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Figure 1

Elena del Rivero, Les Amoureuses: Elena & Rrrose , 2001 (Photo: Kyle Brooks; © Photo 1963: Julian Wasser. All rights reserved)

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Figure 2

Elena del Rivero, Las Hilanderas (The Spinners), 2001 (Photo: Kyle Brooks; © Photo 1963: Julian Wasser. All rights reserved)

Figure 3

Diego Velázquez, The Spinners, c. 1657

In her artist's statement for [Swi:t] Home and Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) Elena del Rivero describes her work thus:

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Figure 4

Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562

And finally, the following is an excerpt of Rita Gonzales' essay "How to Feed and Sustain a Fragment," published in the 64pp. catalogue At the Curve of the World (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1999) that accompanied the group show of the same name which took place at Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, September 11–November 6, 1999.

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© Elena del Rivero & video artist Nacho Pereez. All rights reserved.

Figures 5-9 Elena del Rivero, still images from A Reading, 1998

Figure 10

Elena del Rivero, Opening Tom Patchett, 1999 (Photo: Kyle Brooks)

The accompanying pictures (Figs. 5-9) are film stills from A Reading, showing Elena del Rivero with her Tarot teacher, a performance that took place during her Unfinished Letter exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, 1998. The last photo showing del Rivero with Man Ray's chess board is called "Opening Tom Patchett" (Fig. 10). She explains [in an e-mail to Tout-Fait of 13 August 2001: "He is a collector from LA and I was having a show at his space Track 16 [see above] and stayed at his place. Going into his bedroom I saw the chessboard by Man Ray in the edition of 1943.

Rita Gonzales writes:

"Elena del Rivero’s work seeks correspondence with an invisible audience sometimes figured as an absent mother, lover, or friend, and in the case of her recent video installation A Reading with the infamous image of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a young nude woman. According to accounts in Bonnie Clearwater’s West Coast Duchamp ⁽²⁾ , no individual party (including Duchamp himself) took credit for the staging of this event at his Pasadena Art Museum retrospective exhibition in 1963. Dickran Tashjian has revealed that the woman in question, Eve Babitz, was in fact the grandaughter of modernist composer Igor Stravinsky. Tashjian intuits that her naked presence may have brought to Duchamp’s mind (among other things) a historical moment of rupture at which he was present--the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring before a decidedly disturbed audience. Unlike del Rivero, critics of Duchamp have tended to shy away from this image, perhaps imagining that the event was a cheap publicity ploy (even though Duchamp himself held a strong fondness for it).

He is not 'simply' modern or postmodern, authoritative or anti-authoritative, regressive or progressive, masculine (virile, original subject) or feminine (seductive object), heterosexual (paternal and generative) or homosexual (coquettish camp idol), but particularly illustrates the contingency of each of these terms on its supposed opposite. ⁽³⁾

"These contingencies are perhaps what drew del Rivero to the infamous image of seduction and sublimation. She, like Jones, searches for a throughway to access the document and to play out her own critique of the en-gendering of art production. While in Spain for art exhibition of her massive series Unfinished Letter (1998), del Rivero staged a private performance, the end result of which was A reading (1998):

'I asked the museum director [at the Reina Sofia in Madrid] if I could have the rooms closed for two hours. I had previously asked my tarot reader, whom I had not seen for seven years, if she could come to the Reina, read the tarot for me there, and be recorded. She accepted. I had two camera-people ready on that day, a candle, and a glass ball. The cameramen thought it looked OK. I had fetched a small table and two simple chairs. They were placed in the middle of the room, very much after the Duchamp photo. The séance started. It was recorded in actual time. It lasted thirty-four minutes….'⁽⁴⁾

"The final edited version of the video intermixes elements from an audio art piece entitled String Quartet (1998-99), the sound of which was captured during the embroidery of the six hundred sheets that make up del Rivero’s series Unfinished Letter. As String Quartet blurs and obscures the revelations of that tarot reader, the enigmas of the artist are preserved, echoing with humor the staging of the Duchamp photograph. It is the very difference between tarot and the chess game that del Rivero uses to address the contradictions in the philosophies and oeuvre of Duchamp and their subsequent effect on the readings and inscriptions of his work. A Reading draws on the ambiguity of Duchamp’s notions of art production as they shifted between 'mysticism and the games,' a phrase drawn from Duchamp’s own contradictory statements about art production as being pure sensation to associating art with pure concept. 'I do believe in the mediumistic role of the artist,” said Duchamp at a Philadelphia Museum College of Art panel in 1961. A Reading allows del Rivero to inhabit the photograph and disturb the sense of disclosure and culpability felt by those who approach both the historical document and her own serial work looking for confessions. As Maria-Josep Balsach has so eloquently said of del Rivero’s work: “Perhaps it is an inverted movement--or a projection--of what has been the innate objective of twentieth-century art: To dislodge utopia and ostentatiously occupy the essence of the confronting and self-confronting ego, arising from the most intimate, dark, abominable recesses.'⁽⁵⁾ "