums and outdoor installations, the deconstructed rubber tire is both material and medium between the Black laborers and the aristocracy with whom they have no audience. These works are meditations on Black labor. They are not simply metaphors, they are memorials to Black laborers.

I met with Booker many times while collecting her papers, during which she often mentioned that she had letters, notes, and cards from the artist Al Loving saved in a file that she would one day donate to the archives. Loving taught painting at the City College of New York from 1988 to 1996. Booker was his student. Born in 1935 in Detroit, Loving earned a BFA from the University of Illinois and an MFA in painting at the University of Michigan. He had his first solo presentation in Detroit in 1969. Six months later, having moved to New York at age thirty four, he became the first African American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Shortly after this exhibition, which featured Loving’s hard edge geometric abstractions, the artist shifted paradigms.

Loving’s exhibition in the second-floor auditorium integrated the Whitney Museum at the height of the civil rights movement. From 1968 to 1971 the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition demonstrated at the Whitney, demanding the exhibition and acquisition of Black artists therein, and this was the museum’s response. Amid a heated debate among Black artists on the formal and representational qualities of “Black art,” Loving’s paintings provided a seemingly deracialized, depoliticized surface. “Loving had concentrated on the tension between flatness and spatial illusionism. In the 1970s the artist became disenchanted with his earlier, hard-edge geometric paintings. Loving dispensed with notions of centralized composition, figure/ground separation, and pictorial frame in his later corn canvas and collaged paper works.“* Disillusioned with the impersonal discourse around abstraction, Loving reinvested in abstraction’s capacity to represent aspects of the Black experience. In works like 

 (1973), Loving, whose mother and grandmother were quilters, “combined hundreds of pieces of cut and corn canvas or paper into an abundance of overlapping patterns and shapes, their rich and intuitive array of colors [stretching] irregularly, spiraling outward, surrounding the space, and engulfing the viewer.”*

Richard J. Powell asserts that “these works were based on thematic and perceptual echoes of non-European prototypes, West African masquerades and textile arts.”* For Loving, abstraction was an opportunity to engage materials, rather than color, in the debate regarding the racial, economic, and cultural origins of a work of art. These heavy, discarded rags, sheared, torn, and sewn into heptahedrons and spirals suspended from the walls, conveyed the complexity of the African American condition.

In a review of the exhibition “Radical Tradition: American Quilts and Social Change,” Sarah Rose Sharp asserts that “quilts have always offered a subversive avenue for self-expression to people who have been historically marginalized due to their gender, education, financial independence, and access to materials. The act of creating whole cloth from scraps and dregs is not just a matter of making ends meet, but a statement on the nature of what (and who) is discarded, as well as an empowering act of reclaiming that refuse in the name of something transformative and beautiful? Drawing on the quilting tradition, Loving alludes to the geometric, abstract quilts in which African American women embedded codes, conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad as they migrated from slavery and Jim Crow laws in the South to freedom in the North. Loving became known for his spirals, constructed of rag paper, glue, acrylic paint, and windshield wiper blades. The spiral was, for Loving, a political con, referencing the African American abstract artists who formed the Spiral Group 963 and a spiritual symbol of the continuity between generations of Africans and African Americans.

Booker’s use of abstraction to access ancestral expressive modes echoes, parallels and builds upon the artistic strategies employed by her model and mentor. The two conversed and corresponded frequently, even after Booker earned her MFA from City College in 1993. Like Loving, Booker was raised by women who sewed clothes for themselves, their families, and their friends. Having learned to sew at an early age, began her practice with cloth, deconstructing recycled clothing to construct wearable mixed-media objects. Though she also experimented with bone, ceramics, basket-weaving, and casting metal, her consciousness of the effects of industrialization and globalization, specifically on people of African descent, brought her back to recycled material and its subversive power. Like Loving, Booker would enter the world stage at the Whitney Museum. In 2000, her large-scale twenty-one-foot-long wall relief tire sculpture titled 

, composed of spirals of sheared rubber tire, was featured in the Whitney Biennial.

At the time of his Whitney debut, Loving’s post-painterly abstractions were not compared to those of his white male counterparts. Kellie Jones notes that Loving received only three reviews by mainstream art press. Considering the absence of critical discourse addressing Black abstract artists, Jones concludes, “the majority of Black professional artists were unknown to this generation of critics.”& Thirty years later, Booker’s work would enter the canon, placing her in conversation with white male artists who celebrated or critiqued American capitalism via the iconography of automobiles.

Having seen and studied Marcel Duchamp’s 

 (1957), and Allan Kaprow’s installation 

 (1961), Booker knew that by employing the readymade rubber tire as material, she would compete with white male artists whose sculptures, performances, and conceptual works dominated postwar abstraction. In deconstructing the tire, she could confront, challenge, and complicate the tires status as the signifier of freedom, and the car as a symbol of the American dream. If Rauschenberg represented the physical impact of the Ford Model I, Booker addressed the metaphysical impact of Fordism.

The discarded tire is a metaphor for the dispersion, dislocation, and discarding of Black labor. Employing the inner and outer portions of the tires, Booker implies that the physical and psychological states of people of African descent have been altered by their employment in the Western colonial, capitalist, and corporate system. Booker’s intent is to evidence the physical and psychological violence rendered upon the Black body within the global capitalist system since the invention of transportation technologies.

The rubber used to make the tires in Booker’s sculptures can be traced to Africa, specifically to Harbel, Liberia. In 1822, freed slaves who were sent to West Africa by the American Colonization Society founded Liberia, which declared its independence as a republic on July 26, 1847. Fifty-six years later, in June 1903, Henry Ford founded Ford Motor Company in Detroit. That same year, his friend Harvey Firestone began manufacturing tires and, in 1906, Ford selected Firestone to supply tires for his company’s car models. Starting a business partnership that would last for decades, Firestone delivered 2.000 sets of tires to Ford Motor Company, fulfilling the largest single order for tires placed by the industry to date.* In 1926, due to the increasing demand for rubber for tire manufacturing, Firestone sought to establish a rubber plantation. The Liberian government agreed to lease Firestone 1 million acres of land for 6 cents per acre for ninety-nine years. To date, Harbel, where Liberian men and women carve Hevea trees to tap latex, is the largest rubber plantation on Earth and Liberia’s largest private employer. This rubber – planted, cultivated, and tapped by Liberian hands – was manufactured into the fires delivered to Detroit for almost a century. Firestone tires, though primarily designed for the Ford Motor Company, also produced tires for other companies. Paid an average of 72 cents an hour, to those who work on this plantation cannot afford the cars chat could not be produced without their labor. And as ofJanuary 1, 2020, these African laborers were being laid off and evicted from their homes on the plantation. “Firestone is the anchor, said Gyude Moore, Liberia’s former public works minister. “Like the auto industry was for Detroit--except for an entire country.”!

In 1915 Detroit was home to all but two of the country’s fifteen most popular automobile companies.* Between 1916 and 1930, approximately 1. million African Americans migrated from the South of the United States to the North in search of economic opportunity. In Detroit, economic opportunity translated to employment in the automobile industry, specifically the 5-dollar workday at Ford Motor Company. “Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant alone employed 10,000 Black workers by the mid 1990s, ten percent of its entire workforce, over half of all Black auto workers in the country, and about three-fourths of those in Detroit.* The Great Migration was the first step in the urbanization of the African American population. 4 By 1930 African Americans composed 8 percent of the population of Detroit and 14 percent fall autoworkers in the Motor City “Joyce Shaw Peterson notes: „The techniques of mass production were well developed and included a system of meshed, continuously moving assembly lines. Work was primarily characterized by monotony, repetition, and attention to task rather than back breaking physical labor... However Black workers were more likely to get chose remaining jobs for which physical strength was a prerequisite... They were hired into those jobs that had the lowest pay scales, required the greatest physical exertion, had the highest accident rates and the largest number of health hazards.“*

Most African American autoworkers, between 60-70 percent, even at River Rouge, worked in the foundry.* It was a physically and psychologically painful experience. Inside the factories, they were discriminated against in training, hiring, job classification, and wages. They were the last to be promoted and the first to be laid off or fired during periods of financial instability. Outside the factories, they were discriminated against in lodging and housing. When refused lodging, some auto workers slept in cars. Most crammed into overcrowded rooms, often in condemned buildings without electricity, heat, or plumbing. These unsanitary conditions translated into depression, disease, and death from tuberculosis and pneumonia among Detroit’s African American autoworkers, who often traveled considerable distances to get to factories each day.

Though they did not have physical refuge, these workers found psychological refuge church. Pooling their resources to purchase property, they physically laid the foundations of the buildings in which they would worship on Sunday mornings and after-Peterson asserts: “Despite secular attempts to provide a social life to Detroit’s workers, by far the most important social institutions were the Black churches... churches served as all-around social centers hosting suppers, lectures, recitals, plays, picnics, athletic events, sewing and cooking clubs. ... The leading Black workers filled early on Sundays and turned away hundreds of worshippers for lack os space.“* Autoworkers were the driving force in establishing Hartford Memorial Baptist in 1917, Tabernacle Baptist Church in 1920, and New Bethel Baptist Church These churches were not just the center of spiritual and social life, they were also economic development and political empowerment.

At the outset of World War II in 1939, 12 percent of the auto industry’s workforce was Black, but by 1940 that figure fell, and tensions over unemployment, workplace discrimination, housing segregation, and war rations flared. “In May of 1943 a mob of more than one thousand whites, some of whom were armed, lit a cross on fire and angrily picketed the arrival of their African American neighbors.” Weeks later, from June 20 to 22, 1943, “with Woodward [Avenue] as their dividing line, white mobs overturned cars owned by Blacks and set them on fire and beat Black men as white policemen looked on.“* African Americans were pulled from streetcars and automobiles and beaten until there was blood on the ground, leaving thirty-four dead and hundreds injured.” The UAW Ford Local 600 (River Rouge), which was established at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in 1938, organized civil rights activism that resulted in government policies discouraging employment and workplace discrimination. By 1945, 15 percent of Detroit’s automotive workforce was Black. In the immediate postwar period, African Americans were disposed of by two shifts in auto manufacturing. First, decentralization: companies increasingly relocated plants to suburban and rural areas n the segregated South. Secondly, automated technologies. “The great irony of the postwar auto industry was that just as Blacks found themselves on the first rung of the ladder of economic mobility in the auto industry, that rung was cut away by decentralization and automation.“*

Between 1947 and 1963, the Motor City lost 140,000 manufacturing jobs.* The 1950s and early 196os found African American workers standing not on assembly lines but unemployment lines. Unemployment lines led to picket lines. Unemployed autoworkers lobbied, marched, protested, and prosecuted. “Detroit, the city with the largest number of Black auto workers, was also home to the nation’s largest NAACP chapter and some of the nation’s most politically influential Black churches.” Reverend C. L. Franklin, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church and chairman of the Detroit Council on Human Rights, co-organized Detroit’s largest demonstration. Known as the Walk to Freedom, on June 23, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the 125,000 people who marched lockstep with him down Woodward Avenue, the site of the 1943 riots twenty years prior.

Between 1945 and 1965, there were more than two hundred violent racial incidents of whites attacking Blacks in Detroit, and almost all stemmed from the first or second Black families moving into all-white neighborhoods. The migration of Blacks into Detroit, which helped power its economic rise, was followed by an exodus of white residents to the suburbs.*

But the riots in Detroit from July 23 to 27, 1967, would impact the city for the next forty years. “By the time the bloodshed, burning and looting ended after five days, 43 people were dead, 342 injured, nearly 1,400 buildings had been burned and some 7,000 National Guard and U.S. Army troops had been called into service.“* Ebony magazine coined the summer of 1967 as the summer of “Retha, Rap, and Revolt.”

When Aretha Franklin, Reverend C. L. Franklin’s daughter, called for “R-E-S-P-E-C-T» African Americans around the nation responded in unison, calling for the same. According to Thomas J. Sugrue, “amidst the growing call for Black Power in the late 196os many auto assembly plants became racial battlegrounds.”28 On the factory floor, African American autoworkers chanted Motown melodies while executing Revolutionary Union Movements during which they slowed down the assembly lines not just for the right to labor, but for the right to be skilled laborers, foremen, and superintendents.

By 1970, 20 percent of Detroit’s automobile labor force was African American, but by 2000, the auto industry again disproportionately displaced African American workers, this time through globalization. Michigan lost 83,000 auto manufacturing jobs between 1993 and 2008. Dramatically decreased auto sales resulted in the decline of the auto industry. In 2006 Ford mortgaged all its assets for a $23 billion loan that ensured its survival, 9 while its rivals GM and Chrysler filed chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in 2009. “Detroit’s singular reliance on an auto industry that stumbled badly, and its long history of racial strife proved a disastrous combination,” catalyzing the divestment, depopulation, and deterioration of the city. On July 18, 2013, the City of Detroit, with an 83 percent African American population, claimed $20 billion in unpaid bills, filing “the single largest municipal bankruptcy in American history” and leaving the city “defined by a barren landscape of deserted neighborhoods and abandoned buildings.“* Detroit was the automobile industry’s sacrificial lamb.

Reminiscent of the crucifix hanging from Booker’s neck in 

 (2012) features a cross covered corner to corner in shredded tires, large enough to hold the body of an athletic adult. The symbol of Christianity, its razor-sharp edges resemble the thorns on the crown Jesus wore as he was crucified. Composed of perpendicular angles, the sculpture leans at a protracted 45-degree angle and is held in place by two empty black wheelbarrows, one on either side. Not only absent is the body of Christ, but also absent are the bodies of the Black laborers behind the wheelbarrows. In other sculptures, Booker lines the shards of shredded tires unilaterally, but on this “old rugged cross” the seemingly charred shards of shredded tires are applied in multiple directions. It is riotous. It is rebellious. Though made of soft and supple rubber, these spiked edges evoke agony. Envisioning the crucifixion, one hears the refrain repeated during the sacred moments of communion each first Sunday in African American churches: “I will cling to the old rugged cross and exchange it someday for a crown.” This cross is about transfiguration.

While metal and wood crosses of this scale grace the facades of churches globally, the cross is a paradoxical religious symbol for African Americans. The cross was deployed by Europeans to colonize and enslave Africans and to segregate, discriminate against, and assassinate African Americans. It is the cross upon which Black boys and men were lynched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And it is the cross that justifies modern-day lynching: criminalization, racial profiling, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the assassination of Black men in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For James H. Cone, who authored Black Theology and Black Power in 1969 and God of the Oppressed in 1975, the riots and rebellions that led to the liberation of people of African descent, particularly in America, are righteous ritual acts. In his seminal text The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone states: “The real scandal of the cross is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst.”

Whereas other contemporary artists, including Renee Cox in her work

(1994), have used the crucifix to compare the lynching of African American men to the crucifixion of Jesus, Booker’s use of rubber tires to construct the crucifix denotes the inextricable relationship between racism, capitalism, and Christianity. The protracted 45- degree angle of the sculpture illuminates the intersectionality between the rise and fall of the automobile industry and the rise and fall of the African American labor class in Detroit. This population leaned on the iconography of the cross, even as church members were being crucified. In 

the car, like the cross, is a paradoxical symbol for African Americans. Though the automobile industry provided geographic, economic, political, and social mobility for African Americans (particularly in Detroit), countless arrests, assaults, and assassinations of African Americans have taken place in cars.

As Sugrue argues, “the history of the automobile and Black America parallels the history of American race relations itself.... Encapsulated in the history of the car is the story of Black America’s ongoing, still unfinished, struggle for freedom and equality.“*

The refrain from another spiritual often sung during communion states, “At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light and the burdens of my heart rolled away.” The empty wheelbarrows reference not only the extraction of minerals for industrial manufacturing, but also the haunting loads of manual labor that people of African descent have carried for generations. Upholding the larger structure, they also imply that the cross is a contact zone in which the psychological burden of labor is lifted. While the two wheelbarrows represent physical labor, the cross represents the psychological state of people of African descent. Booker has lifted weights for decades in order to bear the weight of tires. She rescues these tires from the ruinous and riotous streets of New York, relocating them to her studio, where she transforms them into sacred objects of art and transports them to museums, galleries, and parks. Like the elastomer in the tire, the spirituals, rituals, and religious practices of people of African descent have protected and provided them with the resilience to withstand the physical and psychological violence of a capitalist system.

The materials, those foreign bodies that constitute any artwork, are eminently significant in the art of Carol Rama, which is itself articulated around several iso- lated limbs of the body that together form a singular anatomy: wet watercolour, formless Bricolage and erectile mutant rubber.

In seventy years of art making, Rama has transitioned with disconcerting ease and palpable pleasure from the representation of the body and its organic matter to the matter-rich presentation of fluids or corporeal textures. Although very het- erogeneous, these different series form a coherent ensemble around recurring themes such as sex, illness, madness, fetishism, voyeurism, pleasure, wars, ani- mality and death. With Rama, as with lovers of so-called deviant sex, the prop is more than an accessory: far from being contingent, it is truly essential.

Like Beuys, but without his mystic-egocentric dimension, she freights her pre- ferred materials with symbolism. She is closer to Robert Gober, to the uncanny in Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, and to Cindy Sherman.

Expressionist, Surrealist, Pop, Minimalist:1 Rama is all those things, and sometimes even appears anachronistic,2 knowingly outside the big identified movements and, for that very reason, eternally contemporary.

Obsessed with the abject (whether artificial or organic), the obscene, the exotic, the ‘non-allegorised or Bataille’s ‘base materialism’, Rama occupies an eccentric position in the field of art, and all the more so in patriarchal and Catholic Italy from the thirties to the 2000s, from Mussolini to Berlusconi (with their highly repressive and sexualised policies). Rama’s unbridled, pornographic eroticism, when she was only just twenty-five, constituted an act of Resistenza. It dared to celebrate Masturbazione. She never stopped quoting herself, in fact, in a body of work that forms an indivisible whole but resists any recuperation.

To compare her to other artists of her generation, Rama appears more sexual than Niki de Saint Phalle (prophetic name notwithstanding), less formal than Louise Bourgeois, and less elegant than Alina Szapocznikow or Louise Nevelson – and more ambiguous than Birgit Jürgenssen or Meret Oppenheim too.

Claiming not to have discovered Buñuel, Bataille and Klossowski until the eighties, Rama affirmed that ‘sin was [her] master’. However, the trap would be to reduce her practice to that of a neurotic and self-taught hysteric, even if it is tempting to refer to her biographical background (invalided parent, interned mother, father who committed suicide, etc.) to explain her choice of subjects and materials. Rama openly positions herself as a bricoleuse in the sense attributed to this term by Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage – in opposition to the ‘engineer’. But her work also recalls Duchamp and his erotico-conceptual machines, which invalidate any kind of duality. Her undeniable ‘raffinato brut e colto naïf’ (refined brut and cultivated naïve) side, noted by her poet friend Eduardo Sanguineti, has its SM side: indocile, she rejects all normative interpre- tations and claims an almost political attraction to everything that is normally devalued, exploding all the established categories (feminine/masculine, human/ animal, submission/domination).

TheWatercolours, the Tongue or the Taste for Wetness

Her first known works from the thirties and forties are paintings (almost abstract self-portraits and portraits of lesbian couples) and above all watercolours, both orgiastic and melancholic, of unclothed women, alone or surrounded by multi- membered men. Italian Futurism inevitably comes to mind here, with its repre- sentation of movement by means of repetition. Her strange visions revisit Courbet’s The Origin of the World but give the lady her face back (it stares out at us) and Manet’s Olympia, that manifesto of pictorial modernity (revealing her vagina and anus), while also prefiguring Lynda Benglis (and her naked self-portrait brandishing a huge dildo).3 Rama alternates between anonymous Appassionata figures and named but generic portraits.

Watercolour is an eminently feminine, gendered medium. Apart from Egon Schiele, few male artists really engaged with it. Sherrie Levine knew exactly what she was doing, years later, when she used it to reprise the great icons of male- dominated modern art and to implicitly criticise the machismo of art history and the role assigned to women of making pallid reproductions. In Rama’s work, it is the contrast between the gentleness of the water-dilute colours (in harmony with the often flower-decorated frames, recalling the crowns of flowers or thorns worn by her ‘chosen’ but pagan figures) and the sexually explicit poses of the subjects (generally valued by male artists, with the well-known exception of Unica Zürn’s drawings) that is most striking.

The extremities of the body are emphasised, reddened, as in the work of Aloïse and Marisa Merz. But by deliberately emphasising the tongues, genitals, anuses and painted nails of her subjects, Rama takes away the watercolour’s inno- cence, as she does with patchwork, another discipline she practises (like Sonia Delaunay, Louise Bourgeois and Annette Messager), reminding us that sewing is also stitching and thus eminently sexual (see her Abiti di sposati, black with embroidered genitalia in red) – done with a needle. Rama has constantly trans- formed reality using disguises and accessories.

Indeed, rather like the bodies of dolls, the dislocated puppets and the ampu- tated ancient sculptures, the bodies are represented dismembered, floating in irrational spaces. As in the Anatomies made in the thirties by Man Ray – a close friend –, Rama deterritorialises bodies, and sexualises them, in fragments. As a ‘paraphiliac’ whose ‘disorder’ was celebrated in 1887 by Alfred Binet in his book Le Fétichisme dans l’amour, Rama also explores desire, outside the traditional erogenous zones. The recurring dentures subliminally and ironically remind us of the fear or desire inspired by the image of a castratory vagina dentata.

To explain the faces sticking their tongue out that appear so frequently in her watercolours, Rama invokes her memories of psychiatric hospital, a place that embodies the heterotopia of repression in Foucault,6 but also the place of multiple fantasies with its bodies tied down, constrained – the pleasure of bondage. Rama’s necrophiliac attraction to a certain kind of orthopaedic or prosthetic beauty brings to mind J. G. Ballard’s Crash, as filmed by Cronenberg, and the interdependence of Eros and Thanatos. The tongue, the only organ that ‘non invecchia mai’ (never ages) is eminently ambiguous, an instrument at once of ‘eloquence and spitting’ (Michel Leiris). Sticking one’s tongue out is above all an act of defiance and provocation. Figuratively, it becomes Malelingua.

The tongue/mouth is also the exploratory organ par excellence, the one that licks, tastes, sucks and penetrates all the orifices: from the ears (for Sade, hearing was more important than touch: see Rama’s series C’è un altro metodo per finire, ancora, 2003), to the anus (and Rama can even get scatological, in the style of Salò),7 the vagina (Duchamp, with his tongue in cheek humour, defined himself as a ‘cunni- linguist’), and the penis (one thinks of Warhol’s Blow Job). Rama has also produced many images of urinals: inverted fountains8 with a latent homoeroticism about them, these works prefigure Gober’s Sinks – those ‘windows onto the under- ground world’. A privileged ally of foot fetishists, the tongue can also be excited simply by the idea of dirt,9 provoking as much pleasure as it does disgust. Rama’s uncle was a prosthetic shoemaker and in her work (as in that of Warhol or Carlo Mollino, her architect neighbour and taker of fetishistic Polaroids) we find many shoes, heels and related forms. The shoe can effectively function as a vagina sur- rogate for the phallic foot (see her bronze cast Feticci/ Scarpe) and the similarly phallic high heel can penetrate and crush and thus signify a woman’s domination of a man.

Rama addresses zoophilia in Eretica. This is as much a way of casting off taboos as an image of the repressed,11 for the animal (which she also represents in the form of animal skins) embodies instinct and desire. In Rama, the so-called ‘oral’, ‘anal’ and ‘phallic’ phases seem to have broken ranks.

Rama then abandoned figuration and did not return to it until the Transavant- garde-dominated eighties, when her watercolours, prints and paintings in nail var- nish (what medium could be more feminine?) featured fat Fellinian women, fallen angels, power animals and fragmented bodies, drawn on graph paper, maps or classic architectural plates, and seeming to decry their subjacent phallocentrism.

Bricolage Eyes, Survivors of Formlessness

In the fifties Rama briefly aligned herself with the aesthetic of the Milan and Turin-based Concrete Art Movement, organised around her friend Gillo Dorfles. If this fairly masculine geometry, antithetical to figuration and lyricism, allowed her to temporarily shake off both any biographical interpretations of her work but also censorship, her approach was nevertheless fairly organic and included move- ment: the lozenges and rectangles seem to be sucked into a kind of centripetal, often pink void,13 recalling Louise Bourgeois’s ‘geometry of pleasure’.

However, Rama’s second really important period was that of her Bricolages or relief paintings in the sixties. These were more about making painting concrete than representing matter by means of paint or watercolour, resulting in concrete painting (more than concrete abstraction) that explores the idea of formlessness. Rama stuck recognisable objects in her paintings, but the matter is never absorbed by the image–object, nor is the image-object absorbed by the matter. Traces of splashes, impact or stains suggest all manner of maculation: phlegm, vomit, shit, blood (from menstruation or wounds), urine (piss painting effect), sperm (facial ejaculation, etc.), damp and other kinds of degradation that fascinated Bataille.

By definition neither abstract nor figurative, formlessness has historically been the manifestation of a reaction to something unbearable – the Second World War, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Algeria. Witness Fautrier’s Hostage, Fontana’s slashed canvases, the skeletal, charred figures of Giacometti or Germaine Richier, Burri’s burns, the deformed bodies of Dubuffet and Bacon – or again, the proliferating aliment blanc (white food) of Malaval, or the more fetid liquids of McCarthy.

Organismi ancora ben definiti ma vulnerabili, Rama’s series in viscous sprayed glue with monstrous black figures that are archaic and undifferentiated, takes on an apocalyptic quality, somewhere between rock painting and exorcism.

Rama is not afraid of explicitly political subjects (see her portraits of Mao and Martin Luther King, two leaders but also two idols) and makes several direct ref- erences to the atom bomb (Bomb), with the names of Einstein and Oppenheimer alongside mathematical formulae, but which only she can decipher. The way sci- ence was perverted in the service of war explains Rama’s wariness of all culture.15 She asserts that no war – ‘the school of man’ – is ever clean, or astratta, whatever the claims: the traces and damage are as indelible as the discharges of fats or glues creating phallic or mushroom-cloud marks on the canvases.

The recurrence of body/debris may thus refer to napalm explosions. Organic elements of a somewhat repulsive nature are thus directly incorporated into the paint/matter or glued onto the canvas or paper: eyes, hair, fur, claws, nails, teeth (attributes of defence and aggression) as well as electrical and medical tools (bat- teries, resistors, syringes, nozzles). These Bricolages suggest occult rituals – Turin happens to be located in the black magic triangle,16 along with San Francisco and London – and are like African fetishes that have been aggressed and studded with nails (of which Rama owns a few examples) or Christian ex-votos. Her ‘collages’ of objects are reminiscent in equal measure of Surrealism, Junk Art (Bruce Conner, Robert Rauschenberg) and Nouveau Réalisme (Arman, Spoerri), while her titles are often cut-up neologisms (‘autorattristatrice’, ‘autoportraitiste’).

More than any other grafted object, it is the ‘false-real’ glass or porcelain eyes (used for stuffed animals, as prostheses for people with just one eye, or for Bellmer’s dolls) that seem to give the key to her Bricolages. A central character in Bataille’s Story of the Eye (in which the eye/egg is an erotic delicacy, as in Oshima), the eye is a metaphor for a fertile, tactile (and haptic) vision, not for an optical representation of the tactile. It is at once a source of lubricious pleasure (that of the voyeur) and image of consciousness (the seer).17 Finally, the gaze can also disturb, when it is without thought, as in the case of a dead animal (see her hyp- notic representations of carcasses of foxes and snakes) or an inanimate object; for, as Lacan observes, ‘objects regards us’

The Penis (and the Udder) as Erectile Rubber

In the seventies Rama inaugurated a new phase centred on rubber, which, although intrinsically linked to the Bricolages, is more monochromatic, more abstract, and in larger formats. Soft and black – the colour Rama adores above all others – the material’s physical properties are one with the psychic conditions of its perception.

Essentially vegetal, taken from bicycle inner tubes (but knowing that Carol’s father ran a factory that made these, then went bankrupt and killed himself, can- not explain everything), rubber is in contact with the ground and embodies a certain functional baseness. Waterproof, it was used by fisherman and postmen, but also by sadomasochists (from Molinier to Catwoman), who appreciated this close-fitting, matt, restrictive and suggestive second skin, before the wet look of latex and PVC gained preference.

Close to the Mad Max aesthetic (note the leather jacket by her friend Corrado Levi that Rama pimped with a pneumatic spinal column), the titles of her works, such as Arsenale or Presagi di Birnam (evoking Macbeth), suggest conflict of a rather military nature, even if the curves of some of the less symmetrical compositions seem, on the contrary, to represent breasts. Rubber is also a mutant material: a bicycle tyre (or on a wheelchair) can harden or soften like a penis (or a glove). Natural latex (in the same way as felt or plastic) appeared frequently in American art of the sixties, just when the machismo inherent in Minimalism was under attack: flaccidity was a key feature of the soft sculptures made by Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris and Richard Serra, with their organic, eccentric abstraction,19 and fits well with Rama’s Gomme series, although in fact she has made very few sculptures per se.

In Rama the inner tubes are carefully torn up, flattened and stuck on the canvas, like a surgical operation with a scalpel, often showing the repair patches, those scars of time. Forced into immobilità and two dimensionality, the wheels no longer turn, or at least only spin on their own axis.

Historically however, the bicycle, a symbol of liberation, has aroused numerous fantasies. As early as 1900, the nascent discipline of sporting medicine was accus- ing this means of transport of making women infertile or nymphomaniac.

In the nineties, and up to the mid 2000s, Rama worked on one final big series. More baroque and more figurative, but still in rubber (sometimes combined with prints), her Mucca Pazza were inspired by the outbreak of mad cow disease. They are like ablations of breasts (or bull’s testicles). This ecological disaster that was given so much press coverage (cattle caught a nervous infection from eating animal feed, in a case of forced, unnatural cannibalism) was also a socio- economic one, and threatened to contaminate humans (as suggested by the postal bags used as a backdrop in some of the collages). Rama has often said that she identified with these frenetic cows, these uncontrollable, rutting ‘appassion- natas’. Highly tactile, these works seem to be subliminally saying ‘Please do touch’, echoing the words on the cover (and the title) of the book by Duchamp, ‘Prière de toucher’, for which Rama also produced a kind of pendant, with a teat formed by a car valve.

Through its constant back and forth movements, from the inside to the outside and vice versa, its references and self-citations, Rama’s work, full of dismem- bered, formless, patched up or cut up bodies, manages to compensate for an absurd world that would otherwise be doomed to depression, tedium and frus- tration. With an appetite for life and non-standard pleasures, all the senses, from taste (the wetness of watercolour), to sight (the bricolages) and touch (the flaccid latex) are brought into play, linked with organ-bodies (tongue–eye–penis/breast), themselves with their multiple commutative secretions, and which appear as equally our acknowledged origin and as our only possible way out.

Installation view, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Set of 6 lithography and photogravure on paper 

 1944
Sanguine (reddish-brown chalk) on paper, mounted on wooden board 2 framed panels, side by side
196.5 x 245 x 3.6 cm


Chakaia Booker
Heaven On Earth, 1996
Rubber tires, wood and steel
167.64 x 182.88 x 66.04 cm