到越南開會最後晚上的Gala Dinner 上，沒想到我竟然會被胡志明市頒發勲章。
1992年，我聽到我的老師台大外科李治學教授收了越南醫師來台大醫院接受「腎臟移植手術訓練」。我也効法他，想幫越南成立骨髓移植中心。我請Sandoz 藥廠幫我到越南聯絡。因為Sandoz 在越南的代理是一位法越混血法國人Dr. Bousquet, 他對越南有感情，於是他大方資助我搭機到越南先行考察胡志明市的輸血與血液醫院Blood Transfusion and Hematology Hospital BTH.
1993年3月，我初到BTH, 簡直不敢相信這𥚃可以做骨髓移植。醫院只有27床，還在燒煤球（家母日文發音稱為Gara）。醫院沒有藏書，沒有期刊，唯一會講寫英文的是一位50出頭的陳文賓副院長。他會說英文是因為他1975年之前，與駐越美軍一起工作。越南統一後，他下獄數年。因此他不能當院長，院長是一位北越下來的書記型人物。照片是這次再與陳文賓醫師重逢。他八十歲，健康如昔。
當時醫院唯一較資深的住院醫師，就是這位阮醫師。他那時幾乎一句英文都不會，沈靜寡言，就是默默努力那一型。
我回台後，跑去衛生署國際合作處，替BTH申請四個獎學金。我記得是一位醫師，一位醫檢師，二位護士。於是1993年底到1994年底，阮登明醫師來台受訓一年。這一年，他很認真，不在話下。
1994年底，他回去越南，選了三位適合的病人開始做移植準備。這期間，台大醫院也贈送他們一些儀器，他們方能做HLA，選擇有捐髓家人的病人。
骨髓移植是團隊作業。也感謝那時台大血液科醫師及護理同仁，不辭離家背井，輪流到胡志明市去值班。像姚明醫師，就曾經在旅館一住經月。昨晚，他也得到了勲章。我也台北胡志明市飛了十幾趟。還有一次夠警覺，防止了一次越航墜機大難，救了168人，包括自己。——以後有空再聊。哈哈。
1995年8月21日，兩國之移植團隊完成第一例。病人是CML（慢性骨髓性白血病），迄今活得很好，有兩位小孩。我們做了三例。都成功了。
1998年我在台灣召開亞太骨髓移植大會。BTH 的正副院長都到了。這是他們開始踏入國際醫界。1995－2000 這幾年，越南經濟開始起飛，我在許多會議都看到兩位醫院領導的身影。他們也開始在國內飛黃騰達，極受重視。但我卻未能遇到阮登明醫師。大概是對移植病人的責任心，較少出國。
2002到2004，我借調到國家衛生研究院擔任國內第一個幹細胞中心主任，研究興趣由造血幹細胞轉移為間質幹細胞，也較少參與骨髓移植的會議，但知道阮醫師開始步步高升了。而且，他方向正確，他也到慶應大學的岡本真一郎教授及東京大學的高橋恒夫實驗室學習臍帶血幹細胞的儲存與臨床經驗。高橋也替他規劃臍帶血公庫。現在越南每年的臍帶血移植竟然比台灣多。
2010年，WHO知道了台灣援助越南骨髓移植之事，以越南為典範，在河內召開了“Bone Marrow Transplantation in Emerging Countries”,新興國家的骨髓移植。雖然台灣不是聯合國一員，WHO仍然邀請我與會，並現身說法。我記得其他有蒙古、印尼、剛果⋯⋯等國家。
2015年8月，我應邀再訪胡志明市。這時，阮登明醫師早已由BTH 院長又昇任醫學院院長。8月20日我到他辦公室，在胡志明的肖像下照了相。他意氣風發show給我看他正在規劃的胡志明市醫療園區圖。然後帶我到現場參觀。8月21日，他在峴港（今年越南辦APEC之地）為應邀前去的台大團隊辦了盛大歡迎會，那種場面，台北看不到。
今年，在越南晌噹噹的BTH在名勝地大叻又辦國際會議。有25位以上外籍學者受邀。十多位來自歐洲，規模比台灣血液學會年會還盛大。他們英文不很好，但他們很厲害的是，第一，有同步翻譯，下圖中每人都戴了耳機。第二，他們要求speaker 在一週前先交slide,因此三個銀幕中，中央是英文，兩旁有越文。他們的秘書工作，非常好。
在會議中，主桌都是我、姚明醫師及岡本教授、高橋教授。阮登明是知恩必報的人，對我和姚醫師真是設想週到。前天晚宴上，他向整桌越南醫界高層說，當天到台灣，my eye and my mind opened! 也因此，他每年都派他學生到法、比利時、日本。他喜歡這些國家。他當然也喜歡台灣。也有許多越南年輕醫師想到台灣。
我建議衛福部可以考慮多為越南醫師設專門奬學金。因為台越千年前同源百越，現在又是姻親。台灣有7% 國小學童有越南媽媽。
昨天的Gala Dinner上，銀幕上一直播放由1994到2017的鏡頭。我沒有想到，當年他們雖窮，卻都有留下影片紀錄。我2015年來時的紙上醫療園區，兒童醫院已經開幕，癌症醫院已經完工，整個園區2021年完工。阮登明醫師很得意地告訴我，一共有三千二百床！
然後我沒想到，竟然頒發了胡志明市政府的勲章！我事前完全不知，連領帶都沒有帶上。
台灣與越南，二千年前即同源，現在新親家。外婆的澎湖灣，已成外婆的金蘭灣。願台越永遠友好！
各位好朋友：謝謝大家美言。
有的。衛福部今年七月有頒發衛福專業獎章给我。耀昌還有一個心願，就是為國人成立幹細胞庫。耀昌會繼續努力。再謝謝各位！！！耀昌敬謝
補充報告：
這次越南胡志明市贈勳15人，台灣佔3人。除了我，還有姚明醫師。他當年是總醫師，是與Dr. Binh實際在照顧病人，在越南停留了一、二個月，成了Dr. Binh 的好朋友。
另外一位受勳者是慈濟基金會骨髓庫的楊國樑主任。今年越南完全第一例無血緣之骨髓移植。越南病人在台灣找到HLA相配者，因此由台灣運送周邊造血幹細胞到越南。
Dr. Binh 是一位很細心週到的好人。台灣有這位朋友，也很幸運。
------
漢清講堂與陳耀昌醫師 福爾摩沙三族記 等2片；「傀儡花」: 2014年他退休時所提的3C夢想，Cell, Cinema及Countries,
陳耀昌醫師（1949年2月9日—2025年11月17日），臺灣血液疾病專家、作家與政治人物，生於臺灣臺南。
2017 1202陳耀昌醫師新書「獅頭花」發表會。見到我80年代工研院電子所的同事宣明智先生(老宣)。慰靈歌。 "陳忠信： 原來美麗島事件四十年了！......."
20171202
陳耀昌教授別有特色的新書發表會。
陳耀昌醫師新書「獅頭花」發表會。
我搭上末班車。唱的是慰靈歌。
----
今天在陳耀昌醫師的新書發表會，意外見到我80年代工研院電子所的同事宣明智先生(老宣)。
宣先生是因為幹細胞領域的投資，認識陳醫師(他是幹細胞學會的理事長)的。
據陳醫師說，老宣在"鏡傳媒"鼓勵文學有加。
老宣說，後來他與合肥有緣，因為新書多說來台的淮軍招魂，所以要買百本送合肥的朋友。
----
"陳忠信：時序進入12月。四十年前的12月，我經歷人生中的一件大事。四十年後，這一、二個月，陸續有媒體訪問我、約稿子。原來美麗島事件四十年了！......."
謹以五年前影片記念
WWWW
據說同學張嵩文女士 (~2025)是虔誠的佛教徒。我寫過與她互動的某些故事 (1971~1975) ....剛好讀到到聖嚴法師的這篇發菩提心，行菩薩道──萬行菩薩；
諸位都是菩薩行者，菩薩行的最後目的是成佛。人成則佛成，人人都成佛，就是建設法鼓山的終極目標；為此做奉獻，便是發了菩薩願的菩薩行者。菩薩眼中的眾生，也都是菩薩。例如，我們看到小孩子或老人家時，要稱他們為小菩薩、老菩薩。我們看人家是菩薩，自己應該也是菩薩。我們是發了菩薩心的菩薩行者，貢獻的是以菩薩的心態，來做我們現在能做的福德事。以前發心幫助法鼓山事業的人，我們都稱之為義工，現在都稱為菩薩行者。但是只有一個「行」字是不夠的，應是「萬行」才對。萬行並不是萬能的意思，而是高也可以做，低也可以做，沒有人做的事情我們去做，有人做的事就讓賢。例如：打掃廁所、擦地板、端盤子等卑微事，沒人要做，我們去做；與高階位者應對，即使尊貴如總統，若沒人敢去，我們就去；有重要的職務，無人適合去做，我們就學著去做。菩薩發心種福田的事，只有多少，沒有貴賤；不論工作粗細，只論菩薩發心；只論做與不做，不論高下尊卑。所以能行他人之所難行，能忍他人之所難忍者，就是萬行菩薩。如果這個觀念不能建立，學佛成佛的事情就無法推動。所以諸位一定要建立信心，認定自己是初發心的萬行菩薩，要學著有什麼工作需要人手，你就去做什麼的義工，做一個初發心菩薩的最佳榜樣。法鼓山為什麼需要這麼多萬行菩薩？我們環顧四周，可發現許多人類的醜惡面，所以我們要學菩薩精神，行菩薩道。善用佛法的精神，幫助他人，希望帶動風氣，使得人人都能成為以佛法的精神來自利利他的菩薩行者。菩薩行者，便是修行六度法門及四攝法門的發心菩薩，六度的內容，是指布施、持戒、忍辱、精進、禪定、智慧（正知見）的六個項目；四攝的內容，是指布施、愛語、利行、同事的四個項目。以此二門盡攝一切善行的一切功德，故在《仁王般若經》卷上，有「六度四攝一切行」的連用語。在中國大乘各宗，便有使用六度攝萬行的語句，例如《鎮州臨濟慧照禪師語錄》，就有這樣的句子說：「諸方說，六度萬行，以為佛法。」菩薩行，即是眾生成佛的正因，《維摩經．佛道品》的末後第三偈說：「如是道無量，所行無有涯，智慧無邊際，度脫無數眾。」其中的第二句「所行無有涯」，便是說成佛之道，當具萬行的意思。然後《維摩經》又於〈菩薩行品〉中說：「如菩薩者，不盡有為，不住無為。」菩薩能夠在淨而淨、處穢則穢而不受汙染，所以不盡有為；菩薩僅是應彼而動，於「我」無關，所以不住無為。「不盡有為」是心無染著，但仍在凡夫的環境中共同生活，「不住無為」是雖已解脫，但卻不會逃離眾生的生死苦海。因此，〈菩薩行品〉又說：「教化眾生，終不厭惓，於四攝法，常念順行，護持正法，不惜軀命；種諸善根，無有疲厭。」這便是說，菩薩行者，當常以四攝法，廣度眾生，永不厭倦；菩薩行者為了護持正法及種一切善根，不僅永遠不會感到疲倦討厭，甚至可以不惜以身命相殉。這都是指菩薩當修一切行，那就是萬行。我們法鼓山的義工群，雖尚都是凡夫，卻已跟未信三寶的凡夫不同；雖不能立即具足菩薩的萬行，我們既是大乘佛教的三寶弟子，既在皈依典禮中，已跟著念誦〈四弘誓願〉，就算已經發了無上菩提心的初發心菩薩，從現在起，能做多少算多少，盡心盡力，不急不怠，到了成佛之時，必定具足萬行。猶如雞在蛋中時，已有成雞的因素；我們凡夫只要發了菩提心，便是具備了成佛的正因。雖不能於一時間萬行具全，只要盡力去做，能有一行、二行，也就算是菩薩行了。因此，凡夫發心，便成初發心的菩薩，便已具備了六度萬行的正因，故即可以被人稱為萬行菩薩，也當以萬行菩薩的目標自勉。基於如上的理念，我們法鼓山的發心菩薩們，都該被稱為「萬行菩薩」。不受薪的，當然是；受薪的，一樣是。我們不可把專職受薪的菩薩們當雇工，受薪只是為了維持他們的生活所需；他們也不應以雇工的心態來法鼓山論工計酬，同樣是為了發菩提心行菩薩道，自然也是萬行菩薩了。（刊於一九九三年七月十五日《法鼓》雜誌四十三期。原收錄於法鼓山小叢刊《法鼓山的方向》）
-------告別 胡守芳Shou-Fang Hu-Moore ~2025）《情渡死生：對抗血癌四十餘年，置之死地而復生的生命奇蹟》2025：這本書的電子書應該10年前就有了。202502 出版紙本，不確定末章"第十二章 健康危機再現"是否新增。”
//胡守芳她是與血癌奮閗40 多年，於10月30日溫哥華時間下午一時（台灣時間10/31日清晨五點）安𡨴療護醫師協助往生，她的先生Randy陪伴在側（類似安樂死）。很勇敢,我們很不捨也很佩服她的勇氣。我們外文系的同學10/29都已知悉。
她的書 《情渡死生》有完整的故事。在博客來可以買到。// 工工 Line 群組
確定同學過世，寫點遺憾。胡守芳日有一則LINE 告訴同學30在家......(她先生陪了一周了.......FEEL PEACEFULLY.....)
那年他們夫婦從加拿大台灣，去東部旅行。我知道這是認識他們，或許是
告別的最候機會。
然而，這有不少障礙。......
-----
- Artwork: El sueno (La cama) (The Dream (The Bed))
Today, we bring you another focus challenge, inviting you to spend uninterrupted time looking at a piece of art. This painting — “The Two Fridas” — by Frida Kahlo was made in 1939, and keep in mind that it’s nearly life size, at almost six feet by six feet.
(These challenges are published on the first Monday of each month. Sign up here if you’d like to be notified.)
Think about these questions as you look:
How are the two figures alike? How are they different?
What emotions do you see Kahlo trying to convey?
Do you relate to anything in the painting?
Frida Kahlo, Whose Self-Portraits Spoke to the Soul
She defined herself by her painting, especially when she painted herself. Revisit the life of Kahlo who died 62 years ago.
Frida Kahlo, Whose Self-Portraits Spoke to the Soul.弗麗達．卡洛 (Frida Kahlo)
Tomorrow the exhibition "Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Monkey. From the Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico" will be opened. It is the first exhibition of this famous Mexican artist at the Hermitage.
弗麗達．卡洛 (Frida Kahlo)
Happy birthday to Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, born on this day in 1907. Celebrate with this portrait of the artist.
Nickolas Muray (American, born Hungary, 1892–1965) | Frida Kahlo | 1939 | Photo by Nickolas Muray, © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art’s excellent display of 20th-century South American drawings at 23 East 73rd Street includes a fantastic if anomalous drawing by Frida Kahlo titled “The True Tease” (1946). A dense, extended doodle, it embeds a lexicon of Kahlo motifs — a hand, veins, some eyes, several breasts — in a geodesic constellation fraught with stars and spirals that seem straight out of late Kandinsky.
FEATURE
Patron saint of lipstick and lavender feminism
Frida Kahlo I
1 May 2005
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait with Monkey 1938
Self-Portrait with Monkey 1938
© 2005 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust and INBAL
Frida Kahlo and her husband both referred to her as ‘the great hider-away’, as if she were a mystery-maker. Fifty years after her death she is idolised for having revealed essential truths about all kinds of female experience, yet partly mythologising her life. Germaine Greer explores the life of the Patron saint of lipstick and lavender feminism
Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera both used to refer to her as ‘la gran ocultadora’. The expression is an odd one, meaning ‘the great hider-away’, as if she were a mystery-maker. Fifty years after her death, Kahlo is credited with having displayed in art for the first time the interior reality of a woman’s life. She is idolised for having revealed essential truths about all kinds of female experience – about disablement, rejection, miscarriage, suffering, Mexican-ness, Jewishness, homosexuality, revolution, subversion, devotion – in 200 or so coloured images, painted in oils on metal or hardboard, and occasionally canvas, the greater part of them depicting or purporting to depict the painter herself.
As a self-portraitist Kahlo fits right into the tradition of women’s painting. Her contemporaries include other practitioners of the same genre, Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, for example. Since the dawn of Western art, women have painted many more self-portraits than their male counterparts; indeed, a significant proportion of their rather small number are known to us only from a single surviving self-portrait of the artist as a beautiful young woman. A woman painter was a curiosity of just the kind that collectors wanted in their cabinets. Gallant patrons complimented them by asking for no other subjects from their hand but their own fair selves, and an artist such as Angelika Kauffmann, to name just one, was in no position to refuse. Like Kahlo, she painted herself time and again, in a variety of costumes, sometimes as an allegorical figure, as Kahlo does. What is not clear is whether the women portrayed are faces or masks; whether the reality is not inevitably ocultada.
在卡羅的半身自畫像中，姿勢幾乎總是相同的：雙肩正對觀者，與畫框平行；頭部側轉四分之一，通常朝向左肩；雙眼直視觀者，目光堅定不移。臉部毛髮通常被誇張化——眉毛在鼻樑上方連成一線，形成著名的連眉，上唇也明顯長滿了濃密的黑色絨毛。從卡羅的照片中可以很容易地判斷出這幅肖像與藝術家本人的相似程度，而卡羅的照片數量遠遠超過了她的畫作。當她意識到鏡頭的存在時，她會盡力重現畫中形象略微側轉的頭部和不苟言笑的眼神。她很少讓自己的臉部照片表達出身份以外的任何訊息，照片的風格如同護照照片一般程式化，只露出一隻耳朵。所有的肖像都以同樣的語氣說著：「我是弗里達·卡羅」。這就是她的成就——弗里達·卡羅畢生的表演。在這一點上，她也延續了女性藝術家作為異類現象的傳統：羅莎爾芭·卡列拉和安吉莉卡·考夫曼只是當時被稱為“女畫家”的眾多藝術家中的兩位，她們必須通過演奏樂器、唱歌以及創作藝術作品來取悅贊助人。
說卡羅是史上第一位真正的行為藝術家，而且她的表演貫穿一生，並且她不知疲倦地年復一年、日復一日地進行著，這絕非誇張。她投入在角色扮演的裝扮上，其精力至少與繪畫創作本身不相上下。她還精心佈置了一個合適的場景，擺放著各種奇特的道具——動物、鮮花、床上的石膏骷髏、瓶中的胎兒，以及構成科約阿坎別墅的所有其他奇特物件和幻象。她也創作了一篇文本，作為表演的伴奏，並最終以此紀念這場表演——一篇選擇性地、部分神話化的弗里達·卡羅傳記。麥當娜和尚保羅高緹耶都是她的粉絲，這並不令人意外。他們都是表演藝術家，都像卡羅一樣，以操控同樣的素材為生。卡羅或許會為她的家人（她沒有給他們留下任何畫作）成功地將她的名字註冊為商標而感到高興，但如果她能看到fridakahlo.us網站上銷售的那些廉價無用的服裝和配飾，她一定會義憤填膺。
與弗里達·卡羅現象頗為相似的是她同時代的“巴西性感女神”卡門·米蘭達的職業生涯。米蘭達原名瑪麗亞·多·卡莫·米蘭達·達·庫尼亞，1909年出生於葡萄牙的一個省份。和卡羅一樣，米蘭達粗俗、迷人、口無遮蔽、不敬、熱情奔放，而且身材嬌小。卡洛發展出一種特瓦坎服飾的變體，而米蘭達則借鑒並誇張了巴伊亞水果小販的服飾。卡洛的繪畫語言源自於民間藝術形式；米蘭達則借鏡了薩爾瓦多貧民窟的舞曲。與卡洛一樣，米蘭達在美國也廣受歡迎；1940年，薩克斯百貨公司推出了一系列以她標誌性的厚重珠串和誇張頭飾為靈感的服飾珠寶。與卡洛一樣，米蘭達也創作詩歌和繪畫。與卡洛一樣，她英年早逝，膝下無子，經歷了多年的苦難。與卡洛不同的是，她沒有嫁給一位民族英雄；人們普遍認為，她的白人丈夫虐待了她，而且在她去世前多年，她也像卡洛一樣，嚴重依賴毒品。如今，世界各大藝術機構正在舉辦卡洛的回顧展，以表彰她的藝術成就。在巴西，米蘭達的巴伊亞時尚正在復興，EMI-Odeon巴西公司也重新製作並發行了她六小時的音樂作品。然而，人們卻從未將她們進行比較。這兩位傑出的女性，儘管有許多共同之處，卻始終生活在不同的世界。
奧蘭可能並非弗里達·卡羅的忠實擁躉，但在許多方面，她的藝術實踐是對這位墨西哥藝術家的先例的拓展。從1960年代她開始拍攝自己的身體，如同雕塑一般，奧蘭就一直對自身的形像以及改造形象的能力著迷。她曾以聖母瑪利亞和聖奧蘭的形象示人，用自己嫁妝中的床單製作服裝，最後甚至訴諸手術。卡羅的傳記作者們一直對她頻繁的手術感到困惑，並質疑這些手術是否真的必要。奧蘭的手術表演始於1979年，當時她被診斷出子宮外孕，需要緊急手術。在她進入手術室之前，她已經安排好一台攝影機記錄整個過程，並將錄影帶以最快的速度送往里昂藝術中心，在那裡立即放映，以一種非同尋常的方式重現了卡洛1932年創作的《亨利福特醫院》。卡洛在手術後畫了自己處於截石位、流血的形象；奧蘭則在手術過程中即時讓自己躺在手術台上。
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait with Small Monkey 1945
Self-Portrait with Small Monkey 1945
© 2005 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust and INBAL
In Kahlo’s bust-length self-portraits, the pose is almost always the same: shoulders square on to the viewer, parallel to the picture frame; head a quarter turned, usually towards the left shoulder; eyes looking back to the viewer in a direct, unwavering stare. The hairiness of the face is usually exaggerated – the eyebrows meet over the nose in the famous unibrow, and the upper lip is conspicuously furred with dark down. How closely this icon resembled the artist can be easily judged from photographs of Kahlo, of which there are many more than there are works by her hand. When she was aware of the camera she did her best to reproduce the slight head turn and the unsmiling stare of her painted image. She seldom allowed images of her face to express anything beyond her identity, in a version as stylised as a passport photo, showing the obligatory one ear. All the portraits say, in the same tone of voice: ‘I am Frida Kahlo’. This is her achievement – the lifelong performance of Frida Kahlo. In this too she remains part of the tradition of the female artist as outlandish phenomenon: Rosalba Carriera and Angelica Kauffmann are just two of the ‘paintresses’ (as they were called at the time) who were obliged to entertain their patrons by playing musical instruments and singing, as well as making artworks
It is no small praise to say that Kahlo was the first ever true performance artist, that the performance lasted all her life long, and that she was indefatigable in presenting it, year on year, day by day. At least as much creative energy went into dressing the part as in drawing and painting it. Fashioning herself also involved the creation of an appropriate setting with intriguing props – animals, flowers, a plaster skeleton atop her bed, a foetus in a bottle and all the other impedimenta and phantasmagoria that made up the house at Coyoacan. She also generated a text to accompany and eventually to commemorate the performance, the selective and partly mythologised account of Frida Kahlo. One is not surprised to find that Madonna is a fan, or Jean Paul Gaultier. Both are performers and both live by manipulating the same materials as Kahlo. She might be delighted that her family, to whom she left no paintings, has succeeded in registering her name as a trademark, though if she could see the shapeless cheap garments and accessories marketed on the world wide web by fridakahlo.us, she would be outraged.
A seductive parallel with the Frida Kahlo phenomenon is the career of her exact contemporary, the ‘Brazilian bombshell’ Carmen Miranda, born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha in provincial Portugal in 1909. Like Kahlo, Miranda was vulgar, charming, foul-mouthed, irreverent, exuberant and tiny. While Kahlo developed a variant on Tehuacan costume, Miranda adopted and exaggerated that of the fruit vendors of Bahia. Kahlo’s pictorial language was derived from popular art forms; Miranda adapted the dance music of the favelas of Salvador. Like Kahlo, Miranda found favour in the United States; in 1940 Saks brought out a line of costume jewellery based on the heavy beads and extravagant headgear that she had made her trademark. Like Kahlo, Miranda composed poems and painted. Like Kahlo, she died young and childless after years of bitter suffering. Unlike Kahlo, she was not married to a national hero; it is generally thought that her gringo husband abused her, and that years before she died she was, like Kahlo, heavily drug-dependant. Kahlo is now being honoured by retrospective exhibitions in the world’s great art houses; in Brazil Miranda’s Bahian fashions are being revived, and EMI-Odeon Brazil has remastered and issued six hours of her music. Yet the instructive parallel is never drawn. These two remarkable women, with so much in common, remain in separate worlds.
Orlan is probably not a great fan of Frida Kahlo, yet in many ways her art practice is an elaboration on the Mexican’s precedent. From the beginning of her career in the 1960s when she photographed her body as if it were sculpture, Orlan has remained fascinated by her own image and her power to modify it, portraying herself in the guise of the Madonna and as Sainte Orlan, creating costumes by using the sheets from her own trousseau and, ultimately, by recourse to surgery. Kahlo’s biographers have been puzzled by her frequent operations, and have questioned whether they were really necessary. Orlan’s surgical performances began in 1979 when she was diagnosed as having an ectopic pregnancy necessitating an emergency procedure. By the time the artist was in the operating theatre she had arranged for a video camera to record the event, and for the tapes to be ferried as fast as they were recorded to the arts centre in Lyon, where they were immediately screened in an extraordinary updating of Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital of 1932. Kahlo painted herself in the lithotomy position and bleeding after the event; Orlan had herself portrayed in the stirrups in real time during the event. The difference is no more than one of epoch and available technology. The shock value in the different contexts is the same.
The French artist’s first operation was the precursor of the nine surgical performances that make up La Réincarnation de Sainte Orlan, in which, in much the same spirit as Kahlo exaggerated her unibrow and the dark brown fuzz on her upper lip, Orlan acquired two bumps on her forehead and the chin of the Botticelli Venus. The procedures were all photographed and recorded on video with live commentary by the artist herself, watching completely unmoved as her face was sliced open, turned inside out, scraped and remodelled. In the following days she would pose, immaculately coiffed and made up, for glamour shots of her horribly bruised face. This is very reminiscent of the woman who made a personal appearance at the opening of her one-man show in Mexico City in 1953 in her hospital bed, specially transported to the gallery for the purpose. All Kahlo’s appropriations were stylish; the names she dropped were the names to drop. Just so, when Orlan went under the knife, she had Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake design clothes for her and the surgical staff, and poets and musicians accompanied the procedure. In Orlan’s carnal art, the events portrayed actually happen, while her predecessor insisted that she was not portraying dreams as a Surrealist might, but showing her reality.
To consider Kahlo as a painter only is to confuse one part of the performance for the whole and, moreover, to find her wanting. As a maker of two-dimensional images she is, despite the vast range of motifs she includes, deliberately unsophisticated. She does not want anyone viewing her work to be sidetracked by the paint quality or seduced by the composition. The paintings function as advertisements; they are the hoardings announcing the stages in the performance. The notion of art that Kahlo acquired along with Diego Rivera was fundamentally didactic, as were the Mexican ex-voto paintings which defined the narrative strategies that she would eventually use. The Kahlo icons are arresting without being interesting from a painterly point of view. The shock effect is not derived from the treatment of the objects depicted, or from any drama or energy compressed within the composition, but is felt simply as a consequence of identifying the motifs, as it were, in a diagram. That these are drawn from a vast range of sources, mythological, anthropological, historical, metaphysical, pyschoanalytical and folkloreistical, is only to be expected. To claim that these vast realms are explored when they are simply sampled, is to go too far.
Within the pièce d’identité formula there are not-so-subtle falsifications; no human neck was ever as long as Frida Kahlo in her self-portraits. We know from photographs that her shoulders were narrow and sloping; those in the painted images are usually square and broad. By such unsubtle shifts, while making herself recognisable by the trademark eyebrows and moustache, Kahlo also makes herself monumental. She may have wanted her public to believe that she painted what came into her head ‘without any other consideration’; in fact, she did as every painter does – she produced what she wanted others to see. The formulaic reduction of her face functions in the same way as any icon: as a mnemonic, rendering it memorable. The fixed immobility of the likeness signifies eternity. Revealing though the strategy may seem, it is anything but intimate. The personal, being represented in impersonal, archetypal terms, becomes universal. This is by no means to say that Frida Kahlo was an ordinary person pretending to be extraordinary. Her devotion to this process was extraordinary. The performance was her reality.
其他女性自畫像畫家，她們大多不得不靠為富人繪製肖像來謀生，因此她們的自戀方式截然不同，因為她們需要說服贊助人，自己既能將他們描繪得光彩照人，又能讓人認出她們本人。維熱·勒布倫（Vigée Le Brun）預示了卡羅（Kahlo）的風格，她不僅在畫布上，也在現實生活中扮演自己的角色。為了將她那些身穿緊身胸衣、精心打理髮型的顧客帶入新古典主義的玫瑰色光暈中，她脫掉了自己的緊身胸衣，穿上了高腰白色薄紗長袍（robe en gaulle），這種長袍後來成為英吉利海峽兩岸新古典主義女性的標配。她沒有撲粉，也沒有捲曲自己的棕色頭髮，而是用絲巾纏繞頭部，而不是用珠寶和羽毛裝飾。兩人最大的區別在於，這位法國藝術家為一代人創造了一種風格，而卡羅的風格則只屬於她自己。維熱·勒布倫也刻意美化自己的形象；在她眾多的自畫像中，她的嘴總是畫得非常小，牙齒也比珍珠還小。更重要的是，她筆下的膚色極具誘惑力，這表明她即便麵對最蒼白的贊助人，也能做到同樣的事情。
弗里達·卡羅對描繪他人毫無興趣，只對自己感興趣。她為他人創作的肖像畫都顯得敷衍了事。格爾曼夫婦是她和里維拉作品的重要收藏家。當裡維拉為格爾曼夫人畫像時，他幾乎到了令人啼笑皆非的地步，將她那修長的身軀斜倚在畫布上，從右上角一直延伸到左下角，身著一件緊身的白色晚禮服。而卡羅則畫了一幅滑稽可笑的肖像，畫中一個金髮碧眼、穿著皮草大衣、面無表情、脖子幾乎看不見的女子，顯得有些慌亂。儘管她把自己描繪得令人難忘，卻把格爾曼夫人畫得毫無記憶點。妻子對自己形象的詮釋如此深刻，以至於當裡維拉為她畫像時，只能臨摹一個蒼白的版本。
卡洛生前雖然在紐約和巴黎的時尚圈擁有眾多追隨者，但她最廣為人知的身份是壁畫大師迭戈·裡維拉的異國風情妻子。裡維拉堅信世界正處於社會主義革命的邊緣；事實上，當時正在興起的是個人主義時代。如今看來，裡維拉的社會寫實主義顯得天真，而弗里達的預言卻無比精準。 《宇宙之愛的擁抱，大地（墨西哥）》，迭戈、我和索洛特先生（1949年）這幅畫中，迭戈被描繪成一個皮膚灰白、臃腫的嬰兒，躺在弗里達的膝上，如同聖母瑪利亞懷抱中的基督遺體一般。果不其然，卡羅過世50年後，她已成為名副其實的崇拜對象，既是口紅的代名詞，也是淡紫色女權主義的象徵。這完全是她應得的。
Louise Vigée le Brun
Self-Portrait 1787
Self-Portrait 1787
Other female self-portraitists, most of whom were obliged to earn their living producing portraits of richer people, flattered themselves in a very different way, because they needed to persuade their patrons that they could make them look glamorous and yet recognisable as them-selves. Vigée Le Brun prefigures Kahlo in that she performed the role in which she depicted herself in real life as well as on canvas. Anxious to bring her corsetted and coiffed clientele into the rosy glow of neoclassicism, she removed her own corset and donned the robe en gaulle, the high-waisted white muslin dress that was to become the uniform of the neoclassical female on both sides of the Channel. She wore her own brown hair unpowdered and uncurled, winding scarves about her head instead of decking it with jewels and feathers. The great difference between the two is that the French artist was inventing a style for a generation, whereas Kahlo’s style is reserved unto herself. Vigée Le Brun also falsified aspects of her representation; in her numerous self-portraits she always showed her mouth as tiny, her teeth no bigger than seed pearls. More importantly, the flesh tones are infinitely seductive, a sign that she could do as much for her sallowest patron.
Frida Kahlo was uninterested in portraying anyone but herself. Her portraits of other people are perfunctory. The Gelmans were important collectors of both her and Rivera’s work. When it was Rivera’s turn to paint Mrs Gelman, he permitted himself an almost laughable degree of flattery, draping her impossibly elongated figure in a clinging white evening gown obliquely across the canvas from upper-right corner to lower left. Kahlo produced a kit-cat portrait of a tizzy blonde in a fur coat, blankly full face and virtually neckless. Though she portrayed herself as unforgettable, she made Mrs Gelman entirely forgettable. So powerful was his wife’s version of her own image, that when Rivera painted her he gave himself no option but to reproduce a pallid version of it.
In her lifetime, though she had her following among style gurus in New York and Paris, Kahlo was famous principally as the exotic wife of the heroic muralist Diego Rivera. He believed that the world stood on the brink of socialist revolution; in fact, what was dawning was the age of individualism. Now it is Rivera’s social realism that seems naive, while Frida is right on the money. El Abrazo de Amor del Universo, la Tierra (México), Diego, Yo y el Señor Xolotl 1949 shows Diego as a grey-skinned bloated baby lying in Frida’s lap, like the body of Christ lying in the lap of the Virgin in a votive pietà. Sure enough, 50 years after her death Kahlo is the subject of a veritable cultus, patron saint of both lipstick and lavender feminism. It is no more than she deserved.
沒有留言:
張貼留言