City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works

Publications and Research John Jay College of Criminal Justice

2014

"Epidermic" and Visceral Works: and

Claudia Calirman CUNY John Jay College

How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know!

More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/jj_pubs/148 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu

This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ''EPIDERMIC'' AND VISCERAL WORKS

LYGIA PAPE AND ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO

By Claudia Calirman

s feminism gained ground in the United States in the Anita Malfatti (1889- 1964) was instrumental in introducing 1970s, its ideology and terminology were called into Expressionism to . In the 1920s, Maria Martins A question by many leading artists in Brazil.1 Lygia Pape (1894- 1973) explored Surrealism, and Tarsila do Amara.l's (1927- 2004), one of the most prominent female Brazilian artists (1886- 1973) paintings powerfully evoked the notion of of the twentieth century, was among those who rejected the Antropofagia, or cultural cannibalism, as described by her nomenclature, stating she was not interested in "any partner, the poet and writer Oswald de Andrade, in his ideological feminist discourse."2 The work of Anna Maria "Anthropophagite Manifesto" (1928).6 The 1960s saw a Maiolino (b. 1942) from the 1960s seemed to be motivated by veritable explosion of prominent , including experiences such as women's daily lives. She recalls that many (1920- 88), Lygia Pape, Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933), critics considered these themes prosaic, banal, and obvious.' Anna Maria Maiolino, and Regina Silveira (b. 1939), among Such domestic subjects have long been critically and popularly others.7 In more recent generations, Jae Leirner, Beatriz disallowed i11 women's art, and to a large extent remain so Milhazes, Rosan gela Renn6, and Adriana Varejao- all born in today. Though adamant about rejecting the feminist label, both the 1960s- have gained marquee status in the international art Maiolino and Pape were engaged in questioning and market and in global exhibitions. The discussion in Brazil has redefinin g constructions of women's identity, a central never been based on the same issues raised by Linda Nochlin's feminist pursuit. seminal 1971 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Despite their professed lack of allegiance to feminism as a Artists?," since women artists have had a seat at the table for cause, both artists contributed seminal works to the feminist over a century. A more compelling question, then, is w hy so canon. Though both Pape's and Maiolino's artistic practices many leading women artists so vehemently rejected feminist were rooted in the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement from the discourse, even as their works addressed the same issues 1950s and 1960s,' the focus here is on these artists' later tackled by their feminist coun terparts in the U.S. and "contaminated" production, their so-called "epidermic" or elsewhere. visceral works addressing the abject and the sensorial. For the art critic Paulo Herkenhoff, Brazilian artists, Through these themes, they were able to question traditional regardless of gender, have always striven not to be considered gender roles and introduce topics related to women's derivative of hegemonic centers of artistic production; constructed identity in without any overt therefore the discussion of center versus periphery was always engagement with the discussion of gender. more salient than the debate on gender issues. Herkenhoff This separation, while subtle, likely represented an points out that artists from Latin American countries are important tactical gambit: in Brazil and elsewhere, women "constantly being pressured with the burden of proving that artists who addressed feminist issues frequently found they are not mirrors but full individualities, perfectly capable themselves pigeonholed or critically lambasted. In the 1993 of participating in the contemporary system of symbolic exhibition catalogue UltraModern: The Art of Contemporary exchanges."" From this perspective, the desire to bridge the Brazil, Aracy Amaral states: "It seems quite clear to me that, at confining territory of "Latin American art" and to participate the moment, any artist who represents social problems in his as "equals" on the international scene was always a more or her works will always be discriminated against in Brazil by important issue for these artists than inwardl y focused the country's formalist critics."5 These critics have also discussions of identity politics. As Lygia Pape said, "I think it dismissed the multiculturalism that has permea ted visual art is outrageous that an exhibition can still be titled Latin criticis m since the 1990s, accusing it of being an imported American Art .... This is self-discriminating, it is very fashion from the United States, and disdaining it as part of the reductive."• The art critic Guy Brett concurs: "No European minority quotas program and the politically correct mindset. artists are asked that their work give proof of their European Despite their lack of embrace of feminism, women artists identity, but this is always the first thing expected of a Latin have enjoyed a predominant role in Brazilian society since the American." 10 Brazilian artists constantly sough t to smgularly advent of what is known in Brazil as Modernismo. In 1917, define themselves by the quality and innovation of their work,

FALL / WINTER 2014 Fig. 2. Lygia Pape, Caixa de Baratas (Box of Cockroaches) (1967), cockroaches, acrylic glass, mirror, c. 13 7/8" x 13 7/8" x 10". © Project Lygia Pape. Photo: Paula Pape.

Though this argument does not explain the phenomenon, it does ra.ise an interesting point about the discrepancy of class in Brazilian society. It is only now, in light of the recent massive street demonstrations in Brazil in response to the government's Fig. 1. Lygia Pape, Caixa de Formigas (Box of Ants) (1967), live ant s, lavish expenditures to host the 2014 World Cup, that this gross acrylic glass, meat, mirror, c. 13 3/4" x 13 3/4" x 13 7/8". ©Project Lygia social and economic inequality is being publicly challenged. Pape. Photo: Paula Pape. A complete accow1t of the lack of interest in gender issues in Brazil throughout the 1970s must also take note of the independent of any specific context or culture. However, as the country's history of brutal social and political realities. In the cultural theorist Nelly Richard astutely claims, late 1960s and 1970s, Brazil was in the midst of the most repressive years of a military dictatorship that came to rule the [T]he judgment of "guality" seeks to make itself country for twenty years (from 1964 w1ill 1985). In December trustworthy (equitable) by pretending to rest on the 1968, the military regime decreed the AI-5, Institutional Act #5, neutral institutional recognition of women and men with which abolished civil rights in the country, instituted works of equivalent merit. But how can we not doubt censorsh.ip of the media and the arts, and implemented torture this judgment when we know that the formalist category 1 as a practice of the state. ' All attentions were turned towards of quality is not neutral (universal) but rather forged by the struggle against the repression and censorship imposed by a prejudicial culture that defends among other interests, the military regime, overshadowing other important debates masculine supremacy as the absolute representative of such as gender differences, social inequalities, and racial the univ-ersal?u discrimination. In the wake of globalization, Latin American As Latin Americans, then, women artists in Brazil already artists became better known, yet for the most part, the work of faced certain unwanted and unwarranted expectations about Latin American women artists from the late 1960s and 1970s­ what their a.rt would stand for; to adopt a fem.inist identity in a period characterized by both artistic innovations and 1 their practice would only add another, potentially narrowing political repression- remains largely unexamined. • stamp. In attempting to avoid any specific label, many women artists understandably opted out of feminist discourse. In time, om in , Lygia Pape participated in the discussion of feminist art in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin seminal 1967 exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira America became all but taboo. B(New Brazilian Objectivity) organized by Helio Oiticica Amaral suggests an additional explanation for the lack of at the of Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ). feminist interests in Brazilian art, writing: Pape contributed two sculptures to the exhibition: Caixa de Formigas (Box of Ants) (Fig. 1) and Caixa de Baratas (Box of Tn reality it is necessary to recognize the practical reason Cockroaches) (Fig. 2), both from 1967. In Box ofAnts, an acrylic why women in Brazil had so much availability to box encloses a piece of raw meat being devoured by live ants, dedicate themselves to the arts. The presence, even laid on top of a mirror placed at the bottom of the box; Inside today, of one or more domestic helpers in the household the box, three painted circles bear the inscription "a gula ou a providing services for the middle class and the upper luxuria" (gluttony or lust). Box of Cockroaches is also an acrylic middle class always gave Brazilian women the box with a mirror affixed to the bottom- this one containing a possibility to dedicate themselves to the arts, a condition grid of dead cockroaches, with the larger ones glued to the that their North American counterparts could not afford bottom of the box. in contemporary times.11

WOMAN'S AR"T JOURNAL Fig. 3. Lygia Pape, 0 Ova (The Egg) (1967), black & white photograph, c. 7 1/8" x 9 3/8". ©Project Lygia Pape. Photo: Mauricio Cirne.

At the time, these sculptures were interpreted as a critique transformation implicit in the act also referenced the political of museums, and the stagnant, "dead" art contained therein. In repression of the times, and the need to break free. Like Box of retrospect, however, Box of Ants and Box of Cockroaches were Ants and Box ofCockroaches, 0 ovo also functions as a critique of also significant in their attempt to break with the reigning geometric abstraction, since the participant has to break the constructivist order promoted by the Sao Paulo-based box, violating the cube to be "reborn." Concrete movement, which favored geometric abstraction, The sensorial experience of breaking tluough a surface to rationality, and mathematical order. By provoking disgust and create a transformative state was similarly promoted by Pape's repulsion in the viewer- whose face is reflected among the Divisor (Divider) (Pl. 12), first performed in 1968, and since then dead cockroaches in the mirror at the bottom of the box- these re-performed several times in multiple venues. Divisor consists works offer a stark repudiation of the rationality promoted by of dozens of people poking their heads tluough gridded holes geometric abstraction. For Herkenhoff, "These works made in a large sheet of white cloth. The piece is a collective and contaminated the aseptic constructivist project, through the amorphous moving body, a kind of expanded ghost figure parochial female fear of cockroaches and its scatology."'5 moving in space, with multiple heads and openings like a A year later, Pape participated in the Happening monstrous Greek Hydra. Speaking simultaneously to the one ''Apocalipop6tese" (in Portuguese, a combination of the words and the many, Pape's Divisor resonates with Antonio Negri and "apocalypse" and "hypothesis")- a weekly series of outdoor Michael Hardt's 11otion of the "multitude," which those authors artistic interventions at Aterro do Flamengo, in the outskirts of describe as an organization based on the free singularities that MAM/ RJ. '" At this event, Pape performed O ovo (The Egg) converge in the production of the common.18 The multitude is (1967; Fig. 3), which centered on metaphors of birth and neither fully a collective agent nor a collection of individual destruction. The Egg incorporated a series of giant wooden agents- it takes shape mainly as agency, a "productive cubic structures (not ovoid-shaped, as the title might suggest) potential" of human life for those who perform through or covered with colored plastic. From inside these breakable within it. The symbolic meaning of Pape's Divisor changes every boxes, members of a samba school burst out dancing and time it is performed and shifts based on the viewer's individual playing music in a clear analogy to a birth.11 The surface of the experience; this is intentional, as the artist was more interested cube, which was made of a thin plastic material, acted like a in proposing ideas than authoring a finished work of art. Divisor second s kin or epidermis, and was easily torn apart by the has a transformative power, suggesting a change of perception dancers in a visceral act. The violence and spirit of once the participant is immersed in its collective experience. FALL / WINTER 2014 • Fig. 4. Lygia Pape, Eat Me (1975), film still, 16mm, 35mm transferred to Fig. 5. Lygia Pape, Eat me: A gula ou a luxuria? (Eat Me: Gluttony or HD Video/color. © Project Lygia Pape. Luxury?) (1976) installation at Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. © Project Lygia Pape. Photo: Paula Pape. Divisor also suggests a figure come to life, sharing a sensibility with Mikhail Bakhtin's description of ''grotesque realism"- a grandiose, exaggerated body that is not individualized but rather hybrid and social. 19 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White suggest that, in order "to complete the image of the 'grotesque realism,' one must add that it is always a figure in process, it is always becoming. It is a mobile and hybrid creature, dJsproportionate, exorbitant, and outgrowing all limits, decentered and off balance, a figural and symbolic resource for parodic exaggeration and inversion."2° For Bakhtin, the grotesque realist body violates classical aesthetics, which favors a unique, individualized, autonomous, closed, polished, proportionate, and symmetrical body.21 If anything, Diviso1~ like her earlier works Box ofAnts and Box of Cockroaches, also represents a contamination of the classical order, a bold challenge to the prevailing claim of formalism and modernist autonomy in the visual arts in Brazil.

In her seminal film Eat Me (1975; Fig. 4),22 Pape once again provoked sensations of attraction and repulsion. Here the viewer is confronted by a close-up of a female and a male mouth, suggestive of a vagina, sucking and expelling objects, Fig. 6. Anna Maria Maiolino, Monumento a Fome (Monument to partially inviting and partially threatening. In one shot, a Hunger) (1978), two bags of 1 kg each, rice & beans over black cloth in mustached, lipstick-covered mouth- incidentally belonging to table; performed at empty lot in Rua Augusta, Sao Paulo, 51 1/8" x the artist Artur Barrio-fills the entire screen. It sucks a red 25 1/2" x 25 1/2". Courtesy of the artist. stone (actually an object made of plastic), which soon changes color, becoming blue. This image cuts to a female mouth both objects and agents of consumption.24 Tents containing sucking on a sausage smothered in ketchup, and then goes small white paper bags carried the inscription "objects of back to the cavity of the man's mouth. Male and female seduction." In.side the bags were kitschy objects- calendars mouths are alternated among voices in different languages with naked women, pubic hair, aphrodisiac lotions, peanuts, rhythmically uttering the phrase "a gula ou a luxuria?'' and mirrors. She stamped the bags, kissed them with red (gluttony or lust?).21 The growing sound of female groans, lipstick, and then signed them. Everything could be bought by sexual in nature, culminates with a scream, creating an the audience at the bargain price of one cruzeiro- the Brazilian unsettling experience for the viewer. At the end of the film, an currency at the time.25 abrupt transition to the sounds of an advertisement suggests When the installation was later re-created at MAM/RJ, an interrupted sexual consummation. viewers were once again invited to inspect and purchase vulgar Playing even further with notions of bad taste, debauchery, objects of desire-dentures, wigs, eyelashes, apples, miniatures and kitsd1, the following year Pape created the installation Eat of fake female breasts bearing the word "darling," red lipsticks me: a gula ou a luxiiria? (Eat Me: Gluttony or Lust?) (1976; Fig. 5), with the inscdption promessa (promise). Pape defined these which referenced and strongly criticized the idea of women as items as instruments from daily life and offered them to the

WOMAN'S AR'T JOURNAL Fig. 7. Anna Maria Maiolino, Estado Escato16gico (Scatological State) (1978), public Installation/performed at the event "Mitos Vadios" (Vagrant Myths) in Sao Paulo, toilet paper, newspaper, branches.and leaves against wall. Courtesy of the artist. public as a critical vision of debauchery and consumerism.1.0 By Pape's 'epidermic' works dealing with the body through mimicking salacious trinkets sold by street vendors, Pape notions of the abject and contamination, the breaking of the sarcastically exposed female strategies of seduction, unmasking cube/ skin, and consumptive desire go beyond the discussion false promises of ideal female beauty in society. of women's construction of identity in society. Her feminist This installation is even more striking when considered legacy, even if she did not intentionally embrace it, belongs to within the context of the "economic miracle" that was a larger critical project- one that reminds us that consumerism underway in Brazil at the time, with sales of consumer goods and mechanisms of seduction can unleash desire, but cannot for the lower middle class soaring even as the military regime ever fulfill it. was at its most repressive. Pape points to the impoverished aesthetic of kitsch pervasive in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, or A,ma Maria Maiolino, as for other artists enduring the stressing issues of class difference and inequality through the climate of fear and self-censorship under Brazilian cheapness of the objects and their discarded quality. Fdictatorship, the notion of "viscerality" was a poignant Summoning the comic-tragic, Pape's installation offers a and conunon theme: works dealt with body parts, viscera, and sardonic view of the beautification of women as objects to be the fragmented and dilacerated flesh. According to desired, and as avid consumers of objects of seduction. Herkenhoff, "h1 Brazilian art milieu the words 'visceral' and h11976, a version of the project Eat Mc: Gluttony or Lust? was 'viscerality' were used [by many artists] to indicate the body's published in the second issue of Malasartes, a celebrated (albeit expressive intensity; as well as the organic production of short-lived) journal in Brazil that disseminated theoretical and meaning."29 visual projects by artists.27 In the pages of Malasartes, Pape In Maiolino's visceral pieces from the 1960s, this concept elaborated on the concept of epidcrmiza1;ao (epidermization), came through the connection of food and excrement. In one of emphasizing the sensorial aspect of her work as opposed to a her earlier works, the soft sculpture titled Glu, Glu, Glu... (1966; rational one. She wrote: "It is not a discourse or a thesis. I unfold Pl. 13) (made of upholstery stuffing), a male torso above bears the project at the level of an epidermization of an idea, the the inscription G/u, Glu, G/u. In the lower section, padded sensorial as a form of knowledge and consdousness."28 volumes depict digestive organs, in.eluding the stomach and FALL/ WINTER 2014 • notes and commenced a fertile period of writing poetry. In her interviews about those years, there is a sense of silently bearing the unspeakable, deprived of her personhood and her voice. Of this difficult yet formative period, Maiolino wrote: "The words, with their weight and meaning, originated metaphors of sentiments, in angst to find answers to the many questions from my personal life and also to constitute a way to elaborate my reencounter with the military dictatorship upon my return to Brazil."31 In 1978, back in Brazil, Maiolino was invited by Oiticica and lvald Granato to participate in the Happening "Mitos Vadios" (Vagrant Myths) in a vacant lot in Rua Augusta, in Sao Paulo. The title was a direct response to the I Bienal Latino­ Americana, concomitantly inaugurated in Sao Paulo, which was one of the first important international cultural events Fig. 8. Anna Maria Maiolino, In/Out (Antropofagia) (1971-74), film held during Brazil's transition back to democratic rule. The I still, Super 8 transferred to DVD. black and white and color, sound. Bienal Latino-Americana was called "Mitos e Magias" (Myths Courtesy of the artist. and Witchcraft), an allusion to the predominance of magic realism and surrealism in Latin America, a trend frequently the intestines. These body parts, nakedly protruding out in pilloried by many artists as regionalist. Maiolino participated space like overexposed viscera, alluded to the torture inflicted in this Happening with two installations: Monuinento a Fame on political prisoners during the military regime in Brazil. (Monument to Hunger) (Fig. 6) and Estado Escato/6gico Born in 1942, in wartime Italy, Maiolino immigrated with (Scatological State) (Fig. 7). Monument to Hunger consisted of her family to South America at age twelve, living first in two sacks, one filled with white rice and the other with black Venezuela and then moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1960. Like beans. The sacks were tied together with a ribbon and placed many European artists from her generation, Maiolino lived on a table covered by a black cloth. In this work, Maiolino through the experience of war, exile, and the need to adapt to addressed the food staple of the lower class in Brazil: rice and new environments. From 1968 to 1971, she lived in New York beans. In Scatological State, she displayed various types of toilet City, where she felt once again like a displaced immigrant, paper on the wall, arranged from the cheapest to the most writing, "Without a green card, without anything, I am but one expensive, and humorously included a newspaper and a plant more 'illegal' in the American p aradise." "1 Also during this leaf. With these two works, Maiolino cmmected the ends of the time, overburdened by household tasks and the obligations of digestive system- ingesting and excreting food. She implied motherhood, she produced no new work. Eventually, that what enters the body must subsequently be eliminated. In following a suggestion by Oitidca, she began taking personal associating food to excrement- she comments on the masses

Fig. 9. Anna Maria Maiolino, Entrevidas (Between Lives) (1981), eggs, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

WOMAN'S AR'T JOURNAL Fig. 11. Anna Maria Maiolino, Mais de Mil (More than One Thousand) (1995), clay, d imensions variable, installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, . Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 10. Anna Maria Maiolino, Muitos (Many) (1995), clay, dimensions variable, installation at the Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, . the wasted. For Bataille, "What the system ca1mot assimilate Courtesy of the artist. must be rejected as excremental." 15 In examining Bataille's writings on the abject, Rosalind Krauss pointed out their of flotsam and jetsam, the discarded items- or in this case, association not necessarily to bodily abjection but instead to people-left adrift at the margins of society. social exclusions. According to Krauss, "These texts identify Likewise, her later installation Arroz e Feijiio (Rice and social abjection with a violent exclusionary force operating Beans) (1979) remade for the 29th Sao Paulo Bienal (2010), also within modem State systems, one that strips the labouring addressed disparate social access to consumerism, masses of their human dignity and reproduces them as discriminating high from low, those with means from those dehumanized social waste."36 Krauss claims th at much of who are disenfranchised from consumer society. It consists of a abject art is founded in the multiple forms of the "wound," large table covered with a black cloth set up for a meal. Seeds which is always the place of the feminine. She asserts that of rice and beans germinate from white plates filled with soil. "whether or not the feminine subject is actually at stake in a Hope and hunger are intertwined. given work, it is the character of being wounded, victimized, The art critic Frederico Morais ironically noted that it is traumatized, marginalized that is seen as what is in play precisely in the excremental function of the body that low and within this domain."' 7 Indeed, underlying Maiolino's practice high meet indiscriminately, with no class distinction.'l2 is a pervasive sense of the precarious, the fragile, the visceral, Maiolino's work draws on the notion of abject art: the abject and the sensorial: for better or worse, all qualities traditionally occupies the place of unfulfilled desire. She writes, "The related to the female body. intestine is a cavity that we never can fill in, in the same way The feminine struggle against the male, patriarchal, and that we can't fulfill desire."" From the mid to late 1930s, univocal sense of order is also played out in Maiolino's work Georges Bataille wrote about the abject in a group of through language (or better, the lack of proper language). unpublished texts under the title "Abjection et !es formes Maiolino similarly attests to the utterance of language as an miserables,""' as a way to describe attraction to the rotten and impossible task, an unfinished business, in her super-8 film ln- FALL / WINTER 2014 • Out (Antropofagia)(1973- 74; Fig. 8). Two mouths, one female Once formed, the clay does its natural duty: it dehydrates, and one male, alternately occupy the full screen. At the petrifies, goes back to the state of being potential dust."•0 beginning, a black adhesive tape covers the mouth on screen, Maiolino's thousands of handmade pieces made of raw clay, like a censor box, making the act of speech impossible. The called Rolinhos e Cobrinhas (Little Rolls and Little Snake­ mouth then tries to convey some sonnd, to formulate a sort of Shaped Coils), (1993- 2007), are unformed, fluid, and speech, to no avail. In subsequent shots, non-linear images amorphous. At dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012), the artist unfold: menacing teeth, a mouth ingesting a long black thread, filled a small house with myriad unfired clay pieces in lips spilling colored filaments, a mouth holding an egg. different shapes. The installation Here & There exuded ilie same Despite their articulation of different bodily motions such as sense of precariousness and fragility from her early works. eating, talking, and arguing, ultimately, these mouths are These multiple little coils and rolls were taken as reminiscent stripped of an important function: the ability to articulate of food or exciement- handmade pasta from her childhood cohesive linguistic meaning. There is nothing epic about tl1ese memories or simply waste. Food and intestines were again mouths' movements; on the contrary, they are banat non­ entwined. eventful, mere exercises in space. They attest to the failed Though gender difference was not a priority, it is time to attempt to communicate through language. The revisit the prevailing idea that there was no feminist art anthropophagic act of cultural ca1mibalism is also evoked coming from Brazil. The works presented here by both Pape through word (the title) and image (the mouth). As in Pape's and Maiolino incorporate the notions of "viscerality" and 1975 film Eat Me, the mouth devours and swallows, "epidermization" ilirough ilieir insistence on ingestion and its appropriates and regurgitates back creating symbolic expulsion, contamination, failed attempts to communicate meanings. The verbal and tl1e pre-verbal, nature and culture, through language, metaphors of birth and destruction, and images and words are intertwined in a disruptive way. Both through the vulnerable and the precarious. These works bring films generate a state of chaos and confusion undermining an exquisite (dis)order and debasement to the prevailing qualities predominantly associated with masculinity, such as masculine logical djscourse, becoming, despite their utterly efficiency and clarity. They also allude to the mouth as a means negation, a hallmark of Brazilian artists' take on feminism in for consumptive unfulfilled desire which relentlessly ilieir own terms during lliis period. • cannibalizes us. Also like Pape's 1967 The Egg, Maiolino's 1981 installation Claudia Calirman is an assistant professor at John Jay College Entrevidas (Between Lives) (Fig. 9) tidily knits notions of birth of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her book, and destrnction. Consisting of a floor dotted with hundreds of Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, eggs, which the audience is invited to walk through, this and , received the 2013 Arvey Book of tl1e Year fragile egg carpet acts as a minefield potentially charged with Award from the Association for Latin AmericanAit. the possibility of birth and annihilation. The eggs also represent the passage from nature into the symbolic order Notes existing in a transitional space. According to Herkenhoff, this This article is part of a larger upcoming publication focusing on women work occupies an area "between the pre-verbal (the egg as a artists from Brazil and Chile from the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to a 2013 metaphor for life before birth), and the non-verbal (the Art Writers Grant I have received from Creative Capital/Warhol growing fear of experiencing a s pace of insecurity and Foundation. alienation).'"AJt is a visual poem alluding simultaneously to 1. A few important publications have included the work of some historical Latin American women artists. Among them are: fear and censorship, to fragility, precariousness, and UltraModern: The Art of Contemporary Brazil, exh. cat. ternporality. (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993); In the early 1990s, Maiolino further explored the notion of curated by Susan Fisher Sterling with essays by Aracy A. Amaral and banality, repetition, and the tedious manual labor of women's Paulo Herkenhoff; Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th daily domestic tasks: waiting, passing time, knitting, cooking, Century Art In, Of, and From the Feminine, , ed. (Boston: The MIT Press; 2nd edition, 1996); Manobras Radicais: and preparing food. She adopted handmade wtlired clay as her Artistas Brasileiras, Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda and Paulo main medium. Abandoning the mold and shaping forms with Herkenhoff, eds. (Sao Paulo: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2006); her own hands, she worked with large amounts of clay, Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Cornelia Butler, ed. (Los manipulating them on site and letting them dry out without Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Elles firing iliem. In ilie installations Muitos (Many) (Fig. 10) and Mais @centrepompidou: Artistes femmes dans la collection du musee de Mil (More ilian One Thousand) (Fig. 11), both 1995 and from national d'art moderne, centre de creation industrielle Camille Morineau, ed. (, 2009). "Re.act.feminism-a ilie series Terra Moldada (Modeled Eartl1), Maiolino repeatedly performing archive" is a comprehensive archival website and emphasized the gesture of creation. Produced in succession, travelling exhibition for women performing arHsts. It has an each of these objects bears the mark of the artist's hands, what accompanying book Re.Act.Feminism-a Performing Archive, edited the art critic Paulo Venancio Filho called "The Doing Hand."-~ by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice Ellen Stammer, with the essay In a 2002 interview, Maiolino stated: "The installations of "Performing Feminist Archives: a research-in-process on Latin American performance art" by Eleonora Fabiao (: Verlag fi.ir unfired clay were ilie result of the desire to make sculptural moderne Kunst Ni.irnberg and Live Art Development Agency, 2014). works with more hand-molded parts in less time, thus 2. Denise Mattar, Lygia Pape: lntrinsicamente Anarquista (Rio de enabling a greater accumulative potential, greater entropy. Janeiro: Relume Dumara, 2003), 85.

WOMAN'S AR'T JOURNAL 3. "Helena Tatay conversa com Anna Maria Maiolino," in Anna Maria 19. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, t rans. Helene lswolsky Maio/ino (Sao Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2012), 37. Translated by the (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), 19. author. 20. Peter Stallybr.ass and Allon Whit e, The Politics .and Poetics of 4. Lygia Pape was a major exponent of the Neoconcrete movement, Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 9. along with Helio O it icica (1937- 80) and Lygia Clark (1920--88). The 21. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 25. Neoconcrete artists moved away from the finished object of art and embraced the idea of art as process or experimentation. Based on 22. Eat Me (1975) was originally shot in 16mm and later remade in the "Neoconcrete Manifesto" written by (1959), t hey 35mm, 10 minutes, and in color. moved away from the rigid geomet ric abst ract forms of the Sao 23. Eugenio Puppo, ed., Cinema Marginal Brasileiro: Fi/mes Produzidos Paulo Concrete group, creating a more tactile, perceptual, and nos Anos 60 e 70 (Sao Paulo: Heco Produ~oes, 2004), 135. sensorial art. Ferreira Gullar, "Manifesto Neoconcreto," Joma/ do 24. Eat me: a gula ou a /uxuria? (Eat Me: Gluttony or Lust?) (1976) was Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Suplemento Dominica!, 22 March 1959); and first exhibited at Galeria Arte Global in Sao Paulo. Rona I do Brito, Neoconcretismo: vertice e ruptura do projeto construtivista brasileiro (Neoconcretism: Vertex and Rupture of t he 25. Denise Mattar, Lygia Pape: lntrinsicamente Anarquista, 84. Brazilian Constructivist Project) (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1985). 26. In the outdoor space of MAM/RJ, a film showed the artist 5. Aracy Amaral, "Brazil: Women in the Arts," in The Art of the seductively inviting the viewers to enter the installation. Ultramodern: Contemporary Brazil, 23. 27. Despite the brevity of its existence (only three issues between 6. See Gillian Sneed, "Anita Malfatti and Tarsi la do Amaral: Gender, September 1975 and June 1976) and its relatively small run of five Brasilidade and the Modernist Landscape," WAJ 34, no. 1 thousand copies per edition, Ma/asartes became one of the most (Spring/Summer 2013): 30-39. celebrated artists' journals published in Brazil during t he mid-1970s. 7. A few recent exhibit ions have cast light on prominent Brazilian 28. Malasartes no. 2, (1976), 22-23. Translated by the author. women artists from the 1960s. Among them, Mira Schendel, Tate 29. Paulo Herkenhoff, "A Trajet6ria de Maiolino: Uma Negocia~ao de Modern, London (September 2013-January 2014); Lygia Clark: The Diferen~as," in Anna Maria Maiolino, Vida Afora/A Life Line, Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988 (May-August 2014), The Museum Cat herine de Zegher, ed. (New York: The Drawing Center, 2002), 328. of Modern Art, New York, with an accompanying retrospective of 30. Anna Maria Maiolino, Vida Afora!A Life Line, 264. films and videos "On the Edge: Brazilian Film Experiments of the 1960s and Early 1970s" (May-July, 2014) featuring works by Anna 31. "Helena Tatay conversa com Anna Maria Maiolino," in Anna Maria Bella Geiger, Sonia Andrade, and Leticia Parente; Anna Maria Maiolino, 42. Translated by the author. Maiolino: Between Senses at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, New York 32. Frederico Morais, Do Corpo a Terra: Um Marco Radical na Arte (May-June, 2014); and a solo project by Regina Vater organized by Brasileira, n.p. In an audiovisual work from 1970, Morais relays a Sao Paulo's Galeria Jaqueline Martins at Frieze Art Fair, New York quote from the head of the Buckingham Palace garbage collectors, (May, 2014). justifying their five-week strike in London: "The garbage of the 8. Paulo Herkenhoff, "The Contemporary Art of Brazil: Theoretical Queen is like everybody else's: if it is not quickly collected, it will Constructs," in The Art ofthe Ultramodern: Contemporary Brazil, 108. start smelling badly." 9. Lygia Pape: Entrevista a Lucia Carneiro e Ileana Pradi//a (R io de 33. "Helena Tatay conversa com Anna Maria Maiolino," in Anna Maria Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1998), 60. From the series Cole~ao Palavra Maiolino, 39. do Artista. Translated by the aut hor. 34. Bat aille also wrote on the abject in some of his essays first published 10. Guy Brett, "Border Crossings," in Contemporary Art in Latin (posthumously) in English as Death and Sensuality: A Study of America (London: Black Dog, 2010), 189. Eroticism and Taboo (New York: Walker and Co., 1962). Originally published as L'Erotisme (: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957) and 11. Nelly Richard, Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s), trans. later published as Georges Bataille, Erotism, Death and Sensuality: Silvia R. Tandeciarz and Alice A. Nelson (Durham, NC and London: A Study of Eroticism and Taboo, trans. Mary Da'lwood (San Duke Univ. Press, 2004), 30. Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). See Georges Bataille, Ouevres 12. Aracy Amaral, "A Mulher nas Artes," in Textos do Tropico de completes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 217- 21. Capricornio, Artigos e Ensaios (1980-2005), v. 3 (Sao Paulo: Editora 35. Georges Batai'lle, " The Use Va lue of D. A. F. de Sade," Georges 34, 2006), 222. Translated by the author. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Allan 13. For a detailed discussion on the artistic responses t o the military Stoekl, trans. and ed. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), regime, see Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: 91-102. Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Ci/do Meireles (Durham, NC: 36. Rosalind Krauss, "lnforme without Conclusion," October 78 (Fall Duke Univ. Press, 2012). 1996), 89-105. Reprinted in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 14. A long overdue exhibition on Latin American women artists is being 1985, 2nd ed., Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds. (London: John organized at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2017 by Cecilia Wiley and Sons, 2013), 119. Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta. The Political Body: Radical Women 37. Ibid, 121. in Latin American Art, 1960-1985 promises to break new ground in the study of feminism in Latin America. The exhibition is part of the 38. Herkenhoff, The Art of the Ultramodern: Contemporary Brazil, 63. Getty Foundation's Pacific St andard Time: Los Angeles/Latin 39. Paulo Venancio Filho, "The Doing Hand" in Anna Maria Maio!ino, America initiative. Vida Afora/A life Line, 284. Reprinted in Inside the Visible: An 15. Manobras Radicais, Buarque de Hollanda and Herkenhoff, eds., 77. Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art In, Of, and From the Feminine, de Zegher, ed., 441-44. 16. "Apocalipop6tese" was coordinated by O iticica and featured the participation of a number of artists. It was born of the artist's desire 40. "A Conversation between Holly Block and Anna Maria Maiolino," in to break the boundaries between the work of art and the public. Anna Maria Maiolino, Vida Afora/A Life Line, 353-54. 17. Lygia Pape et al., Lygia Pape (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1983), 46. 18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 211.

FALL / WINTER 2014