Staging a Coup
How Ligia Bouton Installs Her World
Jennifer Esperanza
An emerging artist whose multimedia installations are as intriguing as her name (it’s Portuguese, and a student once accused her of making it up), Ligia Bouton creates work that turns heads and bends minds. Her sprawling installation in SITE Santa Fe’s Pretty Is As Pretty Does show (through May 10) brings the building’s walls to beastly life, while in Alternative Spaces, at the New Mexico Museum of Art through May 3, she combines craft and video in puppets that mimic the marionettes of 20th-century artist Gustave Baumann. For the Santa Fe local and UNM faculty member, represented by EVO Gallery, landing major projects in group shows at two of the city’s top art spaces is bending her mind, too.
Concurrent installations—that’s quite a coup. Both recall your previous work, yet are drastically different from one another. What do they have in common for you?
There is a strong link to the idea of reanimating things that are inanimate. And both have a narrative element. The Baumann narrative comes from a woodcut he did of his puppets waiting backstage. Now they’re never used—which is death for a puppet! The piece at SITE pulls from a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, by Angela Carter. In the end, instead of turning into a prince, the Beast starts to lick Beauty, and underneath her skin is fur. At SITE, if we lick off this white modernist structure, we might find something more visceral.
Why is dealing with an entire space so important to you?
I’m very interested in this idea of the artist as a storyteller, and in the theatrical. I want to wrap somebody in a narrative moment. I came of age in the art world in the ’90s, when installation was a big thing. And now—I hate to even admit this!—part of it is a control issue: I’m giving somebody an experience I’ve directed.
There are a lot of ideas at play in your piece at the NMMA, Waiting for Baumann. What’s your goal with this?
There’s a part of my brain that’s making all of these connections at the same time: Waiting for Godot; our relationship to Baumann as one of the founding fathers of this region; the puppets made of images of me; I’m both the women and men. I don’t want it to feel like a test—it’s not about that. I’m wrestling with all these issues, and I want it to work on all kinds of levels.
The SITE installation seems to speak more directly—to the beasts in our heads. What was the beast in your head that brought it into being?
In many senses, the beast is that building itself! It is vast. I’m much more engaged in a baroque sensibility than a modernist sensibility; I like smaller, tighter spaces. So how do you create a project that will work as [director] Laura Heon thought of the commission as working: to set the scene? That would be subtle, yet strong enough to cohere through the entire building? We worked together to bring it into focus, with the fleur de lis pattern and the fur ruptures together pushing the white space in two separate directions: the fleur de lis, toward a Western conception of propriety; and the fur, toward this wildness.
What’s next?
I start on a project for the Philadelphia Art Alliance. The hardest thing for me, in a project, is the beginning and ending, so I’m anxious to be back in the middle again.
