Carol Rama

“Nobody in the world has ever been more pissed off than me,” Carol Rama said in an interview six years before she won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Indeed, fury plays a role in nearly every image and object the eighty-five-year-old artist has produced over the past six decades. A vibrant, nasty, eccentric, erotic, corporeal, and irrefutably feminine (one might say feminist) wrath is everywhere visible in Rama’s oeuvre, yet hers is hardly piss without pleasure. She probably couldn’t fathom a life without heavy doses of both, preferably delivered simultaneously. In 1996, for instance, mad cow disease became Rama’s unlikely muse as the malady spread across Europe; a series of truly elegant, if macabre, drawings featuring taut, tumescent udders and other bestial part objects was the result of her enthrallment. (As far as I know, the last person to wax poetic about the orgasmic qualities of dying cattle was Georges Bataille, in his 1928 Story of the Eye.)

Rama’s second solo exhibition at this gallery (her 1997 show here was her first in the United States) was a small but meaty sampling that spanned the years 1946 (a delicate, dirty watercolor titled Zef) to 1998 (a Mad Cow with distended sherbet-colored teats). Much of the iconography found in Rama’s earliest works is carried through to her latest. Here are a few of the artist’s favorite things (some visible in this show, some not): tongues (which may morph suddenly into snakes or penises or long, bloody intestines), teeth (animal and human), dentures, women’s shoes, fox collars, rubber bicycle tubes, urinals, cigarette holders, cat claws, and ink-bottle droppers. (Perhaps it goes without saying that Rama holds Duchamp in high esteem; she was also friendly with Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray.) Among the works in this exhibition, a fetishistic 1972 drawing in marker of three shoes—sandal, wedge, and orthopedic—was oddly moving, and Boy, 1993, a Schielesque adolescent with alarmingly tangled fingers, gave off a perversely erotic charge. In three images from a series titled “Masturbators,” 1997, deliriously onanistic men with erect pricks and outstretched tongues were drawn in black marker on pages from a nineteenth-century artillery manual, coyly implying that both types of bodies, animate and inanimate, comprise a paradoxical blend of the mechanical, the dangerous, and the pleasurable.

Rama’s output is not limited to surrealistic figuration. In the 1950s, for instance, she joined the Movimento Arte Concreta (a group interested in experimenting with shape, line, and color independently of nature) and produced rigorously geometric works, a portfolio of which appeared here. Two untitled “bricolages” from 1969 exemplified Rama’s practice of embedding objects such as glass eyes, human teeth, or animal claws into canvas, while Birnam’s Presages, 1984, was a striking example of a whole subcategory of sculptural pieces made from the innards of bike tires. Recalling work by other feminist pioneers (Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse), the dangling tubes—black and pink—are as formally compelling as they are ambiguously evocative of body parts.

If Carol Rama is as pissed off as she claims to be, I hope she’ll be pleased with the effect of her modest show: The works were so striking I was angry I couldn’t see more. In Italy, where she has spent her entire life, Rama has been esteemed for years, but she’s much less known abroad, generating interest primarily among feminist scholars and curators. Despite her recent Biennale success, it seems wrong that the most an American audience can see of her work at any one time is an appetite-whetting handful.

—Johanna Burton