from my email, Rhian Sasseen on Helen Almeida
What blue means to me: a romance; a melancholy; ink strokes; a poetry collection; a book-length essay; watery; lady sings the— ; in childhood, a favorite color; crepuscule; gloaming; the concept of the l’heure bleue. For the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida, blue took the form of a provocation or dare. The color cuts clean across her photographs, obscuring her face and limbs or echoing a certain dynamism exhibited by her sharply-angled body. It is a familiar blue, a halfway point between a cobalt and a cerulean, reminiscent of the famous blue developed by Yves Klein. Is this a reference, a criticism? In one of her most famous blue works—all from the 1977 series of photographs Study for Inner Improvement—she can be seen eating the blue, perhaps as a form of reclamation, stealing back and merging with the color Klein used to coat the naked bodies of women, flinging them as paintbrushes, as objects, across the canvas. In another, she even poses atop a stool in the arms-out swan dive seen in Klein’s 1960 photograph Leap into the Void. But Almeida denied any dialogue with his work: “I use blue because it’s a spatial color,” she once said. “I use blue to show space.”
How the human body navigates this space is a subject of particular interest threaded throughout her work. These blue paint photographs are among Almeida’s most well-known works, and they’re the images I came cross by chance a week-and-a-half ago, scrolling down a social media feed. They are arresting, these photographs; a cool elegance suffuses them, those greyscale tones combined with the sudden shock of blue paint. Certain elements in them—the black-and-white color scheme, the dark clothing, the focus on the artist herself—are repeated across Almeida’s larger oeuvre, spanning from the 1960s until her 2018 death, at age 84, in Lisbon. Seen in the greater context of her body of work, their emphasis on color feels slightly unusual; what seems to really matter in her art, the strongest focus and theme, is not the properties of pigmentation occasionally surrounding their subject but rather, the movement of the human body itself. “I turn myself into a drawing,” Almeida explained in a 1998 interview. “My body as a drawing, myself as my own work—that was what I was searching for.” Earlier, in 1969, she declared, “My work is my body; my body is my work.” These are sentiments that are reminiscent of the performance art that was becoming popular at the time, but Almeida’s work isn’t a performance or process. As the curator Isabel Carlos observed in an essay on Almeida for the Drawing Center in 2004, “this distance—from the time of ‘occurring’ to the time of ‘seeing’—is a characteristic of the world of photography, of the world of fixing images, and not of performance.” Though Almeida is capturing her body in motion, we do not see this motion. We are privy only to the aftermath, frozen and captured, the movement turned still. In this heightened attention paid to the body, Almeida is able to portray it in all its emotions and ages. A later series, Seduzar (Seduce), made while in her seventies, is still scorching in its subtle heat, the occasional glimpses of bare feet and legs, high heels cast aside, that belie the idea that a woman’s sexual force decreases with age. A similar eroticism can be seen even in her rare photographs of objects outside of herself; most often, these are canvasses. The fabric slumping down from the frame in 1969’s Untitled has the feel of a dress slipping from a woman’s bare shoulder. And when Almeida combines the canvas with her own body, the results call into question the relationship between the woman artist and her audience. The thoughtful, witty Inhabited Canvas series, from 1976, portrays Almeida contemplating a canvas frame, until finally moving through it.
I wonder, too, if I am drawn to Almeida’s work because so much of it was created while she was living under or immediately after a repressive government, the authoritarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar and the Estado Novo. Life under a dictator requires a constant negotiation of how one moves one’s body though space, the words and actions one can and cannot say. The ways in which one compromises one’s morality, one’s politics, and one’s life. Almeida’s father, the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida, made these compromises when he designed the Monument of the Discoveries commissioned by Salazar’s government in 1958. And these are choices that are becoming prescient in the United States today. Our cultural and artistic outputs are quickly being reshaped by the facile imaginings of the Trump administration. In February, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it will cancel a fund intended to support artistic creation in underserved communities; their new guidelines also include an emphasis on “patriotic” projects. The National Endowment for the Humanities announced in early April that a portion of its funding will be redirected towards building a “National Garden of American Heroes,” a sculpture garden in which all works will be built in a “realist” style with, as the New York Times reported, “no abstract or modernist sculptures allowed.” A shift towards neoclassicism in its artworks is the go-to move of authoritarian governments the world over. Fascists are terrified of art that is not immediately and easily digestible, art that provokes or questions rather than soothes their desultory and destructive fantasies of what constitutes the ideal social system. A photo montage from Almeida’s 1978 series Ouve-Me (Listen to Me, or Hear Me) depicts the word “ouve” painted across the artist’s smiling, closed, puckering, and open lips. This series is the rare instance in which words are incorporated into Almeida’s work; that it comes four years after the Carnation Revolution that ended the Estado Novo and marked Portugal’s transition to democracy feels significant. The thin lines of “ouve” marked across Almeida’s mouth resemble the thread used to sew together corpses’ mouths before their funereal display. In another photo from this series, Almeida poses with a black bandana reading OUVE-ME across her eyes, blinding her; in another photo, the scarf becomes a balaclava, OUVE-ME blocking her mouth but leaving her accusative, defiant stare into the camera free. In still another series of photos from this project, Almeida appears to pull a crumpled piece of paper from her mouth, like a medium teasing out strings of ectoplasm during a séance. The paper is eventually joined by what looks to be a single wire or strand of thread. And a video depicts her trapped behind a pale expanse of fabric, her face and fingers pressing through from the other side, searching. Eventually, she writes “OUVE-ME” on the gauze.
In every work from this series, Almeida’s mouth is obscured or obstructed in some way. Trapped in a silent medium—photography—she demands that her audience listens to her, but we can only see. This is not dissimilar to how people operate when their words, actions, and bodies are left stymied by their government. Listen to us, listen to us, listen to us, the photos of the injustices we are now witnessing seem to cry out—they are confined to the photograph’s frame, rendered immobile. Sitting on the other side of the screen, their audience, more often than not, simply watches. Parting gifts
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