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Cruz: Crucial Manoeuvres Jacqueline Millner |
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 Maria Cruz, Maria,
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Say it loud and
there's music playing, say it soft and it's almost like
praying. Maria. I'll never stop saying Maria. What's in a name? Juliet's arguments were never very convincing. Monikers are bursting with semiotic plenitude, particularly those names that occupy central places in a culture: like the sacred names of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or the names of the historically infamous or even the often fabricated names of celebrities. Complex chains of meaning mobilise even before you invoke the power of names as guarantors of authority and authenticity. Mary, Mary quite contrary, Mary had a little lamb, Mary Pickford, Mary Magdalene, Mary Mother of Joseph! Mary and its Latin variant Maria are said to be etymologically linked to the Hebrew word for bitter, or alternatively, rebellious. Yet beyond this of course in the Judeo-Christian West the name is generally associated with the curious blend of piety, martyrdom, chastity and maternal love represented by the Virgin. When one's name is Maria Cruz - in Spanish cruz designates a cross - then the religious overtones are difficult to escape. It is a name that evokes not patrician bloodlines, but ordinariness through its ubiquity. It conjures up the salt of the earth, reminds us of the moral purity Catholic parents wish for their daughters. Moreover, in a predominantly Anglo-Celtic culture, Maria as distinct from Mary is also inflected with a certain Hispanic exoticism: the excesses of the Virgin cult (visions of self-flagellation, and ecstasy) which come into full glory during Semana Santa as celebrated in Latin cultures such as Spain and Mexico and parts of The Philippines. Sondheim and Bernstein's Maria was a Puerto Rican caught between the moral codes of her native Catholicism and the emergent values of American teenage sexuality in the 50s. Maria wanted to live in (a supposedly multicultural) America even when confronted with the fact that this America favoured distant Central Europeans, namely Caucasian Polish immigrants, over its brown-skinned near-neighbours. Anton becomes Tony with ease but Maria remains Maria. Why focus on the artist's Christian name and why is this so crucial? Perhaps because the artist herself has often foregrounded her name in her works. Perhaps because Cruz's paintings might act as a mode of self-portraiture and fragments of autobiography. Indeed perhaps, with its tentative speculation or imaginitive curiosity forever testing propositions although never with assurance, characterises Cruz's works. Cruz's practice is diverse and eclectic, although she has repeatedly returned to various themes and subjects in her career as a painter. One of these is the self-portrait, often rendered in a conventional realist style, or in a combination of text and figuration as in her winning entry to the 1997 Portia Geach Memorial Prize. Arguably, however, her entire oeuvre could be understood as a mode of self-portraiture. Not that Cruz is on a quest for identity through her art. Rather, her work testifies to very personal reflections and concerns, which necessarily involve negotiating her position in Australian culture, as a native Filipina, as a woman, as an artist and as a painter. In other words, Cruz's painting is self-reflexive, implicitly working through a variety of formative experiences across a set of cultures, from the Asian country of her birth, to her adopted country of Australia, to the country perhaps most significant to her art education, Germany (Cruz spent two years in Dusseldorf's Staatliche Kunstakademie in the mid-80s). Not coincidentally, all these locales are thoroughly imbued with colonial and post-colonial problematics. The Philippines has witnessed a series of colonisations, from Spanish invasion, to the establishment of American military bases, with all the cultural implications attendant upon the servicing of American desire. The long-standing alignment of The Phillippines with the US has to some extent marginalised the country within Asia, forcing an identity problem of major proportions and earning Filipinos the derision of some regional powers for being brown Americans. Closer to home, Australia's identity problems are legion; debate over its cultural and political allegiances as well as over its core values, over whether multiculturalism is alive and well or outmoded bureuacrates, continues with varying degrees of intensity. And if Australia's obsession with defining its national character is legendary, then so is Germany's soul-searching. Interestingly, while Cruz was studying in Dusseldorf, Germany was enjoying a period of international ascendancy in contemporary art with the heavy-handed promotion of the trans-avant-garde with their hot painting and nationalist themes. While Cruz does not directly depict her experiences or deal explicitly with themes of displacement and ethnic identity, these complex undercurrents form a subtext for her work. If the subtext is the perpetual negotiation of personal and national identity, the overt project might be the process of painting itself. As Cruz comments in a 1993 interview, "My artworks involve ideas about making paintings".1 Cruz experiments with different ways of making painting, by splashing, or dripping, or traditional easel technique. She merges abstract and figurative styles to make a nonsense of the distinction. She weaves text into the very fabric of her canvases, so that the words at first fragment into chaos, but then cohere once more to yield intelligible texts. And each time one gets a sense that these paintings are ways of testing Cruz's role as an artist. Their tenor is faintly evocative of Bruce Nauman's early works where, without money for materials and only a vague idea of what an artist was but an avid desire to be one, examined his life in the studio: "If you see yourself as an artist and you function in a studio . . . you sit in a chair or pace around. And then the question comes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around in the studio".2 Counter to traditional notions of art as being quintessentially about quality and success, Nauman's work was often about failure; his efforts acknowledged the relationship between art and everyday life, with its regular incidence of little disappointments, frustrations and indecisions. In a similar way, Cruz's work is also about failure. That is the failure to hit upon the definitive answer to a question and the failure to meet expectations of what it means to be an artist according to conventional or even postmodern notions of the avant-garde. It is a failure that reflects Cruz's approach to art-making as "provisional realisation" (to borrow Bronwyn Clark-Coolee's phrase).3 Cruz's process often results in a rough unfinished look: for example her geometric abstractions such as Heaven, Earth, Hell (1995) are painted without the usual tricks of the trade, such as masking tape, but entirely by hand. This might betray some measure of anti-formalism, but Cruz maintains that she is not interested in engaging with an anti-aesthetic, nor in issues around the deskilling of the artist. She rebuts attempts to frame her paintings in terms of the postmodern destabilisation of taste manifest in artists who are self-consciously bad. She states plainly, "I'm not trying to be a B-Grade painter. I try to paint well".4 While she is resolutely a painter, Cruz deploys painting strategically. She does not confine herself to a singular style or approach. Her works, even within very short time frames, span an immense range from decorative patterns, to geometric abstraction, to appropriations of Romantic paintings, to realist renditions from life, to arrangements of text. It takes some concerted looking at Cruz's text paintings before sense begins to emerge, and when it does it is unsettling and difficult to contextualise: "Under what conditions would you be prepared to make a sacrifice? Do you think that suicide can be justified on principle?" The words pin you down in a manner recalling Barbara Kruger's injunctions, although stripped of their sureness and univocal quality. When Cruz explains that the text derives from a set of questions drafted by German schoolchildren to pose to their national leaders, the resonances become increasingly complex and ambiguous. Cruz regards art as a diurnal activity, not a heroic search for expression. Her work has often been noted, for example by such writers as Eve Sullivan and Julie Ewington, for its humility.5 Perhaps this attempts to describe an approach which combines a quiet respect for one's materials and skills together with a healthy disrespect for grand claims to personal vision. It might be another way to evoke this notion of provisional realisation. On meeting Cruz one suspects that this humility is also inherent in the artist herself. In a self -portrait, the artist is both subject and object. As Marsha Meskimmon points out in The Art of Reflection (1998), "self portraiture is implicated in the complex interweaving of the subject and object roles we play".6 She adds that, within the tradition of the self-portrait, rooted as it is in the concept of the artist as a special individual and hence historically associated with the male genius, "women have used their own self representations to explore, expand and reclaim the acts of looking and making meaning for themselves. In so doing they have made visible complex, multilayered, fragmented and diverse subjectivities". Both Meskimmon and Frances Borzello, author of Seeing Ourselves,7 track the variety of forms women's self-portraiture has taken in the twentieth century. Not only do the authors examine conventional approaches to the genre, but they also note the many examples of non-conventional representations of self. In Sonia Delaunay's self-portrait, an abstract composition using her familiar boldy coloured semi-circular shapes, "the artist's appearance takes second place to artistic style".8 Frances Hodgkin depicts herself by way of a collection of objects in a semi-abstract still-life. Louise Bourgeois calls one of her erotically charged, organically shaped objects a self-portrait. With performance and the preoccupation with the body in some conceptual art, Borzello notes that self-portraiture seems to invade the art world: "Everywhere you look you see the artists; they star in their videos, they pose in their photos, they appear in their paintings, they put their hair combings and nail clippings into their installations, they freeze their blood into self-portrait busts".9 In an extension of earlier conceptual concerns, contemporary artists such as Mona Hatoum videotape the inside their bodies, while Helen Chadwick creates floral sculptures from her own urine (Piss Flowers). While these portraits rarely tell a biographical narrative, nor say anything particularly personal, for example they are not confessional, Borzello argues they are nonetheless self-portraits. In each case, the artist uses herself as a way to present much broader issues and ideas. Some might object that this approach expands the category of self-portraiture so broadly as to render it inoperative. And yet, perhaps, it offers a complex means by which to engage with Cruz's work. It may be a way to make sense of the enormous variations within Cruz's oeuvre, its embrace of traditional genres and conventional styles (without irony, it should be emphasised), its aspiration to quality while well-aware of postmodern critiques of connoisseurship. And, crucially, such an approach highlights the rich subtext in which Cruz makes her paintings about painting, that is, a subtle interweave of disparate cultural influences, which plays host not to a search for identity, but to an acknowledgement of identity's necessarily provisional character... "I'll never stop saying Maria..." Jacqueline
Millner Endnotes © the artist |
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