Visionary Kitsch: Concretism vs. Surrealism in Brazil
by Lucas de Lima on May.09, 2012, under Uncategorized
[Montevidayans, here is the beginning of an essay I wrote for skool that owes much to Johannes, Daniel Tiffany, and discussions about kitsch on this blog that I've only come to fully grasp recently. The essay goes on to analyze Roberto Piva's amazing Paranóia, which I plan to post more about later.]
Roberto Piva, "Beat-surrealist" shaman extraordinaire.
In light of the prominence of internationally recognized figures such as Octávio Paz, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Aimé Cesaire, it is undeniable that surrealism has long enjoyed a rich and fruitful trajectory in Latin American poetry written in Spanish, French, and even Vallejo’s native Quechua[1]. As soon as one turns to the literature of Portuguese-speaking Brazil, however, the influence of André Breton and countless writers and artists worldwide seems either lacking or, upon further consideration, mysteriously obfuscated. Surrealism, if we are to believe the gatekeepers of Brazilian poetry, simply found little to no cultural relevance in South America’s largest and most populous nation. According to concretist poet Haroldo de Campos, “South American Spanish poetry was very much influenced by Surrealism, whereas in Brazil [there is] no surrealism at all” (Jackson 175). Beyond merely reflecting attitudes within national literary discourse, surrealism’s supposed insignificance in Brazil has also been invoked in recent discussions about American poetry and the international avant-garde. In Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, Marjorie Perloff attests to the irrelevance of the aesthetic among Brazilian literati when she quotes de Campos’ brother Augusto[2]: “Brazil never had surrealism because the whole country is surrealist” (Perloff 67).
For Perloff and the de Campos brothers, incidentally, this would-be absence of an enduring and far-reaching aesthetic is hardly lamentable. As a global manifestation of the avant-garde, surrealism proved to be “distraction rather than breakthrough” according to the Brazilian concretist poets (67). Unlike concretism, which Perloff herself considers an “arrière-garde” movement that exemplifies Marx’s evocation of a “‘hidden face of modernity,’” surrealism purportedly failed to engage “the transformation of materiality itself” (53, 68). Surrealists, in this sense, were misguided in their pretext of rupturing from tradition and aiming for novel artistic expression; their focus on dreams, fantasy, figurality, the unconscious, and political revolution led to innovation that was merely “thematic rather than formal or material” (83).
If this equation posits concretism as the rightful heir to the early twentieth-century avant-garde by virtue of its formal and material self-reflexivity, it does so by relegating surrealism to the status of false consciousness. Surrealism, as per Haroldo de Campos, fell short of its goal to reject rational logic insofar as it left untouched the materiality of the signifier and, in turn, ideological claims to the autonomy of language. Cast accordingly as a deviation from the avant-garde, the movement takes on the stained legacy of a debilitating virus or plague after spreading from Europe to the Americas and elsewhere. In rhetoric as scathing as turns of phrase lobbed by earlier critics of surrealism, de Campos went so far as to deem the latter’s “influence” outright “traumatic” (67).
This essay takes as its starting point the concretists’ criticisms in order to contextualize and foreground the self-professed “beat-surrealist” writing of Roberto Piva, a contemporary of the de Campos brothers. Slightly over a decade after the founding of the concretist group Noigandres in 1952, Piva’s Paranóia was published in 1963. While Paranóia sold well and was reviewed in Breton’s magazine La brèche, its reception alone failed to push surrealism beyond the margins of Brazilian literature. Despite decades of indifference if not scorn on the part of the literary establishment, Piva belonged to a community of writers who shared his aesthetic sensibilities, including Claudio Willer, Sergio Lima, José Silvério Trevisan, Antonio Fernando De Franceschi, Roberto Bicellias. As an indication of the growing interest in Piva since Paranóia as well as the vitality of surrealism in Brazil, the major publishing house Editora Globo has, in recent years, reissued his entire oeuvre as a series of collected works. A number of scholarly theses and dissertations also published in the last decade, meanwhile, argue for his significance in Brazilian letters at large.
Even Haroldo de Campos is said to have once spoken highly of Piva’s writing[3]—a fact that should not lead us to dismiss the concretists’ charges against his aesthetic influences as a matter of purely subjective preference based on intellectual whim. By framing surrealism as essentially inauthentic—or, in de Campos’ own words, as the “bastard child” of a rationalism it was ultimately incapable of evacuating—the concretists deployed rhetoric highly resonant with modernist art critic Clement Greenberg’s essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” For Greenberg, the artistic and mass productions of surrealism and kitsch, respectively, overlap as one and the same imitation of a true avant-garde. As in de Campos’ formulation, the fundamental shortcoming of the surrealist writer or artist lies in his or her apparent disregard for “the medium of his [or her] own craft” (Greenberg 7). Just as de Campos faults surrealism for its lack of critical attention to form—an oversight that, in Augusto de Campos’ words, resulted in the movement’s “automatic factory of metaphors” (Perrone 28)—Greenberg identifies in the mass product of kitsch a similarly deceptive capitalist formulism:
Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time.
Although Greenberg was perhaps unique in excoriating surrealism as an aesthetic tantamount to kitsch, many other critics[4] have analyzed kitsch on terms that condemn its parasitism, falsification, superficiality, ornamentality, predictableness, manipulativeness, and/or decontextualization. By echoing Umberto Eco’s notion of an ‘aesthetic lie,’ even Haroldo de Campos himself wrote an essay (bearing the same title as Greenberg’s, no less) that sustains Hermann Broch’s normative view of kitsch as “the element of evil […] lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art” (Broch 62-3).
Clearly, the ferocity with which critics have vilified kitsch alone begs the question of its relationship with surrealist cultural production such as Piva’s Paranóia. If kitsch is evil and surrealism exemplifies yet another one of its insidiously successful disseminations, we might pause to ask, along with Greenberg, “How is this virulence of kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained?” (Greenberg 12) And to what extent do criticisms of kitsch inform and illuminate a historically persistent bias against surrealism not just in Brazil but—if we recall Perloff’s discussion of an international avant-garde—anywhere vulnerable to such contagion?
In “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism,” Walter Benjamin had, in fact, identified the aesthetic relationship we are considering long before Greenberg; his discussion recasts our questions in terms that enable rather than foreclose kitsch as a lens or category worthy of analysis. In stark contradistinction with their detractors, Benjamin argues that the surrealists “are less on the trail of the psyche than on the track of things” (Benjamin, “Dream” 238). Dreams and material objects, in Benjamin’s theorization, are kitsch insofar as modernity has rendered them not just accessible and tangible but actually an integral part of the human body; mass production advertently “advances on the human being” and “ultimately fashions its figures in his interior” (238). By focusing less on the materiality of the signifier than its ever-proliferating plethora of referents, the surrealists thus enact through their work the perceptual proximity that defines modernity itself. What surrealism negatively traces as the loss of auratic distance, in turn, translates into its potential to blend dreams and objects, confuse what is interior and exterior, and “take in the energies of an outlived world of things” (238).
[1] As Jason Wilson points out, critics have written about Vallejo’s surrealism even though he, like many detractors noted in this essay, officially rejected the movement and its aesthetic as inherently formulaic (Wilson: Companion 256).
[2] Here de Campos was himself echoing Décio Pignatari, another concretist poet.
[3]See Maurício Arruda Mendonça’s anecdotal account at http://epigrafias.blogspot.com/2010/07/perenidade-de-roberto-piva.html.
[4] Ezra Pound, Umberto Eco, and Saul Friedlander, among others.
May 9th, 2012 on 5:24 pm
Lucas, I’ve been reading about Constructivism and Concretism lately and enjoyed this. Your reconnaissance of the critical treatment of Surrealism v. material-based movements is accurate, but I must note the inherent baselessness of this line of argument starting with Greenberg’s generation through to folks like Danto and your quotes from Perloff. Just because Abstract expressionism reduces art to the material doesn’t mean they didn’t gather their material techniques directly from the Surrealists (Ernst, Masson, Miro, Matta), who took the use of the material further and with more variation than the creators of endlessly repeated “signature” works of material manipulation. The techniques of Ashbery, Berrigan, Koch, and the NY School as well as Spicer etc are of course influenced to a large degree by Surrealism.
Greenberg’s attempt to create a dichotomy between poets of form and content, by suggesting the content of Mallarme and Joyce was of lesser importance with that of other writers, falls apart when you poke it. Greenberg’s contrast between the avant-garde that depends on elites v. the kitsch that functions for the urban proletariat has no basis in reality, even by reviewing the experiences of the artists and writers he cites in the kitsch essay. In Brazil this is especially not true, as urbanization in the North increased the popularity of Capoeira songs of the African spirits which were important to the development of Brazilian Surrealism, and Helio Oiticica’s installations of the 60′s were translations of the fragile improvisations of the urban favela. Oiticica’s installation in DC now has predictably drawn the reaction from the Post that it is flawed because it could only exist for the museum, as if such an installation in a favela wouldn’t exist. But as I said, you are recounting these critical traditions accurately and I look forward to reading about Piva and the Sao Paolo Group that followed him. Ian
May 9th, 2012 on 9:06 pm
Lucas, great post, and Ian, great comment.
I think another element at play here is the idea of surface, and the fear of art as surface. The rhetoric against both kitsch and surrealism is the supposed lightness and frivolousness of those types of art, whereas material-based movements somehow wade into the deeper waters of the present, they tells us more directly how things actually stand…
In other words, critics like Perloff are still obsessed by meaning. And Goldsmith’s notion of “thinkership” is along the same lines. God forbid we enjoy art for its colors and sounds, for the forces it brings into play…If it doesn’t adhere to some conceptual meaning, it’s considered worthless…
It’s the same old story: intellectualization, control, generalization…A movement from sensation to Idea…The specific to the universal….
Goldsmith couldn’t be further away from Warhol’s sensibility. Warhol once claimed that the longer you stared at something, the more the meaning went away. Conceptual arguments about Warhol almost always sound banal because his work is about breaking apart meaning, liberating and multiplying surfaces, kicking down the ladders needed to get to the “conceptual”…
James
May 9th, 2012 on 9:20 pm
I also think this relates to how criticism itself is carried out — “thinkership” strikes me as being simply a conceptual gloss of the close reading. Both are based at least implicitly on the idea of the vantage point, that we can somehow gain a higher ground over the work we are experiencing…
But I’m much more interested in art that is almost impossible to “think” about, and texts that are so on the plane of “immanence” (to use Deleuze’s term) that criticism has no choice but to remain on the plane of immanence itself.
Criticism in such cases will become simply another art form…not above art, staring at it from some imagined Olympian height…
James
May 10th, 2012 on 3:11 pm
Lucas discusses Cesar Vallejo above, and there’s been quite a bit about him on Montevidayo in the past. In light of that, I’m a bit surprised (even though I sent the link to three contributors of the blog, including Lucas!) that no one here has thought to give even the smallest note to this fascinating interview from 1931–the only interview known to have been given by the poet–that I recently translated, prefaced by the strange and delightful introduction that originally accompanied it (by the Ultraista writer Cesar Gonzalez-Ruano). I’ve also annotated the contents somewhat extensively, at the end, for further context. Anyway, this is the first full translation of the document into English, and it is an artifact, obviously, with historical value (the only “sound,” for one, that we have of the great poet’s actual conversation): it was lost for nearly four decades and has been mentioned in critical studies (and reprinted in Spanish numerous times since discovery in late 1960s), but for some reason it’s gone almost unnoticed by English language poets. Anyway, here it is. In past couple weeks, the interview has been given feature links by P&W, the Rumpus, the Paris Review, and the New Yorker, so maybe some of you have seen it. But thought I’d post the link here, for those who haven’t.
http://theclaudiusapp.com/2-vallejo.html
Kent
May 10th, 2012 on 5:56 pm
Much of this depends almost wholly on the reading, and how one approaches, indeed, any text. Most often there’s a distance, or a distance to be maintained, such as that between the patient and the doctor who operates. Yet, closeness and emotion evolves, and while it is often unspoken between the doctor and the patient, one can’t help desiring an expression of whatever closeness one might need. Regarding a text, however critical, I find myself looking for that very closeness, ie., are you writing merely to write (a certain way) because it’s fashionable (in certain esoteric circles) or because you believe implicitly in your subject:
Long-winded, I know, but: what exactly is your link to surrealism, to kitsch. Do you like surrealism, or (for there is a difference) do you like kitsch? Which are you drawn to, or repelled by? And why?
For myself, I prefer that kind of clarity, as opposed to the clustering of various and sundry ideas gleaned from others, and presented as a definitive, rather than explorative presentation.
Johannes stresses the importance of kitsch, and intimates that “there isn’t a thing called kitsch.” Which, of course, calls kitsch into question. (Unless by “thing” he means an object, and not a state of mind or thought…)(sic)
But, as I see it, Kitsch is what happens when there is an inauthentic imitation of an original authentic source, which is most obvious (in this context) when things (states of mind) like pop surrealism, neo-surrealism, mas-surrealism, etc., etc., come into play, and I have to agree completely, these are the epitome of kitsch.
I don’t like kitsch. But, I do like surrealism, and I understand it. These are my clarities. But, considering that “kitsch is not a stable category” per Johannes, it makes me wonder whether kitsch will in turn become kitsch when it is succeeded by something else that looks back with nostalgia at it’s debris.
Lucas, which do you find pleasure in, surrealism or kitsch?
Kent, in the context of Lucas’ text, Vallejo apparently did not like surrealism. And by the way, the footnotes are longer than the interview (which I did not feel contributes to this discussion.)
Bogartte
May 10th, 2012 on 6:01 pm
Of possible interest, too: Leila Ferraz (and her husband Sergio Lima) were in direct relation to Surrealism. Both were founders of the Surrealist Sao Paolo group active in the 1960s. Ferraz was co-editor of A Phala, a key journal devoted to Surrealist writing in Brazil.
There’s a surrealist cast to much of Raul Bop’s Cobra Norato, recognized in Brazil as one of the nation’s great modernist works, which engages indigenous and Afro-Brazilian myths and magic. Chris Daniels has much of this translated; it’s never been published in English.
May 10th, 2012 on 10:13 pm
Yes, there was surrealism in Brazil. The São Paulo group was quite active. Lima is a good example.
May 15th, 2012 on 3:36 am
Lucas, great essay, and, folks, these comments are terrific.
Kent, yeah, definitely, Bopp’s Cobra Norato shares some attributes with surrealism, it’s undeniable.
The poetry of the great Murilo Mendes was surrealist from the beginning, though he never joined any surrealist movement, or even a group that called itself Surrealist. Likewise Ismael and Adalgisa Nery. Jorge de Lima’s later poetry is to a great extent informed by surrealist techniques. Roberto Piva, yes, absolutely, and Claudio Willer, self-avowed surrealists. The SP group. The work of Hilda Hilst sometimes reads very much like surrealism to me (I’m more familiar with her fiction, not so familiar with her poetry).
Visual artists (most famously, Tarsila do Amaral and Maria Martins) absorbed surrealism and used the influence to make something of their own.
The earlier work of both the Campos brothers, before they became concretistas, is utterly shot through with surrealism, and anybody who can read the stuff can see it. Haroldo de Campos post-concretista becomes more or less a neo-baroque poet, and the Latin American Neo-Baroque tendency (Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Perlongher) owes something to surrealism.
I mean, French Surrealism had an effect on everybody, didn’t it? Vallejo may not have liked surrealism or Surrealism, but a negative effect is still an effect.
Does Marjorie Perloff know Portuguese? No. Does she know much at all about BR literature and literary history. No. She takes a statement by one of the Campos brothers without any real knowledge of what that statement means in its context. Enough said.
Yours,
Chris
May 15th, 2012 on 3:45 am
Not to mention Floriano Martins!
May 15th, 2012 on 4:01 pm
Chris,
Interesting comments. The issue of Perloff is complex. On the one hand I think she’s been a real force for the internationalizing of people’s idea of modern poetry (especially in the academy). And I think that’s really wonderful. I know that I gave a paper on Brazilian-Swedish concretist Öyvind Fahlström at one MSA conference and I was in the last slot on Sunday and I knew nobody would come to the talk until Marjorie gave the keynote about Fahlstrom and the Brazilian concretists and also informed everyone that they had to go to my panel. I’m very grateful for a lot of the work she’s done in that way.
I also don’t want to play into the idea that only experts of the native country/context can engage with foreign works; this emphasizes a kind of power of the original, the authentic, and it inhibits translingual movements. Too often works in translation are put in brackets – these are not the real thing.
But on the other hand, Perloff does tend to use certain US-centered narratives about poetry that not only oversimplifies US poetry, but most certainly oversimplifies poetry from other countries. Fahlstrom for example was absolutely shaped by surrealism – his big hero was Artaud, and Artaud is an incredibly strong influence on his work (his poetry as well as his art). His first – sadly still unpublished – collection The Trumpet in the Butt in particular shows the influence of Artaud’s poetry.
In all of this, I’m very interested in the way Surrealism is constantly being defined as that which has to be resisted – it’s too popular, it’s not original, it’s too much like pop culture, it’s seductive, contagious, it’s unethical, it doesn’t follow academic histories of modern poetry etc. Thus the constant conflation of surrealism and kitsch.
BTW Chris I’ve been meaning to write to you.
BTW, Lucas post the next installment of this piece! It’s super interesting and informative. Perhaps Chris would like to chip in too?
Johannes
May 15th, 2012 on 8:15 pm
Thanks for the comments everyone, which I’m just getting to now after graduating and stuff this past weekend. MFA in the trap!!
Ian, great points. I’m very interested in the commonalities between currents like concretism and surrealism, which Chris also points out. Seems like one needs to elide those overlaps in order to neatly establish the lineages and canons integral to ‘official’ literary movements.
Yes James, totally, criticism as another form of art, or even a sympathetic mutation of the artwork it engages, a byproduct of that artwork’s contagions.
Kent, thanks for the reminder about the Vallejo interview, which now I’ll have time to read.
Karl, I’m bringing “kitsch” into the equation not because I like it per se but because it’s a way to understand the biases against much of the writing I love and admire. I don’t believe in “inauthentic imitations”; I think everything is a kind of imitation, though some imitations are more interesting than others.
Chris, so good to hear from you, after having heard about you for years now by more than one person! Tudo bem? I hope we can talk more about Brazilian lit. The connections you make are key, especially when it comes to the baroque–a genre that from its origins could never excise kitsch from itself, as Maravall has pointed out.
Johannes, great points. I appreciate Perloff’s attention to foreign poets, but not when it misrepresents the history of a literary culture already as peripheral and obscure as Brazil’s is.
I’ll post the next part of the essay tomorrow.
Beijos para todos,
L
May 16th, 2012 on 4:53 pm
Johannes, I just wish M.P. would talk to someone else besides the Campos brothers – like Lucas, for instance! I mean, there’s been literature in BR for 500 years, and the Campos brothers ascribe to a very specific, and in some ways very narrow view of BR lit. history. It seems to me that Perloff is being very lazy here, and I get frustrated.
Lucas, yeah! Lezama, Perlongher, Sarduy EMBRACED kitsch. They used it.
I’ve always thought of surrealism as a form of baroque…
May 16th, 2012 on 5:47 pm
Yes, surrealism – baroque, I think so too. They are related. Except “baroque” has certain more specific cultural meanings – catholocism etc.
Johannes
May 16th, 2012 on 6:14 pm
Johannes, you’re absolutely right about that, but Catholicism has been the French state religion for centuries, and the historical French baroque is very strong (La Tour, Poussin). Latin America is overwhelmingly Catholic, despite a recent influx of evangelism. Just like surrealism, the Baroque had a deep effect on artists everywhere it reached.
Anyway, seems to me it’s no coincidence that surrealism (well, official surrealism, anyway) started in France and had such a tremendous impact throughout Iberia and Ibero-America…