“My world has tangential contacts with that of Aída Carballo, who was one of the artists who supported me when I was just starting out. She threw me into the ring. I had a very special relationship with Aída; she protected me, and I had the feeling that she wanted to save me from something.”
— Mildred Burton
Starting Wednesday, March 22, Ruth Benzacar Gallery of Art presents “La monarca” by Mildred Burton and “La gracia extrañada” by Aída Carballo. Both exhibitions will unfold in Room 2, accompanied by texts by María Gainza and an interview with Mildred conducted by Analía Couceyro and Albertina Carri, filmed twelve years ago.
THE MISSED GRACE
Twice a month, I get migraines. I can usually tell when they’re about to arrive because a slight pressure settles on the right side of my temple; the frontal bone of my skull swells a bit, as if an auxiliary pipe had gotten clogged. Sometimes it’s so subtle that one denies it, thinking it’s all in your head—that this pressure isn’t enough of a sign of what’s coming, that maybe it’s just a paranoid fantasy and the ibuprofen can wait. And that’s where the mistake comes in, because once a migraine attack is triggered, there’s no turning back. It’s like being caught in a tornado in the middle of a field, with no roof or tree to take shelter under. Neurologist Oliver Sacks called them “psychic storms.” I’ve learned to live with these headaches because mine don’t completely incapacitate me. I know people who can’t get out of bed for forty-eight hours. I walk around a bit dizzy, a bit nauseous, quite irritable—but I walk.
Of all the many symptoms of migraine, the only one that really gets under my skin is the aura. It has, by far, the best name—AURA—but just as angel’s trumpets look and sound like enchanted bells yet are toxic, I think they call it that to disguise the terror it brings, something that, if it happens to you for the first time, feels like the onset of a stroke. It usually appears after some upset, when I’ve finally relaxed. A few hours earlier my brain’s electrical current had overloaded; I’d had what’s commonly called a massive stress episode—or, in the more Buenos Aires idiom, I’d “blown a gasket.” For example, yesterday I was washing the lunch dishes, warm water running over my hands, I’d baked a broccoli tart straight out of a seventeenth-century Flemish painting, and everything seemed peaceful, when suddenly I began to see the crazy little rays across the kitchen tiles. “Intermittent flashes in the visual field,” as the manual would say. The day before, I’d had a strong family argument.
When the aura passes, the world won’t be the same. And this is where I’d like to linger. I share a WhatsApp chat with twenty paternal cousins; seven of them suffer migraines with aura and have stories of aunts and grandmothers with the same symptoms, clear evidence that the tendency is hereditary. One cousin told me that after an aura “she felt her body completely limp, as if she had no bones.” Exactly! Once the crazy rays are gone, my body feels flaccid and amorphous, and on top of that comes the strangeness. After an aura, I look at the world as if I don’t quite recognize it. I’ve read a bit about it—it’s known that before migraine or epileptic attacks, an ethereal world reveals itself. Some see in that a source of myth-making, but what I see and feel hasn’t yet been useful to me as artistic material: my arms and neck lengthen like jungle sticks, my feet feel swollen, the room I’ve slept in for twenty years doesn’t quite feel mine, and the wooden floorboards look oddly sinister.
I wouldn’t make the foolish claim that Aída Carballo drew the way she did because she suffered from migraines—there’s no mention of them in her hospital diaries from Vieytes, and I can’t infer, as has been done with Lewis Carroll, that her perceptual distortions were the product of visual hallucinations. But I do want to note that after an aura, my body feels as though it’s inhabiting Aída Carballo’s world. A world that has passed through some kind of mirror or gelatinous surface. We are in the city of suspended time, and in its plasticity it reminds me of The Madmen Series or The Levitators, even The Lovers.
I step onto the sidewalk—the ash trees on the block stand like upright sentinels watching me; the guys from the auto shop drink beer early; the homeless man sits on the hood of his car-home talking to a scruffy dog; a couple makes out on the corner. Everything I know by heart seems to unfold on another plane, a little caricatured, a little unsettling. I’m hypersensitive and yet detached. It’s as if a donkey had drawn the scene—the veins on the ivy leaves, for example, appear blindingly sharp, and people and objects suddenly seem neatly arranged on the flattened plane of the street, like on a chessboard—or in a Uccello painting that, instead of a battlefield, takes place in a Buenos Aires neighborhood at three in the afternoon on a weekday. There’s a sadness and a grayish tone to it all, and it’s no coincidence I mention it’s a workday. The silence I think I hear in Aída’s images (which in her case comes from looking so much at Piero della Francesca) I feel too in my post-aura state, even if it’s a Tuesday and buses are roaring by on the corner. Today they don’t matter to me, because in this off-frequency everything around me becomes the colloquial poetry of existence, Brueghel-style. And I no longer know if I’m talking about myself or about Aída—that’s what happens with powerful artists, they get inside you—and through her, now everything takes on a notable lack of anxiety, a dead calm, a strange grace.
My neighbor asks if I had a power outage the night before—it’s summer, and we’re already in the ninth heatwave. I answer in slow motion, and while I do, the words that leave my mouth make no sound, yet she seems to understand. And now that I look at her closely—with her headscarf, hooked nose, and pupils dilated like a nocturnal cat’s—she looks very much like one of Carballo’s engravings. But I’m careful not to show my feelings, and besides, I’m not deceived: I know that in that moment, the character from Aída Carballo’s work is me. Aída, who defended what was her own like no one else: “Better the art of someone who makes a kite for their child than a copy of something that isn’t ours.”
During those minutes when the world grows strange, I understand more than ever the title of her engraving “The Worm Is a Distant Relative of Madness.” I don’t know if “understand” is the right word—I experience it physicochemically, which is a way of perceiving intellectually but by proxy. The aura takes an hour or two to fade. Then comes calm, lucidity, relief—as if, after a technical failure at the Atucha nuclear plant, the normal flow of electricity had finally been restored. In my neurologist’s waiting room, I once met a girl who said she preferred not to take medication so she could “see the rays and let the world become more mysterious.” I suppose that’s what they call making friends with your illness. I’m not there yet—but I’m on my way.
— By María Gainza
