Carol Rama, A Great Woman Artist

Michelle Wong

MEDIA 384

Blog Post #5

Carol Rama, a Great Woman Artist

            I have never been creep out by a piece of art on the level of getting chills until I saw Carol Rama's work. At the MoMA, I randomly stumbled upon "Spurting Out" and if you are someone with trypophobia (fear of holes), this was an automatic trigger to your fear. This piece is extremely bloody, and with eye liked objects that resemble holes intact on it. To me, it was quite interesting the fact that she gathered found objects, and pasted it on a piece of flat canvas. It was a quite modern approach in art making, combining art with objects making it 3-D like, especially during the time this piece was made, which was in 1967.

"Squirt Out" Carol Rama, 1967

            I was going to see her the same week at the New Museum, which had a whole floor dedicated to her artwork. I kept seeing the same patterns of her just putting eye like objects on her art with squirting blood. It was such dark art. Something about her art resonated in me, and made me quite uncomfortable. After reading more about her, it was confirmed that her art was inspired by her anger due to things she experienced in her life. First off, she was a self-taught artist in Italy, and grew up being in a ward because of her mentally ill mom. She said, “I didn’t have any painters as masters, the sense of sin is my master.” Her art is heavily influenced by things she saw in the ward, including women not being dressed and sticking their tongue out. On top of that, many people in wards were attached to wires or machines, and were mentally not present. Carol Rama grew up in that spooky environment and it became a part of her, but she was never taunted by it. The women in the ward intrigued her and interested her.

            Her first exhibition including her most casted character in her art, Dorina, was shut down by the police for being too risqué. Many of her paintings or etchings always included tongues sticking out of women’s mouths, and snakes being inside or as the sexual organ. This was in the 1940s, where women artists weren’t even a known item, and her art was definitely not acceptable in fascist Italy. She was the power female who defied norms and created art without a “man” teaching her what to do. She was fascinated by human bodies, and was not shy in expressing sexuality and “sin”.

"Dorina" Carol Rama, 1944

                                       

            The way that Carol Rama was different from other artists was that she didn’t create art for the male gaze like most renaissance paintings were. Her drawings had a pinch of naivety that sets it apart from just a women being naked laying on a surface whose desires to please the man in front of the painting. She drew characters in a pure form way out of her imagination. Huffington Post described it as, “The female form is sexual but not sexualized; it’s at once disgusting, dangerous and desirable.”

            Her art is so meaningful because she made it with all of her first hand experience. Her mother lived in a ward and her father committed suicide because his bike tire business failed. She grew up living in a world where she basically lost her parents, and used every ounce of anger as her energy. She said in an interview in 1977, “Nobody in the world has ever been more pissed off than me.” Her artwork was so discomforting because it came from anger, and the less spoken, less desirable things in the world. That is a reality, and she painted what people wanted to avoid.

Sources used:

 Frank, Priscilla. "Step Into The Erotic Universe Of Proto-Feminist Artist Carol Rama."The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 27 Oct. 2014. Web. 17 May 2017.