In Brutal Ordeals, a Performance Artist Embodies the Oppressed

Confronting you head-on are a dangling flag, and a person at risk of hanging.

The flag, unfurled vertically between two white structural columns in a gallery at El Museo del Barrio, resembles the celebs and stripes of the United States, besides the blue and pink are black, and the white has been dyed a gristly pink — stained with blood, in response to the exhibition supplies, given by undocumented immigrants residing in New York.

The man is Carlos Martiel, an Afro-Cuban efficiency artist recognized for placing his physique by grueling, painful trials whereas audiences watch. He’s not truly current in El Museo del Barrio: A big monitor leaning towards the again wall, aligned with the flag, performs footage from a 2022 efficiency titled “Cuerpo” — physique, in Spanish. Martiel is bare aside from a rope, looped round his neck and connected to the ceiling of a gallery. A handful of individuals take turns shouldering his legs and propping up his again whereas he grimaces within the noose.

These are the 2 strongest, most unsettling artworks in Martiel’s first main survey, additionally titled “Cuerpo,” in New York City, the place he’s lived since 2012. The phrases “undocumented immigrants” within the written description of the flag work, “Insignia VII,” cost it with violence. The noose efficiency is tense, dynamic and unsure, even from the protected distance of a video. You are dared to disclaim the struggling of the artist, or of these he stands for.

The 16 performances represented within the gallery by movies, pictures and drawings embody greater than a decade of ordeals of endurance and self-mutilation, during which the often-stoic artist evokes the brutal historical past of colonialism, racism and enslavement. Martiel doesn’t intellectualize slavery’s wake; as an alternative, he makes it terribly current, within the physique of a residing individual: his personal.

A video of the earliest piece on view, “Prodigal Son,” from 2010, exhibits the artist pinning his father’s Cuban navy medals to his bare chest. For “Continente,” from 2017, Martiel had 9 small diamonds embedded in his pores and skin, then he lay supine in a New York gallery whereas a white man sliced them out. In pictures of each successive work, you may see the marks left on Martiel’s physique by the earlier ones.

You can solely think about Martiel’s ache; at El Museo, you additionally really feel his absence. Seeing {a photograph} of Martiel standing with an armload of animal entrails (“Monument III,” 2021) is completely different from smelling that gore. Instead of sharing area with the artist, a viewer should relate to those bodily performances from the take away of images and sketches, in addition to their first-person descriptions on the checklist of works.

Here’s the reason of “Monument II,” executed on the Guggenheim in 2021: “I stand handcuffed on a pedestal within the middle of the museum’s rotunda. This work displays on the structural racism and political and systemic violence traditionally suffered by the Black and immigrant physique within the United States.” (Before he moved to New York, Martiel typically mirrored on the racial prejudice in Cuban society.)

It’s damning to restage the public sale block of a slave market in a museum foyer, a (actually and traditionally) “white” area devoted to lovely and provocative objects. Martiel’s posture can be dignified, erotic, a sardonic echo of the chiseled physiques of classical marbles on their plinths.

But as soon as the shock of those efficiency paperwork abates, you’re left with the work’s heavy metaphors — and pictures that, whereas horrible, are simpler to abdomen than the regular spectacle of Black and brown demise within the information.

This survey makes me miss the wry contradictions of “Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform),” by Félix González-Torres — one other queer Cuban-born artist working in New York, who died in 1996 — during which a muscled man displayed on a blocklike stage wears tight shorts and a Walkman and dances to music solely he can hear. His objectification is minimize with pleasure. It makes me miss the perverse self-debasement of Pope.L, whose susceptible crawls by main cities invite the madcap uncertainty of an uncontrolled world, in a approach that Martiel’s elegant symbolic shows — which embody digging a Mali signal for knowledge right into a garden utilizing his tooth — don’t.

There’s no mistaking the message, for instance, in {a photograph} at El Museo of the 2019 efficiency “South Body,” during which the shaft of a small American flag pierces the pores and skin of Martiel’s shoulder. It leaves a fats scar.

And Martiel’s endurance performances appear undercut by the concept — in contrast to the enslaved folks being appraised within the markets of 18th-century New York — he might climb down from that pedestal at any second. Eventually, that’s precisely what he did.

Then once more, free will is as important as intestine drive to Martiel’s work — simply as it’s for the durational performances of EJ Hill, Nona Faustine, or Miles Greenberg, Black artists who equally put themselves on public show in varied states of nakedness and misery. By selecting his destiny, Martiel pushes previous easy victimhood, daring to symbolize each sufferer of racist violence — and pins the viewer within the place of each perpetrator or witness. Whether or not your pores and skin shade matches the pale pink stripes on Martiel’s flag. And if a person had been actually hanging from his neck, who would let him choke?

Cuerpo: Carlos Martiel

Through Sept. 1. El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org.