Blood control
Every artist, it seems, has blood on their hands these days. Or at least on the canvas. Or their bodies. After seeing four major exhibitions back to back in London by artists vastly different in style, expression, and era from each other, the fact that blood was everywhere in their work—in theme, in colour, as medium—could hardly be mere coincidence.
At the Tate Modern, one could say that blood was oozing out of the works of three women artists in three separate shows—Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Tracey Emin (1963-present), and Ana Mendieta (1948-1985). Blood was a metaphor for life in all its aspects: in the creation of new life, in the loss of life, in celebration as well as in union with another person. Some of Kahlo’s most famous and visceral self-portraits has her heart ripped off her body, blood seeping into the ground; another has blood staining the sheets beneath her as she lays trussed up on a hospital bed, recovering from her near-fatal tram accident; yet another has tiny drops of blood running down her collarbones as her body is encaged in thorns from her neck to her shoulders.
The Cuban emigré artist Mendieta celebrated blood as a life force, primeval and eternal yet ephemeral, irrevocably entwined with the essence of womanhood. The earth was quite literally her canvas; molding the earth and shaping outlines or silhouettes in the landscape, she created absences that alluded to the presence of women, and the ancient histories that connected them to land and to time. Some of the works, part of her Silueta series or her Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) series, the womanly figures appear to have been drenched in red powder or liquid; in the works on bark or paper, she repeats those outlines and pigments them in a deep red that evokes blood.
There has always been a strong element of the explicit, the personal, and the confessional in Emin’s work that boldly confronts her own experiences of love, heartbreak, trauma, and disease as well as the realities of being a woman while shattering bourgeois conventions. There is a painting tinged in red that outlines the bodies of a man and a woman in copulation. Above it, in blue, are the words “You keep fucking me.”
In “The End of Love” (2024), we make out a bed, a cat atop a chest of drawers, looking at a figure on the bed, hair strewn all over the pillow, distressed, disconsolate, and defeated. The violent, uneven swathes of red and the pink drips on the side suggest that the woman in bed is likely crying over a breakup, which of course the title confirms. In “I Never Asked to Fall in Love – You made me Feel like this” (2018), the canvas, in echoes of Cy Twombly, is mostly drenched in red, and we perceive a broken figure, in both physical and psychical pain from a love affair that may have just ended, or should end.
More gruesome but compelling is a series of tiny photographs along a darkened hallway that documents her own medical traumas, with Emin showing herself bleeding from surgery.
At that point, I had just seen too many evocations of blood in art. The rawness of it all was extremely powerful; it takes an immense amount of vulnerability and resolve to express and mediate deep trauma so explicitly. Just that morning I had seen Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and while there were many oohs and aahs from viewers as they regarded his massive red-pigment-soaked installations that looked like volcanoes in mid-explosion, or the insides of our bodies, tissues, muscles and all, frankly, I found all that goriness so gratuitous and off-putting.
Like a hell-and-brimstone bloodbath we—or at least I—didn’t need to see at all. Of course, one can say that the juxtaposition of his better-known mirrored spheres—imagine Richard Serra but in gleaming, reflective metal—was a deliberate study in contrasts between the visceral and the sleek; the fact of the physiological violence that happens inside our bodies as well as the geological violence simmering beneath the earth’s surface as opposed to the sheen of our urban architecture; image versus reality.
Yes, yes, I get all that, but where Kahlo, Mendieta, and Emin allowed themselves to be vulnerable, acknowledging how blood is passion, pain, and life itself, constantly flowing and renewing, and nurturing, it seemed to me that Kapoor was simply grandstanding with all that angry monumentality.
How like a man, really.
