Claudia Coca’s Chola Power: Pop Art as Decolonial Critique
Abstract: This essay showcases the work of Claudia Coca, a contemporary pop artist from Lima, Peru whose paintings and drawings critique the links between race, gender, and class in a decolonial, transnational frame. First, the essay explores the way Coca celebrates the Peruvian chola by presenting herself as an empowered subject instead of as an insulted object in her paintings. While the term chola has historically been used derogatorily, Coca reappropriates her chola identity and reclaims it as her own, consequently subverting its prejudicial, racist origins. Second, the essay studies the critiques she performs of the “afterlives of colonialism” on the natural and cultural environment in her most recent series of drawings from 2017. She demonstrates that not only human bodies, but other natural materials are tangled up with the project of cultural colonization. Throughout the article, the work of Chela Sandoval […Differential Social Movement] is drawn on to argue that Coca practices an oppositional aesthetic that makes sensible the perspectives of subjects whose voices and bodies have been disparaged instead of valued within an uneven global capitalist system.
Daly, Tara. “Claudia Coca’s Chola Power: Pop Art as Decolonial Critique”. In Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 18 no. 2 pp. 414-444, 2019.
READING NOTES
- The tension between a digestible medium and an uncanny message about historical violence is where the power of her art lies. She jars viewers to consider the layers of social injustices that underlie the shiny screens of late capitalism.
- an “oppositional” subject to hegemonic norms no longer exists because postmodernity results in a shattering of “the original” or “the normative” (Frederice James)
- due to third world social movements and women of color feminisms, an oppositional consciousness to Jameson’s reading of history had already developed out of the 1968 context and continues to evolve as a creative, mutating pattern of differentiation vis-à-vis hegemonic forms of history
- shift from a logic of oppression to a logic of resistance. (Lugones)
- potential alliances between oppressed subjects as they navigate transnational spaces as part of a broader decolonial feminist aesthetic.
- “Bring your flag for a ritual of electoral cleansing”
- the power of taking up public space in a peaceful, participatory way, to help embody an oppositional movement and consciousness
- example of an oppositional aesthetic project speaks to the power of collective action via a peaceful act built on love and respect for difference within a nation.
- Coca’s use of self-representation enables her to connect to people through empathy, and to avoid speaking “for” others, but rather as herself alongside peers.
- racism as a structural problem in Peruvian society, whose origin takes root during the colonial era, but at the same time locates the “other,” in general terms, in a field of exclusion with respect to the codes of society
- emphasizes duality or multiplicity as identity, not as problems to be resolved.
- …ways that products and images from the outside can influence self-perception in Peru.
- Coca has turned the lens around by representing herself as the three graces, thus subverting the dynamic between the object of the painting, the subject in the painting, and the painter herself.
- eliminates the power dynamic between “painter” and “painted,” or anthropologist and object of study, by collapsing the two and flipping the relationship between outsider and insider and the directionality of the male gaze.
- chola women; that is, women of both indigenous and European origin who have been socially disparaged.
- But this multiplicity is not paralyzing like the schizophrenic, fragmented subject of capitalism that Jameson describes; rather, it is nomadic and crafty, as Chela Sandoval argues in her revisionist take on Jameson’s “lost” subject in the postmodern era of late capitalism
- beauty as an ongoing aesthetic and personal project, not an imported look to attain
- feminist visual parodies
- term cholo/a (or cholx) is an unstable racial and social category that is acutely dependent on context, and reflects a cultural dynamism that is, at its worst, racially and culturally derogatory, and at its best, celebratory in its symbolization of an emerging, new identity.
- This process of cholificatio was fluid[…]a social “becoming” that could not be considered as an immutable identity. Cholaje was not, nor is it, a fixed structure; nor is it subject to hard and fast borders. Rather, it is a porous, soft structure that transforms, that changes
- Tate features the word pop as a verb, not just an adjective, to emphasize the action that the word performs; pop art “pops” that which went before it— stylistically, abstraction and expressionism; and culturally, the notion that art could not be inspired by Campbell’s graphics associated with mass production, like soup cans or the Sunday comics.
- how does she “pop” racial and gendered stereo types and formalliances within and beyond national borders via her art?
- how does she more broadly “pop” colonial legacies projected onto the landscape?
- Paul Preciado, in his reconceptualization of the body in reaction to the mandates of modernity, argues that part of decolonization means “making corporeal vulnerability a platform for action and common resistance”
- Coca draws attention to the fact that strife is not commonly represented in pop art, even though the affective experience of anxiety associated with social prejudice might be one of the most popular shared experiences that people undergo in the public sphere. Coca makes sensible what is invisible publicly, but might be hyper visible internally to citizens: the doubt within as to why someone else might hate “us” so much.
- If hate is the result of neocolonial prejudices, then love is that of decolonial alliance
- Sandoval explains the concept of love as a method as “the experience of ‘the originality of the relation’ between two actors that inspire new powers”
- “ What Coca asks in her art is “Why do much?” And yet, as viewers she challenges us to reflect on the opposite question: “why don’t we love each other and ourselves?”
- viewers look at the beauty of the art and the creative power and are hurt by the hate or marginalization that inspires them, but simultaneously empowered through their reaction
- ongoing call for oppositional consciousness to the smoothing over of difference
- In this image, Colonizados, the black-and-white thrashing ocean becomes less a symbol of pristine and neutral nature, and more that of a force inscribed with the arrival of a project that transforms the ocean from a shared resource to a privileged imperial space.
- speaks to the violence of a colonialism that cannot be located.
- the much deeper and more complex systemic violence that fades from our discourse as we point the finger and blame individuals for the symptomatic issues of a diseased system. (Zizek)
- denaturalizes colonization and reinstates the centrality of nonhuman nature as a necessary part of sustainable human life.
- Our material relationships, across race, gender, sexuality, and even species, are sites of oppositional movement to the tide of exploitative economic and social practices that develop out of empires.