Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question …
The question posed by Oswald de Andrade in the Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagic Manifesto) in 1928 had implications well beyond the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1920s. Invoking the cannibal ontology of Amerindian cosmologies, de Andrade’s manifesto articulated an anthropophagic ethos that shaped successive Brazilian avant-garde in the 20th century, accumulating layers of meaning with each iteration. In the 1960s, Hélio Oiticica amplified its meaning in his manifesto Nova Objetividade Brasileira that accompanied the homonymous exhibition he organized in 1967 at the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro. For Oiticica, it was an expanded anthropophagy, a superanthropophagy, that was to enable artists to counter the dominant narratives of Western art, modernity and the rhetoric of progress and development.
Anna Bella Geiger’s production of the 1960s and 1970s can be inscribed in the anthropophagic lineage initiated by de Andrade in the 1920s and redefined by Oiticica in the 1960s as a strategy of resistance to the ethos of developmentalism and an imposed modernity. Her interrogation of ideas such as identity, otherness, nature, culture, geography, history, education, and society, is set against her own identity as a Brazilian, daughter of Polish immigrants, coming to terms with the country’s pre-colonial past at a time when artists viewed the logic of economic developmentalism as a renewal of the colonial logic. In the mid-1970s, amid the military dictatorship’s promotion of its infrastructural projects as part of the “Brazilian miracle,” artists such as Lygia Pape, the Colombian Jonier Marin living in Brazil at the time, Regina Silveira, and Anna Bella Geiger turned their gaze towards the Amazon region and its peoples, which at the time were considered by the state and the financial elites as major obstacles to an economic boom dependent on the wholesale exploitation of the natural resources of the forest, as well as to the construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway. Geiger’s Brasil Nativo/Brasil Alienígena stages the contradictions of a country that exoticized the indigenous peoples as tourist attractions, circulating their images in postcards for tourists and Brazilians alike to send abroad, while at the same time it destroyed their habitat in the name of progress and economic prosperity. Geiger takes de Andrade’s translation of Hamlet’s existential question to the Brazilian context, Tupy or not Tupy, and resignifies the dilemma between the two faces of otherness, the native and the alien. Taking the aforementioned postcards, which were issued by Mercator as a series entitled Brasil Nativo, and duplicating some of these postcards herself using images of indigenous peoples from the Manchete agency, Geiger staged scenes that replicated the vignettes depicted in the postcards, in the domestic space of her home and with the assistance of family and friends, highlighting the inherent paradoxes of contemporary Brazilian identity and the tensions between its Westernized and indigenous populations. [1] The inscription in the fictional postcards that restaged the scenes from the Mercator and Manchete images, with the title “Brasil Alienígena,” added the text “…with my lack of skill as a primitive man.” An inscription that perhaps hinted at the loss of a primeval relation to nature and the skills that come with living in close communion with the natural world; in other words, that conveyed a sense of disenchantment and alienation.
The caption in the Brasil Alienígena postcards can also be read as a self-reflexive and introspective comment on her relation with the trope of anthropophagy, the savage mind and her place as an “alien” within the space demarcated by these ideas. In a similarly self-reflexive video-work from the same year, Declaracão em retrato no.2 (1976), which combines her statements on art with the act of self-portraiture, the following phrase appears in English: “What is art? Or: I have this concept of art, how does my concept match yours? This is the other side of the Anthropofagic (sic.)”
In her Visceral series, we can perhaps perceive an early instance of this introspective dimension that delves into the mind-body dualities, where feelings and the body prevail over intellect. These etchings, aquatints and watercolors, render different bodily organs, guided the materiality of the techniques using cut printing plates to isolate the figure from the background and give an organic and visceral quality to these fragmented internal organs. This interior meditation on the body gives way to a more conceptual approach in her later work, which nonetheless is marked by a constant and accentuated sense of self-reflection on her practice as an artist.
As Geiger stated in a brief text included in a 1976 exhibition catalogue, her work is produced within what she has defined as limit-situations, establishing her interdisciplinary approach, and its contingency and dependence on everyday life: “About art or about the nature of art? Through which means? Of tensely elaborated dual situations? (…) Acting at the level of the real or the ideal? considering the use of 1st grade primers, notebooks, and school books as efficient for primary initiations? Using a system of indications that consigns one work to the other, so that none of these works exist in and of themselves? So that nothing in this context can be read separately? (…) Creation is dependent, without autonomy.”[2] This statement gives us insights into how her work fluctuates from the interior dimension of the visceral to the macro dimension of a geopolitical context and power structures, which she explores in other bodies of work produced from the mid 1970s onwards, such as the series “Sobre a arte,” the Quadernos and different series of maps she made during this period, from Mapas elementares to O Novo Atlas.
Geiger´s use of maps not only relates to an interest in geography, cartography, and the territorial dimension of biopower, but also to the map’s pedagogical instrumentalization in both educational programs and in ideological indoctrination. In her Quadernos, the map features as an ideological tool that entrenches ideas of nationalism and identity in school education, which is especially the case of O Novo Atlas and Admissão, which feature the map of Brazil with the line of Tordesillas. The notebook entitled A cor na arte (1976), instead would seem to direct its critique towards nationalism and the colors of the Brazilian flag, which oddly forecasts the more recent appropriation of the colors of the Brazilian flag by the neo-fascist supporters of Jair Bolsonaro.
Geiger also addresses the problem of dependency through her maps, using them as a tool to understand the geopolitics of development and dependency. Cartographic representation forms part of the “creation of a world” and its imaginaries by imperial and colonial powers, and artists capitalized on the visual and representational aspects of the map to articulate their critiques of neocolonial power structures. Anna Bella Geiger anticipates the relation between globalization, territory and capital in her ample repertoire of cartographic explorations, establishing a complex relation with this kind of representation. The deformations in size of actual landmasses inherent in the different types of map projections are resignified through different operations. Geiger takes on a sociological approach that relates not only to an interest in the representational potential of the map but also to the construction of the concept of a nation-state tied to the representation of territory. Geiger’s conceptual operations offer an insightful commentary into the discourse of cartographic representation and its role in instrumentalizing the power of the West.
The map also offers a territory for Geiger’s formal explorations. She deforms and stretches it beyond recognition as a semantic device in Am.Latina, which renders the transformation of an amulet in the shape of a closed hand into a “mulata” and subsequently a crutch (muleta) progressing towards Am.Latina. These shifting shapes are signifiers for religion, slavery, dependency as constitutive of Latin America’s structural problems. A later map work from 1997, entitled Brasil 1500-1997, reclaims prior strategies such as camouflage and cartography, as well as the use of images allusive to the chronicles of conquest and exploration of Brazil by the colonizers to convey the interrelation between the map and the colonial entreprise. The camouflage pattern created by Geiger brings to mind her deformations of the map, it appears recurrently throughout several bodies of work. In a video from 1981, entitled Quase Mapa, we can see this transformation of a map into camouflage and vice versa.
The “camouflage” pattern is reprised in her soft canvas maps and works such as Parte, and in a series of mixed media works from the late 1990s which she has continued to work on until recently, entitled Rrose Sélavy, mesmo [Rrose Sélavy, même] (1997-2018). These works bring us back to the existential doubt raised by Hamlet and the ambiguity of a Brazilian identity torn between its native and alien conditions. These collages also transfer this duality to art and gender, in the guise of Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy. The first in the series confronts the viewer with the question, “Who Are You” and sets the tone for the others to come, where the figure of Rrose Sélavy is juxtaposed with the camouflage pattern over newspapers in a game of chance. The more recent ones displayed here take recent Brazilian newspapers with different themes, amongst them the ecological crisis and the plight of indigenous peoples facing the destruction of their natural environment. The camouflage pattern appears to allude to both map and forest, and in the midst of this chaos of dire news and this seemingly eroded forest land, is the face of the trickster in his/her double identity, asking us to reconsider progress, tip the ecological balance in favor of nature and think of a future that lies on the side of the Brasil Nativo; Tupy or not Tupy …
Julieta González
[1] The Mercator postcards, from the series “Brasil Nativo” and “Brasil Turístico” were featured in works made in the mid to late 1970s by Lygia Pape, the film Our Parents “Fossilis” (1974) and Regina Silveira Brazil Today (1977), indicating an interest on behalf of the artists in the circulation of these images as media culture, and the packaging of a notion of Brazilianness by the commercial tourist industry at the time.
[2] Anna Bella Geiger: Obras: 24 de agosto a 10 de setembro, 1976. Galeria Arte Global, São Paulo, 1976.
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