The Americas | One Work, Many Voices

Maris Bustamante’s El pene como

instrumento de trabajo (1982): A Pivotal
Gesture
Karen Cordero Reiman

November 13, 2019

Created in 1982 by the Mexican conceptual artist Maris Bustamante, El pene como
instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a Freud lo macho (The Penis as a Work
Instrument)/To Get Rid of the Macho in Freud) is an iconic work for the history of both
performance art and feminist art in Mexico. By contextualizing the piece in relation to
Bustamante’s practice as a member of the No-Grupo collective and later as part of the
feminist group Polvo de Gallina Negra, we can understand its pivotal role in the
emergence of feminist content in the artist’s production and in feminist art in general.
Fig. 1. Maris Bustamante for No-Grupo. El pene como instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a
Freud lo macho (The Penis as a Work Instrument/To Get Rid of the Macho in Freud). Mask used
in the performance Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot) by No-Grupo in the Museo de Arte Moderno,
Mexico City, 1982. Fondo No-Grupo, Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC, UNAM.
Bustamante received her initial training as an artist at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura,
Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” in the 1970s, and after early explorations in
various media, her work became focused on conceptual and performance art. 1  She
also worked as a professor and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana beginning in the 1970s, concentrating on the transdisciplinary art forms
she defined as Formas PIAS (performances, installations, and atmospheres). 2
Fig. 2. Maris Bustamante for No-Grupo. El pene como instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a
Freud lo macho (The Penis as a Work Instrument/To Get Rid of the Macho in Freud).
Documentation of the performance Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot) by No-Grupo in the Museo de
Arte Moderno, Mexico City, 1982. Fondo No-Grupo, Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC,
UNAM.
Bustamante came of age as an artist during a period that was characterized by the
formation of interdisciplinary conceptual groups known as “Los Grupos,” and she was
a key member of the No-Grupo, active from 1977 to 1983, with Rubén Valencia,
Melquiades Herrera, and Alfredo Nuñez. 3  In close dialogue with ideas about non-
objectualist art expounded by the Peruvian-born critic and theorist Juan Acha, the
group staged ephemeral actions in public spaces that Bustamante baptized
as Montajes de Momentos Plásticos. 4  These were characterized by the appropriation,
activation, and resignification of everyday objects, language, and social situations in a
kind of guerrilla action that sought to interrupt and subvert habitual codes of
representation and the conventional structures and power relations of the art world
and market. 5  Consonant with this practice, the announcements the group created for
their activities used the formats and styles of publicity for popular urban events
like lucha libre (Fig. 3). 

Fig. 3. No-Grupo. Poster of the performance Caliente-Caliente (mano a mano con Carlos Zerpa) [Hot-Hot
(Hand in Hand with Carlos Zerpa)], 1982. Fondo No-Grupo, Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC,
UNAM.

Marked by the Mexican government’s violent repression of dissidence in the decades

following the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, No-Grupo’s actions presented a break with
official institutions and hierarchies. They questioned dogmas and opened up spaces
for critical reflection. 6  Also, unlike more group-minded collectives of the period, No-
Grupo’s members created individual actions related to a general theme, maintaining
their autonomy within a collaborative structure (an element underlined by the name of
the collective). 7  In this context, Bustamante carried out conceptual actions that
constituted a sort of “Theatre of the Absurd,” highlighting key contradictions regarding
power, property, and gender. The role of sexual symbolism was often underlined in
these operations. 

El pene como instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a Freud lo macho was Bustamante’s

personal contribution to the No-Grupo performance Caliente-Caliente (mano a mano
con Carlos Zerpa) 8  [Hot-Hot (Hand in Hand with Carlos Zerpa)] that took place at the
Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in January 1982 (Fig. 4). Bustamante
manufactured 300 cardboard masks of her own face, replacing the nose on each with
a phallus identified by a tag as a “work instrument,” and distributed them to the
audience as a response “to Sigmund Freud’s theory that a woman who wanted to
engage in professional endeavors suffered from penis envy.” 9  Like many of
Bustamante’s works of the period, the action mobilized a concise, ironic gesture
through her performing body and its interaction with the public in order to counter
social and theoretical mystifications that are used to justify and institutionalize
hierarchy and discrimination. 
Fig. 4. Unidentified photographer. Raquel Tibol and other members of the public participating in the
performance event Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot) by No-Grupo in the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City,
1982. Fondo No-Grupo, Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC, UNAM. 

The pose adopted by Bustamante for the photographic mask and the documentation
of the piece (Fig. 5) conjures Mona Lisa as crossed with Groucho Marx. Hinges on the
mask’s “nose” and eyes allowed the faux penis to become erect and the eyelids to
open. With the mask on, Bustamante intoned a Spanish translation of the lyrics to a
song by punk artist Nina Hagen that played in the background (the lyrics expressed
Hagen’s sardonic desire to be a man because men were allowed to have more
fun). 10  Overall, the piece humorously debunked the phallocratic division of labor by
suggesting that anyone could put on and take off the very attribute that permitted
access to certain social roles and activities, thus upending the patriarchy by reducing
its talismanic object to the realm of the everyday. There was also an element of the
burlesque to the performance (a theme Bustamante would take up again
in Pornochou of 1984 to 1985).
Fig. 5. Maris Bustamante for No-Grupo. El pene como instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a
Freud lo macho(The Penis as a Work Instrument/To Get Rid of the Macho in Freud).
Documentation of the performance Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot) by No-Grupo in the Museo de
Arte Moderno, Mexico City, 1982. Fondo No-Grupo, Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC,
UNAM.
Bustamante’s use of a mask underlined an important political strategy of No-Grupo’s.
As noted in the exhibition catalogue Perder la forma humana: Una imagen sísmica de
los años ochenta en América Latina, “the mask as conceived by Bakhtin is a ‘negation
of identity and fixed meaning,’ an ‘expression of transferences’….The mask acts as a
kind of catalyst: it not only covers the face, but also with that same gesture reveals
different aspects of the social body.” 11  Indeed, the mask as a discursive vehicle had
been present in No-Grupo’s work since their action for the 10th Paris Biennial in 1977,
held at the Centre Georges Pompidou. They did not attend physically, but sent
cardboard masks based on photographs of their faces for the public to wear in
accordance with the collective’s instructions (Fig. 6). “Our proposition induces the
possibility that the spectator be the one who facilitates our virtual presence,” the
group declared. “We want to be there without being there physically; we want the
viewer to be the one who takes us there; we want to inhabit the visage of each person
who puts on our masks; we want to be the spectator.” 12 Their intervention suggested a
merging of identities, a displacement of the self and an inhabiting of the other—a
psychological and social exercise presented in a neobaroque mode.
 Fig. 6. No-Grupo. Maris Bustamante’s cardboard mask for the group’s participation in the 10th
Paris Biennial, 1977. Fondo No-Grupo, Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC, UNAM.

The feminist bent in Bustamante’s work that emerged in El pene como instrumento de
trabajo was undoubtedly linked to the increasing influence of the feminist movement
in Mexico in that moment 13  and was expanded in her contribution to Agenda
Colombia 83, a graphic diary produced by No-Grupo in 1982 in collaboration with the
Colombian insurgent group M-19 and the Mexican art collectives Proceso Pentágono
and Grupo Mira, among others (Fig. 7). 14  In this work, she presented herself with her
visage displaced by that of Karl Marx (who became her “mask”), and introduced
additional elements to her performative identity and feminist iconography that would
be consolidated the following year when she and Mónica Mayer, another pioneering
Mexican feminist artist, formed the first feminist art group in Mexico: Polvo de Gallina
Negra (Black Hen Powder) (Fig. 8). 15
 Fig. 7. Maris Bustamante for No-Grupo. ¡MUJERes del mundo: Uníos! (Women of the World:
Unite!) for Agenda Colombia 83, 1982. Fondo No-Grupo, Centro de Documentación Arkheia,
MUAC, UNAM.

Fig. 8. Ana Victoria Jiménez. Performative participation by Polvo de Gallina Negra (Mónica Mayer
and Maris Bustamante) in a demonstration for the legalization of abortion, Mexico City, February
1991. Archivo Ana Victoria Jiménez, Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad
Iberoamericana, Mexico City.

Bustamante’s image in Agenda Colombia 83 shows what seems to be a cloth hung on a

clothesline, on which is traced a rectangular form suggesting both a sewing pattern
and a notebook page. Within it is another sketch of a more conventional landscape,
which serves as a background to a portrait that once again echoes the Mona Lisa. In
this meta-image, the artist’s hands are demurely folded in front of her lower torso (an
anatomical area that would later be emphasized by Polvo de Gallina Negra as the
defining zone of motherhood) and her body, scored with a few lines alluding to a
brassiere, is covered by an apron, represented with the dashed lines of a sewing
pattern and with tabs to affix it to the body as if it were a paper-doll costume. All these
aspects refer to the imposition of gendered stereotypes on women in various contexts
—dress, play, and artistic representation, to name a few—but the artist’s head is
replaced by a photograph of Marx’s face, from which emerges a speech bubble
containing the appropriated, modified slogan “¡Mujeres del mundo: uníos!” (Women of
the World: Unite!). “Mujer” is rendered in a bold graphic font, intimating a masculinist
command, but it is interpolated with a handwritten script that holds the rest of the
statement (“-es del mundo: uníos”). Altogether, Bustamante transmuted a directive
both patriarchal and Communist into a feminist motto.

Moreover, the apron foreshadows those that would become the hallmark of Polvo de
Gallina Negra, acting both as a reference to women’s identification in relation to
domestic activities and as a prop that set off both the real and simulated pregnant
bodies of the group’s two members in the performative activities of their
project ¡MADRES! (1983–90). 16  The contrast between the submissive hand gesture
and the vehement rhetoric in her piece for Agenda Colombia 83 was characteristic of
No-Grupo’s artistic strategy—highlighting ironic contradictions to underline pointed
social messages—but the work also launched a new performative persona for
Bustamante that she would embody for the next 10 years—a direction signaled by the
movement of her own body out of the picture frame and into a feminist framing
device. In this respect, El pene como instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a Freud lo
macho can be understood not only as a powerful conceptual statement in its own
right, but also as one that articulated and enacted a decisive repositioning of
Bustamante’s practice overall in relation to issues of gender.

All title translations in this text by the author.

1 Dina Comisarenco Mirkin, Eclipse de siete lunas: Mujeres muralistas en México (Mexico City: Artes
de México, 2017), 188–190.

2 Maris Bustamante, “‘Formas Pías’: Cartografías incompletas en la obra de Juan Acha,” post,

September 28, 2017, https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1042-formas-pias-cartografias-
incompletas-en-la-obra-de-juan-acha.

3 For more information about No-Grupo and its participants, see Sol Henaro, No-Grupo: Un
zangoloteo al corsé artístico (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno/Instituto Nacional de Bellas
Artes, 2011), 18–21.

4 Henaro indicates that while Carla Stellweg, who worked at the Museo de Arte Moderno at the time,
familiarized the group with the term “performance,” they preferred the nomenclature in Spanish
formulated by Bustamante (No-Grupo, 23).

5 Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 172–173.

6 Polgovsky, Touched Bodies, 162–165.

7 Henaro, No-Grupo, 24.

8 Zerpa, a Venezuelan artist known primarily as a painter, was also active as a performance artist in
the early 1980s and was close to No-Grupo. The performance Caliente-Caliente was organized on
the occasion of his first presentation in this mode in Mexico. See “El pene como instrumento de
trabajo,” Archivo Virtual Artes Escénicas, accessed June 25, 2019,
artesescenicas.uclm.es/index.php?sec=obras&id=1139.

9 See Bustamante’s description of the work at http://www.reactfeminism.org/entry.php?

l=lb&id=24&e=a&v=&a=Maris%20Bustamante&t=, accessed June 25, 2019.
 10 Archivo Virtual Artes Escénicas, accessed June 25, 2019, artesescenicas.uclm.es/index.php?
sec=obras&id=1139.

11 Fernanda Nogueira, Lía Colombino, Sol Henaro, Ana Longoni and Paulina Varas, “Máscaras” in Red
Conceptualismos del Sur, Perder la forma humana: Una imagen sísmica de los años ochenta en
América Latina (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012), 186.

12 The typewritten text is reproduced in Henaro, No-Grupo, 38.

13 For more information on this topic, see Nora Nínive García, Márgara Millán, and Cynthia Pech,
eds., Cartografías del feminismo mexicano, 1970–2000 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de la
Ciudad de México, 2007).

14 Henaro, No-Grupo, 89.

15 The group’s name comes from a powder sold in traditional Mexican markets to protect people
from the evil eye, a quality that seemed appropriate to Mayer and Bustamante given the precarious
situation of art in Mexico at the time, especially for women and feminist artists. For more details,
see Sol Henaro, et al., Mónica Mayer. Si tiene dudas… pregunte: Una exposición
retrocolectiva/When In Doubt… Ask: A Retrocollective Exhibit (Mexico City: MUAC-UNAM, Alumnos
47, and Editorial RM, 2016), 60.

16 ¡MADRES! was conceived as a way to integrate the art and life of its participants at a time when
both had small children. It included various elements, among them performances, actions, and
mail art. ¡MADRES! also included a series of performances for television, including one in 1987 for
the program Nuestro Mundo in which they invited host Guillermo Ochoa to put on a Styrofoam
belly and named him “Mother for a Day.” See Henaro, et al., Mónica Mayer, 61.

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