Facing Brazil: The Problem of Portraiture and a Modernist Sublime

The 1998 São Paulo Bienal, organized by Paulo Herkenhoff, asked the international curators of the different portions of the exhibition to respond in some way to Brazilian literary modernist Oswald de Andrade's famous "Anthropophagist Manifesto" (1928). In this fantastic text, Oswald proposes that the Brazilian national body is made up of the cannibalization of European, African, and Tupí Indian cultures. The Bienal was wildly successful, with very high attendance numbers among both international and national audiences, and its organizers continue to receive requests for its long-sold-out catalog (P. Herkenhoff, personal communication). Was the Bienal's success and popularity just one more instance of successful exoticism of Latin American art in the international art world? Was Oswald's pronouncement of Brazilians as cannibals in any way different from the more familiar modernist primitivism of Picasso and Gauguin? Why do Brazilian audiences and contemporary artists continue to engage with images produced in the 1920s and 1930s?

If not merely a marketing ploy to sell the exotic domestically and internationally, the ongoing importance of these decades of experimentation to the contemporary visual arts in Latin America requires a serious reconsideration of theories of modernism on the periphery. The following work is part of a larger project that conceives of Latin American modernism as an ethos: a form of cultural production that emerges at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. This practice proves to be neither obsessed only with the formal composition and purity of the work of art, nor reducible to a didactic political message. In the conception of a modernist ethos, I change the terms of the discussion and argue that the aesthetic experiments of these movements are impossible to extricate from their ethical (not strictly political) concerns. This praxisis ethical not simply in the colloquial sense of morality, but rather, drawing on the word's etymology, it refers both to an ideal of excellence and beauty and to "the characteristic spirit, prevalent tone or sentiment of a people or community" (O.E.D.). Ethos governs the dynamic between formal and ethical concerns of a particular place, locating but not limiting the modernist practices at work.

What follows is one part of the formulation of this modernist ethos, which emerges at the intersection of theories of subjectivity, ethics, and aesthetics during the 1920s and 1930s. The vocabulary of the sublime and the genre of portraiture found in the title of this article likely seem so hopelessly conservative as to preclude any continued relevance to contemporary art and theory. What possible gains for critical theory and studies of visual culture could be contained in such exhausted ideas? Portraiture, we shall see, is a crucial genre for modernist experimentation in both the literary and visual arts. It exists at the center of the tightly drawn knot between ethics, which Jacques Lacan called a "science of character" (Lacan 1992, 10), and aesthetics, one of what Freud referred to as the "higher psychic activities, scientific, artistic, or ideological" (Freud 1961, 49). Revisiting portraiture will illuminate important terms of debate in recent critical reconsiderations of Brazilian modernism and the Spanish American vanguardias within the Latin American academy, which have limited their claims of significant social impact. It will also make possible important disruptions of what Rosalind Krauss (1993) has called "mainstream modernism," especially the privilege granted abstraction in the naming of a modernist aesthetics.

Mário de Andrade is one of the most influential figures in Brazilian literature and aesthetic theory in the twentieth century, credited for initiating the famous Week of Modern Art in São Paulo (1922) with a reading of his introduction to the collection of poems entitled Hallucinated City.² Mário's ongoing practice of portraiture, in both photography and writing, reveals a theory of the sublime that provides crucial components of this modernist ethos. His portraits merge ethics and aesthetics by committing a reversal of the Freudian model of modern subjectivity, conceptualize a practice of indigenism in contrast to European primitivism, and present a theory of modernism as "lyrical true deceit." For Mário, this true deceit...