Near the end of the definitive, long-overdue survey of the artist Marisol at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, after a parade of totemic sculptural portraits, a work of smaller stature turned the wrench. A self-portrait, titled Diptych (1971), this lithograph ruptures the boundaries between violence makers and their victims through an exquisite-corpse depiction of the artist’s naked body, prone and disjointed. Marisol took inspiration from the Japanese gyotaku tradition of pressing fish against paper to document prize catches, and the piece scans like an inventory. From her rolled-out face and Medusa-like hair, which we meet head-on, to her overextended neck and two headlamp breasts—and, almost comically, beneath them, a tiny heart pierced with an arrow—we move down to her waist, through which a hand punctures and waves internally. Below, her pudenda leaks a deepening ink blot. When the portrait undergoes an equator-like break—a white line demarcating the print block being reset—the artist’s legs appear on the other side, more poised than her torso. Her leak is still pooling by the left foot, as two footsteps boldly walk off the paper toward us, defiant and inviting. Having revealed a fractalized version of herself ensconced in a world of violence, Marisol demonstrates how it is possible to acknowledge our implication in this violence and still refuse it.
Marisol, Diptych, 1971. Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum. © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The most comprehensive assembling of her work to date, Marisol, curated by Cathleen Chaffee, was six years in the making. The exhibition was born of Marisol’s sweeping donation of her estate to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly Albright-Knox Art Gallery), which was confirmed only upon the artist’s death in 2016. (Chaffee continues to speculate about the reasons for Marisol’s loyalty to the institution but suspects that donor and former board president Seymour H. Knox Jr.’s purchase of The Generals (1961–62) in 1962—the artist’s first work to enter a museum collection and still one of her most celebrated—likely fomented it.) The survey argues for Marisol’s canonical standing, backstopping a lack of scholarship on the artist and giving her a marquee tour that stops at four North American institutions. It also reminds us that she wasn’t always underrecognized. Marisol was considered the rising woman artist of the 1960s—the “first girl artist with glamour,” as Andy Warhol dubbed her—and the exhibition’s first large gallery at the Buffalo AKG is dedicated to her most boisterous sculptural works. For instance, the aforementioned The Generals, a homoerotic depiction of George Washington and Simon Bolivar mounted on a horse, took pride of place, signaling why she was miscast within Pop’s ascendency. However, just as soon as it presented these forceful works, the exhibition complicated a narrative of Marisol as bold and glamorous, shuffling us into the fractured interior of her experience as a woman—one who suffered sexual violence and loss, and who was overinspected and then dismissed, and who used this experience as material. Works that consistently upend gender norms and undermine the premise of sexual difference invariably play with the theater of self-presentation as Marisol continued to use—and cut up—her own image. And in earnestly foregrounding these themes and their uncanny anticipation of cultural conversations that wouldn’t take root for decades, Marisol makes the case for an artist most concerned with what it means to survive in an uncaring world, and what she can mean to us now, in ours.
Marisol, The Generals, 1961-62. Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum. © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Marisol was born Maria Sol Escobar in 1930 to a diplomat family that participated in what Chaffee calls a “peripatetic Venezuelan elite.” Her mother died by suicide when Marisol was eleven, setting off several years during which the then-adolescent artist withheld speech (in fact, silence would later become one of her most artfully wielded instruments, when the press was being patriarchal or invasive). Marisol spent her education variously in Caracas, Los Angeles, and Paris, and then moved to New York City in 1950, where she dedicated herself to studying art at the New School for Social Research and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, with the likes of the folk-inspired master Yasuo Kuniyoshi and abstract-expressionist forebearer Hans Hofmann. Exposure to pre-Columbian sculpture in the 1950s, through a trip to Mexico and a show at the New York gallery of Sidney Janis (who would become her dealer and longtime friend), proved influential for the young artist.
The first galleries of Marisol set up these influences, in addition to the artist’s itineracy and grief, as foundational by including the artist’s early formal experiments. Marisol began in intricate woodcarving and wood-relief, as well as in plaster casting and stone, establishing her folk-rooted aesthetic early. Her sculptures would continue to be roughly hewn and cast from her own body parts, setting them apart from the detached polish that pervaded Pop. She leaned toward multi-figure portraiture, a crude form of statuary, and a stealth approach to self-portraiture, through which her own likeness ricocheted across the arc of her career. In her diaries, now part of the Marisol papers at the Buffalo AKG, she wrote about this as a tactic for staving off the “fear of losing my body and my mind.” But she also spoke about never really understanding “the problem of perspective very well. What is inside. What is outside. And, where is the midpoint?” In doubling herself, she seemed to acknowledge the mutability of identity and the potential to embody the collective in oneself. She chiseled family portraits from tree trunks and adorned them with googly eyes cast from her own features, or placed blockheads atop wooden wedges. With small inflections and props, Marisol could describe (or impugn) her subjects. A cup held just so; a gesturing hand; a cat, condoling and comprehending. A pink bum or a yellow bucket hat.
Marisol, The Party, 1965-66. Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum. © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In the mid-1960s, Marisol made her most politically daring and telegraphing installations, which still shimmer with self-interrogation and implication. The retrospective does right by these works, pairing them to underscore the artist’s critical acuity. Love (1962) features a plaster-cast face emerging as though from a lake, as a bottle of Coca-Cola tips down its open mouth. Underscoring capital’s ensnarement with self-harm, Love’s bottle is submerged too far down the subject’s throat. The subject receives the product like an assault. Love was cast from Marisol’s own face, and tiny scratch marks pervade thesurface of the skin, as though she had put up a fight. The sculpture sat adjacent to (and was admittedly somewhat dwarfed by) her celebrated The Party (1965–66), a massive, multipart installation that assembles its guests—fifteen freestanding, life-size figures—in front of three wall panels. The figures, facing outward, variously wear Marisol’s features (in one instance, her face appears through a wood-carved TV screen), and most have their eyes closed, suggesting a checkered interiority. Each figure, blocklike, defines themself with a fizzy tell: a bowtie, a tray of glassware, two exposed breasts. Marisol’s attention to the march of loneliness despite—or through—our multitudes is on full display. But as with Love, which lurked nearby with its thuggery that aligns capitalism with misogynistic violence, so, too, does misogyny course through The Party. Male hands encroach on female guests and attempt violations. Male noses grow long like phalluses.
Marisol, I Love You, 1974. Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum. © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Despite the distinctive energy of Marisol’s sculptures, it is in her drawings, featured heavily in later galleries of the retrospective, that the artist’s most candid confessionals can be found. They reveal the enduring features of the artist’s output as being those that came quietly, and at great personal cost. These drawings often center on themes of violence against women—a body torn between external forces and self-possession—and provide a kind of interior scroll, even if one full of schisms, ellipses, and stained ink. “Stop praising me!” she scrawled in an untitled drawing from 1971 that features a lacerated face with the text trailing around it like shrapnel. “I think I am no good. I want to be treated badly forever. It excites me.” We know that Marisol addressed her own experiences of rape in a 1975 interview in People, in which she also argued that “whatever the artist makes is always a kind of self-portrait.” However, she was famously enigmatic and contrarian, which makes it hard to firmly trace a relationship between her personal experience and subject matter. Following the publication of that same interview, she wrote an angry letter to the editor regarding the interviewer’s line of questioning: “You could have more respect for people who dedicate their lives to art.” Yet, whether or not confessional, violence is intrinsic to form and self-depiction in several of Marisol’s drawings, with guns multiplying and merging with limbs in I Did My Future (1974) and hands morphing into firearms in Lick the Tire of My Bicycle (1974). Hands present threats as well. In Sexually Frustrated (1973), grabbing hands defined by vibrating color radiate around an otherwise dark figure, encircling and escaping her form. The imbrication of outside/in, intrusion, and the personalization of violence is everywhere in these works.
Marisol, Face and Hand with Coca-Cola Bottle, 1974. Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum. © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Critical reception of Marisol’s work did not always embrace, or understand, the nuance of the artist’s project. Her tendency toward self-doubling through portraiture was often read as narcissism and not, as we can see now, a funhouse-mirroring of the expectations set upon her. The disinterest she was met with after a decisive five-year break from the art world in the early 1970s seems to be steeped in a dismissal of her ecofeminist works, which underscore human dependence on the environment. (In an atmospheric and spare gallery, Marisol’s underwater films documenting the threats to coral reefs played behind a lifesize wooden figure with a fish for a face.) Yet Marisol, which succeeds in rushing the artist up to the present, reveals the datedness of these critical dismals, arguing, if indirectly, that we were not ready for Marisol before now. We didn’t have the tools to meet her subjects, contentions, grievances, or her ability to undermine her own subjectivity as she issued her exhortations.
Elsewhere, in a series of wall-hanging portraits, plaster-cast faces had been smashed in by various objects (a Coke bottle, a beer can, a key, a paw, a fist), tethered and hanging like pendulums—so many still-active threats. Installed in proximity to Marisol’s stirring Diptych, which bears another wounded self, these casts treat brutality with such clarity as to exude self-possession. We step into the world violently; it takes us up violently. And here we are again, with a misogynist felon about to step into the highest office, implicated in the violence-making and also its victims. In this way, Marisol reveals the artist’s remarkable prescience, arriving both late and right on time.
