BECOME A BULL. Circumcision in times of cultural wars: the bullfighting photos of Andrés Calamaro. Rodrigo Cañete - May 3, 2021.
The relationship between photography and bullfighting has been twofold. For the most part, photographers have been drawn to the stylized encounter between beast and man. Rineke Dijkstra, on the contrary, was interested in this moment when adrenaline crumbles into exhaustion; when the bullfighter no longer even has the strength to pose. Against what one might think, throughout the great narrative of art history, bullfighting has been used to question heritage as true. The horn-shaped mustaches that Diego Velázquez painted on the portrait of a mature Philip IV in 1653 attested to the compromised masculinity of an already evanescent empire. Whereas in Francisco de Goya, the bull as a figure of fantasy and reality highlighted human stupidity; with Picasso, tragedy has become a farce and the bull has been reduced to a caricature of itself. Calamaro's intervention is part of this tradition, but it comes in a context of cultural and necropolitan wars. For him, the task is a coded way of integrating the loss. But what is a war of cultures if not a theological debate in which one of the parties refuses to admit that theirs is also a question of faith?
What is necropolitics if not the transformation into a crusade of this rejection of free thought? At the center of religion: the host. At the center of political correctness wars: the sand circle of an arena. Another circle, this time transparent, focuses, by the artist's hand, on a sacrificial offering but only to show fragments. The frame is cut out and what the image represents is another cut: that of the animal's skin. As in Jewish circumcision, this cut does not separate but connects space and time. In the early '80s, this young rock star was placed in the center of the crowd to make a similar cut, separating horror from democracy. Calamaro made his body an offering to a generation, first persecuted and then put to death in the Malvinas and in doing so he allowed them to promise each other, at least for the duration of the song, that death would never was not necessarily the end. RC
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