Poesia concreta brasilena: las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista (review)

Gonzalo Aguilar is already well respected for his reflections on theories of the Latin American avant-garde and his translations of 1950s and 1960s Brazilian concrete poetry. Poesía concreta brasileña brings these two interests together in a definitive study of the latter in the light of the former, and in the process takes a decisive step forward in thinking about the avant-garde in general. In dialogue with a panoply of metropolitan critics, Aguilar's work synthesizes a tradition of thinking about the avant-garde inside and outside Latin America, furthering previous contributions by well-known critics. Just as rigorous, demanding, and rewarding as the concrete poetry it studies, Aguilar's book moves deftly between text and context, convincingly insisting throughout that the avant-garde cannot be read without attention to the question of strategy, and that strategy involves not only a relation to literary tradition (treating tradition not as a subject but as an object, in Aguilar's happy phrase), but to the inscription of art in the social.

Restricted as it may ostensibly be to a consideration of a particular literary movement, this is very much a study of the place and possibilities of the lyric in modernity. More impressively still, it is discreetly structured following the principles of the concrete poems themselves. The book's three principal sections (on the avant-garde, on the contextual trajectory of the concrete poets, and on the formal aspects of their poetry), all of which can stand alone as fertile approaches, take on an extra richness and density when considered in light of the other two; thus theory and practice are rounded out by reference to form, making each section a "knot of relations" intimately bound up with its counterparts—just like a word in a concrete poem. The whole is rounded out by three tangential chapters—on the city, on later poetic productions, on a literary-historical debate—and a helpful and recapitulative chronology.

The first chapter explores the question of the avant-garde, in both theoretical and situated terms. Exorcizing the ghost of PeterBürger, Aguilar refuses to confine discussions of the avant-garde to the attack on art as an institution in the early twentieth century, but he also rejects Pierre Bourdieu's dehistoricizing suggestion that the avant-garde is defined by a particular attitude. Aguilar posits instead that the avant-garde consists in a conflictive relation of art to context at specific junctures of technological modernization. Moreover, he compellingly argues that the context of the avant-garde in a peripheral location is ongoing to modernization itself, and that any serious reading needs to take account of the specific functioning of institutions, art forms, and genres in specific areas. The prime candidate for reconsideration here is the museum. A conservative repository of cultural goods in some locations, while in others a dynamic site of enunciation, museums and biennials in Sao Paulo allowed concrete poets to familiarize themselves with traditions of the avant-garde and later exhibit their own works, bringing poetry into interactive contact with plastic arts and thereby productively displacing poetry into other arenas.

Chapters 2 and 3 provocatively narrate the same story from different angles. The first charts the formation and trajectory of the Noigandres group—primarily Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari—from the late 1940s through to the later 1960s, against a background of cultural and industrial modernization epitomized in the construction of modern art museums and the new capital, Brasilia. Aguilar isolates three distinct phases organized around determined ideologemes: design (1956-60), revolution (1960-66), and fashion (1967-69), each of which corresponds to a specific moment of national history (cultural effervescence, political radicalization, and the mass-media-inspired tropicalista exhibition). Chapter 3 focuses attention on aesthetic procedures and choices, placing the accent on form rather than socio-cultural context, yet never losing sight of the latter. The concrete poets, in Aguilar's meticulously detailed account...