The Body's Discontents:
Carol Rama's Erotic Fragments
by Paige K. Bradley

Carol Rama’s body of work is a record of her body working to depict the figure and its affects. But her figures aren’t working— they’re posing, fragmented, mutilated, or even escaping depiction. When they do appear, they show off how unworked they are—Rama cut school and willfully chose to be self-taught. My favorite is an oil and lacquer snake from 1968—no body needed because here’s that old chestnut about women allied with nature, the devil, temptation, or simply vulgarity. As the artist said herself, it was “vulgar drawings”² that brought her happiness when she began, at age twelve, visiting her mother in an asylum. Committed between 1936 and 1940, Marta Rama’s time there exposed the young artist to a different model of society, namely the allowances for behavior on the ward. Combined with her family’s loss of bourgeois stature after a sudden reversal of fortunes, she had no need to invest herself in any standards or codes— Rama snaked away from school, training, and anything resembling traditional respectability. 

As another artist drawn to the reptile, Meret Oppenheim declared in the 1970s that the snake was not a phallic, Freudian symbol but more appropriately associated with feminine agency. Rama’s early drawings, including one in this show from 1944, pointedly feature women with their tongues sticking out—sharp and serpentine. Another early “vulgarity” is Opera n. 11 (Renards) from 1938, a watercolor wherein fur pelts dangle above a pair of heeled shoes. No figure needed; instead, here are all the things we like to see her in. (This same work on paper was also included in a show her longtime ally Lea Vergine curated in 1985 for the parvis of Sagrato del Duomo in Milan.)³ Maybe the woman who would wear these things is still in bed, shirking decent appearances, or, as Rama was known for in Turin, receiving visitors from there. 

Vergine, in an introduction to an interview with Rama from the 1980s published in 2017, said that the artist pursued an attitude, and perhaps a less than charming one: “Everything we hold most sacred about suffering and love is turned on its head through a highly sophisticated form of sarcasm.”⁴ Rama aligns her work sincerely against a visuality of sincerity, some tropes of which I might name as considered brushwork, stable imagery, skilled representation. As for domestic life—what of it? New terms had to be invented, and bricolage was one applied to her by the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, after Claude Lévi- Strauss, to describe a turn her work took around the 1960s.⁵ (For her part, she said her bricolage was inspired by the reading of his poems.)⁶ It’s curious that such a fuss was made over Rama’s hairstyle, when those bricolages with whorls of taxidermy or doll eyes affixed in eruptions of glue or paint seem like a rough retort of an erotic gaze—here’s me looking at you. 

Some women artists are repatriated into the canon by way of an argument premised on being “just as good as X or Y,” those variable factors often being male artists. This is a prim line of reasoning— Carol Rama is a woman whose work wasn’t trying to compete with men’s. She was resolute about not having any masters to emulate, claiming instead, “The perception of sin is my master.”⁷ Try and argue with that— impossible! Unruly, outrageous, and in some essential way unassailable. 

An artist working today in a loose lineage with Rama, Camille Henrot makes figurative work that serves as a continuation of that bodily discourse accompanying physical experience. In the essays collected in her 2023 book Milkyways, Henrot writes through the embodied experiences of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and caring for children. She describes her 2021 sculpture Iron Deficiency: “It consists of an ironing table and a body hidden under a sheet, like a ghost with pointy, empty breasts . . . the threat of existential death under the disguise of an every day domestic task.”⁸ The two also share a penchant for animal presences, recalling a passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction to her 1987 compendium Buffalo Gals: “In literature as in ‘real life,’ women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, phallologically.”⁹ When crushed, there is, of course, breakage. The fragmented bodies of Carol Rama’s work and the bodily expressions in Henrot’s work are pushing back against this obscurity, trying to get out from underneath this suppressing civilization erected upon them. 

Later in life, Rama took inspiration from global media coverage around mad cow disease. In a piece from her 2006 volume The Cow, the poet Ariana Reines summarily describes its origin story, a tale of rendered brain and spinal column fed to calves. This grisly citation falls in a paragraph placed between a meeting with her mother and a few other assertions: “A cow could be a way to be. Women: They can’t get over their bodies.”¹⁰ A woman might be called a cow, even a sow, as an insult. Besides its “madness,” perhaps Rama also liked this accident of biological revenge on the part of a single, mistreated Holstein sickening people indiscriminately. Perhaps that, too, was a form of sarcasm. Even the glue on an untitled collage from 1986, affixing the doll eyes, resembles an organic expression. You might recall here the saying about crying and spilt milk.

Sources

1. Carol Rama, conversation with Edoardo Sanguineti (1992), in Edoardo Sanguineti – Carol Rama, ed. Luigina Tozzata and Claudio Zambianchi, trans. Jonathan Hunt (Turin: Franci Masoero Edizioni d’Arte, 2002), 77.
2. Guido Curto, “Carol Rama, Artist not Personage,” in Carol Rama, ed. Guido Curto (Milan: Skira, 2004), 35.
3. Lea Vergine, “Anxiety is a Trip: Interview with Carol Rama,” in Carol Rama: Antibodies, 31.
4. Edoardo Sanguineti, “Carol, o del bricolage,” in Carol Rama (Turin: Galleria Stampatori, 1964).
5. “The bricolages, too, derive from . . . my chopped-up reading of Sanguineti’s poems, I insert his stories grafted onto mine, I have to chop up either the figure or the animal like a private tragedy, which I then hope to make less tragic by the colors and by the way of painting it.” Rama, “Plates with Quotes by Carol Rama,” 126.
6. Rama, conversation with Sanguineti, 73.
7. Camille Henrot, “Mother of Tears,” in Milkyways (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2023), 101.
8. Ursula K. Le Guin, introduction to Buffalo Gals and other Animal Presences (New York: Penguin, 1990), 9.
9. Ariana Reines, The Cow (Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2006), 36.