Essential Interactive Image

Photography: Yasmin HageGalido is a guatamalen visual artist who does work with activist art. She often performs ethically unsettling performances that she uses her body for. In this peice, she is such into a cubicle with microphones. She hit herself 279 times for every woman that was assulted from January 1-9th in 2005 in Guatemala. She performed this peice in January of 2014. The medium she uses is her own body and a bat.

279 Golpes Regina Jose Galido

Themes in the Artwork

Performing Feminicide and Violenceagainst Women in 279 Golpes - Emila Barbosa

This peice forces the audience into an uncomfortable and overstimulating situation. They can only hear the pain of her suffering, and can not see her. It symbolizes the violence against women in Guatemala, where the audience takes on the role of bystanders who have to sit and watch without being able to take control and help the situation. By using her own body to endure the suffering, Galido is able to not only convey her message to the audienceof self sacrifice, and also have herself expirience the pain of the women.

"From the spectators' point of view, one can doubt whether anyone is inside the cubicle on stage, since they never see Galindo going into or out of it. And even if she really is in there, the spectators can doubt that she is, in fact, inflicting pain on herself, for they never see her body."

Emily Barbosa

"Knowing such violence, real as it is doesn't have effect on a real person does not change the power of work"

Alexandra Schwartz

Although the viewers can't know for sure whether or not Galido is in there, it does not change the power of the work, just like the VR exhibit at the Whiney Biennial. The shear thought of this violence occuring to someone is enough to be a moving peice of art.

linkage

Pain and Suffering

Class Concepts

This peice has a similar concept as pilgramage for the artist. Just as the pilgramage journeys are extremly hard, with the goal of emersing yourself in the expireince of others, Galido also endurings the suffering of these women. She exhibits empathetic suffering.Medical application:The blows that she endurs sends a responce to nociceptors which sends the message to her spinal cord and thalamus. The brain then sends neurotransmitters (endorphins) to mitigate the pain responce.

Central Themes:- Smee links historical works to modern ethical issues- While he focuses on a different artist, his main message is that there are no good or bad guys in war, and that all suffering is the same.- "The custody of a prisoner does not call for torture"- Suffering is universal- In this peice, Galido emphasizes the theme of universal suffering, that one persons pain (the women of guatamela) she is putting on herself

Sebastian Smee "Humiliation, cruelty, horror"

The VR expirience in the Whiney Biennial is a similar expirience for the viewers, as they are put into a "PTSD" inducing expirence. There are visual, but more importantly auditory aspects of the peice, including victim gruinting and then being in silence, as well as a man's voice singing two Hebrew blessings in the background. The most important point that Schwartz makes which is true for both that peice and 279 golpes is that older people had a more intense and distrubed reaction than the younger generation, whom instead laughed. This exposes the sad reality that in the younger generations, viewer violence is extremly normalized and therefore the reaction is taken unseriously.

Alexandra Schwartz

Comforting the Shocking VR artwork at the Whitney Biennial