The Art of Walking / Walk to the Cemetery: Visiting the Mother/Other in Carmen Argote’s Art

Be Loved (2022), filmed at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, opens with a tight shot of artist Carmen Argote’s torso, clothed in an ordinary gray t-shirt, jeans, and sweatshirt tied around her waist.¹ Argote moves her red-pigmented hand from her hip to her neck, rubbing the pigment together with sweat. The gesture beckons the viewer into the corporeal and sensorial realms that inform Argote’s practice, including, and most foundationally, the act of walking. 

For Argote, walking is a bodily function akin to digesting, a process by which materials and motivations for her art move through her.² Alongside walking, bodily processes such as eating and urinating, tending to her chickens, and making art objects connect Argote’s art to her everyday life. Instilled from childhood, Argote recalls the quotidian practice of sitting at the kitchen table making drawings in the company of her mother and grandmother who worked on trabajos manuales, objects “made by the hand,” a practice they continued after the family moved from Guadalajara to the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles when the artist was four.³ Understanding walking/digesting as contiguous with daily art making, Argote developed many bodies of work based on walking routes, or “circuits” as she calls them, through neighborhoods she has lived in since moving out of her childhood home.⁴

Relating to Los Angeles as a pedestrian allows Argote to notice the contingencies of city life: the shifts in architectural scale, the smells in the air, and the body’s relationship to land and place.⁵ During the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, Argote walked a particular circuit of approximately six-miles from her home in Boyle Heights to Downtown Los Angeles as part of the process of healing from a severe non-Covid illness for which she was hospitalized at the start of the pandemic. On this circuit, she eventually began to linger for longer periods of time at Evergreen Cemetery, communing with the dead during a time of paranoia around death and loss that was both personal and global. In the object-based works that emerge from her walks to and through the cemetery, Argote offers visceral archives of sensory experiences, relationships to the urban environment, and play as counters to colonial cartographies, neoliberal urban development, and patriarchal knowledge-systems. 

The specificity of Evergreen Cemetery and Boyle Heights, including its particularly fraught relationship to Los Angeles histories investments and disinvestments, contextualizes the ways in which Argote’s acts of making intervene on the site and collaborate with the environment. As the oldest cemetery in Los Angeles, established in 1877, Evergreen is a microcosm of the city’s settler colonial, segregationist, cosmopolitan, and activist legacies. In the nineteenth century, Boyle Heights was a beacon for real estate speculation, and in the early twentieth century, it drew those who were pushed out of other neighborhoods by racial covenants. Redlining in the 1930s led to further disinvestment and in subsequent decades freeways gutted parts of the neighborhood. Anti-gentrification activists continued to protest outsider capitalist investments in the neighborhood into the twenty-first century.⁶ Evergreen could be understood as what Michel Foucault calls a heterotopia or “counter-site,” where “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”⁷ Argote represents and contests the relationship of the self to the urban environment through her practice of walking/digesting and making art at specific sites or “counter-sites.” Argote explains the ways in which spaces and places impact her art and her motivations for making:

My art-making begins with the process of searching, digesting, and conversing with the spaces and places I inhabit. I often think of my body akin to a sponge, trusting in a corporeal processing of my surroundings. This process of digesting builds my understanding of the relationships between personal history, memory, cultural systems, and the collective energy in society.⁸

Along her walks to and through the cemetery, Argote picked fruit off neighborhood trees, which she would eat or bring back to her studio to use in her art. She collected tree galls, palm fronds, and other refuse to incorporate into her art. She stopped to urinate, sometimes at facilities and other times outside in a park, directly onto her artwork, or on the grounds of the cemetery. She carried her beloved pet rooster, Mike Kelley and imagined seeing the world through its tetrachromatic vision as an alternative to human vision, a decentering of her own perspective, and an evocation of ethological respect. In this way, Argote was attempting to connect to the non-human sensorium, specifically that of her flock of chickens, understanding the flock as guides and mothers for art-making. Exemplifying walking-as-digestion, these daily routines connected her and her art practice to the environment in which she lives.

Moving the sanctified space of the home/studio to the cemetery and back again, Argote’s play, healing, and objects are layered with sensorial and psychological responses to the larger world. Drawn to anonymous gravestones that read “MOTHER,” Argote brought materials from her studio with her on her circuit into Evergreen Cemetery to make rubbings. In the second scene of the film Be Loved, Argote kneels in front of a gravestone draped in paper, forms broken red crayons into clumps, and rubs the crayon mass onto the paper to reveal the word “MOTHER.” In her walking/digesting practice, Argote returned to three such gravestones numerous times, rubbing them with crayons in repeated patterns, and, in some cases, pressing into the gravestones to create what she called “impact prints.”⁹ The result of these rubbings are crayon-on-paper works, vertically oriented and over three feet tall, with the word “MOTHER” appearing dozens of times in vertiginous, overlapping patterns. 

Argote has explained that with this and other works that include the word “mother,” there is also the word “other” and “her” within it. Mother, then, becomes a kind of container for linguistic shifters whose meanings resonate from the context of the anonymous gravestone. The repetition of the word evokes traumatic response in relation to mourning a lost loved one (the title of the artist’s film Be Loved is also a play on “beloved,” another common term used on gravestones) and in relation to infant/childhood repetitions that function as defensive to the threat of a loss of the mother.¹⁰ Michel de Certeau connects the inauguration of the subject to an “original spatial structure,” and the subsequent compelling “to practice space […] to be other and move toward the other.”¹¹ Compelled by walking/digesting, Argote’s visits with the mother/other extend the connection with the self/home/studio, or the womb as the original spatial structure, to the city as the infinite mother/other.

The use of crayon to make the rubbings suggest the psychological preoccupations of the child’s relationship to its mother and to play.¹² The rubbings would become part of her larger “Mother” series, a body of work that Argote began making early in the pandemic.¹³ Argote based much of the series on her family’s patriarchal structuring and her relationship to her mother, informed in part by EMDR therapy, re-mothering the “inner child,” and by her study of theoretical and psychological texts, including the writings of D.W. Winnicott.¹⁴

In his essay collection Playing and Reality, Winnicott works through the titular terms as concepts that speak to the paradoxical nature of childhood (and adult) play and the experience of objective reality.¹⁵ Proposing that play allows for an articulation of the self in the world, Winnicott’s theories align with Argote’s preoccupations with art as simultaneously a form of play and way of life and with walking as a way to digest and process external reality. In the essay collection, Winnicott develops his most important concepts, including the transitional object and transitional (or potential) space. Transitional space is characterized by the infant’s anxious state between the subjective self and the outside world. An object possessed by the infant (a blanket, a teddy bear) gives comfort in the transition, and it is in these interstices that the primary relationship to discovery, creativity, and play is formed. In infants, the experience is one of precariousness as the self separates from the omnipotent relationship with the mother to confront external reality and thus the subjective experience of that reality. Seen in this light, Argote’s traversal of urban space is not only geographically but psychologically transitional, a paradox of defining self in relation to other, co-constituted through forms of play. Like the transitional phenomena present in Argote’s everyday life—walking, foraging, art making—the grave rubbings, with the mother literalized (and symbolized) in text, index the interstices between self and other, play and reality, discovery and creation, and intersubjective relation to environment.¹⁶

Just as walks function as transitional phenomena for Argote, so too do the materials that constitute her “comforting objects,” sculptural works included in the Mother series.¹⁷ She forms these in part from objects she collects on her walks through the neighborhood and cemetery, such as oak galls, tree fruits, palm fronds, and discarded objects, along with materials related to colonial and personal histories, such as bananas, cochineal, coffee grounds, and clothing her mother gives her. Argote braids these materials into figural sculptures that range in size from approximately twelve inches to ten feet, many evoking the bodily form of a small child in a supine pose.

If we were to disassemble or cut into one of the comforting objects, we would find a cartography of places Argote walks and a stratigraphy of her “digestion.” Like layers of sedimentary rock, the repeated use of braiding techniques reveal sunken layers of earlier works (repurposed drawings and paintings, for example) and depths of foraged materials; the practice of walking/digesting informs the very makeup of the sculptural object. The object also includes the “invisible” trace of the psychological investments that take Argote through each stage of the work. The process that eventually leads to a “finished” object is full of the materials of everyday life: fruit, feathers, urine, affirmations, dreams, waking life. Like Winnicott’s transitional phenomena, the paradox of self/other weaves through the mass of entangled forms. What is gathered in these objects retains a visceral experience of walking, a cartography of the psyche and senses located in the lingering marks of the process, contestations between the self and reality embodied in the sculpture that is not readily legible or even visible. 

In her comforting objects, grave rubbings, and walking/digesting, Argote points to the inability of the self to disassemble from the mother/other and the lingering of the psyche and body in the ambiguity of play, an inescapable intersubjectivity braided into materials and rubbed onto paper in waxy pigment. Such paradoxes and ambiguities disrupt the fantasy of coherence that streets are grids and gravesites are bounded. Against the determined positioning of such hegemonic forms of city planning, Argote walks in order to digest, to forage for plants, to gain perspective from non-human animals, and to commune with the living and the dead. She maps circuits for a future determined not by the logic of colonial histories, patriarchal family structures, and neoliberal cityscapes, but rather by reckoning with the past and healing the self. At its most foundational level for Argote, walking allows for a digestion of the city, an act that nourishes psychological and sensorial play.

: :

1. Be Loved (2022), Carmen Argote artist website, accessed March 31, 2024, https://carmenargote.com/series/be-loved-primary-nottingham-uk/. The film was exhibited at the Nottingham, UK, gallery Primary from September 24 to December 11, 2021, along with other works from Argote’s residency there.
2. Argote’s thinking about digestion has also been important to her work both in the metaphorical sense of walking-as-digestion and as it relates more literally to the digestion of food. For example, in Argote’s “Thoughts on Food Material,” the artist explains how capitalist interventions in food production have affected her body and sense of self. See Carmen Argote, “Thoughts on Food Material,” Digest 6 (September 2020), https://digest-active-cultures.org/Thoughts-on-Food-Material-by-Carmen-Argote, accessed April 12, 2024.
3. Conversation with the artist, April 2, 2024. An example of trabajos manuales that Argote remembers is of her mother making miniatures out of porcelain baked in the oven.
4. Earlier walking-related works include Wild West (Lake) (2010), Pyramids (2017), Filtration System for a Process Based Practice (2018), andNutrition for a Better Life (Compre Chatarra) (2019), among others. In the film Last Light (2020), one of the more explicit examples of walking as art, Argote walks through Los Angeles in a surgical mask and gloves, evoking increased anxiety around contagion and mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic. She moves through the emptied-out, quarantined downtown, frames street scenes in relation to bodily gestures, and recounts in voiceover memories of her time alone in the hospital.
5. For Michel de Certeau, it is these kinds of contingencies that make the city “daily and indefinitely other” at the pedestrian level. See Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93. For more on Argote’s connection to Los Angeles on the pedestrian level, see: Carmen Argote, “Carmen Argote’s Last Light Screening and Q&A,” interview by Erin Christovale, Hammer Museum Channel, July 21, 2020, video, https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2020/online-carmen-argotes-last-light-screening-and-qa.
6. Boyle Heights was connected via bridges to downtown Los Angeles as early as the 19^th century in an attempt to make it a viable, profitable neighborhood for real estate speculators. Residential restrictions in other parts of the city and surrounding suburbs eventually led to it being open to immigrant populations and the poor. For more on the history of the neighborhood, see George J. Sánchez, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, Berkeley: UC Press, 2022), 33-34. For more specific discussions of the development of Los Angeles alongside art and real estate speculation, see Susanna Phillips Newbury, The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). For more specific discussions of the role of art in the gentrification of Boyle Heights, see Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, “Art and the Aesthetics of Cultural Gentrification: The Cases of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles,” Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City, eds. Christoph Lindner, Gerard F. Sandoval, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 137-154.
7. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” Diacritics 16 (1986): 24.
8. Artist’s website, accessed March 31, 2024.
9. From these imprints on woodblock, Argote made a series of print diptychs in collaboration with Eric Gero, Junio 7, 2001 (2023); Abril 27, 2001 (2023); and Junio 2, 2003 (2023). On one side of each print is the trace of the word “mother” abstracted from repeated impressions/impacts and on the other side is a letter from her father, parts of which she redacted and colored with pencils.
10. The classic psychoanalytic example is Freud’s conception of the fort/da game wherein the baby deals with the anxiety of the absent parent by playing at making objects disappear. See Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955): 14-17. 
11. De Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 109-110.
12. Other works shown alongside the film at Argote’s show at Primary in Nottingham, UK, include the artist’s versions of the childhood game of hopscotch.
13. The Mother series was presented as a cohesive body of work at the ICALA exhibition Carmen Argote: I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe (June 10-September 10, 2023), curated by Amanda Sroka. 
14. Argote relates the term “inner child” to C.G. Jung’s archetype and to its use in trauma-informed psychotherapeutic practices such as somatic work or EMDR. Jill Dawsey, who curated Carmen Argote: Filtration System for a Process-based Practice at MCA San Diego, June 4, 2022 to October 23, 2022, first suggested the writings of Winnicott to Argote. Other authors important to Argote at the time of her making the Mother series include bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Jacqueline Rose, among others.
15. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, (London: Penguin Books, 1971).
16. Argote uses the term “play space” to describe specific set-ups such as a circle-cut canvas laid out like a rug on the floor for making art and as a broader characterization of the spaces where she makes art. For Winnicott, playing is also done in the transitional or “potential space.” Winnicott describes the “playground” wherein “playing is always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects.” In other words, it is the space where the self is experiencing, and in each experience is the potential for relationship with the other. See Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 64.
17. The term “comfort object” (note the distinction from Argote’s comforting object) is sometimes used in relation to Winnicott’s term, transitional object.

• 

  Mary McGuire

  Mary McGuire, Ph.D., is Professor of Art History at Mt. San Antonio College where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art. She has written articles, curated exhibitions, and given talks on subjects including modern dance, feminist performance, and queer spiritualities. Her current manuscript project, Social and Spiritual Movement in Art: The Judson Arts Program and the Long 1960s, situates New York City’s Judson Church as a nexus of art, religion, and social movements. She hosts a performance art + salon series, APT 310, in the living room of her Los Angeles apartment.