The Art of Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo is a sculptor who was born in Colombia in 1958. I became familiar with Salcedo’s work on a visit to MOMA in 2012 for a Spanish class that I was taking at Hunter. To be honest, I don’t know very much about art and a lot of what I saw at MOMA, while beautiful, did not particularly move me. However, I found that the pieces by Salcedo, who has been influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, spoke to me in a way that most art does not.

Salcedo creates sculptures in response to, and as a means of processing, traumatic conditions of violence that she has witnessed both in Colombia and, more recently, in the U.S. She considers these conditions, created “by racism, oppression, exclusion, poverty and humiliation… from the distinct perspective of the victims” (Widholm). Her starting point is typically a violent event that she has either witnessed or encountered in the media.  She conducts extensive interviews with the victims of such violence and/or their families and tries to come away with an object that she feels represents their suffering.  She has said in an interview that she sees herself as a secondary witness to the violence and she wants to portray the descriptions that they have given to her.

Salcedo and her team then construct installations using familiar everyday materials that relate to the victims’ stories. The works do not directly represent the violence, but rather show the absence, or void, created in the lives of those who have suffered because of violent acts. Julia Rodrigues Widholm of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago wrote in 1915, for a Salcedo retrospective, that Salcedo transforms “familiar materials into contemplative objects that transcend the particular details of violent incidents and prompt[s] viewers to consider individual lives lost and families torn apart” (Widholm).

Very often the victims whose stories Salcedo portrays are women.  One of the first pieces that I encountered at MOMA was Atrabiliarios (1992-2004), which focused on disappearances during the Colombian Civil War. In this installation, she uses worn women’s shoes that are sutured into wall niches behind stretched and dried animal fiber. The shoes are stand-ins for those that went missing during the war. Salcedo, when interviewed said that “when you see an old [shoe] in the street, you wonder how it got there.”

Atrabiliarios

In a work titled A Flor de Piel (2014) Salcedo has created a room-sized shroud, sewing hundreds of thousands of rose petals as an offering for a Colombian nurse who had been dismembered by paramilitary forces. Her intent was to provide a “tender gesture” against the brutality of death. (Finkel)

A Flor de Piel

More typically her sculptures will include the use of chairs, tables, dressers and doors. After interviewing displaced rural Colombian women forced out of their homes in search of safety she created La Casa Viuda, a series of six sculptures that used “doors without buildings, unmoored from their foundations, (which) evoke the loss of home and subsequent lack of shelter that these women and their families were forced to endure” (Widholm).

La Casa Viuda

Finally, perhaps her most famous installation was at the Tate Modern in London. Called Shibboleth (2007), it took the form of a 548-foot-long jagged crack cut into Turbine Hall’s concrete floor, a physical fissure that she designed to represent borders and explore racism and the ostracism of immigrants.

Shibboleth

Salcedo is generally well reviewed, and this is despite the highly political nature of her work. I am including here a link to the NYT review of her 2015 Guggenheim retrospective. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/arts/design/review-doris-salcedos-forceful-political-art-in-guggenheim-retrospective.html?_r=0. Her success reflects the progress that Linda Nochlin considers to have been made with regard to women’s art. It is refreshing to see that museums of the stature of MCA Chicago and the Guggenheim have recently displayed Salcedo retrospectives. I highly recommend that if you ever have the opportunity to view Salcedo’s work you do so.

Works Cited

Finkel, Jori. “Doris Salcedo, Whose Art Honors Lives Lost, Gets a Retrospective in Chicago.” The New York Times. 11 Feb. 2015. Web. 1 May 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/arts/design/doris-salcedo-whose-art-honors-lives-lost-gets-a-retrospective-in-chicago.html

MacAdam, Barbara A. “Where the Great Women Artists Are Now.” Art News. 1 Feb. 2007. Web. 1 May 2017.

http://www.artnews.com/2007/02/01/where-the-great-women-artists-are-now/

Widholm, Julie Rodrigues. “Presenting Absence: The Work of Doris Salcedo.” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. 2015. Web. 1 May 2017. http://www3.mcachicago.org/2015/salcedo/texts/presenting-absence/