Up From Under
Lucy R. Lippard
Welcome to the dark and hopeless world of Ricardo Estanislao Zulueta, which, in its very darkness and hopelessness, sheds light into the future. His photo-performances arise froma subconscious/subterranean view of sexual politics that ultimately resists the omnipresent “master narrative” through both image and process. Zulueta and his accomplices sneak into “public” places – schools, toilets, subways, stores, furnace rooms – disrobe to enact their chilling communal narratives, and sneak back out. (He has been caught twice but not arrested.) He was doing this before Madonna.
In this peculiar brand of “tableau” or “set-up” photography, Zulueta does not merely picture danger, but plays it out so that the photo-documents carry with them the residue of their guerilla inception. Private performances become public warnings. As he merges the roles of photographer, performer, and viewer, we too become simultaneously exhibitionist and voyeur.
Zulueta always works with same-sex pairs. In this series, he almost erases the differences between the two models in each picture, stressing an unnatural symmetry. He is dealing not with identity but non-identity, or even non-entity, with the cloning of individuals in this society (and perhaps with the way individuals are robbed of their identities when they are labeled according to their class, gender, race, or sexual preferences). The figures represent not individuals but issues.
Sexuality is the subtext. Zulueta’s imagery is not overtly erotic, but his staged situations are. Though rarely touching and never engaging in anything more erotic than holding hands, his nude and usually faceless protagonists nevertheless challenge public mores. Given the past few years of censored art and the initiatives against lesbians and gays that were supported in some states and cut down in others during the recent U.S. elections, Zulueta’s work becomes still more of a public concern.
In 1987 he titled an exhibition “Tableau Utopia,” and in 1988, “Basement Therapy.” (He was living in a basement apartment which he has since escaped, although the subterranean metaphors remain.) In the earlier work, the paired images and stilled performance were already in place, but Zulueta employed much more detail – peculiar costumes and ambiguous props that in some cases proved distracting to the extraordinarily sculptural quality of the vision. This new series literally strips down, insisting on stark anonymity of the figures. “Humane Society” is more minimal than surrealist, gaining power on both formal and symbolic levels. The bleak environments come forward, competing with and sometimes overpowering the human presence – or absence of human presence. With the elimination of costumes and props, the figures are generalized, intentionally dehumanized, and the ambience is increasingly ominous. Nudity taken of the human(e) context becomes a still life, or nature morte (dead nature).
Zulueta’s esthetic has deep roots. He recalls that as a child in Miami (his family left Cuba when he was four) “I was very secretive, and formulated a secret language, and would leave notes and letters to myself in secret places.” His art too is encoded, even as its primary messages are increasingly accessible. (Quoted in catalogue for Basement Therapyat MoCHA, New York, 1988.) “The selection of photo-performance as a method of work is a result of the impact of the bombardment of media and mass communication on my life. The photograph (final object) reflects the rapid processing of information in a coded tangible image. The performance still represents a documented concept, therefore, the image’s content and it’s ability to make us think about contemporary universal issues is the central focus of my work.”
Occassionally the clandestine performance element triggers a subtle humor in these neutral and even deadpan pictures. For example, Humane Society IV, a Magrittean mixture of the banal and the unexpected: two nude men in fedoras and black shoes in an empty subway car holding the New York Times before their faces, next to an ad that reads, “Tonight Try a New Route.”
In Humane Society V, the mood is quite different. Two nude men, hands held high to form an arch, stand with their backs to the camera in a darkened room full of computers in cubicles – a technological sweat shop. The juxtaposition of sensuously muscled bodies and dramatic, stylized pose against cold white plastic boxes and blank screens (connected by an atypically visceral tangle of cords) is a striking comment on mechanization and dehumanization in the workplace as a metaphor for the loss of a meaningful private life. This is the only image that event hints at intimacy.
Humane Society I jolts the predictable in still another manner: two nude women, one in a wheel chair, one on crutches, their thighs and eyes covered with oversized $1000 bills. Are they handicapped people bought off by an uncaring bureaucracy or defying sexual stereotypes? Women worth more than society concedes? Humans for sale in a consumer society? Or is this another frustrating drama of defused desire?
Sometimes the message is unmistakable, although never obvious. In Humane Society VII, two men are identically profiled in adjacent toilet stalls, arms mechanically (or militarily) outstretched, they reach out towards another human, only to be stopped by a wall. Each has on a surgical (protective) mask. If this is clearly a comment on AIDS, it also evokes the need to touch.
Perhaps the most striking image (Humane Society VII) is two nude, turbaned black women who crouch before a wall-sized map of the world. One covers/represents Latin America, the other Africa. Their poses suggest modern dance. On the five hundredth anniversary of expanded colonialism, these excluded women entreat or demand, tentatively poised to enter, to climb into the “higher” European territories. An LED sign between them reads STOP MODE (or “go no further”).
The two white women in Humane Society VI, on the other hand, are immobilized, blindfolded, hands bound, their contraposto poses submissive and defeated. The energy of the previous piece is absent, replaced by the insipid stasis of classical European art, perhaps referring specifically to allegorical statutes of Justice. Each leans against a tall column on which are pinned the Bill of Rights; they frame a looming “negative” space that might be read as the invisible state, religious power, or on the other hand, freedom of expression. ( I can’t resist additional references to the lack of an equal rights bill in the United States and to the ways women’s bodies are sold into media slavery.)
Humane Society II and III, both taken in a boiler room, seem to be about fear, or the twin fears provoked by dark, dangerous city spaces: of being attacked or of discovering something ghastly. In the first, a menacing pair of nude figures in black leather masks stand among phallic pipes, their vulnerably bent heads providing a minor diagonal (and human) note. In the first, the giant tubes and furnace door attract our initial attention. The figures literally lurk in their shadowy surroundings, all the more startling when they emerge. In the second, the effect is reversed. Our eye is drawn immediately to the hanging figures, whose limbs then merge with their environment. Metal and flesh share a terrible weight.
Zulueta’s sculptural approach to photography – set off by harsh lighting and large scale – both heightens and belies the images’ performance origins. The two mediums exist in a curious tension. You can almost feel the muscle strain of “holding a pose” (which is what the camera does to life), and at the same time the living figures are frozen or objectified into representations.
The title of this series – “Humane Society” – could be an ironic jab at the kinder, gentler society clearly not depicted. It also implies protective euthanasia, the fate of “sheltered” animals. The first meaning is ironic, the second a play on the first. Humans are dispensable in an alienated and homophobic society. Existing in a lightless, claustrophobic world, Zulueta’s tableaux provide glimpses into forbidden territory, dark corners, after-hours lives. Suzanne Muchnic has called them “urban war pictures” in which only the casualties are visible, existing in a “world without nature.” If photography is memory, these could be our memories, because they take place in spaces that are as familiar as they are terrifying.