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| Baroque Sensuousness in Contemporary
Latin American Art: Toward a New Avant-Garde Aesthetics Jodi Kovach, Washington University, St. Louis |
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| How do we interpret the aesthetic value of an artwork that heightens all of our senses and anchors us completely, mind and body, in the present moment? This question should not pose a challenge, if we regard the aesthetic as that peculiar quality of an object that conjures deep and intense feeling within the human subject. But in the longstanding Western philosophical tradition extending from the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment, aesthetic judgment is defined as an exclusively visual process.[1] More than half a century ago, Clement Greenberg formulated a theory of aesthetic judgment in avant-garde art based on Enlightenment principles. His formalist framework has since narrowed the criteria for aesthetic perception in art, leaving us bereft of the tools to evaluate aesthetics that stimulate feeling beyond the sensation of sight.[2] As Caroline Jones has shown in her recent book Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Greenberg conceived of the rational modernist viewing subject in accordance with his idea of Modernism as the evolving pursuit of aesthetic value.[3] According to Greenberg, the modernist spirit was best expressed through the empirical exploration of the irreducible medium, which reached its apogee with Post-painterly Abstraction. He championed the color field paintings of Morris Louis, who used clean, flat bands of color to perfectly articulate the two-dimensional surface, nevertheless meeting the highest ambitions of the Modernist program and completing the pursuit of aesthetic advancement. As a result, late and post-modernist art criticism has either struggled to define the aesthetics of art and its perception within this residual framework or taken recourse to anti-aesthetic positions.[4] Recently, however, a broadening movement among Latin American artists explores the boundaries of aesthetic perception by igniting our more sensuous faculties through a wide range of media. These artists contribute to recent international currents in sound, smell, and relational art, as well as embodied aesthetic experience. But more importantly, their experiments with bodily perception revive the aesthetic principles of Brazilian Neoconcretismo, whose proponents challenged Greenberg’s visual program by exploring modernism bodily and spatially. This paper looks at how three key artists, Lucrecia Martel, Ernesto Neto, and Adriana Varejão, offer up a new sensuous aesthetics inspired by Neoconcretismo. Their aesthetic approach extends from a cultural modernity that is peculiarly Latin American: one that recalls baroque expressions in Latin America to re-infuse aesthetic experience with aura and expand the limits that Greenberg’s aesthetic modernity imposed upon reason. With this in mind, I show how the baroque gives new valence to the role of aesthetics in avant-garde art today. Contemporary Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel plays with film’s audio and visual modalities to prove that film aesthetics cannot be reduced to the scopic field of the flat screen, and in fact have the capacity to enter into and shape the spaces of bodily experience. With her first film, La Ciénaga, 2001, Martel combined minimalist images with poignant sounds that penetrate the viewer’s space and generate powerful and unexpected sensory responses to the film. What makes the result different from other examples of cinematic surround sound is that Martel let sound guide the visual and narrative components of the film by planning out the soundtrack before she shot or even began writing the script.[5] Sound takes precedence over the other formal elements of the medium to the extent that it takes on a unique extradiegetic quality. Rather than retreating into the background, sound supersedes the film’s diegetic world and its meaning is manifest in the viewer’s sensory environment. In the opening scene of the film, sound is substantive and dimensional: we hear the deep rumble of an approaching storm, the anxious tinkling of ice against a glass of garish blood-red wine, grasped unreliably by a trembling hand. Martel fixes her camera on a close-up shot of tired bodies that lethargically drag and scrape metal lawn chairs across the concrete. Every sound is mundane but the sharp juxtapositions between heavy vibrations and grating noises, combined with stagnant images and dull, dim lighting rouse a feeling of stifling, claustrophobic uneasiness. The effect sound and image have on the viewer recalls Donald Judd’s comment on Robert Morris’s Slab (1973), when he stated that “Morris’ pieces are minimal visually, but they’re powerful spatially.”[6] But while Morris’s obtrusive objects redefine the viewer’s surroundings[7], Martel uses sound as a material interface between artistic form and human body. This aspect links her work to Neoconcrete experiments of the sixties, which explored the mutual efflorescence of artwork and spectator through the minimalist art object. Lygia Pape’s Divisor, for example, involved the active participation of a large group of children who interacted with a flexible geometric plane on the streets of Rio de Janeiro in 1968. The children stuck their heads through holes in a giant white sheet so that their bodies were incorporated into the plane, and their movements both determined and were limited by the sheet, combining the artwork and the participants as one vital body in real, concrete space.[8] Like minimalist sculptures of her North American counterparts, Pape’s work is realized through viewers’ contact with the object. However, while the often imposing character of minimalist sculpture dominates the viewer’s experience, collective interaction with Pape’s organic, skin-like form gives rise to simultaneous realization of the work’s meaning and both individual and collective subjectivities. Likewise, Martel uses sound as a malleable physical medium that mediates bodily experience without regulating subjectivity. Sound’s constant movement and ephemeral quality destabilize the isolated image and bring the artwork into a dialogue with the viewer’s senses.[9] By expanding the nature of aesthetic reception in this way, Martel helps revitalize the meaning of felt experience in contemporary art practice.[10] In recent years, art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud diagnosed the crisis of aesthetics in avant-garde art after the “completion” of “the programme of modernity…[which] has drained the criteria of aesthetic judgment we are heir to...”[11] Bourriaud called for a “radical upheaval” of aesthetics in light of the obsolescence of Greenberg’s formalism in avant-garde art. His solution: relational aesthetics, which describes a vein of contemporary art exemplified by convivial environments like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s kitchens, in which he cooked and served Thai curry to visitors. Relational artworks like these counter the “detached optical contemplation” of Greenberg’s formalism with “intersubjective encounter” as both form and mode of engagement with the work. As Claire Bishop pointed out, Bourriaud’s theory conflates aesthetics with the social relations that the artwork purportedly produces.[12] However, we could also consider how the tastes and smells of the food served by Tiravanija generate aesthetic feeling. In a similar way, Martel’s films expand conventional modes of aesthetic apprehension by shifting the grounds of aesthetic experience beyond the visual and toward other sensory dimensions.[13] Sensuous aesthetics in contemporary Latin American art can then be weighed against the conventions of its Neoconcretist predecessors. Compare, for example, the ephemeral architectural qualities of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s palpable sculptural installations with Neoconcrete artist Hélio Oiticica’s provisional structures of the sixties. In 2001 Neto created a stalactiform installation of polyamide fabric legs, filled with different pungent spices such as cumin, turmeric, and cloves for the St. Louis Art Museum’s Wonderland exhibit. These enormous skin-like forms either dripped from a net ceiling or rested on the floor in shapeless globs, creating visual counterparts to the amorphous architecture of scents that pervaded every corner of the museum and ebbed or flowed as visitors moved through the galleries.[14] The way Neto’s work redefined the museum’s interior recalls Oiticica’s architectural enclosures called Penetrables. These works also required the viewer to move around and between makeshift constructions which he conceived not as definite structures but as manipulative models for sensory, tactile, and spatial exploration that incorporate the sensible body into the realization of form.[15] Measuring Neto’s installation against Oiticica’s demonstrates how the human body becomes a sensitive and responsive catalytic presence that brings the artwork to its realization. His aesthetics intervene in the subject’s olfactory, visual, and spatial experiences in successive extemporaneous moments, integrating the body and artwork in a given time and space. He uses aesthetics as a vehicle of sensation that spawns self-awareness and concrete thinking, which together culminate into a meaningful present experience. The principles of embodiment and presentness distinguish the avant-garde program of Neto and Oiticica from that of Greenberg, who couched avant-garde aesthetics in notions of disembodiment.[16] Greenberg conceived a theory of aesthetic reception in accordance with the Enlightenment principles of reason and progress.[17] Faced with the demise of Western civilization in a modern society shaped by developing bourgeois capitalism and afflicted by totalitarianisms, Greenberg offered that the avant-garde would preserve culture in an elite, autonomous realm beyond society’s internal dynamics and ideological conflicts.[18] For Greenberg, the avant-garde could achieve its goals through the self-critical enterprise of painting.[19] By late career he praised color field painting for achieving the representation of unmodulated hues. He particularly admired Helen Frankenthaler for trying to dissolve the paint’s texture into the surface by flooding and staining color onto the canvas. By focusing solely on the quality of undifferentiated flatness to procure pure visual stimulus, color field painting confirmed the vacuity of both painting and viewing subject and preserved art’s autonomy.[20] At the time Greenberg was praising the autonomy of reason and vision, Neoconcretismo dispensed with such abstractions and devised an aesthetic that mediated form, materiality, and multi-sensory experience. With her Trepantes (Obra Mole),1964, Lygia Clark connected dangling strips of rubber in the form of a Möbius strip. These organically unified, manipulative planar surfaces established continuity between the human subject and art object through tactile perception. Neoconcretists believed that creating a dialogue between the subject’s bodily senses and the art object’s physical nature would open a space for expression and test the limits of Greenberg’s rational disembodied subject.[21] But does this sensuous aesthetic approach reflect a peculiarly Latin American modernism, and why is it relevant to artists today? Recent scholarship has shown that the protean concept of the baroque can provide compelling post-modernist contexts in which we can invert stereotypical perceptions of Latin American art as sensuous, erotic, or irrational. It can also loosen former center/periphery models of cultural exchange – in which Latin American art practice operates on the margins of European culture – while still allowing us to distinguish Neoconcretismo and its offshoots from other international movements.[22] This approach, however, can produce a way of thinking of the baroque as an omnipresent sensibility that pervades generations of Latin American art.[23] Instead, we can look at how artists and writers of the twentieth century reflected on the Baroque culture of their colonial pasts in unique ways as inspiration for their historically specific vanguard enterprises. Cuba’s Revista de Avance group, for example, looked to Hispanic Baroque literary culture to re-enchant modern aesthetic experience with beauty and inventiveness.[24] Later, many of the Neo-Baroque authors and critics, most notably Severo Sarduy, combined concepts of the baroque with post-modernism to imagine a new Latin American idiom based on the principle of de-centering. For other groups ranging from the Contemporáneos writers in Mexico, to Antropofagie and Udigrudi, the baroque, perceived as the negative opposite of classical standards of beauty, served as inspiration to subvert the values established in the European philosophical tradition of aesthetics and to explore new ways of representing their specific realities through the excessive, the unbalanced, the sensual, or the melancholic.[25] In a similar way Neoconcretismo’s multi-sensory aesthetic program eclipses that of Greenberg, who depleted aesthetics of anything beyond instantaneous visual perception to purify art of political content. Their approach paved a new direction for avant-garde aesthetics, especially for contemporary artists whose works ignite sensuous faculties to bring both aura and a new concreteness to aesthetic experience.[26] The vanguard Latin American artists and intellectuals who viewed Hispanic Baroque culture as a moment of new explorations in art affirmed this historical moment as the origins of Latin American aesthetic modernity. Hungarian scholar Pál Kelemen devised an altogether new set of aesthetic valuations for baroque art when he began studying Latin American colonial art in the 1930s. Wishing to separate himself from his European cultural roots after WWI, he traveled to Latin America and researched its Baroque art as original products of the conditions of colonialism.[27] In 1951 he published Baroque and Rococo in Latin America, which addresses the positive transformation of European imposed styles into expressions that reflect the tastes and values of the region as well as the individual craftsmen. For example, Kelemen especially admired the sensitive, human-like figures made by Quito sculptor Caspicara, which stood out for transforming the theatrical artifice of the European Baroque into a realistic sentiment that Kelemen described as “drama experienced.”[28] He also references a relief carving on the lateral portal of the church of Santo Domingo in Arequipa to highlight the Andean “mestizo style,” in which the carver cobbled together Andean motifs and Christian iconography to create “an expression of his own.”[29] Through Kelemen’s analyses emerge a cohesive set of standards for evaluating the aesthetic quality of an artwork which challenge Greenberg’s criteria. In contrast to the values of medium-specificity, the evolution of abstract purism, and individual expression fettered by reason, Kelemen championed unique, heterogeneous combinations of influences that came together on the colonial stage, and which allowed for innovation with styles and materials, and unrestrained individual expression.[30] Oiticica put these aesthetic qualities into the service of his ambitious project to rewrite the goals of the avant-garde from the perspective of a developing country. Oiticica’s Parangolés revolutionize aesthetic reception, turning Modernist abstract painting into an aesthetic vehicle for extemporaneous collective expression by channeling painting’s formal structure through samba: a popular Brazilian dance born out of Portuguese and African cultural miscegenation. When set in motion by a dancer, these colorful cape-like garments transform abstract painting from a visual surface into an active composition of form and color that is integrated in real time and space.[31] Today, artist Adriana Varejão continues to expand the formalist limits of painting by making painting’s aesthetics continuous with real, felt experience. Her paintings are embodiments of the cultural processes extending from Brazil’s Baroque history. For Azulejos como tapete en carne viva she painted a grid resembling the delicate blue-and-white tiles commonly used in colonial Portuguese architecture. She then gauged a gaping wound in the painted plane to expose a palpable, tangled mass of blood, guts, and gore that appear to pulsate and ooze through the cracks of the fractured and buckling tiles.[32] By violating the flat surface, she not only animates the violence of colonialism but pushes painting toward an approximation of a living, consuming physical body. The bowels spill out from the gridded surface into the viewer’s space where visceral intrigue and repulsion subsume visual contemplation. This uncontained, uncontrollable element undercuts the viewer’s movement toward aesthetic pleasure, and grounds meaning in the subject’s natural, bodily response to the artwork’s physical presence.[33] Sensuous aesthetics alter sensible experiences to heighten self-awareness and concrete thinking. Guided by the principle of presentness and the motive to catalyze creativity, this aesthetic program engages international avant-garde currents such as relational art. But we can also interpret the sensuous within a peculiar avant-garde history that grew out of Latin America’s baroque modernity. Seen in this light, we can distinguish sensuous aesthetics from the legacy of Greenbergian modernism and conceive of new modes of aesthetic appreciation directly linked to real, felt experience. Moreover, the Baroque perspective allows us to think about art and experience in a different historical framework, prompting us to consider new ways of transforming both so that we can open new avenues for the persistence of the avant-garde.
Endnotes [1] I refer primarily to Kant, who had an important posthumous
influence on Greenberg’s theories. See Immanuel Kant, The
Critique of Judgment, trans. with analytical texts by James
Creed Meredith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986). Although Kant’s
acknowledgment of the subjective element (imagination) in aesthetic
value judgment is unique, he nevertheless emphasized the exclusively
cognitive nature of this process, which is distinct from the body’s
registering of sensuous pleasures and aversions. |
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