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Sophie Bynes

Sophie Bynes (Sofía Bynes García) was one of the most promising, influential and versatile Spanish artist of the 1970’s. Her job is not easy to be catalogued as belonging to a precise style, but it touches all the most promising fields of the most transgressive art of the last decades. Both the material of her work and her style, themes and purpose doesn’t fit within a single artistic movement, it is characterized by the strong influence of artists closely related to her personal and professional life, as well as her constantly agitated and changing personality. Both facts have earned her harsh criticism from her detractors, as well as the praises of a large number of followers.

Both, the liberal political movements of the 1970’s so as the story of her life mark significant the tonic and thematic of her works. The necessities of being disclosed and to reinvent her at the same time she is trying to hide herself are opposed elements that also are remarkable in her work. Her lifetime experiences as well as the events happening along it are also reflected in her performances and other works of art.

Sophie Bynes is mainly characterized by the quiet beginnings of her creative work dedicated to experimental photography, entering radically in the sphere of the performance.

A considerable amount of her work is based in the feminism and reinvention; it reflects a hard critic of the society as a conductor mean of the pressures exerted on women and children. She shows the society as a force that grabs away the innocence and dictates the conditions of the women’s life becoming them objects, dehumanizing their image. Her unique work dotted with rage and irony has a strong philosophical component that looks for leaving a trace in the society. Throughout her work, sometimes simple and naïve, she pretends the society to think and meditate.

CHILDHOOD

Sophie Bynes was born the 10th of March in 1943 in Segovia, Spain; she will be a prodigy child. From an English father and a Spanish mother, several years after her birth they moved to England looking for economical stability.

Thomas Bynes was a well known art curator in Spain that due to his political aspirations saw the opportunity to come back to England and fight for a place in the political life. However, when coming back to England, the apparent happiness and calm that the family lived was altered due to the alcohol problems of the art curator and his tortuous romantic life. These facts will truncate his political career what would led Sophie to life a hard childhood marked by the physical abuses of her father to her mother and the continuous sexual abuses to the child.

These elements will mark notably the work of the artist that, when being thirteen years old her mother sent her to life with her family in Spain.

ARTISTIC CAREER

At the age of eighteen, the artist leaves Segovia and she starts her studies in the Art School of Salamanca. After finishing her degree, and thanks to countless scholarships, she will travel to the United States in order to study a master in photography.

During the period she expends in the university she will meet the famous conceptual artist On Kawara who will introduce her to the world of the conceptual art and the performance.

It is during these years of closed relationship with the artist that Bynes will develop her work: 28 years, 336 months, 122640 days (1971). This work was inspired in the On Kawara’s work: “1000 years”, in her work, the artist creates a book in which she writes down each year, each month of the same and each day of each month of each year of her life. It’s a simple book, with red leather covers and recycled paper. The dates are written in black Helvetica except for those which are the most remarkable for the artist which are written in red: her birth, her birthday, her first day at school, her first kiss, her first abuse…

Later on, this work will be translated into a performance in which the artist, in an empty room, will read out loud each date, changing the tone of voice when reading a red date. The reverberation of the room together with the steps and the echo of her voice will accent the tension in the atmosphere.

After several years working as On Kawara assistant, Bynes will begin her career on her own with several failures such as her work Marcadas (1976) belonging to 1976 series.

In this work she collects the fingerprints of several estrangers together with hers and she will exhibit them together with a picture of each unknown showing them as if they were dangerous offenders.

The work wasn’t welcome with great enthusiasm in Spain, where it was exhibited for the first time, so it wasn’t exhibited again.

However, years after, she will reinvent herself in this work after discovering Piero Manzoni, but she won’t exhibit it until 2009. The work Marcadas will found its evolution in Reinvention (2009).

The work consists in a dozen eggs in which the fingerprints of twelve people, including the artist, are printed for redeeming their sins. The egg is considered as something new, pure, without corruption, it will receive the sins of the person printing his/ her fingerprints on it.

However, one work belonging to this series: 1976 series, it did have a great welcome from the public. Muecas (1976) is a work in which throughout irony, the artist tries to make us come back to our childhood. On it, Bynes asked several people of several ages, in which she is included, to make faces while they are photographed. An easy reading of this work of art, it makes us arrive to the conclusion that what she is trying is to recover some aspects of her childhood. However, a deeper interpretation reveals the hidden social critic of the work. The faces represent the hidden face of the society, the distorted vision of the same, and the one we try to hide.

During the time 1976 series was exhibited, Bynes travelled together with it to all the countries in which it was exhibited. During one of these trips, the artist suffered a serious accident that almost killed her (1980). This fact made her rethink about her life and her career and it led her try to develop an existentialist work that will never see the sun.

During the year she expent developing her truncated work, she will discover the postal art, and she will be influenced by artists such as Ray Johnson who in 1962 had founded the New York Correspondence School of Art.

After a deeply study of this artistic torrent, parallel to her truncated work of art, the artist will develop a work that later on will become one of her most well known works: I’m still Alive (1981).

This work consist of 365 postcards that the artist sent to herself during the year 1981 in which she wrote every day the time she had got up and she said “good morning” to the world.

Due to the dismal failure of her existentialist work, Bynes will work all over the world looking for a new inspiration that would seduce her. That is how she will get to Venezuela where she will meet Diego Barboza, painter and conceptual artist.

Barboza, mentor and after all her lover, will be the one to introduce her in the world of the performance.

It is during this epoch that she will get familiarized with the work of Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Vitto Acconci o Bas Jan Ader.

Together with Barboza, she will live a relationship full of secrets that will well resemble the relationship she had with her father and that will mark her. Barboza’s disdain and lies to Bynes will be reflected later on in her future work.

However, the relationship with the South American artist and the detailed study of the art of the performance that she realized will led her to develop in 1987 on of her most famous work: A gritos, belonging to the series: Secrets and other truths(1987).

It is a work in which she reflects the frustration lived during her relationship with Barboza. It is a performance: it is a video in which Bynes appears in a deserted room together with another person. Bynes looks straight to the camera while the other person is staring at her. This very last one is whispering to the artist which is saying out loud to the camera everything she is hearing.

Her relationship with Diego Barboza will strongly mark her. This fact together with her childhood trauma, the stage she will pass over with several comings and goings from failed relationships and her drug addiction will make her fall into a spiral that will led her enter in a psychiatric hospital due to it numeral attempts of suicide.

After several years of not doing any public artistic activity, Bynes will come back to the world of art with renew ideas. The experience in the psychiatric hospital had changed her and she will blame a purely male chauvinist society for all her problems. It is a society in which women live relegated due to strict norms of social behavior: how to talk, how to look, how to dress, to behave, to make up…

Is during the last years of the decade of the 1990’s and the beginning of the 2000’s that she will develop her most controversial and praised work: Reglas sociales y otras locuras (1995-2007).

During these years she will develop works such as White canvas (1996) or Paper voices (2001).

White canvas is a work in which she wears her white uniform from the hospital. She places herself in a public space of the city and asks the people passing to write on her uniform their feelings and thoughts.

On the other hand, in Paper voices the artist again appears in a public space in the city in where she will read out loud the testimony of different women related to drugs, gender violence and from prostitution networks.