Nao Bustamante

Nao Bustamante

Nao Bustamante is unlike any filmmaker I’ve seen.  Although her films do seem to relate to films by Gunvor Nelson and Stan Brakhage, her films stand apart with the performance she gives.  In Marcel Duchamp’s article The Creative Act, Duchamp says, “[l]et us consider two important factors, the two poles of creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.  To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.”  Bustamante uses many mediums, including performance art, visual art, and filmmaking, all of which she displayed at the Brakhage Center Symposium 2011.

All of Nao’s work was entertaining to watch, but there was also a lot of meaning behind each performance and video.  In the article Bruce Conner by Stan Brakhage, Brakhage calls to attention to the fact that people tend to not think about films.  “People look at Conner’s films - as they do at Broughton’s - and laugh very superficially, or get a simple delight out of them; but do not take them thoughtfully enough.”  This is probably very often the case with Nao’s work.  For example, in Bustamante’s installation Under the Rug, the audience did not take it seriously.  Nao was under a rug in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  She had a microphone with her under the rug, trying to convince people she was under the rug without moving.  The viewers would then kick her and sit on her, convinced that Nao was in another room watching this on a video camera.  The more she tried to convince them she was under the rug, the more they were convinced she was elsewhere.  To me, this installation was to draw attention to our culture’s lifestyle with technology and the unusual.  It explores why humans must think of a reason for weird things to occur.  For example, someone hiding under a rug.  Surely nobody would sit motionless under a rug for forty-five minutes and let people kick and sit on them.  The only explanation would be a hidden camera.  The people did not even step back to wonder why they assumed Bustamante was not under the rug.  They just kept kicking and sitting on her.  This is a prime example of people not thinking of the meaning of a work of art.  It is almost a sociological experiment turned into a work of art.

Relating to Duchamp’s article,  Bustamante also uses her body as a medium.  In her performance of America, the Beautiful, Bustamante applies heavy makeup to her face and forces her body into the ideal hourglass body type.  When she applies the makeup, she adds a large amount of coverup to her face multiple times.  To me this symbolizes the idea that in order to be our ideal idea of beauty, we must cover up ourselves as much as possible, to look as plastic and perfect as we can.  The whole time Bustamante is applying makeup, she has a huge smile on her face.  It is as if this transformation is convincing her that she is beautiful.  She uses packaging tape to shape her body into more of an hourglass shape, once again conforming to our standards of beauty.  Nao wears a toilet seat cover over her head theoretically to keep any makeup off of her clothes, but metaphorically showing how these preconceived ideas of body image are gross and unnecessary.  She then douses her wig of blonde locks with hairspray, displaying how these ideas are cemented into our brains.

This performance brings to mind Gunvor Nelson’s Schmeerguntz, by transforming what our culture views women as.  We view women as perfect if they meet our standards of beauty.  These artists have transformed that ideology into using images to make women look like monsters.  These also remind me of Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, showing us images of women that make us uncomfortable because it is not our ideal type.  All of these artists are trying to show us that all women are beautiful.  All parts and aspects of them. 

Nao Bustamante’s performance of America, the Beautiful gets some big laughs from the audience.  I think the fact that this is causing the audience to laugh helps show us that the American standard of beauty is ridiculous and distorted.  Through her performance we are able to laugh at our culture and our ideals, whereas if we saw a beauty queen preparing to go to an event, we would not be laughing.  Bustamante helps us maintain an aesthetic distance from our lives.  

Although Nao Bustamante’s artwork is very entertaining, it is important to step back and analyze the work.  She uses her body as a medium to explore the definitions and standards of beauty, which are usually skewed and distorted.  Her work is like a sociological experiment, asking, “why do people have these preconceived ideas?”  Bustamante brings this to our attention and shows us how ridiculous and unrealistic these ideas actually are.  She provides us with an aesthetic distance from our culture and allows us to analyze it.