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  Solo Show
Tania Candiani
La Refaccionaria Galería de Arte y Diseño
Issue #70 Sep - Oct 2008

Ruben Bonet


To negate the existence of love and the viability of couples, a quote from Jung is often cited, one that speaks of romantic love as a demented and artificial race to build an “us” when there can barely be a “one.” The designers of women’s magazines in the 1950s didn’t heed this message; for them, marriage meant: “to be two in complete communion, to feel the same emotions, to rejoice in the same joys, to cry the same tears...” While Jung’s words, taken out of context, form an exaggeration, the subliminal pressure that women are subjected to throughout their lives to adequately play the role of ideal woman is also excessive. Instructions never stop coming: family advice, teen magazines, web pages, the great amount of tendentiousness in the mass media, and soap operas.
The artist Tania Candiani (who was born in Mexico City in 1974 and has lived in Tijuana for more than ten years) has explored female behavior in several projects. She is interested in how a woman’s behavior in the domestic sphere and in a couple’s life is stretched (like a corset) throughout her lifetime to accommodate standards of proper appearance and correction, not to mention beauty. To reach the base minimum of being an ideal woman (to be a good professional, a good wife, a good mother, a good lover) practically requires one to have the drive of an Olympic pole jumper.
From the beginning, Candiani’s anthropological study of women abounded in self-representations and topics that emerged from direct experience. She began with Gordas (2001), a multidisciplinary exhibition and series of works—with installation, video, photography, drawing with hand- or machine-sewing, embroidery, and other interventions—based on the many stimuli that drive women to fight weight gain while being bombarded by equally intense pleasures of a capricious, sugar-filled diet. The show included weight scales, locked refrigerators, a brilliant series of paintings of fat, and the recording and intervention of advertisements for a weight-loss industry that has seen truly fat profits. Gordas explored the delicate boundaries between health and pathology, between healthy eating and anorexia, and between self-control and compulsions such as bulimia. One of the series’ most emblematic works is the sewn drawing of an overweight woman inducing herself to vomit.
The study of the female condition continued with the series Protección familiar (2003–04), an allusion to domestic violence, that included Cascos protectores, a series of photographic self-portraits of the artist “wearing” kitchen utensils like metal colanders to protect her face and head from potential aggressions. With the series Lo doméstico (2004–06), Candiani focused on sexual intimacy, perhaps the terrain where women encounter the most prejudices, and she presented mattresses sewn with stereotypical interjections of sexual pleasure: “don’t stop,” “please,” “yes yes yes,” “oh my God...”
With the recent Instrucciones y recetas, Candiani again and with elegant mockery dissected the insistence of the mass media regarding women. She used models from 1950s advertising to verify: “The languages of advertising change, as do the strategies and messages of art, to speak of a topic that DOESN’T CHANGE over time.” To reveal advertising’s subliminal message, Candiani took texts from ads: “TAME YOUR HEART”; “A boyfriend-finding horoscope”; “Now you can buy great beauty with a little money.” The artist sewed these slogans onto large-format canvases and changed the context of the images so that some of them evoked self-pleasure more than conjugal acquiescence.
Candiani’s work offers a small aesthetic revenge against the messages, laden with an indigestible ideology, that are perpetuated in an almost biological way from grandmothers to mothers, as if encrypted in a woman’s genetic code. Despite the fact that films and soap operas (or the ever-popular cowboy books and comics) tend to show a more liberated and independent woman, the female free will is always stigmatized in advertising products, as the “good woman” in the soap opera continues to be the representation of the good wife.
In an installation composed of three hundred clocks lined on shelves against a wall, Candiani alluded to the rite of passage from childhood (evoked as a time free of instructions and prescriptions) to adulthood. Here, time sounded like water: a liquid time—in a literary reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice—as opposed to frozen time, which was crystallized in the video and photographic record of an installation of eight hundred clocks that the artist created in the desert of Laguna Salada, in Mexicali.
Some pencil drawings on large-format canvases completed the show by Tania Candiani, who is accustomed to approaching a given topic—almost always related to the experience of femaleness—using a variety of media.
 


 

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