“My world touches tangentially 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. With Aída I had a very special relationship; 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” (The Monarch) by Mildred Burton, and “La gracia extrañada” (The Stranged Grace) by Aída Carballo, on view in Room 2, accompanied by texts by María Gainza and a filmed interview with Mildred Burton conducted twelve years ago by Analía Couceyro and Albertina Carri.
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LA MONARCA [The Monarch]
She was born in Paraná, Entre Ríos — in 1923, or 1931, or 1936, or 1942. From the outset, the story of Mildred Burton would remain unverifiable.
“Look, she’s like a doll,” her grandmother said when she pulled her out of the room and showed her the coffin surrounded by flowers. Then she lifted her up, and Mildred saw the disfigured monster. She refused to kiss her. Her English mother had died of septicemia — she was pregnant and only twenty-five. “Science killed her,” Mildred said, because the doctor who came to help had just come from a barbecue, drunk, and failed to recognize the symptoms, rushing the birth instead.
Mildred said goodbye to her childhood as the Little Prince did to his rose, and went to live with her German grandmother — a Nazi who knitted balaclavas in a Tudor-style house with silent hallways. She didn’t complain. She had her own method of escape: she told herself a story, made a drawing. Someone saw her talking to herself while she drew, decided she had a nervous weakness, and hung a string of garlic around her neck to ward off demons. That night, her grandmother gave her ten lashes with the hose. “Miss Millie hasn’t done anything,” the mestiza maid defended her. “Doesn’t matter — just in case,” said the grandmother, and kept beating her.
Honoring the allegory of the teenage girl who runs away, Mildred announced at fifteen that she was marrying a soldier. He was tall — she thought short men looked like titi monkeys. For all the good his height did her. “Her honeymoon was one long shiver,” a writer who had lived in the Mesopotamian region some years before would have said. She took with her a nightgown with a thousand little ties and a hole that opened right where the vagina was. She had one child, then another, and another, and another, and another — because sex, well, one had to accept it — until she’d had enough, packed them all up, and left for Buenos Aires, where she worked as a cocktail waitress at El Dragón Rojo, a dive run by a Cuban prince.
Some time later, a letter arrived from Paraná. It seems her father had jumped from the cliffs of the river holding a pair of chickens, one in each hand. He had always wanted to fly — he was an engineer, as was now his grandson, Mildred’s second son, the telekinetic one who lit matches with his gaze, drove back caimans in the Iberá lagoon, and could hypnotize a dog with a single look.
All of this Mildred herself recounted twelve years ago in a filmed interview with Analía Couceyro and Albertina Carri. The conversation takes place in La Boca, the neighborhood where the locals know her as La Monarca — The Monarch — because of the number of rooms in her house (though everyone knows those rooms are filled only with paintings). From there, she tells the strangest things in a tone of complete normality.
Whether what Mildred did was surrealism or not strikes me as a Byzantine debate. What I see is the fusion of elements within an impressionable mind: the British streak preserved in the Chapbooks, a popular form of literature that printed children’s tales full of strange associations and objects with human attitudes (Beauty and the Beast, with its talking teapots, was a classic of the collection); combined with the domestic terror Millie sensed in every corner — in the Chippendale furniture with its ghostly acanthus leaves and clawed feet; in the tablecloths with putrefying floral motifs; in the battered, one-eyed Marilú dolls dressed in frothy white broderie; in the curtains with tassels like fibroids; in the faded arabesques of Persian rugs that stalked her in her dreams.
In a story called The Yellow Wallpaper (1899), the protagonist, locked in a room, becomes obsessed with a wallpaper of sickly sulfurous hue:
“The pattern on the wall slants like a broken neck, and two bulging eyes stare at you upside down. I had never seen so much expression in an inanimate thing. There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, nor ever will. I wouldn’t let a child of mine — an impressionable little thing — live in that room for anything in the world.”
It was in a similar atmosphere that Mildred grew up — and whether she let herself be affected or had no choice, the result was the same: nature had her cornered. Upon the Victorian mania for stylizing the vegetal world, there was superimposed the lush landscape of Entre Ríos, with its macabre legends — the iguanas and the Curupí, the beetles and the luz mala — which all crawled together and took root in Mildred’s fertile imagination.
In The Feather Pillow, a story by Horacio Quiroga, a writer from the same Mesopotamian borderlands, a woman dies from a strange creature nesting in her pillow, sucking her blood night after night. That story could well have been invented by Mildred. In her portraits, there are always infiltrators — the most common being the demonic musca domestica linnaeus, the common housefly. Its hay-colored wings form a William Morris pattern and, at the same time, play the role of a skull in a vanitas — its scavenger spirit hovering with gruesome patience over its victims.
That woman who speaks to the camera, sitting perfectly straight in a short-sleeved white blouse, looks like a student summoned to the principal’s office to explain what happened. The events she recounts border on the unbelievable — the father who wanted to fly tied to chickens, the son who tamed caimans with his eyes, the Nazi grandmother who whipped her — yet she never doubts them. Each story she tells has a cinematic dimension. Mildred is a machine for generating stories that instantly become legends.
Among Gothic-Romantic spirits, evading reality has always been an aim. Ann Radcliffe ate raw meat to induce marvelous dreams; Robert Southey experimented with laughing gas. The Burton method for reaching such fantastic horizons needed no stimulants — it worked on its own, endlessly, as if the machine, once set in motion during childhood, had gained momentum and now sustained itself on its own energy.
“All my paintings are born from a story that came before. I have more stories than paintings,” she said in 1998.
To tell stories until reality swells like a helium balloon — and then cut the string, letting the balloon drift into its strange, erratic flight. Bringing those visual stories onto paper was her great talent.
She wasn’t an exaggerator or a liar — those measures are for ordinary people — she was an artist who had perfected a method of escape that functioned twenty-four hours a day.
By María Gainza
