Abstract: This text approaches Teresa Margolles’s textile works through the lens of gore capitalism, a concept theorized in Sayak Valencia’s important 2018 book. Gore capitalism, according to Valencia, is the inevitable extension of globalization leading to the use of extreme violence in order to gain economic power and status. In 2009, Mar-golles was chosen to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, and her installation included a number of large cloths that had been used to clean up scenes of narco-violence in northern Mexico. In 2012 and 2015, Margolles gave bloody textiles to groups of embroiderers who embroidered directly onto the cloths. In these and other works, Margolles’s stained textiles index violent death ina range of global contexts, staging “soft interventions”that I interpret as political acts of resistance against gore capitalism, violent crime related to narco-empowerment, and femicide. The modernist framing of textiles as excessive is also interrogated, and it is argued that what Margolles’s textile artworks unveil is not the innate excessiveness of textiles, but rather the excessiveness of violence.
Keywords:ViolenceViolence,touchtouch,textilestextiles,skinskin,MexicoMexico,excessexcess,bloodblood.
Resumen: Este texto aborda las obras textiles de Teresa Margolles a través del lente del capitalismo gore, un concepto teorizado en el importante libro de Sayak Valencia de2018. El capitalismo gore, según Valencia, es la extensión inevitable de la globalización que conduce al uso de la violencia extrema para ganar poder y estatus económico. En 2009, Margolles fue elegida para representar a México en la Bienal de Venecia, y su instalación incluyóuna serie de grandes paños que se habían utilizado para limpiar escenas de narcoviolencia en el norte de México. En 2012 y 2015, Margolles dio textiles ensangrentados a grupos de bordadores que bordaban directamente sobre las telas. Los textiles manchados de Margolles operancomo índices de la muerte violenta en una variedad de contextos globales, y dan espacio a “intervenciones suaves” que el texto interpreta como actos políticos de resistencia contra el capitalismo gore, contra los crímenes violentos relacionados con el narco-empoderamiento y contra el feminicidio. La comprensión modernista de los textiles como algo excesivo también se cuestiona, y se argumenta que lo que revelan las obras de arte textil de Margolles no es el exceso innato de los textiles, sino más bien el exceso de la violencia.
Resumo: Este texto se aproxima ao trabalho têxtil de Teresa Mar-golle através do lente do capitalismo gore, um conceito apresentado no livro do mesmo nome por Sayak Valencia(2018). O capitalismo gore, após Valencia, é a extensão inevitável da globalização na que se utiliza a violência extrema para obter poder económico e status. Os têxteis manchados de Margolle indexam as mortes violentas numa série de contextos globais. Em 2009, Margolle foiescolhida para representar México na Bienal de Venécia,e a sua instalação incluiu telas grandes que tinham sido utilizadas para limpar cenas de narco-violencia no norte de México. Em 2012 e 2015, Margolle entregou telas etêxteis ensanguentados a grupos de tecedores que teceram diretamente nos têxteis. Eu apresento estas “intervenções macias” como atos políticos de resistênciafrente ao capitalismo gore, os crimes relacionados com oempoderamento narco e o feminicídio. O enquadramen-to modernista dos têxteis como excessivos é, mesmo,questionado, e se propõe que o que os trabalhos têxtesde Margolle develam não é a excessividade inata das telas, mas a excessividade da violência.
Hard Touch: Gore Capitalism and Teresa Margolles’s Soft Interventions
Toque duro: capitalismo gore y las intervenciones suaves de Teresa Margolles
Tato duro: capitalismo gore e as intervenções macias de Teresa Margolles
Universidad de Los Andes
Received: 25 June 2019
Accepted: 15/11/19
Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’s death-related artworks have usually beendescribed as either minimalist or post-minimalist because of how her spareinstallations employing materials such as vapour, cement, and string encouragea phenomenological approach to embodied spectatorship. In this text I analyzesome of Margolles’s collaborative textile works through the lens of gore capi-talism. I also argue that the violence that Margolles is indexing—specificallynarco-violence and femicide—with her blood-stained textile works can be the-orized as “hard touch.” The hard touch is touch in excess, or put another way,excessive touch. I am not the first to discuss Margolles’s work in terms of excess.In the exhibition catalogue for What Else Could We Talk About?, Margolles’scontribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale, Mariana Botey labels the worksthat Margolles produced as part of the anarchist art collective SEMEFO 1 inthe 1990s as “extreme and excessive.” The work she is specifically referring tohere is Dermis (1996), which was comprised of a set of couches and sofas cov-ered in horse entrails. Botey describes the work as a “monstrous mocking of upholstery.” 2 Amy Sara Carroll, on the other hand, has remarked that “[d]eathand femininity, in Margolles’s solo transitional pieces [after leaving SEMEFO],operate as excesses that haunt the expanding circles that constitute the works’publics.”3
Where my analysis departs from Botey’s and Carroll’s is in my concernwith the material and symbolic specificities of textiles, and with the ways in which textiles have been discursively constructed as excessive in the context of western art history. I also want to engage more critically with the concept of “excess” thaneither Botey or Carroll do in their respective texts. As I have argued else where,excess is culturally contingent; it is culturally and socially constructed. 4 Thus, to get a precise grip on Margolles’s doings with excess, I want to think through whatthis concept unveils in and around her textile works. I contend that in enteringthe global art circuit with her bloody textiles, Margolles has exposed the globalepidemic of violence against women. Further to this, and despite insightful cri-tiques regarding the ethics of Margolles’s use of bodies and body parts in herwork, it bears examining the ways in which her work interrogates—rather thansimply contributing to—“gore capitalism.” As Carroll has noted, Margolles’swork “raises ethical, political, and aesthetic questions that resonate across heroeuvre, including: Does a remembrance and deployment of dead bodies in art-work give anonymous victims voice, or does it exact further violence, this timeepistemic, against them?” 5 In a similar vein, Julia Banwell has remarked:
Some works by Margolles occupy an uneasy space in relation to ethical issues[...]. The first is the ethically thorny issue of permission to use human corpsesand body parts to produce works of art [...]. The artistic context withinwhich Margolles works is a country with a history of using bodies in art-works. Mexican visual culture has long displayed real bodies and body partsin religious and spiritual artworks. 6
The ethical difference between Margolles’s stained textiles and earlier works that either represent corpses in photographs (as in her series of morgue self-portraits produced in 1998) or involve the display of body parts (such as the pierced tongue of a young male heroin addict in Lengua [2000]), is that the textiles frustrate the viewer’s (perhaps unconscious) desire to have visual access toa dead body. In other words, the bloody textiles index violent death without presenting it directly. Moreover, in Margolles’s textile works cloth signifies the vulnerability of skin. Indeed, the fluid identity of textiles as skin and skin as textilesrun throughout Margolles’s body of work, where it acquires a politically charged significance. As Anne Anlin Cheng has observed, this is a space of signification that cannot be comfortably inscribed within the parameters of modernism:
The racial fetish, metonymized as animal or Papuan skin in Loos’s work, provides the pivot on which Modernist aesthetic values turn: essence versus veneer, plainness versus excess, utility versus waste, taste versus vulgarity. Yet, as we have started to see, the pivot—the haunting skin—is itself already contaminated. 7
Accordingly, when we look closely and rigorously at Margolles’s textiles, what we might see is the “haunting skin” of murdered women of colour and othervictims of violence.
In the terminology outlined by transfeminist activist and scholar Sayak Valencia, gore capitalism refers to the inevitable extension of globalization under which violence becomes the means to gain economic power. Valencia defines gore capitalism as “the undisguised and unjustified bloodshed that is the price the Third World pays for adhering to the increasingly demanding logic of capitalism.” 8 In the context of gore capitalism, life does not matter as much asmoney; therefore, murder becomes rampant. Valencia argues for a transfeminist approach to resisting gore capitalism, writing that “by making the violence visible, we might create a critical consciousness and resistance that could lead toactive engagement and the joint creation of responsible intersubjective agreements, endowed with agency.” 9 I propose that Margolles’s bloody textiles are making violence visible without further spectacularizing the violated bodies of women and victims of narco-violence. Our responsibility as intersectional feminist scholars is thus to engage critically with these textile works, from a range of disparate but interconnected perspectives, in order to further illuminate the violence they are indexing. As Valencia importantly remarks:
As a movement guided by a critique of both oppression and the violence of a hegemonic, (hetero) patriarchal system, it would be impossible for femi-nist discourse not to theorize or take actions against the dynamics of gorecapitalism. From our multiple and distinct feminist positions, it is urgent tosituate ourselves in a critical posture vis-à-vis this system. We need to opento internally-focused criticality and redefinition in order to confront thevariety of issues of concern to both first feminisms and to new feminisms and post-feminisms rooted in the specific contexts of our contemporary realities. These realities have their own subtleties and particularities, and yet they are all impacted by the physical, psychological, and mass-media ramifications of the increasing globalization of gore violence and its very real effects on gender. 10
Margolles’s status as a Mexican feminist artist is sometimes obscured in the scholarship that focuses on an account of her work as post-minimalist. 11 As Carroll has also noted, the “gendered dimensions of Margolles’s work” are rarely if ever considered, despite the fact that in an interview with Carroll in 2000 Margolles stated: “Of course, my status as a woman in relation to what’s been termed an all-male aesthetic [that is, post-minimalism] has affected my artistic practice. Of course, my status as a woman in the world affects the ways in whichI work.” 12 The historical and on going denigration of textiles as “women’s work”has also had consequences for the scholarship on Margolles’s out put. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Margolles’s many works involving cloth and embroidery have received less scholarly attention than her installations involving materials such asconcrete, vapour, and body parts.
Margolles’s Textiles: An Overview
Margolles uses textiles that bear material traces of violence, whether drug-related violence, suicide, or femicide. Her first engagement with textiles appears tohave been Dermis (1995), a white hospital sheet bearing the bloody silhouettes of two human figures, collected, as in much of her early work, from the morguein Mexico City. 13 According to Rubén Gallo, the silhouettes in Dermis belongto two gay men who had died by suicide together. 14 Margolles’s 2009 exhibition for the Venice Biennale, What Else Could We Talk About?, is, as I discuss below,comprised of many textiles, all of which Margolles, joined by several groups ofvolunteers, had used to clean up scenes of narco-violence in northern Mexico.
In Margolles’s video work Mujeres bordando junto al Lago Atitlán (2012),a group of Mayan female activists (Lucy Andrea Lopez, Silvia Menchu, Bonifacia Cocom Tambriz, Maria Josefina Tuy Churunel, Marcelina Cumes, RosameliaCocolajay, Alba Cocolajay, and Cristina Lopez) are shown embroidering brightly coloured images onto a stained white sheet. The sheet is stained with blood from an incident during which a woman was murdered in Guatemala City. A high percentage of women murdered in Guatemala as a result of domestic violence come from indigenous communities living in rural areas or on the urban periphery. 15 While they embroider, the women in the video discuss domestic violence in Guatemala and around the world, pointing to the intersubjective nature of collective crafting and the potential for change when women speak openly about intimate violence. As feminist craft historian Janis Jefferies has writtenmore than once, “To craft is to care.” 16
Image 1
Teresa Margolles, Telabordada, 2012.
Embroidered fabricwith blood stains. 202 × 206 cm.National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Photo: Musée d’art contemporain deMontréal.The embroidered cloth that resulted from this gathering—Tela bordada (2012; Img. 1)—was included in the exhibition Mundos, which was on display at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2017. The work was also singled out by curator Greg Hill in the afterword to the exhibition catalogue for Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (National Gallery of Canada, 2013), where he provided an extended description of the work as well as a meditation on violence against indigenous women in global contexts, including the murdered indigenous women and girls of Canada. 17 As Hill observes, “Margolles creates atension between beauty and death that enhances both. The women’s handwork, the labour and the sense of community that comes through in the creation of the embroidery take the work far beyond decoration to enter the realm of ritual and transformation.” 18
Tela bordada anticipated the 2015 exhibition Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread (Neuberger Museum of Art Purchase College, State Universityof New York), curated by Patrice Giasson, which was comprised of six textiles that were stained with the blood of victims of violent crime. Margolles collected the textiles from morgues in Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Brazil, the UnitedStates, and Guatemala, and then gave the textiles to groups of embroiderers in each of those countries. All of the victims of violence were anonymous, except for Eric Garner, an African American man who died while being arrested as a resultof police brutality.
As I have mentioned, Margolles’s textiles have received less attention than her other death-related works. In her monograph Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death, Julia Banwell does note the fact that Margolles engages with “materials [such] as air, water, and cloth, that have been used as carriers to transport the bodily remains between sites of collection and exhibition,” 19 and the textile works produced for the 2009 Venice biennial, but overall analyses ofher work typically focus on Margolles’s “hard” materials , as in Edward Bacal’s 2015 article about concrete and the abstract, where he argues that Margolles and Colombian artist Doris Salcedo “specifically use concrete to depict what [hecalls] ‘abstract bodies’: absent, invisible, or otherwise virtual bodies which have disappeared from the scene of the work but nevertheless leave their impressionon it.” 20 As Bacal fails to note, Margolles’s stained textiles also do this indexicalwork, as the blood stains index bodies that have disappeared violently.
In working with blood-stained textiles, Margolles illuminates the powerful and contradictory symbolism of textiles: neither simply “excessive” nor safely“domestic,” textiles can evoke a range of different affects and reveal a range of different kinds of touch. In what follows I engage critically with the ostensible relationship between textiles and excess. On the one hand, I want to show whatmight be useful or productive, from a feminist perspective, in considering whatis “excessive” about Margolles’s bloody textiles; on the other, I want to use these textile works as a test case, demonstrating how they undermine the modernist categorization of textiles as innately excessive. Margolles’s embroidered, stained textiles open space to interrogate the discursive framing of textiles as excessive and marginal. Like a Trojan horse, Margolles’s textile works have entered western art institutions as artworks that continue a legacy of women artists, and womenartists of colour, using soft materials to engage in socio-political critique. 21
The language of textiles is one that is usually associated with domesticity, but Margolles’s textile works undermine this association. In her early death-related works, Margolles worked with materials that she found in the morgue, using cloth sheets that could absorb bodily fluids. In 2009, as Cuauhtémoc Medina has observed, Margolles moved from the morgue into the streets, using cloths to clean up mud, blood, and broken glass from crime scenes in Mexico. 22 Using“domestic” textiles in public spaces associated with violent death transforms thetextiles into uncanny materials that are no longer safely domesticated. This concern with undermining the domestic has been identified by Marci R. McMahonas a characteristic of many female Mexican artists and writers. She argues that these authors and artists enact “domestic negotiations” that both “challengeand reinforce geographical, racial, gendered, and national borders.” 23 While McMahon does not discuss Margolles, the phrase “domestic negotiations” fitsher way of rejecting the traditional domestic associations of textiles by employingblood-stained textiles to illuminate the notion that the domestic is not always asafe space for women. 24
It is only through art-historical ideology that textiles have come to be conceptualized as excessive, but rather than viewing this excessiveness as a negative thing, as Adolf Loos (in “Ornament and Crime,” 1908) and other modernists would haveus do, I want to suggest that such excess is a potentially powerful site of resistancefor those deemed “other” in art history and in lived experience. Several feministscholars have commented on the (ostensible) excessiveness of textiles. For ins-tance, feminist art historians Janice Helland and Bridget Elliott have stated:
The gendered conflation of textiles—particularly embroidery—with the feminine suggest that some where within the softness of fabric and the intricacy of stitching lies an inherent relationship that cannot be signified or secured: it is always “excess” and therefore external to more easily and rigorously defined concepts. Excess is elusive, defies categorization and thus, according to psychoanalytic theorists like Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva, occupies the margins, but, particularly following Kristeva, it is precisely in this marginal space that disruption ferments, always ready to dislodge the symbolic orderand its dominant discourses. 25
As Helland and Elliott argue, excess is a label or a concept that is bes-towed by those with the power to do so; something that is labeled as “excessive”is often then shoved to the margins, dismissed, and denigrated. But there it “fer-ments,” grows, mutates, and potentially becomes a a powerful source of subver-sion, even while what is expected is silence, submission, and softness. There is aslippage here, of course, between textiles and the individuals, often women, whoare imagined to create those textiles.
British craft historian and feminist artist Janis Jefferies has also underscored the constructed nature of this marginalization, highlighting modernismas the discursive mode and temporal context that engendered a writing off oftextiles as excess:
The taste for the decorative was pathologized as feminine, as embellishment, as style, as frivolous, as excessive, and was therefore constantly repressedwithin the rhetorical devices of Modernism. Detail and fabric were viewed as decorative extras and excluded from the rigid confines of regularly ordered space in the pictorial plane. Once released, detail and pattern become excessively magnified and erupted, even exceeding the borders which once tried tocontain them. 26
According to these feminist scholars, masculine art history has determined textiles as something that exceeds what is perceived as “high art.” They are marginal, outside of, external to the category of “high art,” and they have been described accordingly as “low art” and, of course, craft or handicraft. Yet textiles not only threaten to erupt, as Jefferies claims; they do erupt, exceeding the borders and categories that have discursively been put in place to contain them. As Jefferies and others have suggested, textiles are not innately excessive: they have been discursively constructed as such through the machinations of (masculine,western) art history. As Mary Russo has stated in The Female Grotesque, the“grotesque [...] is only recognizable in relation to a norm and [in the awareness that] that exceeding the norm involves serious risk.” 27 To observe that textilesare not innately excessive may seem obvious, but it bears emphasizing, because describing textiles as excessive without critical discussion risks re-entrenching the modernist vision of textiles as excessive in relation to the masculine norm of flat painting or modernist design. The concept of excess as contingent—that is, inneed of a norm to exceed—is also crucial in my theorization of hard touch or violent touch as excessive. Within this altered framework I would like to reformulate the question about the excessive character of textiles, and examine how reframing this excessiveness might help us to illuminate the affective work that Margolles’stextiles do.
Craft historians have demonstrated again and again how textiles have intersected with affective labour, usually through the hands of women. Quilting bees, temperance banners, suffrage banners, and funeral shrouds: textiles have long servedaffective and political purposes, and Margolles’s collaborative textiles are part ofthis legacy. 28 Many textile scholars have identified the haptic nature of textiles asa strength; as Jessica Hemmings has observed:
While touch is central to our understanding of textiles, writing and reading about textiles tend to be considered, in an academic context, to make a greater contribution to our understanding of cloth. “Reading” the textile, ratherthan “feeling” the textile, means the textile is judged against a value systemthat does not always respond to its strengths. 29
In response to such omissions, Claire Pajaczkowska has endeavored to establish a semiotics of textiles, turning to this methodology in order to illuminate the affective work that textiles do. Although Pajaczkowska’s essay fails toengage with violent touch, her approach lays out a useful point of departure formy reading of Margolles’s textile works. As Pajaczkowska suggests, semiotics is auseful methodology for examining textiles because it can explain
why the trace of the hand within representation is capable of signifying memories of profoundly affective states. The semiotics of ‘the textile’ is nee-ded in order to show how the specifically material meaning in textiles is founded on embodied knowledge and affect, and that these exist as indexicaltraces of the touch, handling, and holding that are the presence of an absence of the body. 30
It is worth noting here that this could be said for both textiles and violence: bruises, cuts, and other wounds on the skin are indexical traces of excessive, violent touch. Pajaczkowska also remarks that “[o]ne reason for the relative absence of textiles from the semiotic field is the paradoxical status of cloth as simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible,” so that “cloth and its component ele-ment, thread, have a cultural position that has endowed them with both an excessive materiality and an almost irrational immateriality.” 31 As is often thecase in discussions of textiles, and in spite of her conceptually nuanced approach,Pajaczkowska does not elaborate here on the ostensible excessiveness of cloth, although she does note that “the individual body is usually covered in cloth,which is for most of the time in contact with the surface of the skin,” makingexplicit the almost constant touch between skin and textiles in our day-to-daylives. 32 Thus, there is an interesting blind spot when it comes to violent touch inPajaczkowska’s text, apparent, for instance, when she writes:
The absorbent quality of cloth is also part of its capacity to signify as iconic, seen in the way that stains which indicate the capillary action of fibresretain the meaning of mark-making. The body as topos of conflict between nature and culture is, traditionally, prevented from staining fabric. There aremany examples of the capacity of textile to signify through its use as symbol. Because textile absorbs liquid, it can be dyed to hold colour. 33
Despite a reference to the “capillary action of fibres” and the “body astopos of conflict,” there is a clear erasure, in these lines, of violent touch and bloodstains as indexes of violence. One possible explanation for the lack of attentionto violence in feminist scholarship on textiles is the fact that textiles, and craftmore broadly, are still marginalized in western art history, leading perhaps to theongoing perception that textiles must be celebrated, rather than complicated, infeminist texts.
Violence, theorized as hard touch or excessive touch, is touch in excess,touch that bruises and breaks skin. Pajaczkowska herself notes the way in whichthe “stitch pierces, punctuates, penetrates, as it unites separate edges, and withina single gesture it combines both aspects of the paradox of destruction and creation,” 34 adding that the “temporality of the tactile, haptic quality of the textileas sign depends on a paradox of presence and absence.” 35 These descriptions are undoubtedly relevant to an understanding of Margolles’s textiles, which function as memories of violence, as their stains index the presence, and then theabsence, of the person who experienced violent touch. Then again, near the end of her article, Pajaczkowska discusses tenderness as an affect that might be considered productively in relation to textiles, arguing that the “meaning of ten-derness is experienced as a property of the textile itself,” and that this “semiotic quality is responsible for the attribution of a protective agency to cloth and tex-tiles.” 36 Thus, the limits of Pajaczkowska’s project come again into view in lightof Margolles’s textile works, for here the idea of cloth and textiles as having a “protective agency” becomes an empty claim, even dangerous and naïve, as cloth proves unable to protect bodies from violence.
Jill Bennett argues in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art that a politics of testimony “requires of art not a faithful translation of testimony; rather, it calls upon art to exploit its own unique capacities to contribute actively to this politics.” 37 I in turn want to argue that Margolles is exploiting, ina range of different ways, the “unique capacities” of cloth and thread—to absorb,to stain, to invite touch, to touch (or to move, affectively speaking)—in order to contribute to a politics of testimony specifically concerned with violence against women.
In her discussion of gore capitalism, Valencia focuses on Mexico, and while her investigation is primarily concerned with narco-violence, she makes the important point that the logic of gore capitalism results in an overall unconcern for life, which “also reflects a gender bias, particularly evident in the scarce interest the government has shown in the feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez.” 38 Accordingto Alice Driver, “[s]ome [commentators] say that [femicide] in Juarez began in1993. Others say it began earlier, perhaps in 1991 or 1992.” 39 In fact, Driver con-cludes that it is impossible to pick a single date to mark the beginning of femicide in Mexico:
Monarrez Fragoso, who studies gender and violence, has been writing about femicide for more than two decades. She notes that any such artificial startdate ignores the deep roots of the problem of violence against women and the lack of institutional rights afforded to them, which has led to the escalation of femicide in Juarez. Perhaps hundreds of impoverished young women, perhaps thousands, have been victims of femicide since the early 1990s. 40
Margolles’s textile works are stained/tainted by blood, but there are nobodies represented. In this way, her works can be compared to the feminist worksof the 1980s and 1990s that eschewed the body in attempts to avoid accusations of essentialism, on the one hand, while deliberately refusing the viewer accessto the female form, whether naked or clothed, on the other. 41 This strategy is remarkable precisely because Margolles was known for her use of dead bodies inher early work, whether photographed, slathered in fat, or fragmented. 42 In herturn to textiles, Margolles ceased to represent dead bodies or use specific body parts, thus adopting a feminist strategy that refuses to give the viewer access to the violated female body. In textile works such as Tela bordada and the embroidered sheets of the 2015 exhibition We Have a Common Thread, the blood stains index instances of femicide not only in Mexico, but in a range of global contexts,by doing which Margolles unveils the fact that femicide is not only a problem of Mexico’s gore capitalism; rather, violence against women and other marginalized groups is an ongoing global epidemic. In Margolles’s textile works, blood-stained cloth stands in for skin, so that the colourful, embroidered designs on Telabordada—which include birds, flowers, candles, crosses, leaves, female figures in dresses, and a radiant sun—function as tattoos on dead, murdered, bloody,metonymic skin. Some viewers may well find hope or solace in the bright colours and icons of birds and flowers, but for other spectators these textile works will more likely illuminate the futility of these palimpsest textiles to bring back the dead or to provide closure for the living.
Margolles is part of what has been called the globalization of Mexican art in thepost-1994, post-NAFTA global art world. 43 In 2009 Cuauhtémoc Medina curated a show of her work for the 53rd Venice Biennale, a show that represented Margolles’s artistic transition from the morgue to the streets. Like many of her earlier works, those included in Margolles’s exhibit at the Mexican Pavilion were concerned with the drug trade and so-called “narco-murder” in Mexico City. 44 According to Valencia’s analyses, narco-violence is central to the concept of gore capitalism, and thus Margolles’s Venice works may productively be considered through this theoretical framework.
One thing to note is that the textile works included in What Else Could We Talk About? are not textile artworks in the traditional sense. That is, unlike Telabordada and the textiles produced for the 2015 exhibition We Have a CommonThread, the textiles featured in the Venice show were, for the most part, not embroidered. The exception was What Else Could We Talk About? Embroidery, one of the “extramural actions” or “joint activities in the streets of the city ofVenice,” which involved “people embroidering with gold threads fabrics with blood collected from execution sites in the north border of Mexico.” 45 These actions resulted in cloths entitled Narcomessages, as the bloody textiles were embroidered with messages left by the drug cartels at crime scenes as warnings to their perceived enemies. The embroidered textiles were then hung on the walls of the Mexican Pavilion like medieval tapestries or paintings. In a carnivalesque gesture, Margolles hung stained, sullied, contaminated, and threatening textiles where paintings would have traditionally been displayed.
As mentioned, all of the Venice textiles had previously been used to cleanup crime scenes in northern Mexico, an action that points to the traditional use of cloth in domestic labour, both paid and unpaid. Margolles’s acts of cleaningresulted in large cloths covered and saturated with blood, mud, and debris. The cloths used to clean up the streets are rust-coloured and often streaked withwhite blotches. The exhibition catalogue for What Else Could We Talk About? frequently describes these fabrics as being “impregnated with blood,” a significant feminization of the textiles that anticipates the blood covered embroideredsheets of We Have a Common Thread that index incidents of femicide in Mexico and Guatemala, among other global contexts. It is worth pausing here to query:What, if anything, is excessive about the textile works included in What Else Could We Talk About? I argue that in these works textiles are not “excessive” inthe modernist sense, as something that can be displaced from the site of “pro-perly artistic” materials. Rather, what these “impregnated fabrics” show is theexcessiveness of violence, of the violent touch that literally ruptures the skin ofhuman beings causing blood to overflow the boundaries of the body and to runin the streets. These works could also, perhaps, elicit shame; not the shame of themurdered, but rather the shame of those who have engaged in violent acts. As craft scholar Jenni Sorkin has observed, referring to self-inflicted stains: “Stains elicit shame: [...] The self-stain renders the body uncontrollable: both capableand culpable of transmission, transgression and impurity, exceeding the acceptable, surpassing the boundaries of the skin.” 46 These bloody sheets and textiles have absorbed blood that resulted from violence index acts of gore capitalism,and what Margolles’s work with textiles does is both to unveil and to resist gore capitalism. Returning once more to Sayak Valencia’s important and timely book,I will quote at length:
We are interested in developing a discourse with the explanatory power to help us interpret the reality produced by gore capitalism, founded in violence, (drug) trafficking and necropower, while at the same time presentingthe dystopias of globalization and its imposition. We are also interested infollowing the multiple threads that give rise to the capitalist practices under-pinned by extreme and ultraspecialized forms of violence—practices thatin certain geopolitical locales have become established as everyday forms of violence used to obtain recognition and economic legitimacy. The raw nature of this violence obeys a logic born out of structures and processes plannedin the very heart of neoliberalism, globalization, and politics. We are talking about practices that are transgressive solely because their forcefulness makes the vulnerability of the human body clear, in how it is mutilated and desecrated. These practices constitute a scathing critique of the society of hyperconsumption, at the same time as they participate in it and in capitalism’s inner workings. 47
As noted at the outset of this text, Margolles has often been critiqued on ethical grounds for creating artwork out of dead bodies and body parts, whichmight lead one to argue that she is a participant in the strategies of gore capitalism, which turns bodies into commodities. While I think this ethical dilemma is not one to be ignored, I do want to underscore once again that Margolles’s turnto stained textiles allowed her to gain further visibility, on a global stage, for the epidemic of femicide in Mexico and else where. While these textiles frustrate theviewer’s visual mastery over the dead body, 48 they also interrogate gore capitalism by making violence visible. As a Mexican artist, Margolles is undoubtedly inside the monster that is gore capitalism, but if we heed the message of her collaborative textiles, we must recognize that the monster does not live in Mexico alone.
One of the threads running through all of Margolles’s textile works is that they are dirty and stained. If we refer to anthropologist Mary Douglas’s definition of dirtas “matter out of place,” 49 we see that Margolles’s textiles force us to think about those individuals who are deemed “out of place” and who are, as a result, more vulnerable to violence and dispossession. I use the term “force” advisedly, because there is something forceful and aggressive about Margolles’s textile artworks,something that destabilizes the usual association of textiles with softness, gentleness, femininity, and safety. Margolles’s textiles are affectively effective, in largepart, precisely because they undermine these associations: they draw attention to violent touch against female bodies and they index domestic violence rather than signifying safe domesticity. Their message is excessive in that it exceeds what tex-tiles have traditionally signified: docile femininity, unobtrusive materials, habits,hobbies, and habitats. The textile-as-skin is both fragile and resilient, a borderand a boundary that is permeable and vulnerable.
These textiles are stained and dirty and bloody. Margolles cleans up streets only to unveil the violence that dirtied them in the first place. The dirt, blood,and stains force (white, privileged) viewers to face the lived realities of vulnerableindividuals, particularly Indigenous women and women of colour. In her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, Alexis Shotwell writes:
Concepts and practices of purity and impurity, in relation to dirt as wellas other things understood as dirty, tell us something about how peopleunderstand the world they live in, and thus how they can imagine the world becoming. In other words, purity practices are also productive normative formulations—they make a claim that a certain way of being is aspired to, good,or to be pursued. 50
Shotwell adds: “To be against purity is, again, not to be for pollution, harm, sickness, or premature death. It is to be against the rhetorical or conceptual attempt to delineate and delimit the world into something separable, disentangled, and homogenous.” 51 In the context of Margolles’s stained textiles, one could argue that the unstained, unembroidered cloth is “pure” in the sense of unsullied, clean, and untouched by both violence and artistic intervention. The bloody textiles, on the other hand, are impure. Dirty, yes, but not “taboo” in the sense that Mary Douglas means, or even “shameful” in the way that Sorkin has theo-rized. Rather, they are impure in the sense that Shotwell means: as something that demands attention because it illuminates the often painful co-existence of peoples both locally and globally. The affective demands of Margolles’s bloody textiles remind us that as global citizens we are all ethically entangled. It is up toeach of us to decide what we do with that knowledge.
Image 1
Teresa Margolles, Telabordada, 2012.
Embroidered fabricwith blood stains. 202 × 206 cm.National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Photo: Musée d’art contemporain deMontréal.