Anna Maria Maiolino: Articulations and Translations of and in Anthropophagy1

Anna Maria Maiolino: Articulations and Translations of and in Anthropophagy1 Michael Asbury 46 Untitled, 1977 From the series Desenho Objeto (Drawing Object) 68 Thread on paper, 31 × 31 cm 69 In the short story, ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), Jorge Luis Borges imagines a library so vast that it is all-encompassing. Its architecture consists of superimposed hexagonal galleries. These are connected by a spiral staircase that cuts across the centre of the entire structure. The endless library holds all possible combinations of the letters of all alphabets, whether the languages are extinct, currently in use or yet to emerge. This random collection of letters is compiled in standard-size volumes, displayed in no particular or known order. All known books, whether based on fact or fiction, or yet to be written, are interspersed among an inordinate number of nonsensical compilations.2 The library is absolutely dysfunctional, since its totality denies the possibility of both specificity and order, which must always be deferred, cast to the field of speculation. A similar sense of totality is evoked in certain works by Anna Maria Maiolino. I refer to her poured ink drawings and installations with clay, where the single and simple action that gives form gains significance Left: The reading room at Hampstead Central Library, now Camden Arts Centre, 1949, Right: Anna Maria through repetition. As in the case of Borges’s library, this significance Maiolino, plan for Continuous from the series Terra Modelada (Modelled Earth), Camden Arts Centre, 2010 pertains not to the specific, whether the individual drawing or object, but to the absolute completeness of the work, which must also always 1 be deferred. While the accumulation of marks or objects tends towards with a particular art historical genealogy: the myth of origin that it evokes 4 This essay has been adapted from a keynote Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, paper, ‘Anna Maria Maiolino: Utopias e totality, each single gesture evokes, but never achieves, the primordial and what seems like its eternal recurrence. Once again, Benjamin’s in Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913 –1926, Subjetividades’, presented at the 20th annual act it seeks to reproduce. Similar to the two infinite extremes of Borges’s reflections on translation are particularly enlightening: ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, meeting of the ANPAP (National Association library, these serial gestures are thus expansive in two directions: they The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, of Researchers in Fine Arts), held at UERJ Cambridge, MA, 1969, pp. 253 – 263. (Rio de Janeiro State University) in September tend towards both an origin and an end. The history of the great works of art tells us about their descent from 2011. A shorter version of that paper, ‘Anna Elaborating on art historian Maria de Fátima Lambert’s suggestion prior models, their realisation in the age of the artist, and what in 5 Maria Maiolino’s Articulations of the Notion that Maiolino’s drawings and installations can be ‘read’3 as a form of principle should be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Borges, 2000, p. 35. of Anthropophagy’, was delivered in February proto-writing, it may be useful to refer to Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Where this last manifests itself, it is called fame. Translations that are 2010 at the conference, Sub-Objects and 6 4 Studio Work: From Eva Hesse to Anna Maria Task of the Translator’ (1923). One can associate the sequential mark more than transmissions of a subject matter come into being when Benjamin, 1969, p. 253. Maiolino, held at the Centre for the Study of or form-making in Maiolino’s work as a search for the perfect translation a work, in the course of its survival, has reached the age of its fame. Contemporary Art, University College London, of that primal mark. The failure to achieve this (as all translations are Contrary, therefore to the claims of bad translators, such translations 7 University of London. Catherine de Zegher, ‘”Ciao Bella”: The Ins ultimately inadequate) leads to the potential infinite reproducibility of those do not so much serve the works as owe their existence to it. In them and Outs of a Migrant’, in Anna Maria Maiolino: 2 attempts. This potentially infinite translation of a primal code invokes a the life of the originals attains its latest, continually renewed, and Vida Afora / A Life Line, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Borges’s narrative discusses the theoretical notion of essence, that which lies beyond strict communicability. While most complete unfolding.8 exhibition catalogue, The Drawing Center, New speculations of a ‘librarian of genius’ through Borges’s narrator poses the question, ‘You who read me – are you certain York, January – February 2002, pp. 81–105. Hélio which he evokes some interesting examples: Oiticica suggested a similar analogy in his essay 5 ‘All – the detailed history of the future, the you understand my language?’, Benjamin asks: Maiolino invites a reading of her work in relation to the ‘complete ‘Brasil Diarréia’, in which he discusses the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful unfolding’ (the fame) of the concept of anthropophagy within Brazilian art. dilution of the notion of anthropophagy and catalogue of the library, thousands and For what does a literary work ‘say’? What does it communicate? It In the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition at the Tàpies Foundation, its relation to the appropriation of Tropicália by thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the culture industry. See Hélio Oiticica, ‘Brasil the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof ‘tells’ very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is the artist declared that she considered herself ‘the faecal pellet resulting Diarréia’ in Arte Brasileira Hoje, Paz e Terra, 9 of the falsity of the true catalogue, the Gnostic not communication or the imparting of information. Yet any translation from the anthropophagous Brazilian banquet’. Arising as an irreverent means Rio de Janeiro, 1973, trans. in Hélio Oiticica, gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that that intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit of national assertion amid the apparently inescapable prospect of cultural exhibition catalogue, Witte De With Center for gospel, the commentary on the commentary anything but communication – hence, something inessential. This is derivation, Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ of 1928 proposed Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, February – April of that gospel, the true story of your death, the 1992, pp. 17 – 20. translation of every book into every language, the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard that that the Brazilian people, irrespective of their ethnic origin, hold an archaic, the interpolations of every book into all books, which lies beyond communication in a literary work – and even a poor pre-Cabralian Amerindian character.10 Anthropophagy thus became a 8 the treatise Bede could have written (but did translator will admit that this is its essential substance – as the metaphor for the appropriative nature of Brazilian culture, one defined as Benjamin, 1969, p. 255. not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, 6 the lost books of Tacitus.’ Jorge Luis Borges, unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic’? inherently (culturally) cannibalistic. By claiming that, ‘Only anthropophagy 9 ‘La Biblioteca de Babel’, in El Jardín de senderos unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically’, the manifesto sought Anna Maria Maiolino, in Anna Maria Maiolino, que se bifurcan, Editorial Sur, Buenos Aires, A similar conjunction of the singular act and its endless expansion a totality by invoking a mythical origin.11 This original Amerindian spectre ed. Helena Tatay, exhibition catalogue, Fundació 1941, trans. Andrew Hurley, The Library of Babel, has been proposed by Catherine de Zegher. The curator observed a pervading the national character was perceived by Oswald de Andrade Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, October 2010 – January David R. Godine, Boston, MA, 2000, p. 23. 2011, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, resemblance between the making of Maiolino’s clay ‘rolls’ and the act to be entirely coherent with the dynamics of modernity itself. Santiago de Compostela, February – May 2011, 3 of kneading bread. Suggesting another analogy that the work sets into The Brazilian translation of European modernism was doomed to Malmö Konsthall, May – August 2011, p. 97. Maria de Fátima Lambert, ‘Anna Maria play between origin and finality, de Zegher went further by recalling the betray its source, like a mirror that sometimes distorts, but always inverts Maiolino’, in Anna Maria Maiolino: Order 7 10 and Subjectivity, ed. Michael Asbury and resemblance between bread and faeces. The association of that which and multiplies the image it reproduces. Brazilian Modernismo, from which The expression ‘pre-Cabralian’ refers to Garo Keheyan, exhibition catalogue, Pharos is ingested with that which is excreted presents us with a cycle that the concept of anthropophagy emerged, thus emulated the Parisian ‘call the period prior to the ‘discovery’ of Brazil. Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, connects humanity, its past, present and future. This analogy was intended to order’ wherein purism, with its Arcadian landscapes, classical and Pedro Álvarez Cabral, the Portuguese navigator October 2007, pp.79 – 89. to go beyond the repetitive nature of the act of making the work itself. primitivist references, sought to re-affirm French culture as the rightful (according to consensual history) first landed on Brazilian soil on 22 April 1500. De Zegher refers to the relationship that Maiolino, as an artist, possesses inheritor of the Western tradition. Similarly, anthropophagy associated the 70 Michael Asbury 71 specific, that is, the myth of origin, with a universal ideal of culture. In Nova Figuração group and subsequent participation in key exhibitions other words, it proposed the presence of a mythical indigenous spectre such as Nova Objetividade Brasileira, held at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum within Brazilian ethnic heterogeneity, and juxtaposed it with another myth, of Modern Art in 1967, are cases in point.

Load more