To defy, protest, bear witness, counteract, or sometimes simply to act, is to be political. As such, political content is a constant in Nancy Spero's work though its expression is neither didactic nor propagandizing-its dose of ambiguity is an homage to the complexity of the world. Spero subverts the single meaning by stimulating a plethora of interpretations.

Spero snatches figures from sources as far-ranging as ancient mythology, contemporary media, art history, literature and her own earlier work; she re-draws them, prints them, dismembers and rearranges them, cross-fertilizes, and makes of them a new community. Stitched together from the world's overabundance of images, Spero's fragmented, non-linear morality plays yield potent stories about struggles for and struggles against.

Crises of Non-being, the representations of which erupted in Spero's early work, gave way in later work to ever stronger assertions of Being. The heroines in Spero's art began a struggle to overcome the forces contributing to their oppression, and they grew to embody the multi-cultural forces of feminine power to which they turned for guidance. Through struggle, Spero's women have ascended from constrictive passivity to expansive action: from androgynous hybrid, through monster, victim and survivor, to protectress and protagonist on a world stage.

In Codex Artaud (1971-72) Spero employed a strategy of visual ventriloquism to give voice to her rage against non-being and exclusion by projecting the radical language of poet/playwright /madman Antonin Artaud through her art. Identifying with Artaud's hysterical voice, Spero gave body to the taboos and terrors of the "animus," the "unsuspected self," the "opposite" which is the male element in the female unconscious. In the imagery of myth and psychology, the heroine assimilates her opposite by swallowing it or being swallowed. Scattered throughout Codex are tiny hieroglyphic figures, comprised of male and female bodies stuck together and truncated as though each had devoured equal portions of the other. Spero says these figures are "trapped," "the opposite of the idealized notion of the androgynous as a spiritually unified entity." Indeed, in Codex Artaud XXI, a golden male warrior dominates an entire sheet of paper, while a hybrid rat-woman is as tiny and insignificant as a fly on a page.

Continuing the practice she began in 1974 of using only images of women, Spero represents man in Torture of Women IV (1982) solely in the result of his institutionalized violence: pulverized woman. Like dried bloody handprints or the vague imprint of a body on a shroud, these images of "disappeared" women are smeared and amorphous. Spero jolts this work of art into a shockingly concrete testimony by incorporating a poem and the case history of the Guatemalan writer/art critic Alaide Foppa deSolorzano who, as a real-life victim of political violence is the subject of this piece.

The memory of our own recent warfare situates Vietnamese Woman (1985) in a specific historical moment. The crowded procession that spans this scroll consists of the repeated image of a single walking woman. The figure's alternation between solid, densely inked forms and blurred, lightly inked impressions implies a variability of the self through time and circumstance, as though the act of going on required the continual dissolution of one's older self. Dark shadows the color of mud or dried blood envelope some of the figures and attest to memories of terror and pain. The forward tilt of a few figures among the striding throng suggests passages of shaky footing-the temporary vulnerabilities that occur within the inexorable forward movement of a survivor.

Cross-breeding politics with mythology, Spero places Sheela-na-Gig, a Celtic goddess of fertility and destruction, atop the buoyantly colorful Sheela Totem H (1985). Presiding like a liberating symbol for the women-on-the-move below her, Sheela pridefully holds open and displays her enormous vagina. Her matter-of-factness may shock sensibilities accustomed to a cultural imagery that represents the feminine genitalia through a lens of mystery and eroticism, or fear and hostility. But with her assertive and unabashed gesture, she counters the traditional disparagement of the feminine sex organs as negative lack by conferring upon her sexual endowment (and that of all women) the status of a positive possession.

In The Goddess Nut (1989), a work comprised of seven vertical panels placed side by side, Spero re-engages the large-scale format of post-war American painting that she rejected when she began making long and narrow scrolls in 1971. While preserving the self-contained, scroll-like verticality in some of the individual panels, Spero nonetheless composes horizontally and diagonally across the seven panels to create the effect of a rectangular whole. The first panel from the left is like a vertical list of characters. Individual bodies form calligraphic like shapes that possess a heavy load of significations: a porno queen displays herself for an intended male gaze, the ancient Egyptian sky goddess Nut, rendered in the flesh tones of a human, dives down to earth rather than vaulting across the heavens; a purposeful Vietnamese woman passes through with single-minded intensity, and a group of ancient Egyptian mourning women wait with arms upraised as though to catch the gracefully diving goddess. Across the very tops of the panels, a delicate blue line drawing of the ethereal sky goddess wafts through choruses of mourning women whose upraised arms beseech her to lend her aid below. Like a divine breath, the goddess passes through the panels of swiftfooted and victorious athletes. Spero has endowed these images of the goddess with two heads-allowing her to see simultaneously up into the cosmos and down to earth. Near the top center of the piece, the proximity of a sitting porn queen to a sitting skeleton intimates an association between exploitive sex and death. This conflation of degradation and annihilation echoes the excruciating image of a bound and gagged woman standing nude near the bottom center of this piece. The discovery, under her photographic image, of the caption "Document found on a member of the Gestapo" catapults us out of the realm of the symbol and into the realm of the real. A gentle procession of goddesses, who stand like human women, surround this brutalized victim with upraised and undulating arms that convey a spirit of tenderness and consolation, a blessing that attempts to counteract the evil unleashed against her. In The Goddess Nut, the simultaneity of life and death, of grace and degradation, of being and non-being comprises a world, like ours, where all triumphs must be informed by the memory of past atrocities and the elimination of present ones.

Pamela Wye

Read another Lawrence Oliver essay on Nancy Spero