Self-Portrait as a Fountain is the title of a performance made by Bruce Nauman in 1966, which became one of the most famous pieces of conceptual art of the 20th century.According to sources, in this piece Nauman parodies the traditional sculpture which represents the heroic male nude in poses that emphasize this masculinity like a metaphor of the source of knowledge and fertility.
Autorretrato como fuente (Self-portrait as a fountain) is a contrahistorical reinterpretation of the original meaning of that artwork. I show my trans body (performing like Nauman) with the intention of rethinking and ridicule the idea that the masculinity as inherent to the body of cis men. The action is carried out with a fluid of my body that I have been taught to deny, hide or be disgusted: menstruation, fluid that shows my fertility, which is part of me, my cycles, my body and my masculinity.
Likewise, this reinterpret-action serves me as a ritual, symbolically I spit my menstruation (i, like fountain) to the androcentric and Heteropatriarchal art history, that has denied and invisibilized discourses, desires, bodies and sexualities out of his heteronorm.
To the art history written by cis men for cis men where “the great referents of art history and they work” have been forcibly engraved in our retinas by repetition year after year, art book after art book, violence after violence.