Page 117 - ARTE!Brasileiros #40

the law that set the slaves free in Brazil. She died in 1964, only organ by excellence, is absent. We also see a strange structure
two years before I was born. This fact should surprise us more. that may be a nose, or a boson, maybe a displaced or folded arm,
Only one existence separates me from an era of slavery. Anita over which the melancholic figure rests her face.
painted women making use of expressionist deformation and the In both cases, Anita and Tarsila, we have a kind of incompleteness
decomposition of perspective practiced by cubism. That is, when of the representation of themselves, of a small flaw in the visage,
women began to produce their own visages in this specific language referred to the interference of this function that Lacan called
of visual arts, they do it according to an aesthetic consciousness object: the subtracted hands, the stain or blemish that fails to
surrounded by the theme of the loss of things. Surely this is a determine the completeness of the form, illusion or deceit in
common problem for the 1920’s avant-gardes, that is, the thing composing the unity of the body. This contrasts greatly with the
can only be recovered if we admit strategies of negativization way how Mário de Andrade’s visage is presented, painted in its
of the Real. If romantic realism and impressionism intended to solidity and fullness, by both painters.
apprehend the relationship between the representation and the
thing, the 1920s found out that the real is apprehended via the 2. FANTASIES OF BODY
negative, by the recovery of the lost experience, by the return An analogous situation, but of different nature, can be found
of the presence from the absence. Thus emerges a regard that in the comparative analysis of two female representatives of
captures events serially and that is distributed between strategies the Neoconcretism of the 1960. In the 1949 painting Retrato de
of denial, repetition and deformation. Regina, we see a young Lygia Clark, who appears to having been
But losing oneself as a thing is leaving slavery. It means to trained in the experience of modernist asexuation. The sadness
emancipate oneself as a position of regarding and a place of in the regard, the abstinence of the hands, the childish model.
speech. The female visage that Anita builds will bear this crucial Let us see how it contrasts with Lygia Pape’s Língua Apunhalada
trait, that there is a missing part. That is, in addition to reconciling a (1968). We are no longer in the production of a feminine visage,
deformative aesthetic form with a social contradiction represented with its trace of negativity, but in the metaphor of the impossibility
by the approaching freedom, even if it does not actually come to of speaking. Once more, we have here the combination between
fruition, there is another detail, which sets the specifically singular a social contradiction, represented by the censorship by the civil-
tone of this woman: the typical concealment of the left arm. military dictatorship and an aesthetic form, this time without any
It is known that Anita was ashamed of a small imperfection on her deformation because it is photographic. The aesthetic form is
left hand. An imperfection that supposedly contributed to forge produced by the language’s metaphorical ambiguity, as part of
her recluse personality and maybe prevented her from declaring the body and the tongue as the medium of speech. The stabbing
herself to her unlikely love, Mário de Andrade. is the signifier interfering. But we do not see the knife or dagger,
The visage is one of the operators of sexuation. Visage unifies only the blood flowing. We arrive one second after the action. But
and composes a variety of traits into different language systems, we see the scene in which she shows us the tongue. Metaphor on
making up a unity. Sexuation is the visage because it demands a metaphor, since now it is a gesture of derision and repudiation we
performative action through which each one takes up a visage. see in the children, and that survives in the message of tongue
Likewise, the speech is the assumption of a language by whoever that does not bend. What we have here is an operation that is
speaks. Taking on a visage is not identifying oneself with essential part of sexuation, not as visage, but as fantasy. In the series of
traits of what it means to be a woman or a man, but building a the fantasy, the essential is provided by the framing. This instant
unity among stories. In this case, the history of oppression and that defines the assembly of a set of perspectives, onto which our
aesthetic deformation finds its unity by subtracting one element. gaze is invited to enter. We are thus kept wondering about what
One missing element in nearly all of her paintings: the left hand. would have happened before or what will happen next.
How is it possible that and accident of this sort creates in someone We are once again faced with the theme of the negativization
the sense of a punitive suffering? It seems unacceptable to us of a part of the body in Lygia Clark, with Máscara Abismo com
that anyone would be embarrassed of the dysfunctional features Tapa-Olhos [Abyssal mask with eye-patch, 1968]. Here the eyes
of their bodies. But the part for the whole has become, in this that are blindfolded, preventing us from seeing. But it is also the
case, some sort of female metonymy. I argue that this captures mouth and therefore the tongue that is directed towards a tube
something that extrapolates the unique case, containing in itself into the abyss. The reticulated tube is transparent so that we can
the historic disposition of femininity in Brazil in the 1930s: The see the lipstick that stands out on the lips. The masquerade is a
suffering and shame of one’s own body. psychoanalytic concept by Joan Riviére and developed by Lacan
The metaphorical aspect of this visage may be found in Tarsila do as a feminine strategy of sexuation. It is not that behind the mask
Amaral. In her self-portrait we also find this small gesture in which there is the essence of feminine sexuality, but that historically
the right hand covers the left. The “silly” hand this time is absent it appropriates the mask to argue that femininity is just a set of
in a different way. This is not about deformation or perspective masks, like an infinite onion whose inner center communicates
unfitness, but a true absence. An absence that goes unnoticed with the outside.
because the red dress covers it. Covered and protected by a sort Another structure built around the cover-up is Divisor, from 1968,
of armor, the painting is made soon after the first exhibition of in which Lygia Clark uses a giant sheet in which people can cover
the artist in Paris, at the Percier gallery, in 1926. their bodies, leaving their heads poking out. Let me remind you
While Anita’s works involve metonymical and descriptive titles such that the sheet is the favorite garment of ghosts. It serves as a
as A Boba [The Fool], A Estudante Russa [The Russian Student] or veil, essential to costumes. But what division? Between visible
A Mulher de Verde [The Woman in Green], Tarsila’s portraits evoke head and hidden body? Between the hypothesis of fantasy of
metaphorical names, such as those that could be created for her several heads with the same body? Bodiless heads? As asexual
self-portrait in a red dress: A Mulher Farol [The Headlamp Woman], ghosts or in the place of the absence of body shown, instigation
A Dama de Ferro [The Iron Dame]. It is also through exaggeration to a body to be constructed by our fantasy? Fantasy is the divisor
that the body parts will take on the woman visage in Abaporu, of the subject, the strategy through which he grasps himself as
our founding Anthropophagist, let us not forget, it was a birthday object to the other or how he divides himself as subject into his
present that Tarsila gave to her husband, Oswald de Andrade. In own desire. It also induces the symptom: gagged word, metaphor
it, we see a huge hand and foot. In it the mouth, anthropophagic of desire, censure of pleasure.

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