Bookreview Optic of the State

WRECK: graduate journal of art history, visual art, and theory Volume 2, number 1 (2008) Reviews The Optic of the State: Visuality and biopolitics [turns] in Power in Argentina and Brazil. thanatopolitics” (p. 18). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Andermann divides his study into Press, 2007. xv + 256 pp. Jens two sections: one dedicated to Andermann museums and the other maps. He opens the section on museums with a Where can the visual manifestation of well-researched and densely- state power be located: in the theoretical analysis of exhibits of monuments, memorials and icons that natural and national history in it constructs, or in the ways of seeing Argentina and Brazil in the second that such objects evoke? Jens half of the nineteenth century. If Andermann, in his exploration of Andermann’s approach is at times visuality and the project of excessively referential—often nineteenth-century state building in invoking four or five different Argentina and Brazil, diverges from theorists in his discussion of a single conventional histories by suggesting object—his text nevertheless makes a that the particular form of state that salient contribution to the growing emerged in Latin America was but body of critical and historical studies one option among many, rather than on the emergence of the modern an inevitable outcome of long-term museum by illuminating the role that social and economic processes. He such institutions have played in Latin argues that the seeming inescapability America. Andermann begins by of this state-form stems from the examining how museums of natural hegemonic influence exerted by history and anthropology enabled and forms of visual representation such as justified state control of both the monuments, museums, photographic natural resources and indigenous travelogues, history paintings, maps, populations of Argentina and Brazil. and atlases. Andermann provides Institutions, such as the Museo significant insight into the complex Público in Buenos Aires and the and often contradictory processes that Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, inform the relation between such conveyed natural and anthropological visual signifiers and the sacral myths specimens from remote regions to that bolster nationalistic narratives of these urban centres, where they could natural or historic destiny. Moreover, be classified, catalogued, and he also demonstrates how the scopic displayed. The museums then regimes at work in late nineteenth- circulated catalogues and scientific century Argentina and Brazil texts, imparting value and meaning to constructed and simultaneously those objects of “bare life.” Museums disavowed the condition of “bare thus became, in Andermann’s words, life.” In doing so, Andermann “centres of calculation”, whose argues, they prefigured the taxonomies made it possible to destruction that would be wrought by subsume indigenous bodies and lands dictatorships in both countries in the into systems of economic and cultural twentieth century, “the moment when capital—measurable and Page 69 Wreck 2, no. 1 (2008) exchangeable like any other historical memorabilia that endorsed commodity (p. 28). Here Andermann the official state narrative of history. locates the silent threat of the He frames this study as an museum: the way in which “the exploration of how the competing power and authority of the museum logics of the archive and the museum are continuously based on the shaped this project of consolidating possibility that it might be a trap” (p. national history. Yet he rarely traces 57). In other words, museum space how these different approaches produces a disembodied gaze manifest themselves in his accounts consuming the objects on display, yet of educational reforms, new national the viewer never ceases to be icons, or monument construction in embodied, sensing that it too could be fin-de-siècle Brazil and Argentina. so measured, exchanged, and One notable exception occurs where displayed. Andermann outlines how antiquarian Andermann examines the 1882 and archive-driven approaches Brazilian Anthropological Exhibition shaped efforts to rebuild the original to investigate shifts in imaging the 1810 May Revolution monument in indigenous population of Brazil. He Buenos Aires. For the most part, his reveals how emerging scientific analysis deals more generally with discourses implicated in systems of the way that museum memory classification and display within the contains and controls the voice of the Exhibition displaced Romantic past/other. Insofar as these museums Indianism as the centrepiece of the of national history denied the fluidity Imperial state’s political iconography. and hybridity of “bare life,” Particularly evocative is his account Andermann rightly identifies them as of the inclusion of members of the sites where “the rational, Xerente and Botocudo tribes in the emancipatory contents of the modern exhibit, themselves one of the event’s project already announce their most popular “attractions.” For eventual falling-over into pure Andermann, the remaining traces of destruction” (p. 17). their presence—“pictures of replicas, The second section of the text representations of representations”— examines the visual means employed reveal the politics of concealment at to map geopolitical expansions into work in the Exhibition as a whole, ‘frontier’ landscapes. Specifically, echoing and reinforcing the trope of Andermann charts expeditions into the Amerindian as part of a virtuous the backlands of Brazil at the end of yet vanquished stage of human the nineteenth century in search of a evolution, one which the modern suitable site for a new capital, as well state had supplanted (p. 73). as Argentina’s violent campaigns The “Museums” section concludes against the indigenous tribes and the with Andermann’s account of how establishment of dominance over museums in Argentina and Brazil Patagonia in the 1870s and 1880s. became, at the end of the nineteenth Draughtsmen, artists, photographers, century, vehicles for the and cartographers travelling with communication of a national civics these expeditionary forces rendered lesson, defining a national heritage of nature in two conflicting yet often Page 70 Reviews overlapping ways: either as the 1887, it is only in the last paragraph mythic enemy that must be defeated that Andermann makes brief at the moment of the emergence of reference to the fact that “of course, the modern state, or as the sublime, there were fundamental differences in monumental image of power to which form and function between the the state aspired. In support of both of capitalist adventurer Popper’s gift to these narratives of nature, the visual the state… and the expeditionary forms of maps, landscape sketches, photographer Flávio de Barros’s history paintings, and photographs state-commissioned visual were activated as instruments of narrative” (p. 204). Unfortunately, the violence that marked sovereignty on implications of such differences in the very surface of the earth. patronage and viewership are not Andermann makes a strong case adequately explored, nor are that these visual forms and their ways questions of circulation. of seeing reinforced the state’s These criticisms aside, however, geopolitical ambitions. Drawing on Andermann’s text nevertheless Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, remains a successful and highly and Michael de Certeau, he analyzes original analysis of the first attempts how methods of measuring and in Argentina and Brazil at hegemonic marking distance on expedition maps visual articulation of national society, worked to disassociate the world one that hints at the unique post- from the bodily experience of it, colonial processes at work in Latin making space abstract and inert – and America. therefore prime for re-ordering. While Andermann’s iconographic Jens Andermann is Reader in Latin and symbolic analyses are admirable, American and Luso-Brazilian Studies where his study seems to falter is in at Birbeck College, University of the consideration of the materiality of London. He is an editor of the the objects he discusses. For example, Journal of Latin American Cultural in his analysis of Flávio de Barros’s Studies and the co-editor, with photographs of the Brazilian William Rowe, of Images of Power: government’s siege of the penitential Iconography, Culture and the State in community of Canudos in 1897, Latin America. Andermann quickly moves away from “whatever the ultimate function - Adrienne Fast, Ph.D. student, and use of Barros’s images” may University of British Columbia have been (p. 197). He instead focuses his analysis (drawing on Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and others) on how the images’ vertical and horizontal geometries bespeak both empowerment and subjugation. In a chapter comparing these photographs to those of Julius Popper’s “scientific expedition” to Tierra del Fuego in Page 71 .

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