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Em 2011,  como curador da instalação da obra Sum of Days (A Soma dos Dias) de Carlito Carvalhosa (1961–2021), tive o privilégio de acompanhar o artista no Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium do MoMA, espaço dedicado a grandes instalações e performances, concebido por Yoshio Taniguchi como parte da extensão do MoMA em 2004.¹

Carlito Carvalhosa faleceu no dia 13 de maio de 2021.

Nascido em São Paulo, Carvalhosa viveu grande parte de sua vida no Rio de Janeiro, onde incorporou o legado radical daquela cidade e das várias gerações de artistas cariocas que o precederam. Conduziu as realizações dos mesmos a um patamar novo e sem precedentes, tanto em termos de conceito, quanto de forma e escala.

Essa afirmação é tanto mais significativa porquanto o peso da radicalidade de algumas das proposições de seus antecessores tornou-se incontornável para a prática artística das gerações seguintes. Tal seria o caso de artistas como Hélio Oiticica ou Lygia Clark, cujas obras tardias, efêmeras e anti-monumentais claramente adentraram territórios que transcendiam as práticas convencionais da arte em direção aos campos do além-arte: a arte terapia ou a prática social, o quasi-cinema e a anti-arte.

Por volta de 1980, jovens artistas brasileiros se viram empenhados em abarcar esse vasto legado enquanto inventavam maneiras de manter vivas suas próprias práticas: tiveram que recebê-lo como lição de humildade ao mesmo tempo em que se viam obrigados à necessidade de abrir novos caminhos através de suas próprias obras; tiveram que aceitar a herança de seus antecessores ao mesmo tempo em que reinscreviam suas próprias práticas nas possibilidades históricas das artes visuais.

É apenas a partir desta perspectiva que se percebe que a abundância de pintura produzida no Brasil em meados da década de 1980, por exemplo, foi certamente muito mais significativa do que a de um mero modismo de retorno à pintura.² A Teoria do Não-Objeto do Neoconcretismo, o Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade de Oiticica, A Fantasmática do Corpo de Clark, e a performance Corpobra de Antonio Manuel³ foram marcos da novidade estética e experiências de exaustão da arte, tanto histórica quanto formalmente, que precederam manifestações como a estética relacional e arte performática pós-subjetiva. A equação a ser resolvida provavelmente compreendia o destino de uma nova vida após a morte da pintura (e da arte), após a invenção de tipologias como as do Parangolé (Oiticica), da Obra mole (Clark), ou do Objeto ativo (Willys de Castro)?

Todo o repertório de Carlito Carvalhosa responde a este desafio histórico, desde o início de sua carreira como pintor, imerso nas fontes escuras do informe, até as suas impressionantes instalações performáticas em tecido, neon, madeira, cera, espelhos e som.

Ocorreu-me, portanto, durante a instalação de Sum of Days no MoMA em 2011, que a obra de Carlito proporcionava uma ampliação sem precedentes da categoria encabeçada por Lygia Clark como Obra mole.

O uso da borracha maleável que posicionava, literalmente, as esculturas sobre os braços e o corpo do público, não foi para Clark apenas um modo de questionar a certeza sólida da escultura: foi também uma continuidade natural da sua busca por uma forma espacial que não seria determinada por noções tais quais interior e exterior, centro e periferia, topo e base, etc. Ao longo de sua jornada em busca dessa forma de uma escultura permanentemente fluida, o que importava era a ideia e a experiência da emergência.

Ao considerar os trabalhos “moles” e performáticos de Oiticica conhecidos como Parangolés, Irene Small escreve que eles também condensam “a capacidade de mudança da estrutura material do organismo, resultando em um corpo composto de um fluxo contínuo, sem forma estável. Tal corpo não pode mais ser avaliado em um único estado ideal. Em vez disso, o Parangolé incorpora em sua própria forma a emergência.”⁴

Pode-se facilmente aplicar tal descrição à Sum of Days de Carvalhosa: um imenso Parangolé arquitetônico e cênico que define para o próprio espaço uma dimensão performática. Meio termo entre um impressionante Parangolé e uma gigantesca Obra mole, a instalação de Carvalhosa consistia em labirinto de tecido branco em espiral, suspenso do teto do átrio do MoMA, iluminado por linhas verticais de neon fixadas às paredes, preenchendo de forma radiante o abismo daquele buraco arquitetonico. A partir do repertório teórico de Clark, pode-se acrescentar a essa descrição a noção de vazio/pleno potencializada por Carvalhosa, a ponto de materializar uma fragilidade monumental corporificando o espaço que habitamos.

Mas Sum of Days não foi apenas um feito imponente que trouxe a maleabilidade da escultura e o vazio do pleno a patamares inéditos. Foi, ainda. uma experiência sonora imensamente complexa e sutil, a qual implicou a participação do amigo de Carvalhosa Phillip Glass (e seu Ensemble), cujas apresentações programadas dentro do labirinto impecável da obra foram sistematicamente gravadas, bem como os ruídos e vozes do público gerados enquanto habitava-se a estrutura.

Nesse sentido, Carvalhosa concebeu um sofisticado sistema de gravação com cabos e microfones igualmente suspensos do teto e fixados às paredes circundantes, desenhando melancolicamente suas linhas como enigmáticas presenças gráficas sobre a brancura do espaço. Durante a exposição, essas gravações de sons e ruídos — som de música e música de sons — foram reproduzidas dentro da obra, criando uma camada constante e frondosa de ilegíveis densidades de presença sonora.

A obra funcionava como uma tautologia física: havia de fato uma soma de dias que emergia gradativamente por meio de uma temporalidade acumulativa, um tempo que não era mais sequência, que era tornado presente como uma massa na estranha suavidade da estratificação sonora, ocupando tanto de forma imaterial quanto invisível a espiral de cortinas brancas que caíam em cascata do teto do átrio.

Há que se considerar este feito excepcional: Sum of Days de Carlito Carvalhosa é uma instalação – escultural, arquitetônica, sonora e performativa – capaz de transformar, traduzir e transfigurar a sequencialidade do tempo em simultaneidade espacial. Enquanto tal, a distinção secular e binária entre as formas de arte espaciais e simultâneas e as artes sequenciais do tempo estabelecidas por Lessing em seu Laocoonte⁵ e renovada por Greenberg em seu Novo Laocoonte⁶, passa a ser inteiramente desativada, desmontada, desconstruída e, finalmente, neutralizada em nossa experiência de Sum of Days.

A noção de desoeuvrement de Alexandre Kojève, ou mesmo o katergeín⁷ de São Paulo são termos mais adequados para essa conquista pois, ao impulsionar a um novo nível as consequências de categorias brasileiras radicais como Parangolé ou Obra mole, a obra-prima de Carlito Carvalhosa sinalizou a superação de um regulamento formal que dominou durante séculos as artes visuais ocidentais: Sum of Days é uma imensa forma fluida, porosa e frágil que contém seu espaço em vez de ser contida por ele, uma escultura de som que se materializa enquanto emergência, uma escultura do tempo. Consequentemente, a desativação das polaridades sequenciais e espaciais da arte implícita em Sum of Days possibilita uma conquista histórica almejada por artistas e filósofos, poetas e fabuladores desde as idades mais remotas e inimagináveis​ ​​da arte: a temporalidade se moldando enquanto espaço, o espaço emergindo enquanto tempo elíptico, retornando, surgindo.

A literal suspensão e a ocupação por meio de esculturas e de instalações; as densidades materiais opacas e as superfícies (também literalmente) reflexivas constituíam os simples preceitos de uma obra que se desdobrou a partir da incessante prática artística de Carlito Carvalhosa, a qual tomou forma através de pinturas tridimensionais e inúmeras realizações escultóricas ao longo de 40 anos, desde o início dos anos 1980 até sua intempestiva morte. Tive a sorte de tê-lo conhecido, de ter continuado minhas trocas com ele até seus últimos dias na terra.

Ao lamentar seu falecimento, fiquei pensando na vasta história dos panos drapeados na arte; das antigas e gloriosas vitórias aladas; de ninfas pagãs errantes envoltas em seus hábitos, transformadas pelo vento; dos ritmos dionisíacos do samba no alto dos morros cariocas que arrebatam o êxtase dos Parangolés dançantes.

A transfiguração incessante e a deriva das formas se situam entre as questões inesgotáveis ​​da história da arte. No entanto, elas recaem apenas a alguns poucos tocados pelo duende ou erguidos pelo angel – como diria Lorca – para encarnar a plenitude de sua potencialidade. Carlito Carvalhosa foi um destes e sua obra ultrapassará uma vez e sempre seu falecimento, lançando sobre nós a iluminação inacabada de seu dromenon.

Todas as imagens são vistas da instalação da exposição Carlito Carvalhosa: Sum of Days, salvo indicação em contrário.

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This article is available in English.

Este artigo está disponível em portugues.

En 2011 tuve el privilegio de acompañar a Carlito Carvalhosa (1961–2021) como curador para la instalación de su obra Sum of Days (La suma de los días), en el Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Family Atrium del Museum of Modern Art,¹ un espacio destinado a grandes instalaciones y obras performativas, concebido por el arquitecto Yoshio Taniguchi como parte de la renovación de la sede del MoMA en 2004.

Carlito Carvalhosa falleció a los 59 años, el 13 de mayo de 2021.

Había nacido en São Paulo, pero la mayor parte de su vida y obra tuvo lugar en Rio de Janeiro, desde donde supo interpretar el legado radical de varias generaciones de artistas que lo precedieron en esa ciudad, llevando sus logros artísticos a dimensiones sin precedentes en términos de concepto, forma y escala.

Esta afirmación es tanto más significativa cuanto que la radicalidad de algunas de las proposiciones de sus predecesores proyectó sobre las generaciones que los siguieron una sombra que se tradujo, a menudo, por el sentimiento de haber alcanzado la práctica artística una calle ciega. Tal fue el caso de artistas como Hélio Oiticica o Lygia Clark, cuyos últimos trabajos, efímeros y antimonumentales, marcaron con claridad territorios que trascendían los límites convencionales del arte, señalando campos inéditos de lo más-allá-del-arte: arteterapia o prácticas sociales, quasi-cinema o antiarte.

Hacia 1980, pues, para muchos jóvenes artistas que hacían obra en el Brasil, el desafío consistió en abrazar este legado agotador a la vez que en inventar nuevos caminos que les permitieran mantener sus prácticas artísticas con vida: debían entonces darle la bienvenida como una lección de modestia y, al mismo tiempo, confrontarse a la necesidad de abrir nuevas sendas para sus obras: aceptar el legado de sus predecesores mientras reinscribían sus propias creaciones dentro de las convenciones históricas de las artes visuales.

Solo desde esta perspectiva puede comprenderse, por ejemplo, que la abundancia de pintura que emergió en el Brasil hacia mediados de los años 1980 fuera mucho más, y ciertamente más significativa, que una simple moda de retorno a la pintura.² La Teoría del no objeto neoconcreta, el Esquema general para una nueva objetividad de Oiticica, la Fantasmática del cuerpo de Lygia Clark o la Obracorpo de Antonio Manuel³ significaron hitos de novedad estética tanto como experiencias de agotamiento del arte, histórica y formalmente, que anticiparon manifestaciones del siglo XXI tales como la estética relacional o el arte político performativo postsubjetivo. La ecuación a resolver era, pues, para los artistas emergentes de entonces, la siguiente: ¿cómo concebir una vida póstuma para la pintura (y, en general, para el arte) después de tipologías tales como el Parangolé de Oiticica, la Obra mole (obra blanda) de Clark o el Objeto activo de Willys de Castro?

La obra entera de Carlito Carvalhosa parece responder, supremamente, a este desafío histórico, desde sus comienzos como pintor que bebía en las oscuras fuentes del materismo informe hasta sus impresionantes instalaciones performativas con cortinajes, neón, maderas, cera, espejos y sonido.

Es así como, mientras instalábamos en el MoMA Sum of Days, en 2011, vino a mí la certeza de que la obra de Carlito implicaba una intensificación sin precedentes de aquella categoría formal inventada por Lygia Clark, la Obra mole.

No solo había sido para Clark esta invención formal una manera de cuestionar la solidez escultural, utilizando materiales como el caucho y colocando, literalmente, la escultura en los brazos y sobre el cuerpo de los espectadores: había sido también la continuidad natural de su búsqueda de una forma espacial que no estuviese determinada por nociones tales como interior y exterior, centro y periferia, alto y base, etc. En esta aventura por buscar una forma enteramente fluida de escultura, importaba sobremanera la experiencia de lo que emerge, la idea de emergencia.

Irene Small ha escrito, por su parte, al considerar las obras blandas y performativas que son los Parangolés de Hélio Oiticica, que ellos condensan “la capacidad del organismo para cambiar dentro de su estructura material, resultando en un cuerpo heteróclito en estado continuo de flujo sin configuración estable. Tal cuerpo no puede más ser aprehendido en un simple estado ideal. Al contrario, el Parangolé encarnala forma misma de la emergencia”.⁴

Podemos aplicar tal descripción, sin inconvenientes, a Sum of Days de Carvalhosa como un inmenso, escénico Parangolé arquitectónico que inaugura una dimensión performativa para el espacio mismo. Entre Parangolé abrumador y gigantesca Obra mole, la instalación de Carvalhosa consistía en un laberinto de espirales hecho con tejidos blancos que pendían del techo del atrio del MoMA, iluminado por líneas verticales de neón adosadas a las paredes, colmando en resplandor el abismo de ese hueco arquitectónico. Podríamos añadir a esta descripción la noción también troquelada por Clark de vacío/lleno, en cuanto que la obra de Carvalhosa la potenciaba hasta el extremo, materializándola como fragilidad monumental capaz de encarnar el espacio que también ocupábamos.

Pero Sum of Days no agota su significado al llevar la blandura de la escultura a dimensiones desconocidas o al encarnar en la escala monumental de la arquitectura la experiencia del vacío/lleno. Se trataba también de una experiencia sónica, inmensamente compleja y sutil, que implicó la participación de Philip Glass, amigo del artista, y de su Ensemble, cuyas performances dentro del impecable laberinto de la obra fueron grabadas sistemáticamente, junto con los ruidos y voces del público que visitaba la instalación.

Para ello Carvalhosa concibió un sofisticado sistema de grabación que incluía largos cables con sus micrófonos que colgaban del techo, marcando con su presencia líneas verticales en las paredes circundantes que dibujaban, melancólicamente, su enigmática presencia gráfica contra la blancura del espacio. A lo largo de la duración de la muestra, estos sonidos y ruidos grabados —sonidos de música, música de sonidos— eran reproducidos hacia el interior de la obra, generando el efecto de una constante, creciente frondosidad de ilegibles y obsesivas densidades de presencia sónica.

La obra funcionaba entonces como una tautología física: era, de hecho, la suma de los días que emergía, gradualmente, a través de una temporalidad acumulativa, como una manifestación de un tiempo que ya no era más secuencial sino masivo, en su hacerse presente, en la sutil aspereza, extraña, de sus sedimentos sónicos, ocupando de forma tan inmaterial como invisible la blanca espiral de cortinajes que caían en cascadas desde el techo del atrio. Debemos considerar este logro excepcional: Sum of Days de Carlito Carvalhosa es una instalación —a la vez escultórica y arquitectónica, sónica y performativa— capaz de transformar —de traducir, de transfigurar— la dimensión secuencial del tiempo en simultaneidad espacial. Con ello la distinción secular y binaria entre artes del espacio con sus formas simultáneas y artes del tiempo con sus estructuras sucesivas, tal como fue establecida por Lessing en su Laocoonte,⁵ y luego reinventada por Greenberg en su “Nuevo Laocoonte”,⁶ resulta enteramente desactivada, desmantelada, deconstruida y ultimadamente neutralizada en Sum of Days.

La noción de désœuvrement propuesta por Alexandre Kojève, o incluso el concepto teológico paulino de katergeín,⁷ son quizás términos más aptos para calificar esta hazaña estética porque, al propulsar hacia nuevas alturas las consecuencias de las categorías radicales del arte brasilero, tales como Parangolé u Obra mole, esta obra hito de Carvalhosa señalaba la superación de una regulación formal que había dominado por siglos sobre el arte occidental: Sum of Days es una forma enorme y fluida, porosa y frágil que contiene su espacio en lugar de ser contenida por él, una escultura de sonidos que se materializa como emergencia, una escultura de tiempo. En consecuencia, la desactivación de las polaridades secuenciales y espaciales implicada por Sum of Days hace posible una victoria buscada sin cesar por artistas y filósofos, fabuladores y poetas desde el otrora inimaginable del arte: una temporalidad que se conformaría como espacio, un espacio emergiendo como tiempo, elíptico, sobreviviente, surgente.

La suspensión (literalmente) y la ocupación a través de esculturas e instalaciones; las densidades materiales opacas y las superficies reflejantes (también literalmente) en sus obras bidimensionales fueron las claves del trabajo de Carlito Carvalhosa; gracias a ellas pudo declinarse en su incansable práctica artística un brillante cuerpo de obra hecho de pinturas tridimensionales y de incontables esculturas e instalaciones, durante 40 años, desde los tempranos 1980 hasta su muerte prematura. Yo tuve la suerte de conocerlo, de mantener un intercambio de ideas con él hasta los últimos días.

Haciendo duelo por su ausencia, entonces, no ceso de pensar en la vasta historia de los cortinados; en antiguas, gloriosas victorias aladas; en las ninfas paganas errantes, envueltas en sus vestidos henchidos de viento; en los ritmos dionisíacos de la samba que en las alturas de los morros de Río embelesa la danza de los Parangolés.

Transfiguración incesante y deriva de las formas son la materia inagotable de la historia del arte. Pero solo algunos pocos, tocados por el duende o elevados por el ángel —como diría Lorca— son capaces de encarnar la totalidad de sus potencias. Carlito Carvalhosa fue uno de ellos, y su obra trasciende su muerte, proyectando sobre nosotros, una y otra vez, la inacabada iluminación de su dromenon.

Todas las imágenes son vistas de la instalación de la exposición Carlito Carvalhosa: Sum of Days, a menos que se indique lo contrario.

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In 2011, in my role as curator, I had the privilege of assisting Carlito Carvalhosa (1961–2021) with the installation of his work Sum of Days in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Family Atrium of The Museum of Modern Art,¹ a space devoted to large installations and performances that was conceived by Yoshio Taniguchi as part of the extension of MoMA in 2004.

Carlito Carvalhosa passed away on May 13, 2021.

Born in São Paulo, Carvalhosa lived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro, where he embraced the radical legacy of several generations of artists from Rio who preceded him. He brought their achievements to new, unprecedented dimensions in terms of concept, form, and scale.

This assertion is all the more significant since the radical weight of some of those predecessors’ propositions was carried by the generations that followed them as a conclusive “no way out” in terms of art practice. Such is the case of artists like Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, whose late works, ephemeral and anti-monumental, clearly stepped on territories that transcended the conventional frames of art, toward the extended fields of the beyond-art: therapy or social practice, quasi-cinema and anti-art.

By 1980, young artists working in Brazil therefore had to embrace this exhausting legacy while inventing ways to keep their own practices alive: they had to welcome it as a humbling lesson, and at the same time, were confronted by the necessity of forging new paths of their own; they had to accept the legacy of their predecessors while re-inscribing their own practices back into the historical conventions of visual art.

Only from this perspective can one grasp that, for instance, the abundance of painting surfacing in Brazil by the mid-1980s was much more than, and certainly more significant than, simply another purely fashionable return to painting.²

Neo-Concretism’s Theory of the Nonobject, Oiticica’s General Scheme of the New Objectivity, Clark’s Phantasmatic of the Body, and Antonio Manuel’s Body/Work³ were milestones of aesthetic newness as well as experiences of art exhaustion, historically and formally, predating manifestations such as relational aesthetics and post-subjective performative art. The equation to solve was, likely, what the afterlife of painting (and of art for that matter) could be following the invention of typologies such as Parangolé (Oiticica), Obra mole (Soft Work) (Clark), or Objeto ativo (Active Object) (Willys de Castro).

The entire repertoire of Carlito Carvalhosa’s oeuvre responded to this historical challenge, from his inception as a painter embedded in the dark sources of the formless to his striking performative installations using fabric, neon, wood, wax, mirrors, and sound.

It therefore occurred to me, while we were installing Sum of Days at MoMA in 2011, that Carlito’s work implied an unprecedented amplification of the category tokened by Lygia Clark as Obra mole.

This was not only, for Clark, a way to question the solid certainty of sculpture by using malleable rubber and by posing, literally, sculptures on the arms and over the body of the beholder, it was also a natural continuity of her quest for a spatial form that would not be determined by notions such as inner and outer, center and periphery, top and base, etc. In her journey looking for this permanently fluid form of sculpture, what mattered was the idea, and the experience, of emergence.

Irene Small has written, while considering Oiticica’s “soft” and performative works known as Parangolés, that they condense “the organism’s capacity for change into its material structure, resulting in a composite body in continuous flux but with no stable shape. Such a body can no longer be assessed in a single ideal state. Rather, the Parangolé embodies emergence in its very form.”⁴

One can easily apply such a description to Carvalhosa’s Sum of Days, an immense, architectural, scenic Parangolé that set a performative dimension for space itself. Between an overwhelming Parangolé and a gigantic Obra mole, Carvalhosa’s installation consisted of a spiral-shaped labyrinth made of white fabric hanging from the ceiling of MoMA’s atrium, lighted by vertical lines of neon attached to the walls, radiantly filling the abyss of that architectural hole. One might bring to this description, also from Clark’s theoretical repertoire, the notion of empty/fullness as being potentiated by Carvalhosa to a point that it materializes a monumental fragility embodying the space we inhabit.

But Sum of Days was not only a towering feature bringing sculpture’s softness and the void of the full to a not-yet-seen milestone, it was also a sonic experience, an immensely complex and subtle one, implying the participation of Carvalhosa’s friend Philip Glass and his ensemble, whose scheduled performances inside the impeccable labyrinth of the work were systematically recorded, as were the audience’s noises and voices made while inhabiting the structure.

For that matter, Carvalhosa conceived a sophisticated recording system with elongated cords and microphones also hanging from the ceiling and attached to the surrounding walls, melancholically drawing against the whiteness of the space their lines as enigmatic graphic presences. Throughout the duration of the show, these recordings of sound and noise—sounds of music and music of sounds—were played back into the work, producing a constant, lofty layering of illegible and haunting densities of sonic presence.

The work functioned like a physical tautology: there was indeed the sum of days emerging, incrementally, through an accumulative temporality, a time that was not sequential anymore but made present as a mass, in the uncanny slickness of sound layering, occupying as seemingly immaterial as it was invisible the spiral of white draperies cascading from the atrium’s ceiling.

One has to consider this exceptional feat: Carlito Carvalhosa’s Sum of Days is an installation—sculptural, architectural, sonic and performative—that is capable of transforming—translating, transfiguring—the sequentially driven course of time into a spatial simultaneity. As such, the secular and binary distinction between spatial, simultaneous forms of art and sequential arts of time, established by Lessing in his Laocoon,⁵ and revamped by Greenberg in his “Newer Laocoon,”⁶ happens to be entirely deactivated, dismantled, deconstructed, and ultimately neutralized in our experience of Sum of Days.

Alexandre Kojève’s notion of désoeuvrement, or even Saint Paul’s katergeín,⁷ are rather more adept terms for this achievement because, by propelling to a new level the consequences of radical Brazilian categories such as Parangolé or Obra mole, Carlito Carvalhosa’s masterwork signaled the overcoming of a formal regulation that had dominated Western visual arts for centuries. Sum of Days is an enormous, fluid, porous, and fragile form that contains its space rather than being contained by it, a sculpture of sound that materializes as emergence, a sculpture of time. Consequently, the deactivation of sequential and spatial art polarities implied by Sum of Days makes possible a landmark achievement sought by artists and philosophers, poets and fablers, since unimaginable bygone days of art: temporality shaping itself as space, space emerging as time, elliptical, returning, surging.

Suspension (literally) and occupation through sculptures and installations, opaque material densities and reflexing surfaces (also literally), were the simple keys of a work that unfolded from Carlito Carvalhosa’s restless artistic practice—in the form of three-dimensional paintings and countless sculptural achievements—for forty years, since the early 1980s until his untimely death. I was lucky enough to have known him, to have continued my exchanges with him up to his last days on Earth.

Mourning his passing, I keep thinking of the vast history of draperies; of ancient, glorious winged victories; of wandering pagan Nymphs wrapped in their habits and morphed by the wind; of Dionysian rhythms of samba in the heights of Rio’s hills that break in rapture among dancing Parangolés.

Ceaseless transfiguration and dérive of forms are the endless matters of art history. But it only falls on few, touched by the duende or lifted by the angel—as Lorca would say—to embody the fullness of their potentiality. Carlito Carvalhosa was one of them and his work will overcome his passing, time and again, casting on us the unfinished enlightenment of its dromenon.

All images are installation views of the exhibition Carlito Carvalhosa: Sum of Days unless otherwise noted.

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It was suggested that I address today a topic that I have recently brought to the attention of my colleagues within C-MAP and at other meetings here at the Museum. This topic has to do with the notion of incommensurability within the radical diversity of objects that we have to deal with in art history—and therefore, and most notably, in our museum practices. By incommensurability, by incommensurable objects, I mean objects for which we might not find a common measure for regulating their significance or meaning, and therefore objects that cannot occupy a fitting location within the conventional geometry of museum representation: objects that have something fundamentally disproportional about them. I believe that the very matter of our discipline—either art history or art criticism or art curatorship—is this array of fundamentally disproportional objects, this variety of material objects and the embodied gestures and ideas that constantly resist being reduced to a common form of proportional representation.

It was also suggested that I address here what seems to be a case study for this problem, which was the exhibition of works by Tarsila do Amaral at MoMA in 2018.

In order to do that, I would like to begin this short talk with this image. A friend who lives in Holland recently sent it to me. We all recognize “Mondrian,” or his “trace,” in the pattern that serves here to ornament an electrical power source, a kind of kiosk, in the urban fabric of the Dutch city of Leyden. I was told that the phrase inscribed on the roof of this small building reads as follows: “Present hides itself behind.” Behind this kiosk? Behind Mondrian? Behind what is left of Mondrian after his legacy became ornament, popular painting, urban device?

We could juxtapose that image to this one. You might have already recognized on the body of this race car the very image of Tarsila do Amaral’s emblematic painting titled Abaporu.

This painting, conceived in 1928, bears a title composed from two Tupi words (Aba/Poru) meaning the man who eats men, the human who digests humans, the cannibal.

We know that Tarsila embodied through her works from the 1920s the Brazilian anthropophagic project of modernity, the idea that by evoking the mythical presence of anthropophagic rituals in pre-Westernized Brazil, modern Brazilians could produce the imagination of a future through the symbolic digestion and cultural metabolizing of the Other. The juxtaposition of Mondrian and Tarsila could well constitute a case study for the topic of “incommensurable” objects: nothing seems to relate one to the other, there is no standard of classification or single common significant criteria that can smooth out the friction that these works produce as soon as we look at them together.

Mondrian embodies a modernity that is totally commensurable with the main narratives of modernism that MoMA has produced since the 1930s. One cannot argue the same about Tarsila, I think. This simply means, for the economy of our museographical narratives, that Mondrian and Tarsila, while being strict contemporaries, are not commensurable unities—in other words: the modernisms that both of them represent cannot be reduced to a common measure, nor can they occupy a proportional place, a proportional dimension, within the same regulated imaginative space of representation—this “Euclidian” image of art history that seems to still regulate our museological hierarchies. They are truly disproportionate, to say the least.

And yet, Abaporu seems to proclaim its belonging to a clear genealogy within the very European modernism within which Mondrian occupies a proportionate commanding place vis-à-vis, for example, Manet. Moreover, Abaporu can be seen as one of the innumerable iterations of the naked bather that Manet conceived in 1863 as Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) and that has become a seminal reference for that European modernism in which Mondrian is a paramount hero.

I would, however, argue that Abaporu, as an iteration of Manet, can only be read as a trace, not a quotation, as a mnemonic, relational trace that has emerged as a deformation. Abaporu, the cannibal, has digested Manet’s naked Modern Nymph to the extent that she has become its melancholic, monstrous trace; alone in a desert signified by a monumental phallic cactus, without célibataires surrounding her, she is, ultimately, a sexually undifferentiated figure.

As much as the link between them is improbable, Tarsila and Manet are also antithetically connected: in order to understand Abaporu as a nachleben (a survival) of Manet’s bather, one does acknowledge their antithetical relationship, where difference rather than similitude seems to be the driving force.

Is this just—maybe—an example of “continuous deformation,” as it is called in topology? As such, Abaporu would simply be a case of homeomorphism vis-à-vis Manet’s Nymph.

Well, I do think that our field will enjoy being addressed in topological terms: art history is a field of constant, continuous deformations and, therefore, the museum —insofar as it deals with the plurality of narratives that constitute art history, and therefore with countless cases of disproportionality, countless disproportionate objects—is a place where notions of homotopy, heterotopy, isomorphism, homeomorphism, connectedness, convergence, continuity, and discontinuity are key visible facts that need to be addressed as such, and rethought time and again.

If art history is a system subjected to the action of multiple, undetermined variables, it simply means for us that it cannot be reduced to, neither reflected nor represented by, a single narrative.

Between Manet’s Modern Nymph and Abaporu there is—I would say—a cannibal discontinuity. “Present hides itself behind” means, in this case, that way far before Manet conceived his painting, something happened that belatedly could effect its legacy, or its reception, through a degree of erratic transformation, rather through imposing a rule of continuous deformation.

However, one cannot exclude the possibility of a common ground for Tarsila and Mondrian: although they seem to be incommensurable, they are contemporaries; they are, for large communities in the very same world, similar tokens of modernity.

I want to stress the moral, political dimension of this issue: if modernity matters to human communities, Tarsila and Mondrian might share, in spite of their visible incongruence, some sort of commensurability through the function that their respective legacies embody for large communities living in the same world at the same time.

In the end, the question is does this matter for us here at the Museum?

I have argued that it is helpful, even necessary, to think about these questions: How do we deal with incommensurables in the Museum? How do we manage, in the visualization of our narratives, the many frictions that constitute those very narratives? How do we show Tarsila and Mondrian together?

At any rate, we can’t think that this kind of friction is something specifically related to modernism, or even something new, with no historical precedent, even within the most canonical form of art history.

These two absolutely disproportionate, incongruent, objects were conceived within ten years of each other in the same sixteenth European century, but we have yet to come to terms, it seems, with the common historical ground between them, between the Northern Renaissance and the Italian Renaissance.

But it seems that the Humanist ideal of convenevolezza, or absolute stylistic proportionality between all the elements that constitute a formal unity, still works through our very own imagination of the museum, at least in this museum.

Messy is no popular word here: No Breughel and Michelangelo together in spite of the infinitesimal gap of ten years that separates them, no Tarsila and Mondrian alongside each other, even if both were painted the same day of the same month in 1928.

It is clear that the very same ideology of commensurability constitutes the epistemological ground for an imagination of art history as a space inhabited by objects forming a composition paced through their measured, regulated dimensions: a machine of proportional hierarchies.

I/We have news for you, and it is not recent: Art History—and the Museum—as a Euclidian space is over. Wikipedia: “One of the basic tenets of Euclidean geometry is that two figures (usually considered as subsets) of the plane should be considered equivalent (congruent) if one can be transformed into the other by some sequence of translations, rotations and reflections.”¹

This is precisely what is impossible between Mondrian and Tarsila, or between de Chirico and Mondrian for that matter: none of them can be transformed into the other because there is no sequence of translations, rotations, or reflections; no rule of deformation; no key of proportion that can activate such a transformation.

But we all know that this is not just a formal problem, this is also, and more importantly, a political problem.

My colleagues here at MoMA know that I am literally obsessed with this issue, that I believe that we also need to think of our practice in topological terms: through a reasoning of works of art that excludes the hypothesis (and the facility) of their commensurability.² Or, more structurally, as semantic unities—because I claim that works of art are semantic unities that can only activate their agency of significance through their differences, rather than through their similitude.

We don’t have the time to delve here into such a complex set of problems. But as I constantly refer to Jean-François Lyotard’s assertion in Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, which among other references, truly sparked my thinking on these issues, I’d like to read that quote in its entirety here:

“But the discovery of incongruence and incommensurabilities, if one brings it back from the space of the geometrist to that of the citizen, obliges us to reconsider the most unconscious axioms of political thought and practice. If the citizens are not indiscernible, if they are, for instance, both symmetrical in relation to a point (the center, which is the law) and nevertheless non-super imposable on one another (as we know is the case for the owners or bureaucrats of capital and the sellers of labor power, as we know is the case for men and women, for whites and “colored people,” for urbanites and provincials, for young people and adults), then your representation of political space is very embarrassed. And if you haven’t despaired of your life on the pretext that all justice was lost when commensurability was lost, if you haven’t gone running to hide your ignoble distress beneath the authority of a great signifier capable of restoring this geometry, if on the contrary you think, like Yours Truly, that it’s the right moment to render this geometry totally invalid, to hasten its decay and to invent a topological justice, well then, you’ve already understood what a Philistine could be doing searching among the little notes and improvisations of Duchamp: materials, tools, and weapons for politics of incommensurables.”³

Recently here at MoMA, and for reasons that are not totally unrelated to these arguments, in response to a political urgency, curators acted politically through some unexpected, incongruent, insertions into our most revered art historical galleries.⁴ These insertions are examples of a narrative of incommensurables. Regardless of their eventful, political nature, or maybe precisely because of it, these insertions activate a logic of incommensurability in which our most commensurable, stylistically controlled, museographical narratives are displayed: precisely where MoMA looks its best in terms of hygienic, humanistconvenevolezza. Maybe this is a path worth pursuing, among others, if, beyond its political agency and significance we, were to actively think on the complex issues implied by a topological understanding of a world of art where “commensurability is lost” and therefore its “representation is embarrassed,” its constituents being “non-super imposable on one another.”

Every one of these insertions produces a break, a cut—a coupure in the language of Duchamp and, therefore, also in that of Poincaré, the mathematician from whom Duchamp borrowed the term. Every one of these “breaks,” as with Mondrian and Tarsila, has the power of disturbing chronology. And disturbing chronology might be the most effective tool in imagining a different form of art historical topological “justice.”

Reflecting on Duchamp, Lyotard brings this beautiful expression on the function of “breaks”: “an autonomous temporal kernel, as the instance of a potency that gives room to a different temporality.”⁵He interprets Duchamp’s logic as a “desire to dischronograph time”: Dischronographing duration—I would say through the production of autochronies rather than simultaneities or successions, through relations of dischrony that can spark, each of them, a new “story.”

I do think that you/we have here a program worth trying.

The post Toward a Museum of Incommensurables appeared first on post.

In addition to the essay by Pérez-Oramas, you can access installation views and the press release through MoMA’s online exhibition history archive here.

Invoking another archaeology of the arts, the line in Caminhando neutralizes an old operational dialectic that seems to have regulated the aesthetic imaginary of the West at least since the Renaissance. This dialectic—or this opposition, this binary tension—appears in Leonardo’s comparison of painting and sculpture: painting, he says, works via di pore (by placing), adding material to material, putting paint where it was not before, while sculpture works via di levare (by removing), subtracting material from material, cutting stone out of the block to find the form hidden within.¹ This distinction might seem to have been outdated by the novelty and hybridity of modern art, but we arguably see a modern via de levare in the aesthetic argument that marked an end of modernism proper in the 1960s, the same period in which Clark abandoned art in her work: the shift from authorship to spectatorship, and the replacement of physical material by informational material, that is, the well-known idea that so-called conceptual art involved a dematerialization of the art object. Leonardo’s distinction, then, continued to bear on the imaginary, even half a millennium after he articulated it.

It would be reasonable to think that Clark’s pictorial maneuver in discovering the organic line responded conceptually to the matrices of sculpture, to the via di levare—that in order to produce this incision, this line that is a space, she took material from material, or at least avoided material and exposed it through its absence. Yet the Superfícies moduladas, Espaços modulados, and Planos em superfícies moduladas and more particularly the studies for those works from 1957 to 1959, which display the enormous repertory of her organic line, indicate a material and operative persistence of the via di porre: an adding of plane to plane, a filtering of strata from surfaces to emphasize their quality of agglomeration, a displacement of juxtaposed fields of color to bring out their density. These works involve less the removal of some of the support than its elevation, plane by plane, modulation by modulation. The work is built up like a structure until there emerges a functional line of division, a limit-line, a minus-line, a line that is a space.

We might suppose—were it not a near-meaningless statement of the obvious—thatCaminhando, like its direct consequence in Clark’s work, O dentro é o for a, is a sculpture, and that all her later objects through Livro-obra (Book-work) of 1984 are also sculptures, were it not for the fact that they only exist relationally and as they are activated. Rather than sculptures, they are really bodies or things. Similarly, everything would seem to indicate that materially and operatively, the action that produced Caminhando responded to the logic of the via di levare, that is, to the matrix of sculpture within humanist thought (if it weren’t for Pliny’s story of Butades, as we will see). Yet the result, the effect, the remainder or residue ofCaminhando is additive, a prodigious accumulation and multiplication of the material diversity embedded in the unity of the plane, which for Clark was “the thickness of space.”² From this density, and without either subtracting from or adding to it in the least, Caminhando produces a mass of paper lines, which grow thinner and thinner until the paper’s own material presence becomes infra-light. Conceptually if not physically, this operation corresponds to the via di porre, to the archaeological matrix of painting.

This complex system of oppositions seems key to understanding the legacy of Clark’s work, and beyond that its origin. Caminhando neutralizes the tension between the via di levare and the via di porre that has been foundational to the Western visual imaginary; it ends a formal dialectic that has regulated visual production, and does so without either emphasizing or stigmatizing its material, without turning to the sophism of the “dematerialization of the artwork.” It neither subtracts from nor adds to the material of the world, and paradoxically, prodigiously, it produces a new being, a new instance of form, a continuous generated form that lacks form, not an addition but a pure accumulation and remainder, a multiplied indivisible line that lives in the potential of the unitary and the dense, without suffering the drama of fracture or the abyss of separation.

The light that Clark’s work projects onto the obscure prehistory of painting—onto its archē—is thus tremendous. Caminhando shows us why Pliny’s crucial text locates the origins of painting in the delay, difference, and deferral (simultaneously narrative and conceptual) that appear in a story of modeling, an act of via di porre—the potter Butades’s use of formless clay to cover an infra-light figure, a line describing the shadow of a body withdrawing, his daughter’s lover moving into the distance. This origin myth of painting as subject to metamorphosis and alteration hides a moral and existential question, one that modern readers of Pliny tend to forget: it is ultimately because of the imminence of a separation, an absence, a loss, that painting is “invented,” when the line of the contour of the shadow of the face of a girl’s lover is traced an instant before the two part. It is the imminence of the lover’s absence, as much as his isolate presence, that creates the possibility of this infra-light shadow, this infra-thin corporeal exhalation, and with it the desire for the line that encloses it, as if embracing it, as if caressing it, as if enclosing the shadow might allow the girl to touch the body that absents itself, that separates itself and departs—to touch it before another body, a grafted alien bulge, a dry poultice with no pulse of life, comes vicariously to substitute for it as a representation.

For Clark, painting was never a shadow: in other words, and to further activate this interplay with Pliny that I’ve made a ritornello, in her work painting was never motivated by the absence of a body. Yet it was the absence of a body—the multiple, various, uncountable absences of the bodies of others as well as the absence of her own body, her sense of what she jarringly called “nostalgia of the body”—that constituted the original, incessant, inexhaustible, and final problem that Clark addressed as an artist. It was this “nostalgia of the body”—the opposite of a body emerging from the body of painting—that was her true obsession and the motive for her art, the question she seems to have addressed, elaborated, revisited, and transformed incessantly in her work throughout her life, and that constitutes her artistic legacy today. “I think,” Clark wrote, “that a painting is always an experimental field for the seeking out of new spaces and authentic spiritual necessities.”³

In fact there is nothing visually “organic” in Clark’s organic lines. They are “organic” because they lie within the material organism in which they exist; they do not originate elsewhere, nor can they be traced as abstract artifices—they take place at the site of what they perforate or separate. Insofar as they fissure, excavate, or split the materiality of the picture plane—actions that translate into an empirical demonstration of its density, its body—they are inductive vectors indexing the body of painting. In other words, the organic line is also a mnemonic line: suddenly and unexpectedly, it reminds us that painting is and always has been a body—a body, another body, between us and others; a body that harbors other bodies, if only in infra-thin shape. Ultimately the organic line also reminds us that life unfolds, actualizes, materializes, becomes present, through separation, failure, absence, discontinuity, interruption. We might think, then, that this demonstration of the body of painting was the condition of possibility that allowed Clark to focus on her own absent body, allowed her to imagine, name, and signal her “nostalgia of the body.” When her organic lines allowed her to uncover the inevitable, weighty reality of the body of painting, they functioned as indications, or vindications, of a body— of her body—and of ours.

Functional lines, vindicating lines, effective lines—different from one another, indeed almost opposites—one made of absence or zero-degree presence, another of pure presence, pure action. From her discovery of the organic line toCaminhando, Clark’s lines suggest a performative dimension, and perhaps a sacramental one to which I believe she aspired from the start. This sacramental dimension—effective, active, rather than purely a realm of the signifier—has to do with the experience of origination and separation, and with elements such as the gaps or syncopes of forgetting, with trauma, remembrance, and dream, with repression and the return of the repressed. This territory seems to have constituted the ground of all of Clark’s work. Her Objetos sensoriais— the paraphernalia of her work on what she called nostalgia of the body, fantasmatics of the body, or structuring of the self—aspired to be signs as much as causes, and as they mediate a complex process of personal decision-making, of convocation and acceptance, they become what they are only insofar as they effectively make what they represent—insofar as they do not stop at signification. Often, if not always, they are like pure signifiers, but beyond what they might signify, they indicate or vindicate an unattainable reality that is covered over or hidden in forgetting, and that belongs to no concrete past but precedes us in our divided being, in what we fragmentarily have been.

What this might be is not mine to name, since naming it is probably impossible, and risks caricaturing an artist who had no choice, as she faced these questions, but to abandon art. The terms that I have used to describe the performative dimension of painting, and of lines, sculpture, and relational objects in Clark’s work—terms such as vindication, healing, the effective sign, the sign that is or aims to be a cause, the sign that both signifies and makes what it represents—originate, as the informed reader will recognize, in theological, sacramental vocabulary. Contemporary theorists of the problem of signature will remember Thomas of Aquinas’s argument that sacraments should be causal, should be performative, should have agency—that they must effectively create what they figure.⁴

It should now be clear what I mean when I say that the organic line is empty-full or abyssal, a fracture or estrangement of the body, while the line in Caminhando is a remedy, an aid, a cure—a sacrament. Perhaps a key idea here is the “privative opposition” in which Agamben locates the survival of a theology of the signature in contemporary thought: “Consider the concept of privative opposition in Nikolai Trubetzkoy, which has exerted a determinant influence on the human sciences of the twentieth century. It implies that the nonmarked term is not opposed to the marked term as an absence is to a presence, but rather that nonpresence is somehow equivalent to a zero degree of presence (that presence is lacking in its absence).”⁵ In this sense, Agamben argues, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s proposal of a constitutive “excess of the signifier”—the idea that signification would originally be in a state of excess in relation to the significations it might incarnate, generating free, fluctuating signifiers—is elucidated from within a sacramental doctrine of the primacy of the signature over the sign. As zero-degree signifiers like sacraments, Clark’s objects refer to the body, which they work on like remedies and probably also like the ancient signatures, which “in the absence of a signified, continue to operate as the exigency of an infinite signification that cannot be exhausted by any signified.”⁶

Clark sought to repair something with her work, and that search began earlier than her nostalgia of the body in the 1970s. In March of 1959, she added her signature to the Manifesto Neoconcreto. In May of the same year she wrote a long, painful letter, both theoretical and emotional, addressed to someone absent: Piet Mondrian. The letter announced her decision to leave the Neo-Concrete movement, just two months after she had contributed to its platform statement. “You know,” she wrote, “that I still carry on your problem, which is painful (You were a man, Mondrian, remember?).”⁷ This abrupt emergence of the feminine, remitted to a paradigmatic—and paternal—figure for her work up to that time, this address of an expression of pain to the creator of a body of work both tremendous and yet indifferent to any possible manifestation of suffering, is revealing in more than one sense. There is a phrase in the letter that may say more about Clark’s work than all our laborious interpretive arguments do: “Mondrian, if your strength can serve me, it would be like a raw steak placed over this painful eye so it can see again as quickly as possible and can face this reality: ‘the artist is a lonely person.’”⁸

This early description of art as a healing poultice, a bandage, something that briefly blinds us only later to cure our sight, was almost a direct quotation from Marcus Aurelius: “Love that to which you are returning, and come back to philosophy not as to a schoolteacher, but as those with sore eyes turn to a sponge and white of egg, and another patient to a poultice.”⁹ Did Clark know she was citing Book V of the Meditations? In his book The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault affirms, “There are verbal performances that are identical from the point of view of grammar (vocabulary, syntax, and the language [langue] in general); that are also identical from the point of view of logic (from the point of view of propositional structure, or of the deductive system in which it is placed); but which areenunciatively different.”¹⁰ This is surely so in this case: where the Roman emperor and Stoic was making prescriptions for difficult times, Clark signaled that her works should be like remedies designed not to make life and its abysses tolerable but to allow us to see it anew.

In the months after making Caminhando, Clark herself certainly experienced the feeling of being able to see once again, and so of being truly able to begin. A few years later, in 1966, she was involved in a car accident and fractured a wrist. In a hugely meaningful text of 1973, Reencontrar o significado de nossos gestos rotineiros (To rediscover the meaning of our routine gestures), she recalled that she had had to wrap the hand in a poultice, coating it in “a kind of paste that had to be kept hot” and keeping it “imprisoned in a plastic bag kept in place by an elastic band, forming a sort of watertight sheath. One day I tore off the plastic bag,” Clark continued, “blew it up and sealed it with the elastic band; taking a small stone, I tried to hold it in place by pressing the bag with both hands on one of the points of the air pocket; then I let it be engulfed, thus mimicking an extremely disturbing birth.”43 So she described her first work of “nostalgia of the body,” Pedra e ar(Stone and air, 1966), the piece that would inaugurate her decisive series of relational objects: “sensory masks (smell, sound, touch), garments that condition movement, obliging us to rediscover the feeling of our routine gestures,” as she described them.¹¹

I’d like to stress the connection between Clark’s discovery of the density of painting, her opening of its surface to apertures and incisions, cracks and fissures, to the intervals of emptiness that she felt traversing her own body, and this injury to her wrist, the experience of a broken bone that would have brought her to the memory of her own body. An organic line is a line of rupture, a line that bursts into the body of things and marks their separation. A symbolic object—a line, a cut in a surface—may turn itself into a symptom: “it loses its primary identity,” Georges Didi-Huberman writes, “…transgressing the limits of its own semiotic field” in order to function in this case as a metonym for the fractures of the body, or, better, as the signature of the infinite, uncountable interruptions that constitute our existence.¹² The wound to Clark’s hand, however, that opened the way to Pedra e ar did not translate as a representation of a rupture. In other words, the experience of a fracture in her own body—an organic line, a symbol written in her own flesh—made way for a form of reparation: that figure of “an extremely disturbing birth,” that stone, metonym for the body, bubbling up out of the aqueous depth of the plastic bag, and precisely not falling heavily to the floor.

Another sensory object, also realized in 1966, may also be linked to this experience of accident, rupture, and reparation. This is Diálogo de mãos (Dialogue of hands,1966), a bandage connecting two people’s hands, forming a Möbius strip at their wrists. The best-known photograph of this work was made by Clark with the help of the artist Hélio Oiticica, her friend and peer: both hands are visible, simultaneously separate and joined, distanced and connected by a Möbius strip/bandage, as if the line in Caminhando had finally come to mend the wound of the organic line.

To give up painting for a bag of water holding up a stone was the action that so perplexed the young Caetano Veloso and his friend Sônia Castro all those years ago. If holding up that stone revealed a new world, if it was a remedy or help, so was Clark’s holding up her hand next to the hand of another person, as she held up Oiticica’s hand in Diálogo de mãos. There the Möbius strip was literally the poultice, the bandage that embraced the wrist, the dressing that mended the separation of bodies, the signature of the embrace that gives birth to vision. Once again it was a question of two lines, this time incarnated in a body, one’s own and another’s; it was two lines making themselves into a body with a body, a world with a world. It was the caressing line of Butades’s daughter nearing the body of her lover, the infinitessimal line that cannot be divided. It was a poultice, a cloth dressing, like the swelling clay that Butades attached to the outline of a shadow so that presence might manifest in absence, in Clark’s case in the form of a line, a Möbius strip. It was the abyss of the body infiltrating its own shadow, infinitessimally, through another body; it was, as Clark wrote, “this nostalgia of being a wet stone, a stone-being under the shade of a tree, outside time.”¹³

This is the third section of a three-part essay by Luis Pérez-Oramas on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment Of Art, 1948-1988, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the first section here and the second section here.

The post Part 3: Lygia Clark: If You Hold a Stone appeared first on post.

In addition to the essay by Pérez-Oramas, you can access installation views and the press release through MoMA’s online exhibition history archive here.

It seems important, then, to clarify the myth of origins indexed by many modernist narratives, even as they translate that myth into the terms of a supposed liberation of painting into the third dimension. A number of questions emerge here, relating to the relevance of that originary myth to our understanding of modernist abstraction and of the subversions it supposedly practiced, and in particular to Clark’s critical inscription within it: why, in the twentieth century, was painting so often the chosen field of this supposedly emancipatory adventure? Why did abstraction establish its principles, possibilities, and theoretical positions through painting more than anywhere else? And insofar as we can continue to use the word “emancipation”— about which reservations abound—why would painting need to emancipate itself, and from what? Looking at Clark’s art of the 1960s—the Abrigos poéticos, theBichos, the Objetos sensoriais (Sensorial objects, 1966), the Máscaras sensoriais(Sensorial masks, 1967) and Máscaras abismos (Abyssal masks, 1968), theArquiteturas biológicas (Biological architectures, 1968), the Estructuras vivas (Living structures, 1969)—we should also ask: if Gullar’s narrative holds, what does it mean for these objects that they were once “paintings”? What role does a prehistory in painting play in these objects that are no longer paintings? What beyond their own “emancipation” might be implied by their incarnating and enacting a sort of oblivion of painting? What does it mean, in the end, for Clark’s work to have once been painting?

If this doesn’t seem sophistic, or too abrupt a recourse to authority, I’d here like to make the point that at least since Aristotle, being has been defined in terms of having been. It can only be predicated in terms of the perfect preterite or past anterior tense. Aristotle expresses quidditas—what each thing is for itself—with an enigmatic formulation that has complicated the world of things and of their knowledge ever since: τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι/to ti en einai, quod quid erat esse, ce que c’était que d’être: that which was being. Being only expresses itself—and thus only thinks itself and utters itself—once it has been.¹

Painting has always been a body. That is what it is in Pliny’s story, where a substitute for the body—its shadow—receives a kind of deferred touch or caress, enacted by drawing, in preparation for its imminent departure and absence. The result falls into the register of the “inframince.” Surprisingly, anachronistically, this is why Pliny’s account is so relevant to Clark. Painting has been a body positioned by the traditions of our culture to harbor other bodies, which it represents, offers up, in different keys—the key of mimesis, or of absence, or, to use a word dear to Clark, of nostalgia. But painting doesn’t hold these bodies as a womb does, growing, swelling, and then spitting them into being, into falling to earth; rather— and this has been so since antiquity—it acts as a place that shelters and preserves these bodies and their actions, whether real or symbolic, historical or fictional. Hence the importance for us of Clark’s early works in which images, forms, and figures seem to go beyond abstraction, whether by force or voluntarily, to represent places, coordinates, interior spaces, and planes with edges, surfaces, and architectures.

It is in this sense that Paulo Herkenhoff has written of staircases in some of Clark’s early works.² Herkenhoff links these staircases to Clark’s training in the late 1940s with the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, who was originally a painter and would later come to approach architecture as a pictorial field. As Herkenhoff notes, Clark went straight from her studies with Burle Marx in Rio de Janeiro to studies with Fernand Léger in Paris, and this at a moment when Léger was thinking as an architect, if I may go that far—at any rate when he was focusing on projects that attempted the modernist utopia of a fusion between art and architecture. To this end he developed such concepts as parois vivantes (living walls), rectangles habitables (inhabitable rectangles), and rectangles élastiques (elastic rectangles), concepts that, as Herkenhoff writes, would be important to critics thinking through Clark’s later work.³

A careful study of the architectural aspect traceable in Clark’s early works and fully visible in her later ones might help us to move beyond a reading of those works as two-dimensional paintings emancipated into bodies or things. In fact that reading comes to us filtered through multiple forgettings, beginning, as I have said, in its failure to recognize itself as the echo of an ancient voice. More significantly, it further asks us to forget that painting has always been a matter of volume, of density—has always been a three-dimensional form (a two-dimensional form being a physical impossibility). When we say that painting is two-dimensional—and even more when we see it that way—we surrender our gaze and our speech to a convention of blindness: we decide not to see the work’s body or thickness, which exists even when limited to the inframince dimension of paint. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for an understanding of Clark’s work insofar as it originates in architectural thinking, that convention itself relies on a forgetting, both structural and historical, of a foundational fact about Western painting: that is, that the first scientific treatise on painting, the first manifestation of painting as analytic thought, was Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura, of 1435—the work not of a painter but of an architect.

The first pages of Alberti’s book address something that we might today call “topology,” in that in reflecting on the representation of physical bodies, he does so in terms of coordinates, places, locations in space. This explains the well-known assertion with which he begins his treatise, “Parlo come pittore,” “I speak as a painter”: he states up front, in other words, that although he has borrowed some of his concepts from mathematics, he is speaking not as a mathematician but as a painter, for mathematics makes abstractions out of material dimensions and physical things, while a painter, who “wants things to be capable of being seen,” must use a “più grassa Minerva”—a heavier Minerva, the Roman goddess of art- makers and artisans.⁴ From Pliny to Alberti to Clark—the “longue durée” of our problem—the reality of painting seems to be translated into two opposing dimensions. One might be characterized as “inframince,” or “ultra-thin,” almost incorporeal, a moment of encounter between two bodies or hands, like a line drawing the shape of a shadow on the wall. The other is the “più grassa Minerva,” or “heavier Minerva,” invoked by Alberti: a body, capable of growth, of swelling, of inflammation, of presenting itself, of finding itself, of fusing with another body, but also of separating itself or absenting itself, like the lover of Butades’s daughter.

It should not seem strange, then, that Clark might from early on have approached painting as architecture, as a science of topology, an operator of place—of coordinates, shelters, homes. I don’t mean that she thought of painting as a form of architecture but that she thought of painting’s conditions of possibility in architectural terms, and that her sense of painting was fundamentally topological. This kind of thinking began early, around 1954 or 1955, in works centering on her discovery of what she called the “organic line.” Significantly, her first formal articulation of this concept appears in a lecture she gave at an architectural school, the Escola Nacional de Arquitetura, in Belo Horizonte, her hometown, in 1956. So we can say that she initiated her greatest contribution to modernist abstraction by thinking—and perhaps also painting—as if she were an architect. If the first theorist of painting, the architect Alberti, claimed to have spoken as a painter, the painter Clark, at the other end of that history, claimed to have spoken as an architect. “The artist,” Clark said in her lecture in Belo Horizonte,

might also investigate by way of lines I’ll call “organic,” lines that function as doors, as connections among materials, as tissues, etc., in order to modulate an entire surface….The visual problem is simply the valuation or devaluation of that line. When I grounded my thinking in this observation, I was able to locate a relationship between the line as I explore it in my paintings and functional architectural lines.⁵

If anything can be called a painting in a state of inflammation, of growth—if anything grows and densifies in Clark’s paintings between 1948 and the 1960s—it does not end up falling to the floor like a critter but rather takes the shape of a place, the place of a place, a coordinate in space, whether that space be imaginary, virtual, or potential. It becomes something that finally resembles less a critter than a building or a house—a place that someone might inhabit, and where he or she might interact with other bodies. We all recognize that Clark’s work after 1965 has to do with the body inhabiting coordinates, and more significantly with the possibility that it might interact with others. Clark herself, summarizing her process in the 1970s, argued that Mondrian, in doing away with representational space in painting, left as a legacy the exclusion of subject matter that wasn’t in some way “body to body,” along with a need for artists to express themselves through “a living organism.”⁶

It is crucial, then, to understand the pictorial origin of Clark’s work, the archaeology of painting buried within it, its derivation from an archē of painting. What that might be, as Giorgio Agamben writes of the archē in general, we cannot know in terms that are “locatable in a chronology (even with as large a frame as prehistory); instead, it is an operative force within history, like the Indo-European words expressing a system of connections between historically accessible languages, or the child of psychoanalysis exerting an active force within the psychic life of the adult, or the big bang, which is supposed to have given rise to the universe but which continues to send toward us its fossil radiation.”⁷ The archē of painting from which Clark’s work emerges is more than an initial state that can be superseded, and the term does not mean the artist’s earliest paintings, given that, like the rest of her work, they emerged directly from that archè themselves, if in a far more radical and complex way than Gullar’s account allows. But even if the archē is something “which is supposed to have taken place but which cannot be hypostatized in a chronological event,” Agamben writes, it “is able to guarantee the intelligibility of historical phenomena, ‘saving’ them archaeologically in a future anterior in the understanding not of an unverifiable origin but of its finite and untotalizable history.”⁸

Perhaps Clark had something like this in mind when, in 1960, having finished herContra relevos and Casulos series, she spoke of a vision that would not be optical but rather would relate to a nonimmediate manner of feeling, “in the profound sense that we do not know where our origin is.”⁹ Here I would like to propose an alternative to the interpretation of Clark’s process as an address of formal problems unfolding into objects. That is, to a narrative centered on the transformation of two-dimensional figures into things I would like to oppose an interrogation that instead asks what forms do, what forms transform—that examines neither their figurative presence nor their eventual metamorphosis, but rather their capacity to activate their field of inscription through topological “shifts”—like the gearshifts of cars—and this, of course, within painting.

The idea of the shift is key to this hypothesis, since a shift is what we use to make a change, from one gear to the next, from one structural mode to another. The lines Clark traced in her early works were shifts, and her entire repertoire of works showing modulated spaces and surfaces, or showing planes within modulated spaces and surfaces, depends on an understanding of the line as a shift. A hinge— that is, the mechanism that allows the Bichos to be folded—is a mechanical kind of shift. And in light of the importance of such shifts, Clark’s work reveals itself as entirely determined by its performativity—and all this, as well, within painting, as a work destined to have and produce concrete effects.

Undoubtedly it was the experience of Caminhando, in which Clark invited people to cut a Möbius strip to the thinnest width possible, that finally offered her the possibility of seeing her work as action—to understand that its temporality could only be performative, and that this had been the case from the start. Participants were asked to cut lengthways along a paper Möbius strip without splitting it into two. When the scissors returned to where they had begun, the participants had to choose whether to move to the right or the left of the existing cut, and then keep cutting. This choice—the idea of decision-making—is central in Clark’s reflections on this experience:

This idea of choice is decisive—within it lies the experiment’s only meaning. The work is its enactment. As the strip is cut, it gets finer and is unfolded in intertwinings. In the end, the path is so narrow that it can no longer be cut. It is the end of the shortcut.

[...]

Each Caminhando is an immanent reality that is revealed in its totality during the period of the spectator-creator’s expression.

Initially, the Caminhando is only a potential. You and it will form a reality that will be unique, total, existential. No separation between subject-object. It is a body-to-body affair, a fusion. The different responses will come out of your choice.

The dualist relationship between man and Bicho, which characterized the previous experiences, is succeeded by a new type of fusion. In being the work and the act of making the work, you and it become completely inseparable.

There is only one type of duration: the act. The act is what produces the Caminhando. Nothing exists before it and nothing after.¹⁰

The Caminhando opened the possibility of an “active” dimension in the work. It also allowed Clark to close the chapter on the Bichos with a key piece, O dentro é o for a (The inside is the outside, 1963). Unlike the Bichos, O dentro é o for a is not strictly foldable, and it contains no hinges: the work is a Möbius strip, this time made in steel, to be held in one’s arms, as in a well-known photograph of Clark. In a note typed on November 1, 1963, in a mood of spiritual and physical exultation just before a return to Paris, a state of aesthetic reflection and of erotic and disturbing dreams, Clark asserts,

Now I perceive the whole meaning of O dentro é o for a. I find that only now am I beginning to understand something….With total humility I recognize that my perception is minimal and I am beginning really only now, and my perception is minimal because it’s the beginning. How could I have thought of myself for so long as great, as if I had discovered a world? The awareness that in this work space is an affective space is the first time I really begin to create a living organism, like a being, and this was truly the reason for my crisis and also the awareness that until now I hadn’t perceived anything, not anything at all.¹¹

This deferred, delayed, or “après-coup”¹² access to “awareness” of O dentro é o for a had origins in the past, being inscribed—if specifically as a potential—in the formal decisions that had informed all of Clark’s work since the early 1950s, when she had created architectural models with open spaces that would contaminate inside with outside and would signal the mechanisms, the shifts, that she would call “organic lines” in her 1956 lecture in Belo Horizonte. It is crucial, however, to underscore—as Clark does in her typewritten note—the affective quality of space in O dentro é o for a: this was a sculptural form whose condition of possibility originated in action, the action of Caminhando. But in what sense might a form, an abstract structure, be affective? How do we affect it or how does it affect us? What did the affective space of O dentro é o for a do? What did it transform in us or in reality? To investigate this affective—that is, performative—dimension of the work, and how Clark moved away from rigorous formal exploration, we must summarize the two great inventions—or discoveries—that propelled her visual thinking, and that took the form of “lines.”

Caminhando resulted from Clark’s fascination with the Möbius strip. It was not just the Möbius form that intrigued her but also its implications, what that form does— its capacity to determine a spatial coordinate in which there is no discontinuity between interior and exterior, inside and outside. The Möbius strip is a line, but one that no longer functions to separate things, beings, or fields. This afunctional line is logically different, even opposed, to the organic line, which Clark had called a “functional line” in her 1956 lecture.

Clark discovered the organic line by projecting a series of questions, architectural in nature, onto her assimilation of the legacy of Mondrian. She identified it first in architectural tools such as doors—transitional devices capable of modulating space—and in connective fusions between materials and in the stitches of textiles. For her, architecture and painting were mediating terms between the idea of an absolutely continuous field—an ideal surface or space, of a kind that might be called by an ancient philosophical name, khôra—and the inexorable discontinuity of the reality within which our life takes place. Clark’s titles for her works of the late 1950s—Superfícies moduladas (Modulated surfaces), Planos em superfícies moduladas, Espaços modulados (Modulated spaces)—are clear signs that she had come to see painting as a functional device for modulating spaces and surfaces through their own topological discontinuity—through their discontinuous shifts.

The organic line, then, is not strictly a line, at least not a graphic line, but neither is it a line in Alberti’s sense: “points…joined without interruption, according to a sequence.”¹³The organic line is a caesura, a break, a fold—a fissure, an absence, a line in absentia. As a negative presence, a nonline, a minus-line or line-minus, it works as an incision between materials—something that, in slicing a surface, reveals that surface’s density and materiality, dividing it into two fields or bodies, separating them and in the process indexing the infinite drama of continuity and discontinuity that constitutes space as a site and coordinate of plurality.

Clearly Clark was fascinated by the potential for plurality latent within every existing thing. She tried to capture this idea in works such as the Composição of 1953 that prefigures the Bichos, and in most of her foldable, transformable sculptures of the early 1960s. We might say that the Bichos turn the fissure or breaking point between two surfaces into a hinge, an agent of discontinuity within a given unity, and that as such they point toward something that occurs in the interval itself, in the exact coordinate between the limits at which things transform into other things, fields into other fields, bodies into other bodies. How a unity becomes a plurality, how the multiple unfolds from the singular: these issues are crucial in mathematics and topology, in metaphysics and ethics. They ask us to address the possibility of thought centering on the links between self and other, us and them. Clark seems to have located this question at the heart of her 1967 workO eu e o tu. Roupa-corpo-roupa (The I and the you. Clothing-body-clothing), which implies the performative enactment of a body-to-body linking, as well as in most of the sensorial and relational works that she began to produce in 1965.

All of this points to the thinking that may have led Clark to the “negative” concept of the organic line—a nonline, an absence of line, yet a line whose negativity in no way threatens its functionality. We might consider, however, that Caminhandoimplies a different, even opposite typology: as the paper strip is divided until “it can no longer be cut,” as Clark said, the line that ensues may be very thin—inframince—but it is materially present. It is real, literally a part of reality, not something cut away but something remaining, neither a graphic line nor an empty space but a material presence, or, better, the inframince residue of paper in the form of a line: empty-full.

We must remember that this line is a residue, the remainder or residue of an action, and we must also remember that Caminhando is that action. This work then implies something like a reinvention of the line. In speaking of her “discovery” of the organic line—Descoberta da linha orgânica, runs the title of a pair of key works from 1954—Clark had implied that its existence preceded its appearance in art, that it was not something voluntarily produced within art but a fixed, determining presence in reality, just as all discontinuity is present among us and in the world. The line produced by Caminhando, on the other hand, is a positive—though residual—consequence of an action: an object-line, a thing in the form of a line, a body that is a line—a “line-plus,” then, in contrast to the absent line, the “line- minus” or fissure that is the organic line. Caminhando’s line does not exist a priori in the world, like the organic line; instead it takes place, it occurs, it comes to pass, in infra-thin or inframince form, when the action of cutting the paper prevents us from continuing—when “the path is so narrow that it can no longer be cut. It is the end of the shortcut.”

This alone would be enough to make Caminhando pivotal. In a sense, the work implies a mnemonic emergence, the return of a deep memory—a concept of the line that Western art seems (again) to have left to oblivion. As before, the source lies in Pliny, in a famous story, set in the fourth century b.c., that like Caminhandoimplies a questioning of the idea of individual authorship. In recalling this story we must remember the question that led us here: what role does an archaeology ofpainting play in the work Clark produced beyond painting? How does the archē of painting in her works (even in those that are clearly metapictorial) broadcast its own “fossil radiation”?¹⁴

Pliny describes a kind of contest between two of the most renowned artists of antiquity. Apelles has just arrived in Rhodes, intending to see the work of Protogenes, which he knows only by its reputation. In the artist’s studio, instead of the artist himself, Apelles finds an old woman and “a panel of considerable size on the easel.” Picking up a brush, he draws “in color across the panel an extremely fine line,” which the woman is to show to Protogenes as a sign of who his visitor was. On returning, Protogenes recognizes the mastery of Apelles’s line, but draws on top of it, dividing it, “a still finer line,” which he asks the old woman to show to Apelles as his own signature. Apelles returns, sees that Protogenes has challenged him, and draws a third line atop the second one, Pliny tells us, “leaving no room for any further display of minute work.”¹⁵

I find in this scene the archaeology of an alternative concept of the line, a concept that Western art has forgotten. The question is, can a line be made that is free of any visual regime determined by visible terms—by the presence of edges, or of discontinuities or interruptions—a line that does not divide, that neither contains nor surrounds, a residual line that determines neither the end of one thing nor the beginning of another, a free, afunctional line that exists in space as the happy remainder of an action with no end but itself? It’s easy to understand Clark’s joy, in November 1963, when she felt that with Caminhando she had arrived for the first time at this indeterminable and undecidable place, this remote and also purely potential space: “If I were to stop making art after this,” she wrote, “I think it wouldn’t matter at all, because I’ve completely lost the sensation of ‘loss in relation to time.’ It seems that the spaces inside me are broader and my breath is hardier.”¹⁶

Clark had come to produce, with a very graceful touch, a line that was like a pure act, in the sense not just of being one with the act and the person that had produced it but of actually, continuously being, of not ceasing to be. If it is possible to assign verb qualities to lines, this was a gerundive line rather than a transitive one, a line that had no beginning and no end, a line that went nowhere and came from nowhere, a line that signaled an existential possibility, a provisional eternity where instead of separation and distance—the abyss—between and within bodies lay continuity. This line that could go no thinner, that could be divided no further, is the line that Clark “reinvented” in Caminhando: an effective and affective line, the zero signifier of an unattainable excess of signification.

The abyssal organic line and the nondividing Caminhando line—how does the one relate to the other? How might we move from the one to the other—from the organic line that is functional, that contains and divides, distinguishes and distances, defines and marks coordinates, to this line that has no set function, that floats free in the air, yet nonetheless manifests as an action? How might we consider these two lines as diverging or dialectical manifestations of a single problem—that is, the issue that seems ultimately to have driven all of Clark’s art, from the topology implicit in her earliest works to the drama of intersubjectivity that unfolds in her final ones?

The process by which Clark discovered the organic line was both pragmatic and fundamentally inductive. She began with inferences from a series of decisions and actions to do with the surface of the painting, where she observed “two lines that appeared when there were two planes of the same color, next to one another, which then disappeared when the colors were contrasting….I made large paintings

with tremendous frames in which I negotiated with this line, depending on the color of the canvas in relation to the frame itself.”¹⁷ Here the organic line appears as a linear incision, a break in the continuity of the painting—and as such inducing phenomena of discontinuity in the real world. Piercing the density of the painting, it pierces the density of the world’s body. Hence, Descoberta da linha orgânica(Discovery of the organic line). Clark had “discovered” something that already existed: “in my naiveté and provincialism I didn’t realize that it was simply a line that is a space,” she wrote.¹⁸ This line, previously unknown to her, could then become a general law of reality, one she could induce by observing certain concrete, known occurrences. As a line of separation, the organic line is theinframince void that affects us in perpetuity, separating and dispersing us, making us discontinuous and strange, and engendering in us the need to seek a suture, a solution, a poultice, a fusion.

The discovery of the organic line would lead Clark to the conviction that things exist in an abyss of separation. Whether in the accidents of their present or in the phantasm of their engendering and conception, they do not match, like uneven, inescapably fractured tectonic plates. In her lecture at the Escola Nacional de Arquitetura, Clark remarked, “I then began to work on the ‘Superfícies moduladas,’ made in plywood previously cut to various precalculated sizes, trying to integrate segments from that real line.”¹⁹ “That real line”: the organic line is real, is a space, is a line that exists in reality rather than being introduced into it through creativity or invention. And since it is part of reality, Clark’s works investigating or manifesting it are to a certain degree representational, though not mimetic: the organic line is a representation in the word’s strictest and most logical sense, a new, supplementary presentation of a real line, a line that exists in reality.

A different phenomenon, deductive rather than inductive, occurs in Caminhando. In cutting a Möbius strip until it is infra-thin, until to keep cutting it is impossible, we can deduce—corporeally, as the result of a finite sequence of repetitions—the existence of another line, present in the work’s residually multiplying mass of paper, which settles like the mute thought of the act that constitutes it. The line inCaminhando, while no less real than the organic line, is unlike that line in that it did not exist previously in the world. It might exist by analogy, and it exists in part in Pliny’s anecdote—one more of the archaeological figures of painting to which our discussion of Clark has led us—but this line is not a discovery; rather, it is a residue, to which the cutting of the paper leads in the way that fluids flow to their destinations. It is not a transitional, functional line, a line in the organic body of things—as might be implied by the very name of the organic line—but an autonomous, immanent line, not necessarily inorganic but free of subordination to or dependence on an organism or other source of support. It is an afunctional, a priori line to which we return, once we have arrived at it, as if to an undefined place where it exists as a potential, and from which, therefore, it always precedes us without ever having taken place among things.

I think of the organic line as like a wound—the wound of the division that prevents us from becoming one single, continuous reality—and of the line in Caminhando as like a cure. Clark’s happiness in arriving at the second of these lines is justified in light of a life and a practice, from 1948 to 1963, in which she unceasingly diagnosed the forms and signatures of the limiting force that always divides human existence. We might say that the line in Caminhando resolves the axiom of the abyss. Clark can only have experienced it as an arrival at an inspiring, joyful terrain.

This is the second section of an essay by Luis Pérez-Oramas on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment Of Art, 1948-1988, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the first section here. The third section will be released in June 2018.

translations instead try to express the “meaning” of Alberti’s metaphor—e.g., “Since we wish the object to be seen, we will use a more sensate wisdom” (Alberti,On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1956], 1:43)—but this is an interpretation rather than a translation. The goddess Minerva was not only the patron of art-makers and artisans but also the embodiment of wisdom. In referring to a more “grassa Minerva” Alberti was simply expressing the need for a practical intelligence, an understanding of physical facts, in thinking about visual arts such as painting.

This is the second section of a three-part essay by Luis Pérez-Oramas on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment Of Art, 1948-1988, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the first section here and the third here.

The post Part 2: Lygia Clark: If You Hold a Stone appeared first on post.

In addition to the essay by Pérez-Oramas, you can access installation views and the press release through MoMA’s online exhibition history archive here.

“Mondrian was a special case. Those red, blue, and yellow squares and rectangles seemed in reproduction as if they had been made with a ruler,” wrote the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso in his autobiography,

and even when I asked myself, for that very reason, if they were a way forward or a dead end, I recognized those structures behind everything we called “modern”: buildings, furniture, clothing—and in the vibratoless notes of cool jazz and bossa nova. Lygia Clark’s bold investigations passed almost unnoticed: my friend Sônia Castro remarked one day in her studio that the total abandonment of painting as we knew it filled her with doubt. I clearly remember Sônia mentioning the word “stone” in her description of what she had seen of Lygia’s in a large group exhibition at the [Museu de Arte Moderna, Bahia], which I didn’t see, though I’m not sure why. It seems that Sônia herself—finishing an abstract painting that I found beautiful and that made her shed tears as she was painting it—was wondering if it was worthwhile to abandon oil paint, canvas, and brushes in order to participate in an exhibition with “a plastic sack full of water with a stone on top”. It’s odd that I should harbor this memory, since I don’t know what Lygia might have been exhibiting in Salvador in 1963–64. I think that Sônia’s phrase was a sort of exaggerated supposition, but it’s odd that what Lygia came to do (work to which I would pay homage in a song from 1971, “If You Hold a Stone”), should be so closely related to that description.¹

Veloso’s brief recollection summarizes the trajectory that this essay will attempt to address. Our purpose here (and how could it be otherwise?) will be to see Lygia Clark in a way that is simultaneously progressive—as it attempts to move through her large and complex body of work—and regressive, since we will often construct our understanding by looking back toward the darkness of forgetting, toward zones now lost to oblivion, even though they were important in nourishing Clark’s thought. We will consider the genesis of work that may only realize itself in the future anterior tense, the future perfect, the “will have been”—as if embedded within it were its and painting’s own archaeology and archē, the Greek first principle.

A schematic idea of Clark’s art has become widely accepted. That understanding sets up her work as divided, as if she were two different artists: the first more conventional, concerned with form-based art, or “formalist” art, as some less critically involved with her work might say; the second abandoning form for an art of actions, relationships, and performative events, becoming one in the long story of modern artists who registered their dissidence in relation to aesthetics by abandoning art itself.

It is true that Clark abandoned art in her artwork. This deliberately contradictory sentence presents one of the challenges I will try to address: if her work continued to be art, if this essay appears in the catalogue of an exhibition of her work in an
art museum, if just four years before her death she helped to organize a retrospective of her work in an art museum, if her abandonment of art continued to manifest in her work in some way—if that abandonment is itself art—then the issue is in part that no matter how radically different her work may be from the phenomenon we usually call (or called) art, it remains part of art, even if in a negative way. Indeed it may be that Clark, in abandoning art in her artwork, allowed art to exist as a negative space within itself—that her work consisted in engineering art’s absence within art.

Clark was sensitive to the dilemma—the destiny—of separation: the separation between bodies, between beings and other beings, between mother and child, lover and beloved, between facts and their recollections, between present and past, living and dreaming, longing and having, lust and the failure to possess, from all of which arises the whole repertoire of ruptures, incisions, cuts, stitches, and other kinds of division within her work. Above all she was aware of those scissions’ most intense manifestation: what she called the “abyss” of the human body. All of her work seems to have been a way of looking directly at failure, the experience of which surrounds us in our lives’ activities, from the greatest to the most trivial. The interpretation of that work through a narrative of fracture between two aesthetic personas doesn’t seem to me to properly honor her endeavor, nor does it attend to the undertone, there from the beginning, of concern with a single focus: to work on the indices of separation. That reading may also correspond in too facile a way to the modernist impulse to understand artistic production in terms of simultaneous advance (as of an avant-garde) and abandonment of the past. And despite abundant evidence in both Clark’s work and her writing, it fails to recognize that she constantly asked questions about memory (ours, hers, everyone’s) and that her work responded to the experience of disjunction that produces our feelings of distance—in terms of both phylogeny and ontogeny—from what has constituted us since birth, from the site that must languish in oblivion yet at which we must have begun.

This essay, then, will attempt another reading of Clark, a reading based not on a narrative of a split in the work but on the ability to see forms within relational propositions—significant forms, forms with meaning, forms intended to have meaning. To this proposal, and in the face of the view of Clark’s work as irreconcilably divided, it is worth adding her own testimony, from around 1974:

My entire process has been an attempt to unite art and life, and sometimes when a raw perception comes to me in life, it is the abyss. The abyss—the thematic focus of my latest propositions and of my earlier ones as well. A couple sitting with their hands closed against one of their eyes which remains open, the other closed, the movement of their hands which open to allow a small space to form between them, the field of vision in the perception of the encounter of the spaces between the two people; this is how the space I call the interior space of the body is discovered….I experienced that space as an abyss until a short time ago. I began to wonder if that space might not be the same space that I’d been referring to for years as “empty-full,” a space that was still a metaphysical space….I discovered that in that space the body is the house, and that when people become conscious of that space, they rediscover the body as a totality—their vision of the world becomes broader….Let’s slow down, I didn’t say what I am;… I’d never a priori be a painter, a sculptor, or, much less, an architect. This is what surprises me every time I pose this problem to myself. Every time, I see with more clarity that my problem was purely existential in kind (space and time were my themes). If I began with painting, it was simply the point of departure that was most readily available.²

What is this space as abyss that Clark constantly indexed, in both her writing and her art? Is it perhaps a place, a coordinate, a moment, a memory? Or is it, rather, something indefinable, a phenomenon real but vast and inexhaustible, present in all people and especially between all people, a condition in which we are all similar and at the same time different, where we both resemble one another and are distinct from one another, where we are near yet distant, familiar yet foreign, estranged, strange? In 1960, when Clark wrote in the Rio newspaper Jornal do Brasil that she was addressing what she called the “vazio-pleno,” the “empty-full,” she defined the means of her investigation as “painting”—yet that investigation was for her “not optical, but rather was viscerally linked to the lived experience of feeling,” a profound feeling “whose origin cannot be located.”³ If the empty-full was already that abyssal space, then Clark’s later work that was not painting, or was no longer painting, nevertheless derived from her painting, or shared a focus with her painting: the problem of existence itself, and that “new reality in which the work of art expresses itself as a living object, like you and me.”⁴

It is at the very least odd to describe a work as a “living object” when in formal terms it looks cool, restrained, rational, measured, and dispassionate; yet Clark described her works programmatically in passionate writings full of ethical, erotic, and existential angst. So I’d like to propose a reading opposed to the conventional —in fact at this point canonical—understanding of Clark’s work as entailing a move from “paintings” to “things,” from the forms allowed by the conventions of the two- dimensional plane to a rediscovery first of objecthood, of the three-dimensional art object, and then of reality, of ordinary existence, of the body. Rather than an aesthetic reading of Clark’s neo-constructivist art, I propose an ethical one, as if, from the beginning of her production, she had seen geometric abstraction as a realm of filters or intellectual symptoms of problems that were ultimately existential, not to mention metaphysical. These problems first existed in her work as metonymic figures, or, better, as figural signatures—figures other than, more than, semiotic in character—that she would later unfold through real bodies, experiences, and propositions.⁵

In 1998, the poet and philosopher Ferreira Gullar—earlier the author of theManifesto neoconcreto (Neo-concretist manifesto) of 1959—published a reading of Clark’s work that no one, in my view, has fundamentally challenged. It is the account of an artist who started out producing “abstractivized figurative painting” at the end of the 1940s, then embarked on an interrogation of the material conditions of the medium—flatness, surface, the plane, the frame—and finally “emancipated” painting from those limiting conventions, freeing it from its dependency on the wall and leading it to “fall.” I’d like to stress that word of Gullar’s: it falls, dropping from the wall to the floor like a a creature, a body, an organism.⁶

Here is part of what Gullar has to say about Clark, and specifically about the emblematic series of sculptures called Bichos: “It becomes necessary to understand the pathway traveled by the artist before reaching this work which, because it is carried out in three-dimensional space, may be classified as a sculpture, but in fact derives, as we have seen, from painting. The surface of the painting, being emptied, denies the possibility of once again being the place where painting would be reborn, it grows, it opens onto the third dimension, it is disconnected from the wall and falls [my emphasis] onto the floor of the room to become an unusual and unexpected ‘Bicho.’”⁷It grows, it opens, it disconnected from the wall, it falls: the words are significant in that they suggest a zoomorphic reading of these works, a reading that, it’s true, might seem legitimized by the series’s name: Bichos, critters. It’s also startling to notice that Gullar’s teleology of falling may owe a debt to the ghosts of other narratives, among them the Judeo- Christian idea of birth as a falling to earth. In any case, the narrative he proposes to explain how Clark’s work emancipated itself from painting (but also, implicitly, how Clark emancipated painting in turn) begins in 1952, with a series of abstract yet at the same time prismatically illusionistic works—works in which the possibility of identifying a set of spatial coordinates, a locus, within the visual structure matters more than the abstraction of the structure itself. It is as if Clark had sought, more than a form, an architecture that might imaginably be constructed in real space.

This investigation would lead Clark to a series of paintings whose planes appear physically distinct, clearly separated from each other. The surface is transformed into a topological field of reliefs and lines that are incised, not drawn—a field of folds and fissures, as in the Planos em superfícies moduladas (Planes on modulated surfaces) from 1956–58, or the Contra relevos (Counter reliefs) from around 1959. It is important to note here an earlier painting, Composição(Composition), from 1953, in which the lines dividing a structure’s splayed planes prefigure the forms of certain of the Bichos, anticipating the hinges that will allow them to be manipulated and folded. These lines in the painting are not graphic inscriptions but incisions in the density of the paint, bored into its material substance, excavated from the body of the plane: tangible intervals, cracks, crevices, hollows. This is the first step toward what Gullar describes as Clark’s painting disconnecting itself from the wall, a move he would see advancing in the works immediately following the Planos em superfícies moduladas and the Contra relevos: the Casulos (Cocoons). After the Casulos, in Gullar’s account, comes the “fall” of painting as “an unusual and unexpected Bicho.”

The correctness, the fairness, of this description is undeniable (if only the description were not, inevitably, also an interpretation). Equally undeniable the fact that although Clark would continue, until well into the 1980s, to produce versions of the constructivist-type works that she had conceived in the 1950s, her focus shifted, at least conceptually, from a repertoire of forms to a repertoire of propositions, actions, acts. The idea of the artwork as act is expressed unambiguously in her many reflections on Caminhando (Walking), of 1963, but it can be applied retrospectively as well as predictively, to her most formal paintings of the 1950s as well as to the relational actions of her late career. It is as if, in discovering the work as act and the act as work, Clark revealed the future anterior of an exploration located in her art from the beginning—in her brushes and cardstocks of the 1950s, and in the drawings and architectural sketches of the same period that marked the explicit onset of her existential, ethical, and “religious” investigations. “For me,” she wrote in 1960, “art is only valid in an ethico-religious sense, linked to the artist’s internal production in the deepest sense, that is, existentially.”⁸

We must pause here, however, to take note of a phrase that Gullar uses at the start of his theory of painting’s fall to the ground in the form of the Bichos: “because it is carried out in three-dimensional space, [this work] may be classified as a sculpture, but in fact derives, as we have seen, from painting.” The issue for us is to clarify that derivation (or perhaps that dérive, or “drift”) as something other than a narrative of the emancipation of painting, for the narrative of “painting” becoming “object” is at this point a cliché in the narratives of modernism, and in the ideology of modernism as emancipation—as if the art of the past were a territory of limits and oppressions that modernism came in to liberate. Instead we might point to an origin that has nothing to do either with a specific moment, an instant in life or time, or with the work’s appearance as an organism, but rather with a legendary, foundational narrative of painting in the West.

Those who maintain that Clark “emancipated” painting by turning it into an object may be unaware that they are restating a very old myth. Pliny expressed this idea early on, in a section of his Naturalis Historia (Natural history, 77–79 a.d.) where he provides origin tales for the arts of antiquity. Contemporary readings of his text (which is more often cited than read) tend to take little account of the critical complexity already evident in the issue in ancient times: “The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain,” in Pliny’s judgment, “and it does not belong to the plan of this work”—even though his work is devoted to just such origins as these. What follows this textual skirmish constitutes a much-debated topos in Western art discourse: “but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow.”⁹

To bring out the meaning of this contradictory passage: the uncertainty of the origins of painting, the impossibility of knowing those origins, leads to the common belief or opinion—generalized, unfounded, and therefore purely a convention—that those origins consist in the drawing of the outline of a shadow. Something else here is also important, and all too often overlooked: Pliny’s earlier phrase “Primumque dicemus quae restant de picture,” “And first we shall say what remains of painting.”¹⁰ Not only are the origins of painting uncertain, then, but painting itself, at the moment of this formative recounting of its origins, is an art that has died. It is an art about which there is never anything to say—or always nothing to say—but what remains of it.

If we are to oppose an idea of continuity to the ultimately simplistic account of Clark’s work as disjunctive—in other words, if we are to move beyond a narrative of painting falling unexpectedly to the floor in order to liberate itself from the wall, which had been oppressively maintaining it in a primitive state—we must understand this dimension of the discourse on painting as words that always come late, expressing only what remains of an art whose origins (at least to the extent that they are recorded in writing, and at least by Pliny) are determined by its present inactuality.

Pliny, then, reveals the origin of painting only once everything else he has found to say about that art he has already said. And what he says was the first painting of all —a work of love and anticipated longing, made in the face of an imminent separation—is in his story immediately supplemented by a body of clay, which gives a trace of a shadow a material presence, a distension, a self-impregnation. The painting itself is simply the outline of a shadow, a form that Marcel Duchamp might have called “inframince,” or “ultra-thin,”¹¹but this incorporeal presence expands, is inflamed, gains volume, receives a new body, a supplementary solidity, and thus becomes a different form of art, an art no longer dependent on the wall that supports it.

The idea of the body of painting as something inflamed into becoming a “thing”—a “thing” that for Gullar is “unusual and unexpected,” though the idea dates back to Pliny—we of course have seen applied to Clark’s progress between 1948 and 1960, from her earliest images of stairs to her Abrigos poéticos (Poetic shelters). Yet it seems to me that no matter how well this account might describe a formal evolution, it ignores or fails to recognize an essential aspect of Clark’s trajectory, an unconsidered fragment of reality: the fact that for her the issue was not a matter of moving from one art to another but of lingering inside a problem, within painting and from there affecting art as a whole, for she would ultimately question the entire practice of art as a means of self-expression through the production of objects. This is why, within the formal territory of abstraction as Clark handled it, I want to identify the ghostly anticipations of her later production: the possibilities of an art in terms of its own powers of negativity, an “infra-art,” perhaps, or what Clark herself called “the singular state of art without art.”¹²

This is the first section of a three-part essay by Luis Pérez-Oramas on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: The Abandonment Of Art, 1948-1988, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the second section here and the third here.

The post Part 1: Lygia Clark: If You Hold a Stone appeared first on post.

III.

Among the voices involved in revealing, materializing that delay, the voices that formulated the effects of Tarsila’s work, was that of the poet Haroldo de Campos. ¹ To tie the work to one of the motivating impulses of literary formalism was a brilliant strategy: for de Campos, Tarsila revealed pictoriality in Brazilian painting, that is, the pictorial equivalent of what literaturnost, or “literariness,” was for literature, according to the Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century. De Campos’s argument that Tarsila read Brazil’s environmental and human landscape “along Cubist lines,” however, fails to take hold. Tarsila was not a Cubist—at least the Tarsila who interests us here, the artist working in the wake of brief studies with Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes in the early 1920s, was not a Cubist. Her work shows not the least sign of Cubism. It may be that during her apprenticeship in those Paris ateliers she absorbed the lesson that painting should account for relations, not things—an ancient lesson that in no way originates with Cubism—but as Paulo Herkenhoff clearly states, 

Tarsila’s work is far from being Cubist. . . . Her so-called “postcubism” merely reflects, by contrast, a period of development in Léger’s work. All of Tarsila’s work was devoid of the complex Cubist logic, which she never fully understood. This does not detract from Tarsila, nor from her founding role in the Brazilian “constructive project.”²

Contrasts of shape, and relationships whether synthetic or analytic, do not come into play in Tarsila’s art of the Pau-Brasil period (1923–25), and as Herkenhoff writes, she never reduced “space into its planar dimension or to the notion of surface.”³ What is interesting to observe instead is how she constructed her work out of a limited repertoire of iconographic elements that repeat and permute: tall palm trees, foliage à la Léger, semicircular hills, accumulations of spheres, conjoined ovals, horizontal colored rectangles, crisscrossing diagonal lines, forests of cones. In fact the work operates so heavily through variations of related forms—“[a] return albeit from something that differs from itself in [the process of] returning,” to the point that it prefigures “an ornamental geometry.”⁴ Hence the diagrammatic quality that is a prominent feature of Tarsila’s drawings, which are stripped of extraneous detail, like haikus of the Brazilian landscape. De Campos describes “Tarsila’s iconic world: synthetic, rigorously demarcated, and lucid places and figures that occasionally—and without contradiction—aspire to a stage of monumental abbreviation, of lush proliferation.”⁵ In these “monumental abbreviations” of the Brazilian landscape, animals and topographic features present there since time immemorial take on new life and new color through Tarsila’s eyes: certain oval gray stones in the bluffs; the riverine capybaras that Frans Post described in the first Brazilian landscape painting in history, made in 1639.

None of this has anything to do with Cubism. I would dare say, in fact, that none of it has anything directly to do with any of the canonical avant-garde languages (despite the link some have proposed with Surrealism).⁶ Following the traces of the work’s ornamental geometry, and the function of repetition and variation in the paintings of the late 1920s, I instead suggest that her iconography responds, in part, to a certain vocabulary—also ornamental—present in Art Deco.⁷

As Aracy Amaral has described, when Tarsila had her first solo show in Paris, at the Galerie Percier in 1926, she commissioned the paintings’ frames from the famous Art Deco designer Pierre Legrain. Amaral establishes the bases—or throws out the clues—for a future investigation of the relationship between Tarsila’s work and Art Deco, and her position is decidedly critical: “Commissioning Legrain to construct frames that emphasized the exotic-magical nature of her works—in lizard skin, in corrugated cardboard, in polished wood, with mirrors cut at angles, etc.—always seems to us to have been a sign of insecurity in light of the public before whom she was presenting. In addition, these frames became works themselves, parallel with her paintings, no doubt interfering with them and causing some French critics to consider them tableaux-objets.”⁸ Legrain’s frames, however, don’t seem to have undermined the paintings at the time. The critic Paul Fierens, while mentioning “Pierre Legrain’s strange frames” in the Journal des débats, described the balance between the paintings’ freshness, freedom from artifice, and an “adequate dose of organizational intelligence.”⁹ Gaston de Pawlowski, in Le Journal, saw in the “Cubist frames” a desire to surprise—”There is something with which to shock the establishment”—but praised the “originality, the firm will of [Tarsila’s] compositions.”¹⁰ More interesting still, given the author’s conceptual reach, is Maurice Raynal’s remark in L’Intransigeant: “For Tarsila’s work, Pierre Legrain made special, very specifically designed frames, the formal and material combinations of which accompany the canvases no longer in a conventional way, but in order to isolate the picture less crudely and to enhance its qualities by harmonizing it with the objects that surround them.”¹¹

Legrain’s assignment was elaborate: he designed a different frame for each work. Only one of these frames now survives, that for A Cuca (1924), but even so, it is surprising that this gesture of Tarsila’s has not been examined with greater care. A frame is no small thing—a parergon, an exhibition device, a Beiwerk—the “bit of cornice,”¹² The decision to hire Legrain could not have been made without the artist’s consent, and she repeated it two years later, for her second show in Paris.¹³ In fact, the catalogues for both exhibitions explicitly mention Legrain’s frames. Their disappearance—not just their physical disappearance, their removal over time from all of the works except one, but their neglect when the work is discussed—may be attributable to a repression typical of Modernism, with its taboo against the ornamental or anecdotal in art. This taboo is an accomplice to the ideology of the absolute artwork, a fiction that art historians from Ernst Gombrich to Hans Belting have wisely dismantled.¹⁴ That fiction contradicts the understanding of meaning in art as the product of an expressive or linguistic system. Indeed, Legrain’s frames, and Tarsila’s tactical recourse to these ornamental accessories, should be interpreted as a symptom of something deeper. Such accessories, Spyros Papapetros writes, are “less, but also something more than a normative object. Biewerk is literally a side-work, or parergon in Greek (yet not a paralipomenon, or leftover). Such an intermediary object transcends distinctions between the accessory and the necessary, the organic body and the inorganic thing imposed in early philosophical discourses.”¹⁵

There is quite a bit we might say about the parergon, but first we must emphasize that logocentric approaches generally tend to disregard both ornament and supplement: “Philosophical discourse,” Jacques Derrida writes, “will always have been against the parergon.” We must also observe that the parergon—like any frame, including Legrain’s for Tarsila—is structurally called upon to position itself precisely against the material it contains
or highlights: 

A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bord, à bord]. It is first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) [Il est d’abord l’à-bord].¹⁶

The frames Tarsila commissioned for her first Paris show, and then again for her second, cannot be considered simply ancillary nor their function purely technical. The charge of making these frames, of transforming these paintings into objects, was not a banal or anodyne gesture that can be disposed of as reflecting “a certain insecurity.”¹⁷ Tarsila’s sensibility, after all, had been formed in the context of a symbolic universe marked by extraordinary supplements to the art object: the ornamental profusion of the Brazilian Baroque, the marvelous gilt reliefs that Aleijadinho made in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, not to mention the exuberant decoration omnipresent in the country’s countless popular celebrations, beginning with Carnival, a collective delirium on the part of the Brazilian people. Tarsila would have to have sustained some sort of determining interaction with Legrain. The fact that we know of no documentary traces of this dialogue does not invalidate the hypothesis: the commissioning of frames from Legrain was—is—an authorial decision, a stamp.¹⁸ That these accessories must be considered operators of historical inscription becomes even clearer when we remember that the gesture was repeated in 1928. In Paris, then, Tarsila presented her works within, or through, a considerable ornamental apparatus. This gesture was consequential and effective. The work “gobbled up” the avant-garde languages that were normalized—generalized and made familiar—through Art Deco during that period, but did so in a convertible, symmetrical manner: camouflaging itself in Art Deco strategies, the work let itself be digested by them. 

IV.

Beyond Tarsila’s decision to inscribe her painting within the widely popular stylistic context of Art Deco, something in the excess of those frames should be read as standing in an oppositional relationship to the work they bordered. “Any parergonis only added on by virtue of an internal lack in the system to which it is added,” Derrida declares. “What constitutes . . . parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon.”¹⁹

If the one Legrain frame that has survived the harshness of time can be taken as representative, these objects supplemented the paintings with the exotic materials shown in the works’ interiors, setting dead materials, such as lizard- or snakeskin, alongside the depiction of animate ones. In the process, these accessory objects aligned with an ancient tradition in the visual arts: the life that is absent inside the frame, though vividly represented in shapes and colors, is supplemented by the (dead) organic matter of the frame.²⁰ With this in mind, perhaps we can understand Raynal’s astute observation more fully: despite their excess and their strangeness, Legrain’s frames would have served to not to accentuate but attenuate the difference between Tarsila’s works and everything around them, to make it less “abrupt,” more fluid. 

In Paris in 1926, then, Tarsila’s paintings appeared not just as singular and admirably different paintings but as decorative objects inscribed into a style that was very à la mode in that city during those years. Aracy Amaral, despite her reservations in the face of this evidence, sees elements in the artist’s work from the late 1920s that respond to that stylistic alignment: “Certainly these works contain a stylization exploited by ‘art déco’ in stained glass windows, tapestry and milk glass, the absorption of which [the Brazilian artists [Antônio] Gomide, [Vicente do] Rego Monteiro, [Victor] Brecheret, and Ismael Nery also reflected.”²¹

Perhaps the vague assignment of Tarsila to a supposed “post-Cubism,” an idea that cuts across the reception of her work from Mário de Andrade to Zilio, is just a critical euphemism, the result of a reluctance to name Art Deco—as if that term, precisely because of its broad dissemination across the applied arts, were spurious and ill-begotten. But once the myths and historical fictions of the modern avant-gardes are transcended, once the truth of Oiticica’s remark “Purity is a myth,” inscribed in his Tropicália, Penetrables PN 2 (1966–67), is accepted, the setting of Tarsila’s work in the massive international constellation of ornamental artistic languages of the 1920s gains a fascinating dimension. And now the commissioning of frames from Legrain makes total (and another) sense, to the point of arousing the suspicion that Tarsila might have had the idea that some of these works would become significant ornamental objects through their frames. One might even speculate that for her second Paris exhibition in 1928, she could have painted some of the works—Abaporu, for example, which she produced that same year—with Legrain’s frames in mind.²²

A second delay: Tarsila came to modernity late. All indications show that in 1917, like so many others, she had failed to fully understand the message of Malfatti; nor does she seem to have found herself attracted—although she was certainly intrigued—by modern art during her first stay in Paris, between 1920 and 1922.²³ In truth, and paradoxically, Tarsila came to modernity in São Paulo: having missed the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, and in the wake of the excitement it had generated, she found herself part of what came to be called the Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five), which also included Malfatti, Oswald, Mário, and Menotti del Picchia. I say paradoxically because when the artist returned to Paris in 1923, she arrived with a commitment to modernity— a will to be modern—only to find Brazil.²⁴ Its exoticism was represented tonally as flat, even paintings, and its vibrant colors layoff in the distance. There was also its black population, widely represented and embraced.²⁵ Not for nothing is A Negra a Paris painting, not a Brazilian one: “It was in Paris,” writes Herkenhoff, “that Tarsila discovered Brazil. . . . It was in Paris that [Tarsila and Oswald] discovered the negro in a different light. African culture until then had been a disenfranchised culture in Brazil, a remainder of the Brazilian tradition of slavery. It was also notoriously absent from Brazilian academic painting.”²⁶

Tarsila, then, came to modernity when modernity was preparing to be absorbed into daily life in innumerable industrial, ornamental, and utilitarian products, achieving the goal at which the supposedly pure historical avant-gardes had failed: to change the world, to invade reality, even at the sometimes-programmatic price of diluting art with industry, the artist with the worker. The fact that one of the ways this came to pass was through impure, even bastard means—the neutralizing assimilation of modern aesthetic languages by the bourgeois fashion of Art Deco—matters least.²⁷ Art Deco made a good part of modernity transparent, dissolving it into acceptability, denying it differentiation. And this transparency, without excluding either modernity’s oddity or its invention of new forms, seems to have served as the vehicle for a formative inscriptionin Tarsila’s work, in Tarsila’s creative mind, in 1926. 

What were they like, those paintings in Legrain’s extravagant frames? What quality in them, what internal deflation, would structurally explain the supplementary exteriority that framed them—up to a point—as monumentally ornamental objects? Perhaps no one has better described Tarsila’s painting of the years following Oswald’s “Pau-Brasil” manifesto of 1924, the work that made up most of the 1926 show, than the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa: 

Tarsila do Amaral is the first Pau-Brasil transcription to painting. Her mission is to restore the naïve iconographyof the provincial interior, transplanting it to the canvas. And, for the first time, modernism finds in Brazil the perfect correspondence between newly learned techniques and the artist’s inspirational subject matter. Tarsila flirts with naïve, caboclo taste as well as the art of the native santeiros [makers or vendors of images of saints]. It is her distinction to have realized the most technically modern paintings produced in the country until then. In order to bring new life to the saints of domestic altars and the golden stars of its blue skies, the languid purple of the manacá [an ornamental and medicinal shrub] and the white of the jasmine, the scarlet of peasant dresses, the tinplate chests with their laughing decorations, the outlines of the banana trees, the crisscrossing lines of little paper flags underneath the gentle roofs of useless tiles, and of the stocks of elements of the everyday life of people, in poetry and in festivity, preserving the qualities of purity and lyricism, Tarsila found herself obliged to keep to the irreducible two-dimensionalism of the rectangle. And, casting aside the procedures and tricks of traditional painting, all destined for the fictitious representation of volumes in space, the artist draws the contours of the icons with clear, limpid lines, in a simple graphic procedure that attempts to evoke the whimsical arabesque of popular ornamentation, while the background of the canvas is divided into flat color zones in which pure blue encounters pink, and a dense, banana-tree green is contrasted against the dark chestnut brown of black skin.²⁸

There is a painting of this period, however, that Pedrosa’s detailed and colorful description doesn’t fit: A Negra. In this work alone might the ampleness of Legrain’s frame as an object be more complementary than supplemental, combining with the arresting amplitude of the body that interrogates us frontally to produce a material redundance. Perhaps this is what Legrain’s frames heralded, and perhaps Tarsila’s decision to commission them prefigured an intuition that would determine her work later in that decade, after the publication of Oswald’s “Manifesto antropófago”: the strategy of creating figures of an amplitude and size in tension with the field in which the artist has inscribed them, signaling in some now explicitly modern way a will toward overflow, a generative opposition, a matrix, a deforming force between imagination and representation. That this tension was announced in a painting from early in that decade, and, further, in a work representing the problem figure of Brazilian national culture as a matricentric and racially mixed society—the black woman, as mother and slave—should take on particular significance. Legrain’s monumental frames for Tarsila’s paintings—frames that turned them into ornament, that integrated them into a decorative strategy—won them a space of indifference, a neutral space where they could echo without facing resistance. Yet through this ingenious ornamental strategy, her work also announced that the modern message required another field in order to be able to emerge: a field yet to come, broader, more social, more shared. It so happens that A Negra, spreading out from its excessive frame among avant-gardes that were already seeing their power of friction fade, was a traumatic image; but it was also, as the embodiment of a historical tragedy and an emancipatory promise, the ground on which the utopian anthropophagic project could feed. A Negra was an implacable gift. The other paintings in the trio—Abaporu, a message and visual manifesto, and Anthropophagy, a synthesis potentially generating a new kind of humanity—were a speculative wager, a bet on a possible world that history, with its delayed skirmishes, would only confirm quite some time later. This explains the delay in the reception of Tarsila’s work and its late assimilation at the end of the 1960s, when it finally came to fulfill its function as the emblem of Brazil’s anthropophagic project. Only then could those paintings be digested in their sophisticated simplicity, like a song by Veloso or by Maria Bethânia. Until then, even as they appeared before admiring eyes in Paris, São Paulo, and Rio, their message only partly filtered into the culture. 

In this regard, Tarsila was no different from the cannibals described in Montaigne’s famous essay (which refers to Brazil without using that name, calling it “the place in which Villegaignon landed”): a people with a message only partly decipherable. These others, hungry for human flesh, offered Montaigne an inverted metaphor for his own location in a bloody time and place, a place of religious wars, murders, massacres, regicides. For him, cannibals offered promise, being representatives of another possible culture. “We may call these people barbarous insofar as the rules of reason are concerned,” he writes, “but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.”²⁹ The key to this essay, as to the modernity Tarsila embodied, is what has no place and remains pending. Montaigne, in sibylline fashion, uses a rhetorical device to articulate the inconclusiveness of history, which in its multiple delays repeats incessantly. Having led his readers to expect to hear from three Brazilian cannibals visiting the court of the French king Charles IX, he leaves us in suspense, producing a willful omission: the cannibals, he tells us, had come to transmit three messages, “of which I have forgotten the third—which distresses me—but I can still remember two.”

Montaigne was surely aware of the abrupt interruption in another essential text announcing a possible world different from our own: Plato’s dialogue Critias (360 B.C.), which describes the land of Atlantis, and which, in the form in which history has passed it down to us, is cut short just as the “god of gods” Zeus is about to explain that utopia’s fate. Another masterful example is Giordano Bruno’s De Vinculis in Genere (A General Account of Bonding ) of 1588, which also leaves us in suspense just when the bonds are about to be resolved in the union of bodies.³⁰ In any case, “Des Cannibales” does pass on the two messages of Charles IX’s exotic visitors that Montaigne remembers: their surprise, first, that a people has submitted itself to the rule of a king—and a child king no less—instead of choosing its sovereign themselves, and second, that half the kingdom lives comfortably and the other half in poverty. This is the real, perfectable, precarious world, summarized in two metonyms. And their third comment, their final message, is lost, consigned to enigma and permanent imminence. 

Montaigne also speaks of a mediocre interpreter, of a failure of communication and meaning. Perhaps that lacuna resembles the primal scene, something that happened in the past but only makes its way back to us through the labyrinths of the future. This is an apt image for Tarsila, and perhaps also for the modernity that she sought, a modernity always pending, always to come, its presence always hoped for in the appropriation of some symbols by others, in the neutralizing digestion of the tensions that constitute us, in endless anthropophagy. 

This is the second and final section of the essay “Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal” by Luis Pérez-Oramas in the exhibition catalog Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, available in the MoMA Bookstore. Read the first section here.

The post Part 2: Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal appeared first on post.

Beyond Devouring, there is nothing. Being is pure and eternal Devouring.


—Oswald de Andrade, “Mensagem ao antropófago desconhecido” (Message to the Unknown Cannibal), 1946

Cannibalism would therefore be the mythical expression of a melancholy bereavement—a sort of putting to death—for an object under whose spell the self found itself and from which it cannot resolve to separate itself.


—Pierre Fédida, “Le Cannibale mélancolique”
 (The Melancholic Cannibal), 1972

I.

It was in 1972 that Pierre Fédida published his essay “Le Cannibale mélancolique.”¹ That same year, in São Paulo, Tarsila do Amaral was in the last days of her life, while another Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark, was undergoing a decisive psychoanalysis with Fédida in Paris, where the young Tarsila had devoured her entire experience of European modernity.² Years earlier, also in Paris, in different decades but each at an early moment in her creative career, both had been apprentices in the studio of the artist Fernand Léger, Tarsila in 1923, Clark in 1950. There, both had learned to be something other than just one more of their teacher’s many followers, just another “sub-Léger.”³

Such coincidences might be no more than that but for the fact that the two women not only may have been the two greatest Brazilian artists of the twentieth century, but were among those who, with respect to the modern period in Brazilian art, initiated it (Tarsila) and brought it to a close (Clark).⁴ Equally significant, both artists were closely linked to the image, the imaginary, perhaps the myth, and certainly the representation—the very ability to be represented—of the Brazilian aesthetic project of Anthropophagy, whose foundational text is the 1928 “Manifesto antropófago” (Manifesto of Anthropophagy), illustrated by Tarsila and written by the poet Oswald de Andrade, the artist’s husband at the time. On January 11, 1928, in celebration of his birthday, Tarsila gave Oswald a painting that, to say the least, was disturbing and strange: a monumental elongated figure, in the canonical, cheek-on-hand posture of melancholy dating back at least to Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholy I (1514), of which this image can be seen as a modern Brazilian version—brutal, barren, asexual, naked, solar. Flaunting extremities now immense, now minute—an enormous foot, a tiny head—the figure sits beside a monumental cactus, potentially with sexual connotations, in the broad light of midday.⁵ (The sun, at its zenith, marks the exact center of the composition.) To title the work, Oswald and his friend the poet Raul Bopp dove into the language of Brazil’s Tupi and Guarani peoples, using the Tupi-Guarani dictionary published by the Jesuit Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in 1640, and set about inventing a word: aba, “person,” plus poru, “who eats”—Abaporu, “the one who eats.”⁶ The work would come to be seen as the incarnation of Brazilian anthropophagy. Paradoxically enough, many years later Clark would describe to her friend the artist Hélio Oiticica the making of a work that would come to be seen as incarnating both the conclusion, and maybe the consecration, of the anthropophagic project as myth and utopia of Brazilian Modernism, as Abaporu had been for its beginnings: 

“I’m sending you a photograph of a work I call Anthropophagic Drool. A person lies on the ground. Around him, kneeling youths place multicolored spools of thread in their mouths. With their hands, they begin taking from their mouths the threads that fall upon the supine person until the spools have been emptied. The regurgitated thread is moist with saliva, and, although people initially feel they are merely pulling on strands, they soon become aware that they are drawing out their own entrails. It is actually the phantasmatics of the body that interests me and not the body in itself.”⁷

In around the same period as this letter, Fédida, in “Le Cannibale mélancolique,” was suggesting that whether as phantasm, dream, or delusion, anthropophagy manifests a longing to devour an object of desire with which we identify, in a primitive identification infused by the anxious possibility of its own rupture. Among the various manifestations of South America’s aspiration to modernity—“utopic messianism,” “archaeological utopia,” “involuntary residuality,” and “deforming indifference” are terms I have used elsewhere to describe independent but visually related aesthetic projects across the continent—perhaps none is more fascinating than Brazil’s cannibalistic phantasmagoria, which becomes image in Tarsila’s work, then later becomes body in Clark’s.⁸ The philosopher Benedito Nunes saw Oswald’s “Manifesto antropófago” (Manifesto of Anthropophagy) as simultaneously metaphor, diagnosis, and therapy: the text set out to assert Brazil’s intellectual autonomy, to diagnose its colonial trauma, and to transcend the collective super-ego that had impeded the accomplishment of modernity in the region since the early stages of the repression that colonialism had imposed.⁹ The starting point of Oswald’s essay, as Nunes understood, was a simplified, somewhat erroneous description of the rituals of anthropophagy, which need not entail literal cannibalism and does not appear as a generalized practice in the tribal cultures that Claude Lévi-Strauss called “cold” societies.
¹⁰From here Oswald made the argument that Brazil could and should cannibalize other cultures, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, by digesting, “without a trace of resentment or spurious guilty conscience, the inner conflicts and resistances of the exterior world.”¹¹

This project, this utopia, would not find a responsive reception until long after Oswald first articulated it. Nearly half a century would pass before the idea would find real social resonance and have a real effect on Brazilian culture. That delay is a concern of the present essay, along with that of Tarsila herself, the “country girl from São Bernardo” who, “dressed by Poiret,”¹² teamed up with Oswald in Paris and São Paulo during the long, heroic years in which his invention won no direct audience or response.¹³

Remarkably, the first systematic monograph on Tarsila’s work appeared only in 1975, contemporaneously, that is, with Clark’s Anthropophagic Drool and Oiticica’s Parangolés.¹⁴ It had had to wait, in other words, until after the late 1960s, when the generation of artists and intellectuals linked to the Tropicália movement had retrospectively embraced Oswald’s cannibalist message.¹⁵ In the 1970s, the first rigorous theoretical interpretation of Brazilian Modernism, written by the artist Carlos Zilio, cast Anthropophagy as its birthplace, though the newborn had yet to grow up—the Modernism that Oswald had conceived as a utopia had yet to be realized.¹⁶ Earlier on, Oswald himself had abandoned Anthropophagy for Marxism; only toward the end of the 1940s had he returned to his ideas of the 1920s, but again without wide effect.¹⁷ The task of embodying the terms of Brazil’s anthropophagic utopia had fallen, after a long wait, to later generations—to artists such as Zé Celso, Gal Costa, Hélio Eichbauer, Gilberto Gil, and Caetano Veloso.¹⁸ Just as significant, Oiticica, Clark, and Zilio had seen in Oswald’s project the sign of a difference, the trace of a possibility that might materialize as a Brazilian modernity, though one emerging in unexpected places and forms—the “line” of color, moistened with saliva, in Clark’s Anthropophagic Drool, for example. Thus Oiticica could write to Clark in that galvanizing year of 1968: 

“Brazil is a form of synthesis of peoples, races, habits, where the European speaks but does not speak so loudly; except in the universalist, academic fields, which are not those of “cultural creation” but those of closure. Creation, even in Tarsila and especially in Oswald de Andrade, possesses a subjective charge that differs extremely from the rationalism of the European, this is our “thing,” that Guy Brett was able to understand so well and that the Europeans will have to swallow, in fact with appetite since they are fed up with everything and it looks as if that saturated civilization is drying their imagination.”¹⁹

Oiticica’s surprising metaphor inverts Oswald’s cannibalist principle: instead of Brazil cannibalizing Europe, ancient (and new) colonists—Europeans—should devour what has metabolized in Brazil. They should eat up this unique and different culture, for “before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.”²⁰ And before Oswald’s invented anthropophagic rite kicked off the adventure of Brazilian modernity—even before that adventure came to have a name, as Sônia Salzstein has shown—Tarsila had already produced its image.²¹

II.

The modernity foreshadowed in the swallowing of everything by everyone (“The one and only world principle. . . . I am only concerned in that [which] is not mine. Man’s law. The law of anthropophagous,” as Oswald wrote) in actuality did not happen.²² It did not happen during the event that the simpler art histories tend to identify as the originary scene—the primal scene, the Urszene in Freudian terms—of the modern in Brazil: the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), a festival organized, and quite well attended, by the coffee-producing elite of São Paulo in 1922. It did not happen during that week’s pomp and circumstance at the city’s Teatro Municipal, nor did it happen earlier: in 1917, for example, when another of Brazil’s great modern artists, Anita Malfatti, having returned to São Paulo after working in Berlin with Lovis Corinth and in Maine with Homer Boss, exhibited the work she’d been making—to no significant critical reception. Nor did it happen in 1912, when Lasar Segall, an avant-garde artist from Lithuania, brought to Brazil from Germany the results of his intense journey through expressionist painting. Modernity did not depend on what was brought into Brazil and what wasn’t; it wasn’t just a matter of cultured men and elegant women being able to feel that they were ahead of local time.²³ Nor was it yet the time for Modernisms elsewhere, such as the one that would blossom in North America after World War II.²⁴ Modernity had no place in Brazil’s Semana de Arte Moderna, although an important public showing by many of the country’s modern artists did take place there.

The argument that the Semana de Arte Moderna failed to accomplish its goals is far from new. Modernity—which in any case, we know, is structurally always an unfinished project, insofar as it feeds on utopia—requires a series of conditions of possibility that were absent in the Brazil of 1922, or rather were only marginally present in meaningful combination. Because modernity must consist of something other than an elitist skirmish, it did not happen in Brazil in 1922, or in Russia in 1915 ,²⁵ or during the rest of that intense decade of the 1920s, in which Tarsila produced her greatest iconographic arsenal: “The historic solitude of Tarsila’s work,” Salzstein writes, “the fact that the peculiar modern visuality that she mounted from an astute dialectic of tradition and experimentation did not become generalized for Brazilian art, is due perhaps to the work’s profound engagement with the utopian project of modernity, which in the end was not realized for the country, at least, in its utopic dimension.”²⁶

The present essay does not set out to resolve the question of what modernity was or was not in Brazil, but it does examine an artist—Tarsila—whose work, artistic personality, and very being are inextricably linked to the fate of Brazil’s modern project and to the image of modernity there. For the moment, we must distinguish image from text—the images of Brazilian modernity from its expressions in texts and manifestos.²⁷ There are many reasons for this, but we can begin with one: the fundamental program of that modernity, Oswald’s “Manifesto antropófago”—a text that is less a series of arguments than a series of verbal images—has as its frontispiece and emblem a drawing by Tarsila.²⁸ We must begin, then, by establishing one condition: we must attempt to see that image—and Tarsila’s work of the 1920s more generally—independently of that text, independently of that word and everything its verbal images impose upon us, because Tarsila literally precedes them all. 

In a beautiful reflection on the art of antiquity, Pascal Quignard weaves his arguments around two assumptions: behind every image is another image, fading into absence; and behind every word is someone lost, someone missing. Behind any image rests a secular sediment of images, forgotten or lost, unknown or undifferentiated, that can somehow return to life in any given image; behind any word rests the absent that the word names.²⁹ What absent image hides behind the organic ampleness of Tarsila’s anthropophagic repertoire? What is the absent image behind Abaporu (1928) or Anthropophagy (1929), or, before them, behind A Negra (1923), that absolute mother?³⁰ Behind these devouring figures, what is the scene of devouring that we do not see? And if behind every word is someone lost, who is the one hidden in the lines of the “Manifesto antropófago” written by Oswald—who by then had been named “Tarsiwald” in a poem by Mário de Andrade, making Oswald and Tarsila inseparable doubles in that cannibalistic plot?³¹

Before addressing these questions, I would like to stress one fact: if the Semana de Arte Moderna was the Urszene of Brazilian modernity, as its program claimed and as some narratives still claim, it is nevertheless the case that Tarsila was not there. In February 1922 she was in Paris and would not return to São Paulo until this foundational event was over. I’d like to begin, then, with this particular delay, before getting to any others: Tarsila was not there. Tarsila came later.

Tarsila, like modernity, came later: for our current purposes her embodiment of modern art crystallized between A Negra and Anthropophagy, which, with Abaporu, constitute an emblematic series of transformations and can be interpreted as such.“³² What is there of each of these paintings in the other two? How do they mutually transform one another? We might perhaps think of them as three distinct sites of articulation: I—mother, black woman, slave (A Negra ); you—uncertain of gender, devourer of humans (Abaporu ); he and she—a strange, deformed, monstrous, copulating couple who condense the previous two characters into a third person yet to come (Anthropophagy). Following Hubert Damisch—who, analyzing the practice of perspective in Western art, replaced the word mask with the word painting in a text by Lévi-Strauss—we might perhaps then suppose “that one painting responds to another by assuming its individuality” and that what matters “is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is to say what it chooses not to represent.”³³

We might perhaps interpret this transformation literally: as an engendering, an act of conception or impregnation. And the issue of engendering (in this case also the engendering of the modern in Brazil) naturally implies, we know, the complex issue of a primal scene—a scene, an image, that is always missing, always absent—as well as maternity, infancy, childhood, emergence, blossoming. In the light of these paintings, such issues indicate a problem at once cultural and organic, relating not only to ideas but to bodies, to coitions, swallowings, and digestions, all as much physical
as symbolic. 

Such is the metaphor, or the parable, that leads me down a strange trajectory: the idea that A Negra was devoured by Abaporu, and that from that swallowing, that (symbolic) digestion, arose Anthropophagy. Just as the anthropophagic project could not come to fruition at the time of its first articulation, but only later—delayed, appropriated, devoured, gulped down for other uses and other fates (just as Oswald’s manifesto was itself a delayed effect, an après-coup, of Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Des Cannibales,” published in 1580), Tarsila’s work, too, came to fruition later, becoming central in that history only when its trauma, orthe effect of its trauma, had been made digestible.³⁴

An acerbic critic of the Semana de Arte Moderna, Monteiro Lobato, sarcastically commented that in the salons of the elitist and Eurocentric café society of São Paulo, and in the rich halls of the Villa Kyrial, mansion of the illustrious senator José de Freitas Valle, they ate “foie gras de Nantes.”³⁵ This nemesis of Brazilian Modernism was certainly aware that not only did foie gras come from Nantes, but much of what was imported from France passed through that port, from the essays of Montaigne to—notoriously, and not that far back in time—African slaves. The anecdotal reference to Nantes in relation to a senator who had earlier, with arrogant cruelty, attacked Malfatti’s work—proof of the elites’ myopia, an obstruction to the early development of Modernism—makes me think of the Africans who were sold in markets in the French West Indies and then in Brazil, the last American nation to abolish slavery. The fascinating woman in A Negra, whom some may find disturbing but who rivets our eyes—and who can be linked to a photograph that Tarsila kept from the early 1920s on, showing a black woman sitting outdoors, a woman Tarsila spoke of when remembering her childhood in 1972—would certainly in 1923 have summoned a memory of slavery, which had ended less than forty years before.³⁶

The figure in A Negra is iconographically a matriarch at the same time that she is historically a slave: simultaneously a primal subject—a figure embodying a collective engenderment, the troubled infancy of a nation—and a subject for emancipation. Nunes writes of Oswald’s anthropophagic texts, 

“The maternalistic nature of Pau-Brasil’s poetic vision is reflected in matriarchy as a schema of primitive life, having served as a core for the crystallization of technological barbarism in the form of an ideal society. And because the break with matriarchal society took place when man had ceased eating his fellow man in order to enslave him, the lack of catharsis providedby ritual cannibalism allows us to see the cause that fixed the power of the father as Superego onto the trauma of guilt feelings and, therefore, as an exterior reality principle, coercing and inhibiting the interior pleasure principle.”³⁷

Matriarch and slave, A Negra is the beginning of everything in Tarsila’s art. Anthropophagy does not operate among these works—they do not devour each other—but it does not precede the tension that links them either: her painting Abaporu is the cannibal, and her painting Anthropophagy is what results from the digestion of A Negra. Anthropophagy digests—condenses, metabolizes—both the matriarch and the slave. 

These three paintings cut through the marrow of Tarsila’s art of the 1920s. If we can sustain this hypothesis, this reading of the trio as a cannibal parable in which Abaporu might have digested A Negra to produce Anthropophagy, then what Anthropophagy traces is simultaneously a neutral zone and a sphere—an interval—of deferment. The neutrality is that between two (perhaps imaginary) poles of tension: on the one hand, filiation, the maternal phantasm, perhaps also Mother Europe, and on the other, submission to (and emancipation of) a messianic phantasm. In other words, the myth or ideology of Anthropophagy is that it establishes a neutrality between the blame-inducing constitutive tensions of Brazilian (and, I would add, Latin American) culture, between dependence and submission on the one hand and emancipation and messianic promise on the other. The deferment comes because it could only achieve its effects—still incomplete—quite a bit later, when it would become possible to locate in an entire social body—not just an illuminated elite—the field of a true public space, a popular culture whose forms and sites Tarsila was able to prefigure ahead of (her) time. 

Yet Anthropophagy, this belatedly realized operating myth of the Brazilian modern project, is at root a European construct, and as such is not cannibalistic at all. Its constructors were white Europeans, from Montaigne to Georges Bataille, without forgetting Francis Picabia.³⁸ “We can already make out,” writes Nunes,“in the ideas that Oswald de Andrade stole from Montaigne, Freud, Nietzsche, and Keyserling . . . the general philosophical outline of Anthropophagy that passed unharmed onto the author’s doctrinaire works.”³⁹

The cannibal, simply, feeds on another human being in a totally normal way. The idea that this behavior is extraordinary is a European invention, a construct of the cannibal’s victims. The cannibal, however, is a weak metaphor for symbolic assimilation because it is too general: should we conclude that every attempt to assimilate modernity in Latin America was a sort of symbolic cannibalism? “The world’s one law,” Oswald called anthropophagy in the manifesto, only to limit it to a term for the absorption of some cultures by others, a word describing the banal truth that cultures—all cultures—have always constituted themselves by symbolically metabolizing elements from outside them. The challenge lies in finding the codes specific to Brazilian anthropophagy, beyond the obvious and necessary kinds of assimilation inherent in cultural migration since time began. And perhaps it is precisely in an image that preceded Anthropophagy, shaping it even before it had a name—that is, in the work of Tarsila, that artist absent from the self-styled birth of Modernism in Brazil—that we can glimpse a path away from such generalizations. Setting aside the verbal texts of Anthropophagy, we must interrogate its image, and above all, as Quignard would say, the image that is absent in its images.

What makes Tarsila’s work modern? How did it come to be modern, through what skirmishes, appropriations, and delays? And if, like Oswald’s writing, it had to wait for decades before
a collective response to it became possible, we have to wonder: what of Tarsila is there in Oiticica, in Clark, in Lygia Pape? What of her is there in Eichbauer, set designer for Celso’s production of O rei da vela (The Candle King ), the play Oswald wrote in 1933 but whose debut came only in 1967, when the entire Tropicália generation discovered Anthropophagy, four decades after the writing of its manifesto? What of Tarsila is there in Gil, Veloso, Artur Barrio, Waltercio Caldas, Tunga, and Anna Maria Maiolino? 

Such questions arise easily, given that Tarsila’s connection to Anthropophagy seems not only authorized by her work but affected by it. Abaporu was printed as the frontispiece in Oswald’s manifesto, although it predated it, and the cactus from Abaporu, or from Distance (1928) appeared in the backdrop for Celso’s production of O rei da vela. Veloso, who attended that production, saw it as the foundational event in the Tropicália movement’s embrace of Anthropophagy: “The idea of cultural cannibalism fit tropicalistas like a glove. We were ‘eating’ the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Our arguments against the nationalists’ defensive attitude found in this stance its most succinct and exhaustive enunciation.”⁴⁰

Less obvious, but more important, is an understanding of the heterogenous temporality of modernity, especially the Brazilian modernity that adopted the motto and visual imaginary of Anthropophagy. To understand this we must understand Tarsila’s “delays.” 

In his brilliant analysis of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit—the deferred action, the après-coup—Jean Laplanche emphasizes the alogical, anachronic order of its manifestation: the operative scene always happens later, and the originary, primal scene (which actually comes to light second, although it falls earlier in time) is always and forever lost. We were not in it; its trauma is such that we have no memory of having suffered it, until it emerges later, through and as an effect of a second event.⁴¹ In effect, it never happened. And if by some chance it did happen—as the Semana de Arte Moderna happened in 1922 or as the painting of Abaporu preceded the writing of the “Manifesto antropófago”—it is as if it had not happened, until another scene awakens the meaning of its traumatic effect. 

It is well known that any après-coup, any Nachträglichkeit, is built on a backward-looking fantasy: to have seen that lost Urszene, to have observed parental coitus. The Tropicália movement, and Brazil’s Concrete poetry and Neo-Concrete art of the late 1960s, were the standpoints for just such a backward view, toward Oswald’s and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy of the 1920s. That retrospective gaze would bring out the repressed meaning of a message that had been waiting to emerge since Tarsila conceived her melancholic monster, her melancholic cannibal. 

This is the first section of the essay “Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal” by Luis Pérez-Oramas in the exhibition catalog Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, available in the MoMA Bookstore. Read second and final section here.

The post Part 1: Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal appeared first on post.

This text was originally published under the theme “Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America.” The original content items in this theme can be found here.

Opposite to the search for transparency and formal purity that characterized the work of her peers—Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Alejandro Otero—Gego was able to produce a sort of radically material form of abstraction, centered on three-dimensional knots and links rather than points and lines, and stressing opacity and density over transparency. Whereas Soto and others cancelled shadows in their works, Gego unfolded her oeuvre through dense clouds and entangled structures that cast their presence as shadows in the exhibition space.

Gego’s major artistic achievement and lifelong commitment is the site-specific installation conceived for the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1969 and known as the large Reticulárea, which the artist did not stop to address and transform until the mid-1980s.

The large Reticulárea provided Gego with the repertoire of elements that would become the signatures of her work throughout the remainder of her career: hanging structures, entanglements of knots, and fractal compositions. One can argue, in fact, that all of her different typologies of works unfolded from it: Reticuláreas, Streams (Chorros), Drawings without Paper, etc.

Once Gego concluded the very first iteration of the large Reticulárea in 1969, she addressed a series of works known as Streams (Chorros), in 1971, one of which, Stream no. 7, is included in the Cisneros gift. In these works, as in all major works by the artist, she transcended the idea of a conventional orthogonal regulating plan typical of Geometric Abstraction by stressing the non-centered dimension of her structures. A system of three-dimensional metal-wire “lines” are subject to free-fall from a hanging point: accident became central, and within the falling lines, she inserted fragments of linked knots and reticula in order to search for form, density, and opacity.

Streams were instrumental in Gego’s complexification of abstraction. They allowed her to set her ambitious take on real space through a succession of potentially infinite additions of linked knots and fragments. By cancelling the notion of a symmetrical, centered structure, she achieved a radically organic form of abstraction. 

The Cisneros Stream, or Chorro is unique in the sense that Gego gifted almost all of her Chorros series to the national museums in Venezuela during the 1980s. Very few were left out. MoMA is, in fact, the only museum outside of Venezuela to have an example of this fundamental series of sculptures. In addition, the Cisneros Gift includes an ensemble of works by Gego that reflects the whole of her career, from her early 1960’s deconstruction of Kineticism to her Reticuláreas, to her series of Drawings without Paper, and collages from the 1980s and early 1990s, making MoMA’s collection of Gego’s work among the most significant in the world.

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