The Proto-Madonna
Sunday found me feeling more misanthropic than a tobacco lobbyist, my faith in humanity deflating faster than an overcooked soufflé, a really angry soufflé sputtering bits of cheese in sheer psychopathic rage. I had gone to Martin Gropious Bau to revisit the Olafur Eliason exhibtion - which deserves its own blog entry - only to be confronted with a long queue patiently waiting to get into the Frida Kahlo retrospective. Why, oh why mighty capricious zeitgeist ? She must be the most overhyped monobrow after the Gallagher brothers. I don’t get the hoopla. I took a Latin American Visual Arts module at university and was exposed to her colourful candid take on self-portrait before Madonna started collecting her works, before Salma Hayek played her (Look, she owns colourful pottery and drinks tequila! She must be Mexican!). She undoubtedly led a fascinating life and got to see Trotsky naked (well that happens when there’s Mexican quantities of tequila involved), but there are so many other female artists that deserve the same level of attention.
So why precisely her? Why should Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, to give her full name, be placed on such a histrionic pedestal? Well, after much pondering I think I have found my Rosetta Stone, and it’s none other than the Material Girl herself and her fascination with the Central American painter. Think about it. Frida Kahlo is like a proto-Madonna. They have both changed their names to present more easily identifiable and therefore more marketable images, both have included Catholic imagery in their works, flirted with lesbianism, dabbled in controversial ideologies, liberally used popular cultural symbols in their works for maximum impact. They are also masters in forging their own myth, so that Madonna rarely mentions her comfortable middle class Michigan upbringing, whereas Kahlo went as far as to change her birthdate to make it coincide with the Mexican Revolution and claimed that her (German) father was of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, as opposed to the more pedestrian Lutheran branch.
And Kahlo’s oeuvre consists mostly of self-portraits, which might explain why a fellow narcissist like Madonna might be attracted to her. Portraits that feature Frida with thorns round her bloodied neck, because she is in PAIN, portraits of Frida in which she has been stabbed because LOVE HURTS, and portraits that contain two Fridas, because as a woman she is SPLIT, portraits of Frida in indigenous attire (never mind her bourgeois background) because she is MEXICAN, portraits of Frida with that omnipresent monobrow - which she never sported outside a canvas - because she is SUBVERTING CULTURALLY ACCEPTED MODELS OF BEAUTY. Oh and portraits with monkeys, because everybody likes monkeys. Her approach to visual semiotics is so heavy-handed that gallery visitors are advised to wear protective headgear, lest they risk getting being bludgeoned to death by a particularly enthusiastically wielded metaphor. Shame that she was too early, she would have worked modern media brilliantly. I bet Lady Gaga is a fan
