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Conclusion: Continuities
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201 Conclusions Continuities What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T. S. Eliot “Little Gidding” Sarduy, a life-long student of art, knew and understood the Western European history of art from the time of the Flavian emperors (the subject of his master’s thesis at the Louvre School of Art) to the contemporary period, which included quite a number of artists who were also his friends, such as Luis Feito and Ramón Alejandro. He actively refused to differentiate between the textual and visual langue of Baroque art, sculpture, architecture, science, literature, and poetry. To him, they were all one—different expressions of the cosmologicalcosmetic “arte del arreglo.” Galileo was to Ariosto what Kepler was to Rubens and Borromini, and Borromini was to the anamorphic image of Holbein’s The Ambassadors what Holbein was to Velázquez, and what Velázquez was to Cervantes, and Cervantes to Larry Bell. The body of the text (literary or scientific , e.g., Cobra) was also the human body and the body of the canvas (Lucio Fontana). Sarduy’s bodies ooze. Cut by broken glass in the sand, and makeshift scalpels, they bleed: (Rothko) red onto (Franz Kline) “muros blancos.” And the implacable Changó threatens Sarduy and his “pájaros” with death and devastation: Un hacha como sombrero, rojo y blanco, blanco y rojo 202 Conclusions nada apacigua el enojo del amo, jefe y guerrero . . . (OC-I 231) But the night writes in an attempt to achieve some kind of immortality through scriptural fijeza. It is also what we attempt to do with images (photographs, paintings) and writing: to leave some kind of trace—however painful, as in the photograph of the leng-tch’é (Bataille, Cortázar, Elizondo)—that once we were (here). ¿Recuerdas? For ultimately, all of us after the Copernican revolutions are mere fragments whose juxtapositions within a frame are as arbitrary as the signs that make us. “Si algo va a quedar del estructuralismo . . . será, sin dudas . . . la puesta en tela de juicio del hombre pleno y centrado,” said Sarduy in an interview with Blas Matamoro (16). A member of the Parisian Tel Quel group in the 1960s, Sarduy was a “structuralist,” in the sense of someone for whom language—in the widest acceptation of the word—was a lens through which to view the world. Not the means by which one revealed something interior to one’s being, or even a transcendent otherworldly reality, language self-referentially pointed back to the materiality of existence. Starting with De donde son los cantantes, Sarduy’s writerly/painterly texts will deal with issues of personal, national identity, and anthropology tout court. The bathers in La playa—who both resemble the svelte bathers of David Hockney and Fernando Botero’s obese figures—and the beach in Cannes is a mythology, a construction of visual language. A beach resort is a color postcard—a sign in what Jean Baudrillard called, “the great procession of simulacra.” And obviously, one dresses up at a carnival, at a procession. So who, in that case, is not camouflaged as some other personage simulating someone else? As such, we should not be surprised to find that Sarduy’s queer poetics and its attendant notions of disguise, simulation, and obliqueness in representation suggest a kind of ontology of the surface, etc .The television confessor “who spills the beans,” as it were, in front of the entire world, exposes nothing other than the system of simulation itself that has created for everyone’s amusement or appeasement a trompe l’œil of normalcy. [44.201.131.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:24 GMT) 203 Continuities The cabaret singer in Gestos, Auxilio and Socorro at Havana ’s Shanghai Theater in De donde son los cantantes, Cobra and La Tremenda at “El Teatro Lírico de Muñecas” in Cobra, and Piet Mondrian dancing the Boogie Woogie in Mood Indigo, all without exception are participants at the carnival. The Calvinist , rectilinear Mondrian admired the formal freedom of African American dancing because he equated it with the same freedom that he sought for his Neo-plasticism, the same freedom Sarduy sought in writing. And Sarduy turned the music of the Harlem Renaissance, of the Jazz Age, along with Mondrian (“bailando”) into a BLACK SPIRAL. The spiral, as spirals tend to do, spirals from the pages of Mood Indigo to the beginning pages of Cobra...