“El cuerpo de verdad”: The Potency of Magali Lara’s Unpictured Bodies

Abstract

This article explores a suite of six prints made by the Mexican artist Magali Lara in 1984 that present a series of views onto bathrooms. Although the artist never pictures bodies, the images manage to articulate women’s bodily realities. Haunting details—a squat toilet, its lid propped up; a roll of toilet paper, ripped askew; a still-smoldering cigarette, freshly ground into an ashtray next to a sink—seem to describe bodies without directly depicting them. At the same time, anthropomorphic and animated bathroom fixtures serve as surrogate bodies, inhabiting the otherwise empty interiors. In the context of 1980s Mexico City where, despite a thriving feminist movement, reproductive health remained shrouded in mystery and discussions of women’s sexuality and inner lives were still regarded as taboo, Lara’s unpictured bodies offered a creative circumvention. They managed to invite discussion of key feminist concerns including women’s health, sexuality, and subjectivity. Counterintuitively, they offered a means of making visible the complex realities of women’s experience. Lara’s images help to expand notions of what has comprised feminist art in Mexico. Charting the possibilities of subjective expression as political in its own right, the suite of etchings invites reflection upon how viewers’ imaginations can become sites of political transformation