Anna Bella Geiger: On Paper And In “Reel Time”

Marek Bartelik*

The mainstream narratives that define the history of 20th - century art, in which the visual arts have been compartmentalized according to the criteria of period, taste, medium, singularity, participation, etc., have largely been established and, therefore, piercing their monolithic and continuous aspects poses a challenge to a critic interested in writing about the artists not included in those privileged categories.

Anna Bella Geiger (born in 1933) has been exhibiting her art for almost six decades. During this long period, she has demonstrated a remarkable commitment both to making and teaching art, while knocking at the door of art history with great persistence. She is among the most versatile artists in Brazil, and was a Postmodernist sui generis before the term took on its specific meaning in the 1980s, but, ultimately, lost its significance by overexposure. Geiger has produced a large number of distinct bodies of work, executed in different mediums: prints, drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos. Her art fluctuates among figuration, abstraction, and conceptualism. The heterogeneity in her art reflects an impressive range of interests, which includes art, literature, philosophy and the sciences. That diversity is additionally reinforced through the exploration of the ambiguity of Brazilianness, which she has been examining in relation to her own biography and self and to the changing socio-political and cultural conditions around her—moving along, what she poetically calls, an “anthropological route.” (1) Geiger’s Brazilianness—fragile, contradictive and “problematic” as it is (2) —in fact activates the subjective, epistemological concerns central in her approach to art making.

Anna Bella Geiger, whose art is featured in this exhibition, is the creator of experimental videos, collages and drawings produced in the 1970s. In these works, she embodies the period of political oppression in Brazil, which shaped her artistic maturity, coinciding with the flourishing of Brazilian neoconcrete art, and established her as one of the most original voices of her generation. Emblematic for them is Emblematic for them is Brasil nativo, Brasil alienígena (Native Brazil, Alien Brazil), 1977—by now one of the canonical works in Brazilian art from that era—which consists of a series of commercial postcards with indigenous people paired with photographs featuring the artist herself. The best- known pair of those images shows a naked coçador from the Uaiká tribe, presented as a “native” par excellence, and the artist, who is wearing a light summer dress, presented as an “alien.” Both of them are striking the same pose, which suggests the bifurcation of the Brazilian body, or, as a critic argues, “the impossibility of being the other.” (3) Native Brazil, Alien Brazil involves, above all, the critique of identity, relating it to the problematic usage of the terms “native” and “alien.” Such a highly political polarization still exists. (4) In Brazil’s multiethnic and multicultural society, the separation of the two identifications has been maintained to preserve and exploit useful societal divisions, while outside of Brazil (in the West in particular) Brazilian identity has often been lumped into the category of the exotic and promiscuous “Other.”

In addition to the special, or territorial, boundaries, and their impact on our physical, mental, and psychological orientation in the world—explored so tirelessly and imaginatively in Geiger’s drawings and collages from the 1970s—her “minimalist” videos deal with the presence of another frontier, that of time. In the medium of video, there are, in fact, two kinds of time, the real and the reel (or the actual and the virtual), which operate simultaneously. The first of these, which provides the fourth dimension to reality, is connected to the events that shape our experience; the second swallows the former in order to feed artistic imagination. Consequently, while the real time in Geiger’s works “pulls” us toward examining
the political, cultural and artistic climate of Brazil in the 1970s (5) , it is the reel time—evasive, ontological, often humorous and layered with linguistic ambiguities—that protects us from the excess of information about the harsh realities around us, and “pushes” that overwhelming experience into the realm of artistic representation with its proper history and praxis. This cinematic push-and-pull approach to time is fully explicit in Geiger’s earliest videos, Passagens I and Passagens II, both from 1974, (6) in which the artist slowly ascends an indoor staircase and outdoor steps. The action is staged, yet it appears ad hoc; the camera is stationary, but the angle of filming constantly changes; and the time is continuous, yet fragmented and repetitive. In these videos, the artist visits places of personal importance to her in her native Rio de Janeiro and endows them with collective significance by video recording the action. The seemingly Sisyphean activities shown were considered highly subversive in the tense political climate of the country under dictatorship, in which any descent from “normalcy” was interpreted as a dangerous disguise for antagonistic divergence.

Acknowledging the historical and subversive significance of Geiger’s works does not reduce their status to that of time capsules. Displaced here from their original context, they await further reading, which must be linked to their current reception. Do they represent the “pure” or the “immediate” past? What do they say about our changing world? What do they reveal about us? How do they expand, or rearrange, our understanding of “difference” and “repetition” and their connections to both real time and reel time? To ask these questions is to allow us to continue going along with Anna Bella Geiger, while acknowledging this artist’s highly valuable contribution to art in both the past and the present.

Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro, 1933) studied Linguistics and Anglo-Germanic Language and Literature in Brazil and Sociology and Art History at NYU and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Geiger has taken part in numerous collective exhibitions such as Espai de Lectura 1: Brasil at MACBA, Barcelona in 2009; Modern Women Single Channel at MoMA PS1, New York in 2011; and Video Vintáge at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2012. She represented Brazil in the XXXIX Venice Biennale in 1980.

Geiger has had major solo exhibitions such as On a Certain Piece of Land at Red Gate Gallery, Beijing in 2005 and Projects: Videos XXI at MoMA in 1978. Geiger received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982 and her work is part of important collections such as MACBA in Barcelona, The Getty in Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York.

* Marek Bartelik is a Polish-born and New York-based art historian, critic, and poet. He currently serves as President of AICA International. For more information visit www.marekbartelik.com

1. Anna Bella Geiger, Territórios, Passagens, Situações, ed. Adolfo Montejo Navas (Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2007), p. 223.

2. Geiger is a first generation Brazilian. Her parents immigrated to Brazil from Poland in the early 1920s.

3. Tadeu Chiarelli, “Anna Bella Geiger: Other Annotations for the Mapping of the Work,” in POZA: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art, ed. Marek Bartelik (Hartford, CT; Real Art Ways, 2008), p. 52.

4. Geiger made the series in reaction to the news that the Brazilian government was planning to redraw the boundaries of the land allocated to local Indians, which would take away their right to live in vast parts of those territories.

5. The fact that Geiger calls what happens in her videos “actions,” rather than “performances,” points to the éngagé aspects of them.

6. Geiger documented with a Super-8 camera the artistic activities at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro between 1970 and 1973, and that time was for her a learning period for making and editing videos.

Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro, 1933) studied Linguistics and Anglo-Germanic Language and Literature in Brazil and Sociology and Art History at NYU and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Geiger has taken part in numerous collective exhibitions such as Espai de Lectura 1: Brasil at MACBA, Barcelona in 2009; Modern Women Single Channel at MoMA PS1, New York in 2011; and Video Vintáge at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2012. She represented Brazil in the XXXIX Venice Biennale in 1980.

Geiger has had major solo exhibitions such as On a Certain Piece of Land at Red Gate Gallery, Beijing in 2005 and Projects: Videos XXI at MoMA in 1978. Geiger received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982 and her work is part of important collections such as MACBA in Barcelona, The Getty in Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York.