IV.4.5 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065118
DOES ETSEDRÓN REPRESENT one of the paths to be followed by Brazilian art . . . ? This is the question that Aracy A. Amaral [SEE DOCUMENT IV.4.4] asks herself and passes on to us and, by extension, to all of Latin America. (The original version of the question ends with a complementary phrase: “. . . always supposing that it is not completely submerged in the current of internationalist art information?”, which I have set aside by virtue of the fact that I consider that the presence of Etsedrón is in itself largely due to that information, and that any Latin American aesthetics will have to confront it.)
When a group of artists takes a bit of the poverty stricken “northeast” habitat and transfers it to the Thirteenth [São Paulo] Biennial in the form of a rustic corral containing a few magic–religious effigies made from equally rustic materials, it means, in my opinion, that they are striking out along a path that leads in a well known direction; one that parallels others already trodden by such modern artists as the primitivists, the expressionists and the environmentalists. The difference lies in the fact that Etsedrón adds a singularly heretic touch by transplanting a rustic reality that is offensive to every idea of neatness implanted by the city and its technological products. Nevertheless, this rusticity has a significant anthropological–cultural background.
Etsedrón, like every work of art, contains two dualities: on the one hand, what is real (the corral and the materials) and what is fantastic (the forms and connotations of the Afro-Brazilian effigies), and on the other, ruptures (contravention of the established ideas of art) and artistic continuity (antecedents such as “arte povera,” environmentalism, expressionism and primitivism).
If we wished to pursue the customary, but poor, course of commenting first on the quality of the work (applying scales of values), we might point out the aesthetic merits of the inner balance of both dualities, since the latter are in agreement with the sensibility of our times (tending more to rupture than to continuity) and with the Latin American need to redefine art on the basis of our own reality. Since there is no possibility as yet of any artistic separatism of an autochthonous and autarchic type, that redefinition must be achieved by combining ruptures with established elements of Western art. Nevertheless, the hostile rusticity—as an artistic rupture and as a reality of our Third World—does not constitute sufficient reason to either affirm or deny the aesthetic quality or Latin American exemplarity of Etsedrón. Neither do the effigies and the dramatism of the work. As for the rest, quality, even for critics, is a result and not a starting point.
The aesthetic quality (axiology) must therefore be considered to derive from the possible functions, ideals, or purpose (teleology) that motivate the couple of dualities. But first of all, we must deduce what it contributes to Latin Americanist aesthetics (not Latin American, since that is a factor that affects the stereotyping and the simple selection of existing elements and is far from being prospective).
Under these circumstances, we do not believe that the teleology of Estedrón can be called political, in the sense of a mere denunciation of poverty. That is something that can be done by other and more effective means, whereas art has a specific function to perform that is clearly reserved to art alone. Even if we were to concede that there is a certain affinity here between the political element and art, we would still have to return to the problem of quality. Nor can this be regarded as a mere hippie-style, Rousseauistic or Franciscan approach to aesthetics of poverty.
As for the effigies, we will obviously have to deny the presence of any religious intent that would constitute a return to magic and to sacred art. The same is true regarding any possible idea of representing magic–religious practices and effigies of a Brazilian cultural minority as an artistic postulate for the purpose of revalidating that culture and laying claim to its legitimate right to be considered an integral part of the cultural plurality of the country. (To claim supremacy would be a crass error, in spite of the fact that the Afro-Brazilian rhythm of the Samba prevails in the sensibility of all Brazilians.)
The effigies do, of course, invoke an aura of myth as an obligatory reaction of present-day art against rationalism and the machine. But what we are really dealing with here is the expression of a whole anthropological-cultural attitude that uses rusticity and effigies as a means of assailing the pressures imposed by a technological ecology and the established ideas of art. And an attitude of this type might easily turn into a questioning of the anthropological and (Western) limits to artistic change, which would include the function we should assign to art in Latin America. But there is only one way to test and confirm those limits: by changing art itself.
One need only employ a touch of the genetic structuralism advocated by [French theoretician] Lucien Goldmann in examining the socio-cultural reality of Brazil to agree that Etsedrón is a direct descendent of such vernacular trends in Brazilian art as “Antropofagia” and “Tropicalismo,” just as it is in large part a result of the concern for the social causes and effects of art that is characteristic of Brazilian critics. Add to this the healthy development of sociology and anthropology in that country, and there is sufficient evidence for one to assert the sociological-cultural background of Etsedrón and to consider it significant. Naturally, that background will have only a practical meaning in the context of the multiple pluralities existing in every Latin American country and of the artistic plurality that is flourishing everywhere in the world today. (The sole or best solution that was the goal of aesthetic monolithic [trend] is now considered outdated, and today every work of art is expected to offer a different solution.) Consequently, Etsedrón constitutes but a minimal part of the sociocultural phenomenon of art, and we would be mistaken if we were to expect a single work to provide solutions for the whole range of Brazilian art. It would be still worse to try to take it as a basis for inferring the entire Latin American aesthetics, even an aesthetics motivated more by sentiments than by ideas; that would be about the same as if we were to try to deduce the entire nature of Gothic art from the fishes and crosses the early Christians scrawled on the walls of the catacombs.
The essence of this work lies in the fact that it goes farther than choosing between familiar realities (in this case, the Afro-Brazilian) and simply expressing resistance to imperialism; here, the resistance itself is a new version of colonialism, because the effort is aimed directly at resisting outside pressures by arousing a neurotic reaction to them, rather than at developing our own creativity and suggesting goals of our own which, put into action, would unfailingly and effectively combat all imperialism, both domestic and foreign.
Etsedrón penetrates one of our realities [by means of] transubstantiation; it reveals a spirit of search; it counteracts Brazilian centralism, and it responds to a need for change and artistic independence. But we must take care that our desire for artistic independence does not lead us to discovering definitive, inflated, and all exclusive values in attitudes of this type that are frequently encountered in world art today. Therefore, I believe that a look at the anthropological-cultural background will help us to decide what possibilities Etsedrón affords for the long-overdue entry of Latin American art into the equally long and complicated process of independence.
I consider the Afro-Brazilian reality that is the basis of Etsedrón to be an anthropological one because it seeks possibilities of art in the idea of the nature of man, thereby freeing itself from the obligations that would be imposed by a sociological and political reality of our own times. Its primitivism is a result of that fact, and is therefore very different from those other types of primitivism which simply introduce primitive themes, messages, materials and shapes in a traditional art object that also contains unnoticed and deep-rooted cultural imperatives—or imperialisms—which can only be unmasked and surmounted by means of a radical re-conceptualization of art. Etsedrón does not seek to transform the manner of producing a painting or sculpture; rather, it proposes that we begin by revising both our idea of man and Western concepts of art in order to give that art (or our own inherent artistic abilities, which is the very same thing) a function that accords with our own anthropological reality.
In short, a decision is made in favor of a primitivist synthesis of erudite art, which is a process that has given good results in our part of America and has been well accepted everywhere, as evidenced by our folklore and, in music, by the tango, rumba and samba.
Meanwhile, the cultured synthesis of the magic substratum that is currently being sought by erudite art has yet to acquire a well-defined artistic personality. The two syntheses saturate a single collective consciousness that is in constant state of flux: one implies absorption through synthesis or a vital combination of racial characteristics, while the other is a continual metamorphosis that has still to achieve independence. Both face a common enemy today: the popular culture disseminated by the mass media. The aesthetic paths of Latin America are therefore both complicated and difficult.
To sum up, the anthropological-cultural background of Etsedrón indicates one of the paths that might be taken by Latin American art. Its merits depend on the ways in which our artists go on changing their concepts of art and draw closer to our reality, while our art theorists and critics provide in their articles the guidance that is needed to understand the anthropological-cultural background of those changes and new approaches. It is to be hoped that these new efforts will gradually free themselves from the spiritualist finalism that still weighs so heavily on Etsedrón and entraps our artistic independence.