This is one of the many paintings by my son Daniel. Daniel has high functioning autism and lives pretty much inside his head. He suffers from auditory integration dysfunction, so expressing himself verbally as well as in written form is extremely difficult for him. Art gives him an outlet he cannot find otherwise.
He paints and sculpts self-portraits. He started painting one face but has progressed to three faces in one. He has never discussed the reason for that number and I do not know if he is aware of this particularity. Daniel is conscious that people see him as different. I wonder if through his self-portraits he’s trying to perpetuate or re-create his self-identity. Anderson (2015) views identity narratives as fluid. Art may offer Daniel the fluidity needed to re-create his identity without making him too vulnerable to the outside world. The three faces may be the different identities he perceives in himself. Varela (1999) discusses the interweaving of microwords (our immediate context) and microidentities (who we are at an immediate moment, in an immediate context). Daniel seems to want to explore and understand his microidentities.
Creating a project around Daniel’s exploration of his microidentities sounds exciting but I would feel that I’m intruding in his private world.
Instead, I can explore the identity of Latin Americans as we struggle to come to terms with the fact that we embody two or three races, races that represent, in the words of Freire (1970), the oppressed and the oppressor. I want to investigate how Latin American artists have explored this issue and how it translates into the visual arts. Kahlo’s Two Fridas embodies the concept of who we are as a pueblo but does not illustrate the inner turmoil we suffer because our oppressed identity has been portrayed as lacking, while the oppressor identity has been equated with superiority.
Hi Dora:
I thought your comments regarding Daniel’s visual explorations were compelling as was Daniel’s drawing. The drawings is fascinating not only because of its rich color and balanced design (the latter maybe associated with stereotypical characteristics of valuing order among those on the ASD spectrum) but also because of its focus on human beings and self, which is uncharacteristic of non-verbal autism. Interestingly, the eyes are closed, thus metaphorically shutting out access at least from a standard point of view. Your reluctance to invade his private world is respectful and empathetic on the one hand. On the other hand, maybe with these drawings he is requesting that you engage with him, and maybe doing so visually might further intimate communication. I write this, obviously, without knowing you or Daniel very well.
The internalized joining of oppressor and oppressed with Latin America culture is a fascinating subject. You suggest that you might explore this topic/theme by researching the work of other Latin American artists and analyzing how this theme resonates in their work. That would be a good art research paper, but I think it would be richer from the point of view of arts-based research and visual methodologies if you could explore how those paintings resonate with your own experience or the experience of Latinas/os that you know. Though your historic support for your research theme is compelling, I also think that each of us combines some aspect of the oppressor-oppressed duality, which may be in part why hegemonic thought is able to flourish. I wonder how that duality manifests itself differently in Latino/a culture than in other cultures that don’t combined the same types of historic conditions. In any case, the co-existence of dual identities implies struggle and conflict as well, and seems rich with transformative possibility. Your challenge is to figure out not only how to document this co-existence within Latino/a art but to visually continue the search for understanding. I have to think about this some more. Maybe the other members of our class have some good ideas related to your endeavor.