The Land of Unlikeness

Victor Vazquez portrays Carribean culture through a dusty sepia lense. His images are riddled with shadows and dark recesses hiding the ghosts of Puerto Rican and island culture. These images, although employing local symbols, embody the universal problems of life and death, sex and birth, acculturation and isolation. His subjects are nearly always nude, and mainly women. They appear to be asleep or dead. Their passivity is the background to their persecution. Vazquez’s Liquids and Signs depicts living organisms oppressed by artificial sexual objects, genitalia, blades, and swimming sperm drawn large on their bodies. Sex, in these images, is not a life-producing event, but rather ravages its subjects. Sex brings death and affliction.

Vazquez’s “Legs with bones” (2002) demonstrates this portrayal of sex as a harbinger of death. In it, we witness the birth of dry bones, still connected by an artificial umbilical cord to the mother, who appears to be hovering or hanging over the scene, There is little movement in the image, no background, an no life. Even the mother’s feet seem still. What’s more, the bones that the mother appears to have birthed seem to have come from a number of different animals. Is this merely a critique of society, or has Vazquez told us something about nature and life? It is arguable that he has herein revealed an aspect of the structure of life itself. Death, of course, is the final chapter of life, and as such the life cycle itself is finite. Yet, Vazquez presents something much more radical than a mere linear relationship; life here gives birth to death. Or rather, death is profoundly and inescapably immanent to life. Indeed, death gives birth and then death again to life. If there is a surplus, it is death’s.

Likewise, birth implicates community. Through birth, we come into the world together, albeit in vulnerability and thrown-ness. As such, death triumphs over life because our common birth is immediately oriented toward decay and finality, sometimes peacefully, oftentimes violently. Death is the unavoidable other to life, a bottomless telos into which all life flows. Culture, therefore, is the sign of death toward life. If this is the case, if there is a surplus of death and decay always present in life, it should not be strange, then, that local symbolism and bodily states lend themselves so well to demonstrations of life’s finitude and being-toward-death.

One wonders, however, what Vazquez makes of original and unique moments of life, moments when one is inescapably confronted with what can only be described as a surplus of meaning, a positivity the does not evaporate at the point that the moment does. I think this is part of what von Balthasar was trying to get at when he described the moment of the mother’s smile, in which the child receives something greater than just the mother’s affection. Indeed, the child receives herself in the mother’s gracious smile, at once both the welcome and the gift of her being. Incredibly, the mother also receives something in this moment, as the child (although unconsciously) is a gift to the mother, a gift of grace and a gift of community. It’s a fecund event, that even words stumble to grasp the weight and significance of. Can something like this be wrapped up in death and sexual violence? Is this just a happy or lucky coincidence that something of this beauty can emerge from the same subject of Vazquez’s work?