| Nicola L. | |||||||||
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Nine Historic Hysteric Women Click here for images of the performance Madame Bovary, Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, Mona Lisa, Billie Holiday, Cleopatra, Eva Hesse, Jeanne d'Arc, Ulrike Meinhof |
"Freud said " L'hysterie est une carricature d'oeuvre d'art"
Nicola L is interested in the sublime aspect of the female persona in
a way that is uniquely her own. Rather than ownership of these personas,
she wants to develop their mystique -- not so much as a memorial, but
as a kind of living texture, a sublimation of life, love, and art, of
the femme fatale -- but in a paradoxically absurd manner. The nine famous
celebrity women she has chosen do not stop in time. Rather they are destined
to an immortal reign like the kings of Byzantium. But unlike the kings
of Byzantine, her women caricatures offer a sensibility that charges us
with new energy. Through them, we discover a way of seeking sensuality
through the seduction of their images. The hysteria of these women is
really our hysteria, our projection, as to who and what they might be.
Like all caricatures in the worlds of entertainment and politics where
women are involved, the underlying presumption is that hysteria surrounds
this ongoing endeavor, this speculation on the feminine. but this hysteria
need not be the case. We might consider this speculation as a kind of
festival that suggests the eternal seduction of glamour and coy intrigue
within the wondrous shape of these marvelous creatures, the eternal feminine
that Nicola L has proposed.
Robert C. Morgan
NYC, March 30, 2006
| Nicola is an environmental artist of a unique kind,
one whose sense of life is both generative and critical, inflected
with surrealist wit and an instinctive feeling for what is natural,
life-preserving, and healing. Although it seems almost obligatory to validate art of our time by characterizing it as "anxiety-making," what Nicola does is not so much provoke anxiety as present its signs in what can only be called a good-natured way. Her feminist icons, symbolic of so much tragedy, violence, and heroism in human history, are presented with a strident, celebratory defiance, rather than the gravity of martyrdom: Ulrike Meinhof, Falconetti as Joan Pucelle, Eva Forest, Billie Holiday, and Rosa Luxemburg are not merely "tragic figures" but affirmative and necessary ones who have appeared at fortuitous moments in the evolution of human awareness. Rather than compose a dirge, Nicola contrives a tango between the oppressions of history and the defiant sensuality of living, of having convictions, conscience, and reason. Her performance art really does "bring people together," many people in the same skin, in a mysteriously profound yet ebullient way: in a plaza in Havana, along the Great Wall of China, at Bergamot Station in Los Angeles---these improvised choreographies have a visual beauty and stunning unlikelihood that I find vastly more engaging and authentic than the flapping clotheslines and umbrella landscapes of Christo, for this is art that doesn't bludgeon the spectator with its artiness but changes the spectator into part of the art. from "A Force Of Nature" by Gary Indiana NYC, April 2006 |