"Their owner, the rain, is still around" II/III
Discover more from WOID
"Their owner, the rain, is still around" II/III
Review: Contemporary Latin American Art at the Museum of Modern Art
“Chosen Memories.” Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond. Museum of Modern Art. through September 9, 2023. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5528
I]
In latest news, the reform presidential candidate in Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, is leading by 67 to 37 percent against his reactionary rival before the August 20 election. His rival promises to be “another Bukele,” in reference to the authoritarian president of El Salvador. Whether the authoritarianism kicks in before the election’s even happened, is anybody’s guess.
II]
When I was young and attending a French high school, I would periodically find myself more popular than usual. Eventually my new friend would invite me over to listen to the latest LP. Then I’d translate: « Je suis le morse. Je suis l'aubergine. » And my friend would look perplexed: « Tu es sûr qu'il a dit ça ? » And then he’d smile: « Ah! C’est Jésus-Christ ! »
The Japanese expression 不易流行 (fueki ryūkō) translates as “the unchanging within that which changes.” It’s easy to read some kind of spirituality into this, as a way to avoid signifying. That’s what the easy-going critic does, bumbling about while trying to locate the “Spiritual” in Chosen Memories. But as Andrew Fitzsimons explains in his thoughtful introduction to the haiku of Matsuo Bashō, plain old spirituality won’t do when dealing with certain works of art that happen to be very similar in their approach over vastly different eras and geographies:
“The haiku as nonnarrative, context-independent, and intent on a moment of encounter with nature [does not reflect] the range and reach of his poetic practice.”
The works now on display at the Museum of Modern Art are indeed “intent on a moment of nature;” but like all such encounters, they are overdetermined by cultural and social choices :
Armando Andrade Tudela, Huaco deforme (Deformed Pottery), 2012. 16 mm film transferred to video. The artist lovingly runs his camera across the surface of a piece of Chancay pottery from Peru.
For an artist the most promising aspect of this show is the artists’ decision to encounter these “moments of nature” by means of up-to-date technological media. Like Bashō, they hold the moment at arms’ length; step back from it; historicize it.
III
Fitzsimons adds:
“Previous translations often present Bashō as a terse proto-imagist.”
“Proto-imagist” could work as well for this show so long as we accept that images, textures, matter, no matter how rooted in pure sensual experience, may be politicized through and through: .
“What makes revolutionists is either self pity, or indignation for the sake of others […] The nature before us is revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth, that pride of life, which to the Greeks was a heavenly grace...” Walter Pater.
It’s a fruitful tension, the movement from self-pity to “the direct sense of personal worth.” For Latin American art at its best it does not seem possible to uncouple the sense of loss, or hunger, or shame from the “direct sense of personal worth.” The nature that’s “revolutionist” is the nature that escapes the demands of practical reason, of History. Brazil is the one country in the world that has the motto of Positivism on its flag.
IV]
Water throughout the show is is a dominant thematic key. Water, nevertheless, is used with specific resonance. In Brazilian Black culture the sea is that which separates us from and reminds us of our homeland. Several works in the show remind us of that:
Thiago Rocha Pitta. Herança (Heritage), 2007. 16mm film transferred to video.
Trees growing from inside a boat: o sertão vai virar mar e o mar vai virar sertão, “The sertão [backcountry] shall be the sea and the sea shall be the sertão,” to quote a well-known prophecy:
“The sertão has frequently symbolized Brazil at its most authentic. Yet the sertão resists definition. […] The sertão served as a foil to European knowledge by signifying precisely that which stood outside of the defining influence of Europe.
[…]
In political, economic, social and geographic terms, transplanted European society defined itself over and against the sertão in a process that gave rise to a stark separation between the litoral [the coast] and the sertão.
[…]
Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões […] established a paradigm for studying the tensions between the centre and the periphery (the litoral and the sertão) that have permeated twentieth-century Brazilian literary, philosophical and political thought.”
No use looking for the single message. Or non-message, for that matter. As in any worthwhile haiku it’s the gaps between images that define what’s unspelt.
V]
To my mind the best-articulated work in this show is Gala Porras-Kim’s Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum, part of an ongoing series. The artist, who is Colombian-Korean, addresses textile fragments taken from a a Maya cenote in Chiche’n Itza’, Mexico, now in the Peabody Museum at Harvard: offerings to Chaac, God of Rain. She, too, sees herself liberating the past from Eurocentric rationalism:
To Porras-Kim these objects, so long as they’re removed from the water, their intended environment, are little more than “dust particles being held together through conversation methods.” And she suggests ways to liberate them to their original function: “Their owner, the rain, is still around.” Like Harold Rosenberg said, “Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what already is destroyed. Art kills only the dead.” や. Ya.
WOID XXIII-23b
August 16, 2023
Andrew Fitzsimons, “Introduction,” in Bashō. The complete haiku of Matsuo Bashō (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2022), xxxi sqq.
Rex P. Nielson, “The Unmappable Sertão,” Portuguese Studies 30, no. 1 (2014): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.5699/portstudies.30.1.0005.