Page 95 - ARTE!Brasileiros #58

Rubem Valentim, or in the generous baroquism in Pele negra, máscaras brancas [Black skin, white masks]. hell nor the devil have a place and which does [PAGE 10]
its accumulative construction of an Emanoel Araújo, Abdias Nascimento writes: not af!ict the life of man with an original sin from
in the mysticism of Hélio Oliveira’s engraving, which he must be puri”ed, but which invites man
and in the ceramics and painting of Miguel dos To my mind, I consider myself to be part of to overcome his imperfections thanks to his effort,
Santos. (1988, 248) the subject being studied. Only from my own to the endeavours of the community of the orishas.” [PAGES 11 ANd 12]
experience and situation in the ethnic-cultural Representing the source and main trench of cultural
Let us consider the intellectual contribution of Rubem group to which I belong, interacting in the overall resistance of the African, as well as the creator
Valentim, who, in the 1970s, clearly formulated a proposal context of Brazilian society, can I sneak up on the womb of Afro-Brazilian art,11 Candomblé had to
for reviewing the aesthetic field and coloniality from the reality that conditions my being and de”nes it. A seek refuge in hidden, dif”cult-to-reach places, in [PAGES 13 to 15]
point of view of Black art. situation that surrounds me like a historical belt order to soften its long history of suffering at the
from which I cannot consciously escape without hands of the police. (2016, 125)
the “manifesto tarDio” by rubem valentim: the practicing lying, betrayal, or distortion of my
struggle “against Cultural Colonialism” personality. (Nascimento, 2016, 47) He was also already formulating strong slogans on the
In Emanoel Araújo’s 1988 collection, the small and subject of Black art stolen by police institutions and also
hard-hitting “Manifesto Tardio,” which came precisely This fundamental step allowed him to refresh the history of kept in institutions of psychiatry, history and ethnography.
from Rubem Valentim’s pen, is one of the most astounding Brazil from the point of view of “genocide,” a term created His idea was to create an “art museum” to give value to
exceptions highlighted by Aracy Amaral as one of the by Rafael Lemkin in 1944 in the context of the discoveries Afro-Brazilian culture (2016, 173). In the chapter “Afro-
few representatives of a Black art. This 1976 manifesto of what was happening to the Jewish population in Nazi Brazilian Art: A Liberating Spirit” he thinks of this art as
is given the adjective “tardio” [late/delayed] by its Europe, but which was gradually used for other mass of the genocide of Africans in the three Americas, thus
author – and indeed it is, if we think of the long history murders of ethnic groups, such as the Armenians during breaking with national boundaries and with the traditional
of Black artistic production in the country. We cannot the First World War. Nascimento’s book opens with two narrative of the formation of Brazilian art that only gave
forget that time in which we are in the “eld of traumas de”nitions of genocide taken from dictionaries, one AfroBrazilian art a secondary role as a source of in!uence.
is the time of the “too late,” of the “delayed” awakening, in English and another in Portuguese. In the chapter It is true that sometimes (2016, 197) Abdias shows
après coup. But it is also in many ways ahead of the “Cultural Whitening: Another Strategy of Genocide,” he that he is still tied to a project of aesthetic valorisation
ethnic shift that would only happen after 1988, with the critically analysed the myth of “racial democracy” in of Afro artistic production, not noticing the collapse
new postdictatorship constitution and its clauses of Brazil, highlighting the commitment between racism of this aesthetic tradition, the commitment between
recognition of the Indigenous and quilombola cultures, and capitalism: the aesthetic and the colonial, and that in fact it is
including the right to the demarcation of their lands. aestheticised art that is addressing the bedrock of Afro,
It is always important to point out that these clauses [T]he password of this imperialism of whiteness, lGBtQ and feminist art, produced by self-aware artists
were achieved as a result of much struggle on the part and of the capitalism that is inherent in it, responds who no longer “represent” external, paci”ed worlds,
of Indigenous and Black movements. Valentim opens to bastard nicknames such as assimilation, with geographies always seen through Eurocentric
his manifesto by stating: acculturation, miscegenation; but we know that instruments, starting with the technique of perspective,
beneath the theoretical surface the belief in the all the way through the classical genres that dominated
My plastic-visual-signographic language is inferiority of the African and his descendants the history of art from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
connected to the deep mythical values of an remains untouched. (2016, 111)(10) Instead, these new agents of the arts produce an art
Afro-Brazilian culture (mixed-race-animistic- that breaks with the division between the subject and its
fetishist). With the weight of Bahia on me – the In the same line of thought, he recalls the creation of object, generating a fusion, as I said at the beginning, a
culture experienced; with black blood in my veins ethnographic museums throughout the 19th century “subjeto” with the forgiveness of neologism. But Abdias
– atavism; with my eyes open to what is being done in as part of the colonial project: “These institutions have also sought to break with the “elitist de”nition of ‘“ne
the world – contemporaneity; creating my symbol- colluded with scientists, theorists of all kinds, and scholars arts’ which exclusively involves Western-white art” (2016,
signs I seek to transform into visual language the in the cabalistic manipulation of theorems based on the 201) and he was right to do so, since it was and is about
enchanted, magical, probably mystical world that supposed exoticism and picturesqueness of the savage, “disotherising” the arts and cultures tending to be “othered”
!ows continuously within me. (1988, 294) primitive and inferior peoples who inhabited Africa” (2016, by the West (Ndikung, 2019; Seligmann-Silva 2019a).
197). The sciences – and, among them, colonial ethnology Breaking with this elitist de”nition of “ne arts means
In dialogue with his São Paulo concretist contemporaries, too, as I stated above, and museums – initially walked unmasking the complicity between the aesthetic and
Valentim seeks to make this language the bridge between hand in hand with the genocidal colonial project. In the the colonial device.
the world of repressed Africanity and his present. He 1970s, Abdias Nascimento also denounced the strategy Therefore, his words are highly applicable, even today,
sees a political struggle in his project: “[A]rt is as much a of controlling the Black population by “reducing African in the context of contemporary Black artistic movements,
poetic weapon in the “ght against violence, as an exercise culture to the condition of folklore emptiness” (the above- and not only in Brazil. His understanding, like that of
of freedom against repressive forces: the true creator is mentioned “folk culture”), which would reveal both Rubem Valentim, is that art is part of a battle technique.
a being who lives dialectically between repression and contempt and avarice, since stereotyping moves onto Going further, he formulates a Black art of the Diaspora:
freedom” (Id. 1988). These words, written in the midst the commercialisation of the pieces of culture divested of
of the repression of the military dictatorship, and under life force and fossilised – a practice he correctly described Because African art is precisely the practice of
the sign of the struggle “against cultural colonialism” (Id. as “ethnocide.” Hence, the next step that was taken at black liberation – re!ection and action/action
1988), echo once again in the struggles being organised the end of the 20th century, as we have seen, towards and re!ection – at all levels and moments of
today, in 2020, when this “eld of Black resistance, which criticising the very ideology and biopolitical machine human existence. […] The art of black peoples in
is armed by the arts and which has developed over the of aesthetics. the Diaspora objecti”es the world around them,
last 20 years, is once again being besieged by powerful Despite not using the psychoanalytic concept of providing them with a critical image of that world.
annihilating forces. On a side note, the fact that these Unheimlich (the strange, familiar and non-familiar at the And thus this art “lls a need of total relevance: that of
words from Valentim are no longer reproduced and same time), Abdias Nascimento sees the need to deal critically historicising the structures of domination,
remembered is a symptom that these annihilating forces with this psychic concept and uses terms that translate violence and oppression, characteristic of
are winning.(9) Finally, I can’t help but highlight, in Araújo’s this Freudian concept to deal with the situation of the Western-capitalist civilisation. Our black art is that
1988 catalogue, the chapter by photographer and art critic Black man: committed to the struggle for the humanisation of
Stefania Bril on the “Olhar Fotográ”co em preto e branco” human existence, for we assume, with Paulo Freire,
[“Photographic Eye in black and white”], which re!ects [T]he black man and his culture had always that this is “the great humanistic and historical
on the work of photographers such as José Medeiros been kept as strange within prevailing Brazilian task of the oppressed – to set yourself free and
(1921–1990), Januário Garcia (1943) and Walter Firmo (1937). society, the only purpose of which, like that of to free yourself from oppressors.” (2016, 203–204)
These photographers also give proof of a new Black art [Waldir Freitas] Oliveira himself, is for Afro-Brazilian
made by Black artists, aimed at re-designing geopolitics populations to disappear, without leaving a trace, By no coincidence, at the beginning of the mentioned
and allowing us to imagine other constellations of life in from the demographic map of the country. (2016, staging of the play Black Brecht – E se Brecht fosse
common. The Black artists highlighted by Aracy Amaral 115; my emphasis) negro, there was a banner with drawings of obás and
and these photographers raised by Stefania Bril are proof geometric shapes inspired by an Afro imagery with bold
that throughout the 20th century a Black art made by Black He also quotes the entry for “negro” from an English- letters reading: “rE-ExIStÊNCIA NEGrx.”
people in Brazil was being established, dedicated to a Portuguese dictionary by A. Houaiss and C. Avery of 1967: This struggle is also based on the deconstruction of
policy of negritude, which emancipated Afro-descendant “negro, -gra (negru, -gra). I. a., black (also Figure); dark; what Abdias calls the “mito do ‘africano livre’” [myth of
artists from academic models and also freed the Black (anthropol.) Black; somber, gloomy, funeral; shadowy, the ‘free African’] (2016, 79):
body from the role of objects of representation. tenebrous; sinister, threatening; cloudy, obscure, stormy;
ominous, [my emphasis] portentous; horrible, frightening; After seven years of work, the old, the sick, the
abDias nasCimento adverse, hostile; wretched, odious, detestable” (Houaiss crippled and the mutilated – those who survived
A key player in this process was Abdias Nascimento. and Avery cited by Nascimento, 2016, 55). The “negro” the horrors of slavery and were unable to keep up
In 1944, he created the Teatro Experimental do Negro, comes across as the repressed proto-element of modern a satisfactory level of productivity – were thrown
which marked generations of artists, produced an colonial culture, which is still our culture. As “horrible,” out onto the street, and left to their own devices,
important oeuvre as an artist and was one of the “rst to it represents the opposite of the classic body shaped like unwelcome human waste; these were called
clearly formulate the importance of a Black resistance, by the classicising “ne arts. We will come across this “africanos livres” [free Africans]. (Id.)
against necropolitics, through art. His book O genocídio subject again later.
negro. Processo de um racismo mascarado [The Black His book also deals speci”cally with Brazilian Black In other words, this liberation was a genocidal gesture,
Genocide. Process of a masked racism] was published in art. In a passage full of meaning, we read: the last stage in the process, and this was the so-called
1976 in English, close in time, therefore, to the publication law abolishing slavery or the Lei Áurea of 1888: [I]t was
of Rubem Valentim’s manifesto. As with the latter, In the understanding of my colleague Olabiyi nothing more than mass murder, i.e., the proliferation
Nascimento also recognises his “place of speaking” Babalola Yai, of the University of Ifé, Candomblé, of the crime, on a smaller scale, of ‘free Africans’” (Id.).
as a component of his knowledge, as had also been the whose message in Brazil is essentially the same The Afro-Brazilian arts were gradually seen as this
case with Frantz Fanon in his “rst revolutionary book, as it is in Africa, means: “A religion in which neither space of struggle for effective freedom, overturning
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