Yeguas del Apocalipsis’s “Desbocadas”

In 1990, Yeguas del Apocalipsis (Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas) were invited to participate in “Museo Abierto” (Open Museum) at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago. Also included was Gloria Camiruaga’s video Casa Particular (1989), which restaged the Last Supper with travestis and dissident artists including Las Yeguas. One day, during a school visit, a group of students stopped in front of the video at just the point that the Virgin Mary ostentatiously uncrossed their legs to reveal a penis.1 The anger of the children’s parents at this vision led to the censoring of the video and the withdrawal of Las Yeguas from the exhibition. The “open museum” remained closed to Las Yeguas—until this year. “Desbocadas” (Unbridled) is a major retrospective that marks the return of these “prodigal daughters.” Far from unbridled, however, Las Yeguas here appear to have been reined in.

This chronological presentation gathers videos, photographs, archival materials, and posters that document Las Yeguas’ actions, which remain shocking in themselves.2 Among them is La conquista de América (1989), a denunciation of imperialism—whether practiced by Spain or the United States—for which the artists danced the Chilean cueca barefoot on a map of South America covered with broken glass from Coca-Cola bottles. In the photograph series “Lo que el SIDA se llevó” (What AIDS Took Away, 1989) they pose as Hollywood stars while visual cues reference death, disease, and transvestism. In the photograph Las dos Fridas (1989), Casas and Lemebel, connected by a blood transfusion tube, imitate Frida Kahlo’s titular 1939 painting. Homenaje a Sebastián Acevedo (1991) documents a brutal performance in which the artists lit their bodies partially on fire, referencing Sebastián Acevedo’s self-immolation in 1983 in protest over the disappearance of his children under the dictatorship of General Pinochet.

Such pieces reveal a committed, political, and audacious duo who spoke out like few others at the time—both nationally and internationally—about the AIDS crisis, political dissent, and dictatorship. The curatorial approach of this exhibition, overseen by Gerardo Mosquera, is contrastingly formal and flat. The only three-dimensional recreation of an action is Tu dolor dice: minado (Your Pain Says: Mined, 1993), in which the artists read the names of the dictatorship’s victims in front of 500 glasses of water placed on the floor. Here, the glasses are installed on the floor in front of a video screen on which the original action is reproduced. It is the only moment in the exhibition that comes close to conjuring the power of the work as originally performed.

One of the few original pieces on display comprises blue vinyl signs offering definitions of words including “apocalypse” and “countercultural” in extra-large font. Unfortunately this serves to overexplain and thereby to diminish the impact of the work. One piece, Instalamos pajaritos como palomas en alambritos (We installed small birds like pigeons on wires, ca. 1990), is repeated three times (twice without identifying labels) as if to decorate empty walls. Another, Refundación de la Universidad de Chile (Refounding the University of Chile, 1988), printed and transformed into a curtain, likewise reads as a gesture of ornamentation. For Las Yeguas, who were committed to actions as unrepeatable events, this conversion of raw and often spontaneous work into something aesthetic and static is damaging. Lemebel died in 2015, and one cannot expect the performances to be recreated. But neither does this mean that such a sensitive, emotional, and unsettling body of work must be reduced to a series of stylized productions.

Ultimately, this is a retrospective of “records of records.” The exhibition would have benefited from the presentation of objects or costumes from the actions, photographs in their original format, or greater explanation of the complex historical contexts in which Lemebel and Casas worked. The museological approach goes against Las Yeguas’ stated ethos. “Unlike [institutions],” they once remarked, “we’re not interested in the registration or cataloging of art actions.”3 In “Desbocadas,” they have suffered that bureaucratization, and something even more damaging: their work has been made acceptable to schoolkids and their parents.