Performance Artist – Márcia X

Márcia X

Brasillian Artist- Performance Art, Visual Art

Since the beginning of her artistic activities, Márcia X. chose performance as her main expressive language. She enjoyed recognition only late in her career, and her premature death in 2005, at the age of 45, put an end to a journey that was beginning to accumulate invitations to important exhibits in Brazil and abroad.

Márcia’s first appearances in the artistic scene took place in the beginning of the 1980’s. Her initial productions reveal the intention of questioning, through humor and estrangement, the role of art and of the artist in society. In 1987, she made an intervention with Alex Hamburger on the stage of Sala Cecília Meireles, an important concert hall in Rio, while John Cage’s “Winter Music” was being played. They were both riding tricycles, and the performance was called “Tricyclage”. Cage’s composition was renamed by the artists “Musica para 2 velocípedes e pianos” (“Music for two tricycles and pianos”).

The 1990s were decisive in establishing new parameters to the work of Márcia X. Her installations with objects acquired in small shops and at the street sellers belong to this period. At Saara , she searched for clichéd, widely disseminated images and erotic gadgets. Série Fábrica Fallus (“Fallus Factory Series”) – originally called Penys Lane – and the Kaminhas Sutrinhas (“Little Kamasutras”) installation are some examples.

Márcia’s main strategy consisted in transforming pornographic objects into children’s objects, and children’s objects into pornographic objects, thus merging elements to which social conventions and moral codes usually assign antagonistic places.

Márcia X produced her most emblematic works in the beginning of the 2000s. Leaving aside her old method of open and corrosive criticism, she followed a new path which conjugated formal aesthetic research and experimentation. She adopted again performance as her main expressive language and reintroduced her own image in the symbolic field of her works. Dressed in a white nightgown, she employed in Desenhando com Terços (“Drawing with rosaries”) 400 rosaries to draw penises on the floor of a 20-square meter room under the surveying eyes of the audience.

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