Natuka Honrubia

PROTEC ME FROM WHAT I WANT. (FRAGMENTARY) MATERIAL FOR CONSIDERING THE OTHERNESS OF DESIRE by Fernando Castro Flórez

 “Natuka Honrubia's sculptures and drawings posit a disturbing series of images of corporality, in the wake of the "thinned" subjectivity of Giacometti or Germanine Richier but also bearing a relationship with the terrible or poetical prosthesis of Rebecca Horn. While in one of her sculptures a hand holds out a type of spinning top, suggesting a sense of tenderness or even a longing for communication with the other, the drawings are dominated by a terrible gesturality and atmosphere, as if these visions were torn from murky nightmares, from some personal descent to hell. Here the anatomy is that of thin or, to put it more bluntly, skeletal, spectral women: "Wings and muzzles, goads and wheels, arms and tails, hands and legs, trampolines and stairs are combined in formal discordance to incarnate all sorts of grotesque and horrifying artefacts".[1] If she creates a baby pushchair it is to hold a body of monstrous proportions, if we see a rocking horse it has a piercing wounding element incorporated, and this is made explicit in the sculpture with a diabolical tail. These works bring to mind almost immediately the terrible objects used by the twin brothers in Inseparables, the disturbing film by David Cronenberg. There is no metaphysical element in the bodily mutilations Natuka Honrubia sculpts, in these fragments casting shadows which only serve to radicalise panic. The same traumatic undertow in the work of Louise Bourgeois, resurfaces in the elongated fallen-to-earth rag doll Natuka has "immobilized" with tape as if it were some sort of talisman of madness. These statues, for it is still possible to qualify them as such, are irrevocably locked into an altered interchange where it is possible to name the instant of death.[2]With boundless energy, this artist names the wound, the suffering, as if she were conjuring up the oppressive atmosphere of the hospital.[3]Juan Lagardera recalls how, on a visit to Natuka Honrubia's studio, she disclosed the emotive grounds that drove her, from the fear of death to the disappearance of a loved one, lack of communication , the sadness of childhood or the memories of wounds inflicted during learning. Tragedy can be grafted into sexual rage,[4] as we can testify in the arm with the toothed vagina, while in Speculum (2001) a mass of fingers seem to compase the jaw of an animal in a kind of horrendous metamorphosis and black humour overshadows the forceful work entitled Para lavativas (2001). The childish subject has been absorbed by a thimble, in an image equally invoking the interweaving of narratives and the "normative" localization of the woman, while the drawings that scream out and sculptures such as Awaiting to be dressed (2000), close to the posits of Kiki Smith, the toothed legs, incarnate the sinister (the estranged everyday): the hand holding out and offering a game is ultimately multiplied in Autofagia(2000) in an infinity of fingers irrevocably bound towards the abysm of the monstrous.

Bataille considers the dialectic of transgression and prohibition as the condition and even the essence of eroticism. A field of violence, what takes place in eroticism is dissolution, the destruction of the closed being which is the normal state of the participant in the game. One form of extreme violence is nakedness which is a paradoxical state of communication or, perhaps, a disjuncture in the being, a pathetic ceremony where the passage from humanity to animality is produced.[5] Faced with nakedness, Bataille experiences a sacred feeling, where fascination and horror are mixed in equal measure, from it arises an equivalence with the act of killing or, to be more precise, the imminence of sacrifice.

Freud was convinced that perversion is not subversive, and further, that it is not the key to the Unconscious. The almost obscene exteriorisations of the pervert produce a simultaneous increase in fantasies yet preclude the Unconscious. Perhaps there is in these ideas an implicit mythology of the Unconscious as veil. "the pervert, with his certainty about what brings enjoyment, obfuscates the gap, the 'burning question'' the stumbling block, that 'is' the core of the Unconscious".[6] Zizek argues that, in the era of the "decline of the Oedipus", in which the paradigmatic subjectivity is no longer that of the subject integrated into the paternal law through symbolic castration, but that of the "polymorphic perverse" subject that obeys the superego mandate of joys, we have to hysterize the subject, that is, recover that battlefield between secret desires and symbolic prohibitions. In this strange will to inculcate the lack (along with the ambiguous fascination with respect to the wound), not only sexualisation would reappear, but also a modulation of what Kant called sublime feeling (that mixture of pleasure and disgust or terror). But maybe then that Other of hysteria will be invested with the archaic brilliance of the numinous.”[7]

 

Translated by Brendan Lambe

[1] Clemente, J. L.: «When the dreams of reason come alive» in Natuka Honrubia. Club Diario Levante, Valencia 1998.

[2] That space is not any space, that place is not any place. It is the line of the maps, the no-man's-land between two borders, the place where there are no police or stations, because the works of Natuka Honrubia turn us inside ourselves, they speak to you about you, to me, but in what we have in common, they quote us; they summon us towards the future, delaying that encounter between our two 'selves' (mine's with mine, yours' with yours, yours' with mine), evidencing the hiatus. But they also quote us in a second sense, commenting on our own life, our condition as human beings turned towards that irremissible moment, because they speak to us of our death, they are its silhouettes, ghosts of permanent disability as an existential condition" (Pastor, M.: "Transit zone" in Natuka Honrubia. Devenir. Espai d'Art A. Lambert, Jávea 1996.

[3] Wheelchairs, beds, prostheses. Based on these elements, and in her first individual exhibition, the young sculptress Natuka Honrubia (Valencia, 1971) has carried out a personal reading on pain, suffering and the subsequent flight, for which she focuses thematically on the bodily limitations of those human beings prevented from full movement, recreating the atmosphere of a health facility whose contraptions appear as a practical substitute for the handicap of the wounded body" (Cf. Parra-Duhalde: "The sculptural stylization of suffering. Natuka Honrubia" in Postdata, Levante, No. 141, May 10, 1996, p. 6).

[4] Maite Beguiristain has pointed out the presence of this sexual fury in the works of Natuka Honrubia: «Her materials are not unpleasant in themselves, but their forms are, both The toothed vulvas that seem to drag a kind of giant galactic mosquito at the end of their tail and toothy, like those tremendously deformed figures, between bug and human, between fellatio and childbirth» (Text by Maite Beguiristain in Partida de Damas. Museum of Fine Arts, Valencia 1998, p. 37).

[5] «The decisive action is to get naked. Nudity is opposed to the closed state, that is to say, to the state of discontinuous existence. It is a state of communication that reveals the search for a possible continuity of being beyond a withdrawal into itself. The paintings open up to continuity through those secret conduits that give us the feeling of obscenity. Obscenity means the disorder that disrupts a state of the bodies according to self-possession, to the possession of lasting and affirmed individuality. » (Bataille, G.: Eroticism. Ed. Tusquets, Barcelona 1985, p. 31).

[6]«All medical, zoological, grammatical and literary meanings have been contested by modern feminism (Haraway, D: "Gender for a Marxist dictionary: the sexual politics of a word in Science, cyborg and women. The reinvention of nature, Chair, Madrid, 1995, p.220).

[7]«All medical, zoological, grammatical and literary meanings have been contested by modern feminisms (Haraway, D: "Gender for a Marxist dictionary: the sexual politics of a word in Science, cyborg and women. The reinvention of nature, Lecture, Madrid, 1995, p.220).

  1. Ese espacio no es ningún espacio, ese lugar no es ningún lugar. Es la raya de los mapas, la tierra de nadie entre dos fronteras, el sitio donde no hay policías ni estaciones, porque las obras de Natuka Honrubia nos vuelven hacia adentro de nosotros mismos, te hablan a ti de ti, a mide mí, pero en lo que tenemos en común, nos citan; nos emplazan hacia el futuro, demorando ese encuentro entre nuestros dos ‘yo’ (el del mío con el mío, el del tuyo con el tuyo, el del tuyo con el mío), evidenciando el hiato. Pero también nos citan en un segundo sentido, comentando nuestra propia vida, nuestra condición como seres humanos volcados hacia ese instante irremisible, porque nos hablan de nuestra muerte, son sus siluetas, fantasmas de la invalidez permanente como condición existencial» (Pastor, M.: «Zona de tránsito» en Natuka Honrubia. Devenir. Espai d‘Art A. Lambert, Jávea 1996.
  2. Sillas de ruedas, camas, prótesis. A partir de estos elementos, yen su primera exposición individual, la joven escultora Natuka Honrubia (Valencia, 1971) ha realizado una personal lectura sobre el dolor, el padecimiento y la posterior huida, para la cual se centra temáticamente en las limitaciones corporales de aquellos seres humanos impedidos al pleno movimiento, recreando la atmósfera de un recinto sanitario cuyos artilugios aparecen como el sucedáneo práctico a la minusvalía del cuerpo herido» (Cfr. Parra-Duhalde: «La estilización escultórica del sufrimiento. Natuka Honrubia» en Posdata, Levante, n. 141, 10 de mayo de 1996, p. 6).
  3. Maite Beguiristain ha señalado la presencia de esa furia sexual en las obras de Natuka Honrubia: «Sus materiales no son desagradables en sí, pero Lo son sus formas, tanto Las vulvas dentadas que parecen arrastrar al final de su cola una especie de mosquito gigante galáctico y denteroso, como esas figuras tremendamente deformadas, entre bicho y humano, entre felación y parto» (Texto de Maite Beguiristain en Partida de Damas. Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia 1998, p. 37).
  4. «La acción decisiva es ponerse desnudos. La desnudez se opone al estado cerrado, es decir al estado de existencia discontinua. Es un estado de comunicación que revela la busca de una continuidad posible del ser más allá de un replegamiento sobre sí. Los cuadros se abren a la continuidad por esos conductos secretos que nos dan eL sentimiento de la obscenidad. La obscenidad significa el trastorno que desarregla un estado de Los cuerpos conforme a la posesión de sí, a la posesión de la individualidad duradera y afirmada.» (Bataille, G.: El erotismo. Ed. Tusquets, Barcelona 1985, p. 31).
  5. Zizek, S: El espinoso sujeto. El centro ausente de la antología política. Paidos, Buenos Aires, 2001. p.264.
  6. «Todos los significados médicos, zoológicos, gramáticos y litersrios han sido contestados por los feminismos modernos (Haraway, D: "Género para un diccionario marxista: la política sexual de una palabra en Ciencia, cyborg y mujeres. La reinvención de la naturaleza, Cátedra, Madrid, 1995, p.220).