Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte fisks–we need a word for when it’s just too ridiculous to require fisking–the argument that Frida Kahlo’s evil communism means that we should assign a historical and artistic value of nada to her life and its artifacts:
Perpetrator of Communism Memorial [John J. Miller]
Less than a month after the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts is opening a new exhibit on Frida Kahlo. She was, of course, an unrepentant Stalinist whose paintings carried titles such as “Marxism Will Heal the Sick.” By the way, the NMWA isn’t in Pyongyang or Havana. Here’s the bizarre part: The museum thinks it will attract visitors because the exhibit includes “a new collection of images … of Kahlo’s private bathroom at the Casa Azul and its contents.” This isn’t an art exhibit—it’s a shrine, to a woman in the thrall of a murderous ideology.
Just what the fuck is a ‘perpetrator of communism?’ I can’t be sure, but it sounds like yet another conflation of saying something and doing something. Maybe if you do it on canvas with brushes, it doesn’t fall into the ‘speech’ category. Are there any lawyers in the house who can help me out with this?
Not just that, but even if we take at face value the claim that Frida and her art supported totalitarianism…haven’t most artists throughout history produced art glorifying oppressive regimes and their authors, as well as the philosophies that legitimized them? The autocrats were the ones with the money, after all.
And over at The Gimp Parade, Blue offers up some insightful, good-faith (on second thought, maybe that’s giving Mr. Muller too much credit) analysis of Kahlo’s life and biography, as well as many links:
For true disability studies analyses of the 2002 film Frida, starring Salma Hayek, read Marta Russell’s CounterPunch review and a wonderful discussion between Harilyn Rousso and Simi Linton at DisabilityWorld. Both movie reviews note the obliteration of any depiction of Kahlo’s childhood polio and it’s early effects, with the tram accident framed instead as the life-altering tragedy to her physical health. Also, her recovery from that accident is made complete in the film so that a tango between Kahlo and another woman is not complicated by what would have been an interesting limp. The Rousso-Linton discussion ranges beyond the movie itself to look at use of the word “cripple,” sexuality, and class and disability.
(There’s also the way that, IIRC, her decision to become a painter is recast as a response to the convalescence resulting from her accident. No one can dispute that her disabilities were an important theme in her art, particularly since she was a self-portraitist. Still, this sort of simplification strikes me as a barrier to any real analysis of her work–and the compensatory moral of the artist’s origin myth seems to have some troubling implications for her life as a woman with disabilities. It reads as though cripple is not the wrong word, that she was someone who had to find some special work-around for fulfillment and self-expression after the tragic accident that took away any simple happiness.)
Anyhow, point, laugh, and then go read.