Emma K. McCagg, “Annie Get Your Gun”; 2010; Oil on canvas with glitter; 34 x 38 inches
The artworks selected for The Emo Show are meant to produce catharsis in the viewer via the emotions of humor, anger, and terror. These emotions are part of the ancient Indian aesthetic system known as Rasa. Rasa qualifies a work of art regardless whether it’s visual, literary, musical, or performative via its powerful embodiment of a particular emotion. The emotional purview of Rasa is broad and encompasses fear, love, wonder and so forth, which, in turn, have their associated colors including black for terror.
As a framework formed from a different cultural location, Rasa reveals the limitations of traditional Western aesthetics that privileged mimesis, ethnocentric notions of beauty, and standards of artistic production that can be characterized as academic. Whereas Western aesthetics is vertical, hierarchical, and singular, Rasa implies a kind of horizontality and is more inclusive and pluralistic. Thus an aria within the context of Rasa, for example, is not valued aesthetically because it’s a textbook model of correct execution; rather, its valence is based on audience response to where it is so moved its experience of the song becomes transformative. But transformation is nothing if it does not produce catharsis. And this was the underlying motivation in selecting works by the following artists: Emma McCagg, Teresa Serrano, and Wojtek Ulrich.
Emma McCagg’s paintings are a confluence of the ubiquitous baby picture and a kind of vintage “girly” magazine. They consist of the heads of babies on adult bodies that are suggestively posed that question a society whose children are sexualized when dressed like adults and goaded to perform flirtatiously beyond their years. This is belied by another concomitant narrative in McCagg’s paintings: the desire of older women to retain their youth through cosmetic surgeries. Similarly addressing issues of what might be considered feminist, is Teresa Serrano’s video titled La Piñata (2003). Whereas McCagg’s approach to her subject matter comes from the emotion of humor, Serrano affects us through anger in a work alluding to misogyny and what may be called femicide. Her video begins with a middle-class man hitting the proverbial piñata. But this is a female effigy based on a latex sex doll outfitted with a wig made from human hair. After the piñata’s destruction with attendant sexual and misogynistic overtones, the work’s coda entails a scrolling text that refers to the murder of more than 300 women in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico that remain unsolved. Rounding out the selected works is Wojtek Ulrich’s single-channel video projection titled The Dog (2011). Working with the emotion of terror, Ulrich’s piece consists of a large pig affixed to what appears to be a cross, which is then submerged in shark-infested waters off the Bahamian coast and violently devoured. Although one could misconstrue this work as being solely about iconoclasm, it triangulates nature as zoomorphic, anthropomorphic and archetypally. This otherworldly environment is like an unnamable primeval locus; however because of humanity’s ongoing destruction of itself and of nature, it is a now a Garden of Eden.........gone amok.
Raúl Zamudio, born in Tijuana, Mexico, is a New York City-based independent curator and writer, and an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Studies. He has curated or co-curated more than 90 exhibitions in the Americas, Asia and Europe and as a writer, more than 200 of his texts have been published in books, catalogs, journals, and magazines.