Papers by Kalinca Costa Söderlund
By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper prop... more By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper proposes Antropofagia as driven by a collaborative cosmopolitanism. It shows how Antropofagia antagonised the status quo of the Brazilian academies, broaching its commitment to national issues on the ethno-racial structure and the cultural identity of a young Republic. Antropofagia anticipates Frampton's ideas on Western post-modern stances, undermining the Eurocentric narrative on the succession of, and difference between, modernism and post-modernism. As a sophisticated Arrière-Garde that not only tackled universal civilisation from without, but also from within, Antropofagia emancipated Brazilian cultural production in relation to that of the centre for it problematized, within a post-colonial reality, cultural and political burdens as heavy as those inherent to the local-global relation.
This study analyses art in Brazil from earlier 20th century modernismo to the official arrival of... more This study analyses art in Brazil from earlier 20th century modernismo to the official arrival of abstractionism at the MAM-SP in 1949. It is divided in two parts, and considers the political and socio-cultural realities and the nationalist and internationalist currents that underpinned the two art historical periods. Part 1 covers the first phase of modernismo (1917-1929) and argues that, whilst acting towards the renovation of Brazil’s aesthetic-literary realm, the movement challenged the political discourse on racial difference and white supremacy implied in the academicist view, thus it undermined the ‘coloniality of power’ inherent in the traditional academic rhetoric. It also argues that on the international front, Brazilian modernismo was original because it extracted from the primitive reference a counter-narrative to Western epistemology. Part 2 analyses modernismo from 1930 to the MAM-SP’s first international abstract art exhibition of 1949. One of its main arguments is th...
By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper prop... more By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper proposes Antropofagia as driven by a collaborative cosmopolitanism. It shows how Antropofagia antagonised the status quo of the Brazilian academies, broaching its commitment to national issues on the ethno-racial structure and the cultural identity of a young Republic. Antropofagia anticipates Frampton's ideas on Western post-modern stances, undermining the Eurocentric narrative on the succession of, and difference between, modernism and post-modernism. As a sophisticated Arrière-Garde that not only tackled universal civilisation from without, but also from within, Antropofagia emancipated Brazilian cultural production in relation to that of the centre for it problematized, within a post-colonial reality, cultural and political burdens as heavy as those inherent to the local-global relation.
Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 2015
Laura Lima’s exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall (October/November 2014), in Stockholm, both offers ... more Laura Lima’s exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall (October/November 2014), in Stockholm, both offers an understanding and triggers interpretations of the claims central to Nelson Goodman’s philosophy: 1) anything becomes art when operating aesthetically; 2) aesthetic experience results from the “implementation” of what has the potential of being art; and 3) art is a “way of worldmaking”. Whilst Bar/Restaurant, The Naked Magician and Choice incorporate the viewer and unfold their individual yet interconnected meanings, they also prove Goodman’s vision of art as creator of knowledge and his positioning of aesthetics within the realms of metaphysics and epistemology to be right. Key words: Laura Lima, Brazilian contemporary art, Nelson Goodman, “implementation”, “ways of worldmaking”, aesthetic experience, Bonniers Konsthall.
By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper proposes... more By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper proposes Antropofagia as driven by a collaborative cosmopolitanism. It shows how Antropofagia antagonised the status quo of the Brazilian academies, broaching its commitment to national issues on the ethno-racial structure and the cultural identity of a young Republic. Antropofagia anticipates Frampton's ideas on Western post-modern stances, undermining the Eurocentric narrative on the succession of, and difference between, modernism and post-modernism. As a sophisticated Arrière-Garde that not only tackled universal civilisation from without, but also from within, Antropofagia emancipated Brazilian cultural production in relation to that of the centre for it problematized, within a post-colonial reality, cultural and political burdens as heavy as those inherent to the local-global relation.
Laura Lima’s exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall (October/November 2014), in Stockholm, both offers ... more Laura Lima’s exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall (October/November 2014), in Stockholm, both offers an understanding and triggers interpretations of the claims central to Nelson Goodman’s philosophy: 1) anything becomes art when operating aesthetically; 2) aesthetic experience results from the “implementation” of what has the potential of being art; and 3) art is a “way of worldmaking”. Whilst Bar/Restaurant, The Naked Magician and Choice incorporate the viewer and unfold their individual yet interconnected meanings, they also prove Goodman’s vision of art as creator of knowledge and his positioning of aesthetics within the realms of metaphysics and epistemology to be right.
Key words: Laura Lima, Brazilian contemporary art, Nelson Goodman, “implementation”, “ways of worldmaking”, aesthetic experience, Bonniers Konsthall.
This paper investigates from an interdisciplinary perspective Antropofagia’s entrenchment in auto... more This paper investigates from an interdisciplinary perspective Antropofagia’s entrenchment in autochthonous culture and its comprehension of the ontological dimension of Tupi cannibalism. Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade’s interaction with Parisian cubists and surrealists is seen as driven by equalising intellectual affinities and a collaborative cosmopolitanism – rather than as motivated by the wish to obliterate perceived hegemonic-subaltern cultural power asymmetries. If their cannibalism-engendered agenda had something to ‘devour’ it was the local aesthetic-literary establishment and its discourse, based on distinctions between white-Brazilian high culture and native, Afro¬-Brazilian and mixed-ethnicity popular culture.
By juxtaposing Antropofagia to Paul Rincoeur’s paradox (namely, how to reanimate an ancient civilisation whilst taking part in a universal one), the paper shows that this Brazilian modernist movement mitigated the tension between the universal and the particular through a specific rationale: to adopt the philosophical ethos of local civilisation against the homogenising traits of modernism, and, by doing so, to also reject the Eurocentric approach to the so-called ‘primitive’. Equally, the paper proves that certain aspects of Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism are recognisable in the ways in which Antropofagia consciously criticised the western root of dominant Brazilian culture. Here a main difference between Antropofagia and Frampton’s category surfaces: whilst Frampton’s Arrière-Garde is more preoccupied with cultural colonisation from without, the anthropophagic one focuses on producing hybrid aesthetic-literary forms in order to reconfigure a local cultural field crippled by issues from within, that is, by coloniality.
The paper juxtaposes Ming Wong’s video art to European cinematic realism, examining the relations... more The paper juxtaposes Ming Wong’s video art to European cinematic realism, examining the relationship between Wong’s “Angst Essen/Eat fear” (2008) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1974), and between Wong’s “Life and Death in Venice” (2010) and Luchino Visconti’s “Death in Venice” (1971).
At the core of this comparison lies Wong’s application of the strategy of replica to cinematic realism as a means of producing art. Connections between Wong, Fassbinder and Visconti’s works are established by analysing how Wong 1) copies and/or appropriates the works and creative identities of the two European maestros; and 2) adopts and implements the ways in which Fassbinder and Visconti conveyed the “Self-Other” relationship through the moving image.
The paper argues that Wong’s re-staging fundamentally allows his works to distance themselves from the ones of Fassbinder and Visconti, subverting cinematic symbols and incorporating them within the space of fine art as coadjutants. However, and rather paradoxically, Wong’s strategy also approximates his video-art to the original’s ultimate goal: to problematize reality (i.e.: the realm in which culture, language, discourse, the law and other social structures interact) as a form of withdrawal from the “Real”. Aware of Wong’s peculiar replicating strategy, the paper explores the several paths with which his work grants the autonomy of image from reality through approximations to the “Real”, stating that satirising Western cultural discourse and its global authority is the work’s highest achievement.
Wong, as much as the two film directors, seeks to seize the “Real”, or, how Slavoj Žižek puts it, that persistent “traumatic kernel” as a means to free the moving-image from reality. Yet, as the paper will show, Fassbinder and Visconti mainly approach the “Real” by cinematically conveying the “Self”‘s repressed desire and destabilising repulsion for the “Other”. Whereas Wong takes an original, sophisticated and contemporary path, using his Asian accent and features, his gender, multicultural background and personal experiences to create moving-images that perform the countless hybrid identities existing in the interstices between “Self” and “Other”.
Review of the 29th Sao Paulo Biennale
Conference Presentations by Kalinca Costa Söderlund
IX JORNADAS DE HISTORIA Y CULTURA DE AMERICA, Universidad de Montevideo (UM), MONTEVIDEO, 26-30 JULY, 2019
This paper explores how, on the one hand, the MoMA’s agenda on US cultural imperialism in Brazil... more This paper explores how, on the one hand, the MoMA’s agenda on US cultural imperialism in Brazil triggered a war between aesthetic traditionalists and reformers on the occasions of ‘From Figurativism to Abstractionism’, the MAM-SP opening exhibition (1949), and of the first and the second São Paulo Biennials (1951 and 1953). These exhibitions promoted abstractionism as a prestigious banner of modernisation in Brazil fostered by Nelson Rockefeller, a symbol of US capitalism and the head of the American museum. Starting from this premise, the paper shows that the Brazilian Modernista establishment working with figurativism reacted to the arrival of abstractionism in Brazil by labelling it a type of degenerate art with no social engagement, anti-Brazilian, and compliant with US imperialism. The paper will therefore highlight how the MAM-SP pro-abstractionist campaign for aesthetic innovation, developed with the support of the MoMA and of Rockefeller, was rejected by the Brazilian cultural establishment engaging with the struggle of the masses against the national elite for being a clear evidence of foreign hegemony and capitalist interest.
On the other hand, this paper will show how Concretismo, the abstract movement that emerged in Brazil around the MAM-SP above-mentioned exhibitions, was conceptually based on Gramscian Marxism, and, as opposed to the caustic opinion of the Modernista establishment, bore educative responsibilities with the masses. In fact, Waldemar Cordeiro, the leader of the Ruptura group that represented Concretismo in São Paulo, cited Gramsci and Marx as theoretical sources (merged with Fiedler’s theory of ‘Pure Visuality’ and the ‘Gestalt’) to respond to the local socio-political reality and to the dispute that was dividing the Brazilian artistic milieu. The paper will reveal that Cordeiro’s programme - even if he clearly sympathised with the forces of progress and modernisation that were recurrently associated with the Brazilian capitalist elite - aimed at serving the masses by means of manipulating the bourgeois order of distribution of culture, and by exploiting the exhibition opportunities that the Brazilian modern art museums owned by national figures compliant with the US geopolitical ambitions were offering to Ruptura.
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Papers by Kalinca Costa Söderlund
Key words: Laura Lima, Brazilian contemporary art, Nelson Goodman, “implementation”, “ways of worldmaking”, aesthetic experience, Bonniers Konsthall.
By juxtaposing Antropofagia to Paul Rincoeur’s paradox (namely, how to reanimate an ancient civilisation whilst taking part in a universal one), the paper shows that this Brazilian modernist movement mitigated the tension between the universal and the particular through a specific rationale: to adopt the philosophical ethos of local civilisation against the homogenising traits of modernism, and, by doing so, to also reject the Eurocentric approach to the so-called ‘primitive’. Equally, the paper proves that certain aspects of Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism are recognisable in the ways in which Antropofagia consciously criticised the western root of dominant Brazilian culture. Here a main difference between Antropofagia and Frampton’s category surfaces: whilst Frampton’s Arrière-Garde is more preoccupied with cultural colonisation from without, the anthropophagic one focuses on producing hybrid aesthetic-literary forms in order to reconfigure a local cultural field crippled by issues from within, that is, by coloniality.
At the core of this comparison lies Wong’s application of the strategy of replica to cinematic realism as a means of producing art. Connections between Wong, Fassbinder and Visconti’s works are established by analysing how Wong 1) copies and/or appropriates the works and creative identities of the two European maestros; and 2) adopts and implements the ways in which Fassbinder and Visconti conveyed the “Self-Other” relationship through the moving image.
The paper argues that Wong’s re-staging fundamentally allows his works to distance themselves from the ones of Fassbinder and Visconti, subverting cinematic symbols and incorporating them within the space of fine art as coadjutants. However, and rather paradoxically, Wong’s strategy also approximates his video-art to the original’s ultimate goal: to problematize reality (i.e.: the realm in which culture, language, discourse, the law and other social structures interact) as a form of withdrawal from the “Real”. Aware of Wong’s peculiar replicating strategy, the paper explores the several paths with which his work grants the autonomy of image from reality through approximations to the “Real”, stating that satirising Western cultural discourse and its global authority is the work’s highest achievement.
Wong, as much as the two film directors, seeks to seize the “Real”, or, how Slavoj Žižek puts it, that persistent “traumatic kernel” as a means to free the moving-image from reality. Yet, as the paper will show, Fassbinder and Visconti mainly approach the “Real” by cinematically conveying the “Self”‘s repressed desire and destabilising repulsion for the “Other”. Whereas Wong takes an original, sophisticated and contemporary path, using his Asian accent and features, his gender, multicultural background and personal experiences to create moving-images that perform the countless hybrid identities existing in the interstices between “Self” and “Other”.
Conference Presentations by Kalinca Costa Söderlund
On the other hand, this paper will show how Concretismo, the abstract movement that emerged in Brazil around the MAM-SP above-mentioned exhibitions, was conceptually based on Gramscian Marxism, and, as opposed to the caustic opinion of the Modernista establishment, bore educative responsibilities with the masses. In fact, Waldemar Cordeiro, the leader of the Ruptura group that represented Concretismo in São Paulo, cited Gramsci and Marx as theoretical sources (merged with Fiedler’s theory of ‘Pure Visuality’ and the ‘Gestalt’) to respond to the local socio-political reality and to the dispute that was dividing the Brazilian artistic milieu. The paper will reveal that Cordeiro’s programme - even if he clearly sympathised with the forces of progress and modernisation that were recurrently associated with the Brazilian capitalist elite - aimed at serving the masses by means of manipulating the bourgeois order of distribution of culture, and by exploiting the exhibition opportunities that the Brazilian modern art museums owned by national figures compliant with the US geopolitical ambitions were offering to Ruptura.
Key words: Laura Lima, Brazilian contemporary art, Nelson Goodman, “implementation”, “ways of worldmaking”, aesthetic experience, Bonniers Konsthall.
By juxtaposing Antropofagia to Paul Rincoeur’s paradox (namely, how to reanimate an ancient civilisation whilst taking part in a universal one), the paper shows that this Brazilian modernist movement mitigated the tension between the universal and the particular through a specific rationale: to adopt the philosophical ethos of local civilisation against the homogenising traits of modernism, and, by doing so, to also reject the Eurocentric approach to the so-called ‘primitive’. Equally, the paper proves that certain aspects of Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism are recognisable in the ways in which Antropofagia consciously criticised the western root of dominant Brazilian culture. Here a main difference between Antropofagia and Frampton’s category surfaces: whilst Frampton’s Arrière-Garde is more preoccupied with cultural colonisation from without, the anthropophagic one focuses on producing hybrid aesthetic-literary forms in order to reconfigure a local cultural field crippled by issues from within, that is, by coloniality.
At the core of this comparison lies Wong’s application of the strategy of replica to cinematic realism as a means of producing art. Connections between Wong, Fassbinder and Visconti’s works are established by analysing how Wong 1) copies and/or appropriates the works and creative identities of the two European maestros; and 2) adopts and implements the ways in which Fassbinder and Visconti conveyed the “Self-Other” relationship through the moving image.
The paper argues that Wong’s re-staging fundamentally allows his works to distance themselves from the ones of Fassbinder and Visconti, subverting cinematic symbols and incorporating them within the space of fine art as coadjutants. However, and rather paradoxically, Wong’s strategy also approximates his video-art to the original’s ultimate goal: to problematize reality (i.e.: the realm in which culture, language, discourse, the law and other social structures interact) as a form of withdrawal from the “Real”. Aware of Wong’s peculiar replicating strategy, the paper explores the several paths with which his work grants the autonomy of image from reality through approximations to the “Real”, stating that satirising Western cultural discourse and its global authority is the work’s highest achievement.
Wong, as much as the two film directors, seeks to seize the “Real”, or, how Slavoj Žižek puts it, that persistent “traumatic kernel” as a means to free the moving-image from reality. Yet, as the paper will show, Fassbinder and Visconti mainly approach the “Real” by cinematically conveying the “Self”‘s repressed desire and destabilising repulsion for the “Other”. Whereas Wong takes an original, sophisticated and contemporary path, using his Asian accent and features, his gender, multicultural background and personal experiences to create moving-images that perform the countless hybrid identities existing in the interstices between “Self” and “Other”.
On the other hand, this paper will show how Concretismo, the abstract movement that emerged in Brazil around the MAM-SP above-mentioned exhibitions, was conceptually based on Gramscian Marxism, and, as opposed to the caustic opinion of the Modernista establishment, bore educative responsibilities with the masses. In fact, Waldemar Cordeiro, the leader of the Ruptura group that represented Concretismo in São Paulo, cited Gramsci and Marx as theoretical sources (merged with Fiedler’s theory of ‘Pure Visuality’ and the ‘Gestalt’) to respond to the local socio-political reality and to the dispute that was dividing the Brazilian artistic milieu. The paper will reveal that Cordeiro’s programme - even if he clearly sympathised with the forces of progress and modernisation that were recurrently associated with the Brazilian capitalist elite - aimed at serving the masses by means of manipulating the bourgeois order of distribution of culture, and by exploiting the exhibition opportunities that the Brazilian modern art museums owned by national figures compliant with the US geopolitical ambitions were offering to Ruptura.