Love in Primal Dance

Alice Guillermo

Today, November 3, 2002

Strongly provocative are the paintings of the artist couple Yasmin Almonte and Dave Lantz at the Hiraya Gallery. Unabashedly erotic, they border on the shocking. They compel a reaction from the viewer and call one to reassess one’s notions of sex and gender.

Both have long trained in the arts in their undergraduate and graduate years as scholars at the University of Northern Iowa. Their artistic professionalism is clear in their concern to make their formal premises clear from the start. One takes note that they both chose to work in the square format of relative sizes. The square pictorial frame sets the basic principle with which to compose and organize the elements of each work. But this did not turn out to be a simple choice, for in the process of painting, there came about, whether consciously or unconsciously on their part, a powerful tension between the rigid frame and the dynamic images, within it which contradicted and defied the order that it imposed. And, indeed, the unyielding geometric frame could barely contain the seemingly endless exploding movements of the bodies within. Compared to a dance, the movements are not just spontaneous projections spilling over boundaries in space, but whether supple or fierce, they are delimited by a frame that re-establishes the conventions. But the square equilateral format, too, can have another signification: in the art of an artist couple, it can also suggest equality. However, it must be seen whether this meaning emerges in relation to the other elements of the work.

The images are, however, the movements of a dance, the human primal dance, and the title of the show, Images of a Tantric Dance, associates them with the Tantric cult of love, as expressed in the swarming erotic sculptures of famed Indian temples. In this way, the artists also resituate their art in a different cultural context which sacralizes erotic love as the metaphor for divine and human union. By invoking such a culture, they hope to attain full candor and liberty of expression, and do away with the conventional restrictions and taboos associated with such images. For the Hindu-Buddhist mythologies do not contain the notion of original sin and the narrative of the eviction of Adam and Eve from Paradise. Original sin in Christian culture has cast a sense of shame on the physical body and its functions. There is always something to conceal, whether words or acts, always something furtive and stealthy in the natural exchanges of man and woman-which is why many artists look to outside cultures such as the Hindu-Buddhist for the celebration of the body as beautiful, even holy. A shift of view provides an alternative way of seeing ourselves and the world.

Now, in Hindu belief, the dance, like yoga, is also a form of meditation. And the goal of such meditation is to clear the mind of its baggage in order to attain the state of no-mind. In meditation, one lets go of one’s moorings in the world. As such, the dance in the last analysis, besides its various particularities, is performed for itself as a thing of purely formal beauty, an offering to the gods, or as a simple movement of physical and psychological freedom-a freedom, however, outside all social context, and which can thus be only an illusory freedom. One cannot be truly free, unless all others are likewise free.

It is likewise interesting how the works of Yasmin Almonte and Dave Lantz also bring out their differences as male and female artists. Yasmin consistently uses warm colors, fervid orange and red tones, and has more linear definitions in her figures. Dave works in black-and-white with strong painterly brushwork. In her new paintings, Yasmin has shed her nature metaphors for the female nude that was often enmeshed with flower and fruit, a style which lent her paintings a note of tender delectation and feeling. But her new approach to the subject is devoid of sentiment and instead has a certain resolute hardness in its straightforward erotic imagery. Lantz’s black-and-white suggests dark passion and pain with streaks of lightning which reveal staring eyes and curling lips in a realm of darkness. Surely, the artists must be familiar with the different Asian books of the art of love, such as the Indian Kama Sutra or the Japanese pillow books for newlyweds. These Asian compendiums are of a different tone from Western imagery for the former have a playfulness and a delight in the almost endless range of sexual acrobatics, some possibly too physically challenging to be realized.

But in both the works of Almonte and Lantz, the imagery is not only that of a dance as they refer to it, but also of a game in the sense that the acts of love often draw out a penchant for role-playing, involving as it does two people who watch each other, are witnesses to each other’s gestures. Yet, to be sure, these roles, though as in play, basically replicate the power relations in our society. Two people who may be quite well-balanced during the day, may in the darkness of night of love take on related positions of dominance and subservience. The man may bring out his whip to assume dominant or sadistic roles, such as king to slave, or animal-trainer to animal; while the woman is accordingly expected to take on her abject role of slave or captive animal. Within the gesture of love itself may well arise human oppression. Some black-and-white paintings imply physical punishment in the tearing of hair, the clenching of fists to strike, while other paintings in orange and red convey a feeling of threat in the male hands and body that are about to take possession of the woman and reduce her to a passive soulless figure. Perhaps these paintings are meant to appeal to sadomasochistic tendencies in the viewer in which passion and pain become fused in a strange synthesis of pleasure. Likewise, the artists may wish to display, or at least imply, a wide range of physical strategies, including bondage. But it is here that one enters upon an endless repetition of power play which becomes a cycle that eventually traps the players.

Yet even in the context of Indian religious sects, if one must invoke them in art, love is nevertheless seen as a form of liberation in which the individual soul attains unity in the universal Atman. And in any culture, love, instead of replicating the oppression of class society, must be a vehicle for personal liberation for both man and woman. And this condition should be what artists must aspire for in their art, as in the case of Yasmin and Dave-that it remains not just within the bonds of a physical relationship, no matter how engrossing and exciting, but truly flourishing in human meaning.