Neo-Baroques: from Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster 9789004324343, 9789004324350, 9004324348

Table of contents :
Meditations on the Baroque / Bolívar Echeverría (translated by María José Giménez) --
Reconsidering metatheatricality: towards a Baroque understanding of postdramatic theatre / Karel Vanhaesebrouck --
Fabricating film: the neo-Baroque folds of Claire Denis / Saige Walton --
Baroque affinities: Wölfflin, Visconti, the Baroque and the films of Glauber Rocha / Rita Eder --
Artist's essay: the neo-Baroque and complexty / Richard Reddaway --
Afro-Caribbean belief systems and the neo-Baroque novel: the duel of faiths in Alejo Carpentier's El reino de este mundo and Ludic Voodoo in Alfonso Quijada Urías's Lujuria tropica / Hugh Hazelton --
Temporal and local transfers: the neo Baroque between politics, religion and entertainment / Jens Baumgarten --
The religious shines through: religious remnants and resurgences in 90s cinema / Walter Mahon --
Symbolic dimensions and cultural functions of the neo-Baroque Balustrade in contemporary Mexico City: an alternative Learning from Los Vegas / Peter Krieger --
Mexico City's dissonant modernity and the marketplace Baroque: Salvador Novo's Nueva grandeza mexicana and Bernardo de Balbuena's La grandeza mexicana / Monika Kaup --
Baroque theatricality and scripted spaces: from movie palace to Las Vegas casinos / Angela Ndalianis --
Artist's essay: post-digital neo-Baroque: reinterpreting Baroque reality and beauty in contemporary architectural design / Marjan Colletti.

Citation preview

Neo-Baroques

Postmodern Studies Series Editors Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens

Volume 55

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/pmst

Neo-Baroques From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster Edited by

Walter Moser Angela Ndalianis Peter Krieger

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: 3&1/2D: Straight vs. Convoluted Digital Drawing, Render Marjan Colletti, 2012. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moser, Walter, 1942- editor of compilation. | Ndalianis, Angela, 1960editor of compilation. | Krieger, Peter, 1961- editor of compilation. Title: Neo-Baroques : from Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster / edited by Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, Peter Krieger. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2016] | Series: Postmodern studies ; v. 55 Identifiers: LCCN 2016028030 (print) | lccn 2016042106 (ebook) | isbn 9789004324343 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004324350 (e-book) | ISBN 9789004324350 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures. | Mass media. | Civilization, Baroque. | Art, Baroque--Influence. Classification: LCC PN1995 .N384 2016 (print) | LCC PN1995 (ebook) | DDC 791.43--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028030

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0923-0483 isbn 978-90-04-32434-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32435-0 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii Author Biographies viii Introduction 1 Walter Moser

Part 1 Neo-Baroques Introduction to Part 1 27 Walter Moser 1 Meditations on the Baroque 30 Bolívar Echeverría (translated by María José Giménez) 2 Reconsidering Metatheatricality: Towards a Baroque Understanding of Postdramatic Theatre 48 Karel Vanhaesebrouck 3 Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis 76 Saige Walton 4 Baroque Affinities: Wölfflin, Visconti, the Baroque and the Films of Glauber Rocha 100 Rita Eder 5 Artist’s Essay—The Neo-Baroque and Complexity 123 Richard Reddaway

Part 2 Religion Introduction to Part 2 137 Angela Ndalianis

vi

Contents

6

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel: The Duel of Faiths in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo and Ludic Voodoo in Alfonso Quijada Urías’s Lujuria tropical 140 Hugh Hazelton

7

Temporal and Local Transfers: The Neo-Baroque between Politics, Religion and Entertainment 160 Jens Baumgarten

8

The Religious Shines through: Religious Remnants and Resurgences in 90s Cinema 179 Walter Moser

9

Artist’s Essay: Towers, Shipwrecks, and Neo-Baroque Allegories 207 Patrick Mahon

Cities

part 3



Introduction to Part 3 227 Peter Krieger

10

Symbolic Dimensions and Cultural Functions of the Neo-Baroque Balustrade in Contemporary Mexico City: An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas 230 Peter Krieger

11

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity and the Marketplace Baroque: Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana and Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana 254 Monika Kaup

12

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces: From Movie Palace to Las Vegas Casinos 283 Angela Ndalianis

13

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque: Reinterpreting Baroque Reality and Beauty in Contemporary Architectural Design 307 Marjan Colletti

Index 321

Acknowledgements The research outcomes of this book were made possible through a Major Research Initiatives Grant funded by the Canadian Research Council’s Social Sciences and Humanities scheme (sshrc). The project titled ‘The Hispanic Baroque: Complexity in the First Atlantic Culture’ was led by Professor Juan Luis Suarez (University of Western Ontario) and most of the contributors in this anthology were part of the research team, focusing especially on the neobaroque dimension of the research project. We thank sshrc and Professor Suarez for their generous support over the years, and for making possible the formation of a dynamic research network of scholars who were sincerely and passionately interested in examining and debating the nature of the baroque and its many fluid articulations. Thanks also to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas for her invaluable assistance in preparing and helping edit this manuscript, and to Tara Lomax for her meticulous work on the index. Finally, many thanks to the wonderful staff at Brill Rodopi.

Author Biographies Jens Baumgarten is Head of the Art History Department, Universidade Federal de São Paulo. He is a renowned art history scholar, with specialization in early modern art history of Latin America and Europe as well as in historiography of art, visual culture and its theoretical and methodological contexts that focus in particular on the baroque and neo-baroque. In 2010 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute where he was conducting research on the baroque and B ­ razilian art. He is the author of Image, confession, and power (in German, 2004), numerous refereed articles, and is currently writing two books: Visual systems in Colonial Brazil and São Paulo as a Neo-Baroque City. He is the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships, including two Getty Art Institute Grants, a Getty Scholar Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the Foundation of the University of Hamburg. Marjan Colletti is a practicing architect, an educator, a researcher and author on digital architecture, and currently a joint appointment at the Bartlett, University C ­ ollege London ucl and the University of Innsbruck, Austria. A key element of ­Colletti’s academic, design and exhibition output has focused on his research expertise in the area of the baroque and ‘Cyberbaroque’. He guest-edited ad Architectural Design’s Exuberance: New Digital Virtuosity in Contemporary Digital Architecture (vol. 80, issue 2, March/April 2010), which celebrates and considers the contemporary digital avant-garde within the context of a new baroque period of formal theatricality and digital performance. He is also author of Digital Poetics (2013). Bolívar Echeverría is a philosopher, economist and cultural critic, born in Ecuador and later nationalized Mexican. He was professor emeritus on the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (unam). His publications include El discurso crítico de Marx (1986), Conversaciones sobre lo barroco (1993), Las ilusiones de la modernidad (1995), La modernidad de lo barroco (1998), La mirada del ángel. Sobre el concepto de la historia de Walter Benjamin (2005), Vuelta de siglo, (México: Era, 2006) and Modernidad y blanquitud, (2010). He also founded several magazines on culture and politics, such as Cuadernos Políticos (Political Notebooks) (1974–1989); Palos de la Crítica ­(1980–1981); Economía Política (Political Economy) (1976–1985) and Ensayos (­ Essays) (1980–1988). He died in Mexico City on June 5, 2010.

Author Biographies

ix

Rita Eder is a researcher, professor and former director at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (unam). She has been visiting professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires; the University of British Colombia; and L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She has published extensively on art, historiography, criticism, and theory in Latin America. Recent book publications include Tiempo de Fractura: El Arte Contemporaneo en el Museo de Arte Moderno, 1982–1984 (2010), the co-edited Surrealism in Latin America: Vivisimo Muerto (2012), and the website Los Estudios de Arte Desde America Latina: Temas y Problemas (2009). Hugh Hazelton is a writer and translator who specializes in the comparison of Canadian and Quebec literatures with those of Latin America, as well as in the neobaroque in French and Spanish literature of the Caribbean and the work of Latin American writers of Canada. He has written four books of poetry and translates from Spanish, French, and Portuguese into English; his translation of Vétiver ­(Signature, 2005), a book of poems by Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General’s award for French-English translation in 2006. His book Latinocanadá: A Critical Study of Ten Latin American Writers of Canada (McGill-Queen’s, 2007) received the Best Book award from the Canadian Association of Hispanists for the period 2007–2009. He is a professor emeritus of Spanish at Concordia University in Montreal and now works as co-director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Monika Kaup is Professor of English and Latin American Studies, University of Washington. Her publications include Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (co-edited with Lois Parkinson Zamora, 2010) and Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (2012). Her other publications include: Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues (Co-editor, 2002); Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative (2001), and Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing (1993). Peter Krieger is an art and architectural historian and a Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (Institute of Aesthetic Research) and the Graduate program of Architectural Design, unam (National Autonomous University of Mexico). He was vice-president of ciha (International Committee of Art

x

Author Biographies

History, ­2004–2012). Since 2007 he has been a member of the research group ­Transcultural and Transhistoric Efficiencies of the Baroque Paradigm, part of the project The Hispanic Baroque: Complexity in the First Atlantic Culture, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc). His recent book is Transformaciones del paisaje urbano en México. Representación y registro visual, 2012. Patrick Mahon is an artist, writer and academic at the University of Western Ontario. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, including, in Canada at Museum London, The Hamilton Art Gallery, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery, and internationally at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (Chongqing, China, 2005), and in Barthète (Toulouse, France, 2011). As a writer and curator, Patrick Mahon publishes and produces exhibitions related to print culture, post-colonialism, and aesthetics. In 2011 he co-curated with Susan Edelstein the exhibition, “Barroco Nova: Neo-Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art” (Museum London, Ontario). Since 2007 he has been part of the ‘Hispanic/Transatlantic Baroque’ project funded by the Canadian grant body sshrc and has been working with the neo-baroque research team. Mahon’s new collaborative sshrc project, Immersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds, on the theme of water, began in 2010 and will include a residency at the Banff Centre in 2013. Walter Moser is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Ottawa. He is a renowned scholar in the field of cultural theory, cultural transfers and the return of the baroque and has published widely in the area. He is on the executive committee of the ‘Hispanic/Transatlantic Baroque’ project, which is a Major Collaborative Research Initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc), and he led the neo-baroque research group between 2007–13. His publications include the edited anthologies: Résurgences baroques. Trajectoires d’un processus transculturel, 2001; The Future of Literary Studies/L’Avenir des études littéraires, 2001; Passions du passé. Recyclages de la mémoire et usages de l’oubli, 2000; and Recyclages. Économies de l’appropriation culturelle, 1996. Angela Ndalianis is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she is also Director for the Transformative Technologies Research Unit. Her research focuses on entertainment culture and media histories as well as the t­ ranshistorical

Author Biographies

xi

and transcultural nature of the baroque. Since 2007 she has been part of the ‘Hispanic/Transatlantic Baroque’ project funded by the ­Canadian grant body sshrc. Her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), The Horror Sensorium: Media and The Senses (2012), Science Fiction Experiences (2009) and The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (editor, 2008). She has also published numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and she is currently working on two book projects: Batman: Myth and Superhero and Robots and Entertainment Culture. Richard Reddaway is an artist and Senior lecturer at The School of Art, Massey University. His research practice draws on aspects of sculpture, installation, photography and drawing. He is currently working on constructing relationships between contemporary art, art history and cultural theory, and non-linear dynamical systems theory (chaos theory), in order to construct an understanding of baroque tendencies in the contemporary visual culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. His exhibition ‘Light, Sound: Built’ (2009) at the Jonathan Smart Gallery in Christchurch and Suite in Wellington sought to expand the audience’s sensual experience of sculpture by including audio and light elements installed in a way that exploited non-linear baroque structures. He has also published on the baroque as a scopic regime of modernity and aligns it with complex dynamical systems theory, thereby making innovative connections between seemingly disparate knowledge fields in the sciences and arts. Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor (“chargé de cours”) and Chair of Theatre and Performance Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches courses in the ma program “Arts du spectacle vivant”. He is also a theory lecturer at the Brusselbased film and theatre school Rits (www.rits.be), the Department of Drama and Audiovisual Arts of the Erasmus University College, where he coordinates the performing arts section and where he teaches courses in theatre history and cultural history. His publications include the books Lieven De Cauter, R ­ uben De Roo, Art and activism in the age of globalisation (2011), Cultuurgeschiedenis. Een handboek (2011), and Le mythe de l’authenticité. Lectures, représentations, interprétations de Britannicus de Jean Racine (1669–2004) (2009). Saige Walton is Lecturer in Screen Studies at The University of South Australia and a m ­ ember of the Hawke Research Institute. Her work on the cinematic baroque and the embodiment of film/media aesthetics appears in Playing with Memories:

xii

Author Biographies

­Essays on Guy Maddin (University of Manitoba Press 2009), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (Routledge 2008); Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion (Latrobe 2004) and in forthcoming critical collections on the cinema of Claire Denis and Todd Haynes. Her book Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement is currently in press and will be published in late 2016 by Amsterdam University Press.

Introduction Walter Moser The baroque is back in contemporary culture. It is present in cultural life in general, in the debates on culture, in the consciousness of artists and cultural producers, and in scholarship. Thus, the baroque today constitutes a broad and complex field comprising both various cultural practices and knowledge production. This volume presents results emanating from the neo-baroque research group that has been active from 2007 to 2013, both from its members and from other neo-baroque scholars. Our group was part of the Hispanic Baroque Project, institutionally located at the University of Western Ontario. Our mandate was to explore the transhistorical and transcultural efficiencies of the historic Hispanic Baroque paradigm. Through ten case studies, authored by international scholars, and three interventions by artists, this volume proposes various entries into this field, in the hope that the variety of its concrete objects, their dispersion in a plurality of domains and geo-cultural spaces, as well as their interdisciplinary approaches, amounts to a reasonably good coverage of the field as a whole and will offer some orientation in it. In order to give the explorations and analyses presented here the consistency of a field of research, this introduction proposes to make its configuration explicit by regrouping some of the parameters and the challenges, which underlie the ten case studies. It will proceed in five steps. Firstly, a short phenomenography will be undertaken to document the object under study and to survey both its extent and its diversity. Secondly, a more general reflection will be necessary on the efficiency of a given paradigm such as the baroque in cultural history. The third stage will focus on the content of the prefix “trans-” in “transhistorical” and “transcultural”, looking at the logics of cultural transfers both in their historical and spatial dimensions. Fourthly, we engage in a critical discussion on the cognitive strategies that apply in this field of research. And lastly, we take a closer look at some of its specific issues, such as the return of the baroque or emergence of the neo-baroque; the triad baroque—modern—postmodern; and the impact of new techno-mediatic possibilities on cultural production.

Phenomenography of the Today

Phenomenography is a qualitative method, which was developed in Sweden in the 70s, mainly for educational research. The French sociologist Michel © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_002

2

Moser

Maffesoli later introduced it into sociology as the first stage in sociological research. He found it necessary, before exploring specific aspects of society, to take a good empirical look at ongoing social processes and to establish an inventory of phenomena that can be observed in order to see what is really happening in the social space. Phenomenography then becomes a method of qualitative diagnostics to collect indices about the existence or emergence of scientific object fields. It is in this sense that the research field that this volume is exploring will be approached by describing various phenomena that document the existence of a renewed interest in the baroque today. There are quite different areas and practices in which a resurgence of the baroque is manifested in contemporary culture and research: Exhibitions There have been (and there still are, of course) many exhibitions on historic baroque art in museums around the world. In 2010, for instance, the baroque painter Caravaggio was duly celebrated by various museums on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his death. Recent events or exhibitions on the baroque thematized this volume’s more specific interest in the baroque, that is in its continuous presence as a paradigm, a style, an issue, or simply a cultural material, from the 17th century on until our contemporaneity. Such exhibitions have been organized in different countries, indicating that they attempt to document a widespread cultural trend and taste as of today. Here are just a few that have taken place in our still young century: – Deftig Barock. Von Cattelan bis Zurbarán. Manifeste des prekär Vitalen. Kunsthaus Zürich, 2012. (Curiger) – Barroco Nova. Neo Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art, The ArtLab, Western; McIntosh Gallery, Western; Museum London. London, Ontario, 2011. (Edelstein and Mahon) – Barock: Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age, Madre Museum of Contemporary Art, Naples, 2010.(Cicelyn and Codognato) – Baroque and Neo-Baroque. The Hell of the Beautiful, DA2 Salamanca, 2005. (Panera Cuevas) – A Baroque Party. Moments of Theatrum Mundi in Contemporary Art. Kunsthalle Wien, 2001. (Folie and Glasmeier) – Ultra-Baroque, Aspects of Post-Latin American Art. Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2000. (Armstrong and Zamudio Taylor)

Introduction

3

Re-Conceptualizations, Re-Interpretations The catalogues of these exhibitions offer extended reflections on the baroque, the neo-baroque and the ultra-baroque. They do rely on recent re-conceptualizations and re-interpretations of the baroque. Indeed, after a first period of intense interest in the baroque, lasting from around 1880 up to the 1930s and leading to major conceptualizations of the baroque (among others by Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Nietzsche, Croce, Benjamin, D’Ors), the second half of the 20th century witnessed another wave of conceptual proposals and major essays on the baroque: in Latin America Lezama Lima, Carpentier, De Campos and the Cuban exile Sarduy; in Spain Maravall, Fernando de la Flor; in Italy Argan, Calabrese; in France Rousset, Deleuze; in Germany Küpper, to mention just some of the best known participants in an ongoing debate. In different contexts, out of diverse interests of knowledge and from varying points of view, they all contribute to a better and new understanding of the baroque, which generally goes hand in hand with a positive reevaluation. They have in common a re-working of the concept “baroque” and, thus, they all participate in a movement that might be called the return or the resurgence of the baroque. More recently, in the 21st century new monographs on the baroque continue to be released, for instance by Lambert, Parkinson Zamora, Egginton, Johnson, Castillo, Kaup, to randomly name a few. In addition, learned journals in different countries continually feature special issues on the neo-baroque. (“La constitución del barroco hispánico”, “The NeoBaroque and the Américas”, “Transatlantic Baroque”). Critical Discourse To illustrate this specific facet of the new interest in the baroque, we can highlight the example of critical discourse in France. Official cultural historiography had declared the French 17th century classical. It was only after 1950 that the Swiss literary critic Jean Rousset, from the Geneva School, “discovered” the French literary baroque. He was followed by Genette and by other critics. More recently, Guy Scarpetta, working on the “retour du Baroque” as a post-avant-garde movement, discovered baroque features in contemporary literature, art and film, even were the artists had neither identified their works nor themselves as baroque or neo-baroque. Self-Identification of Artists However, there are also artists who explicitly assume an affinity with the baroque, or even identify themselves as baroque or neo-baroque. Among them we find Severo Sarduy whose essays on the baroque and the neo-baroque run

4

Moser

parallel to his creative literary work. Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar agrees with his critics about the presence of baroque elements in his films. The British filmmaker Peter Greenaway has made innumerous creative allusions to, and critical reflections on, baroque aesthetics. The famous Canadian playwright Robert Lepage has also linked his theater up with the baroque. And many Latin American authors, such as Alejo Carpentier or Carlos Fuentes, have no problem identifying themselves with the baroque tradition. Among the artists who participated in the above-mentioned exhibitions, many, when asked whether they consider themselves as neo-baroque artists, play a coquettish game: while denying it as an artistic identity they agree to exhibit their works under a baroque label. Cultural Allusions and References Furthermore, cultural allusions and references, and even the outright use of cultural material identifiable as baroque in new cultural productions have become fashionable. “Cultural material” can include different elements, from stylistic features to illusionist techniques, special effects, topoi, the choice of lush materials in art works, the preference given to the spectacular and the theatrical. In this volume, Peter Krieger offers a good example for this specific aspect of the continuous presence of the baroque in a contemporary context. He focuses on the neo-baroque balustrade, an architectural element in the megalopolis of Mexico City. The reuse of this feature is not so much functional as it represents an addition of value. However, its meaning is plural and complex, as is the case with most recycling of baroque elements. Contemporary “Cultural Heroes” Cultural paradigm changes are extremely complex processes. In their clear configurations they might only be recognizable in hindsight. Yet, in the contemporaneous cultural scene, they find a way to crystallize into anthropomorphic figures. I call these figures “cultural heroes”; they are usually figures from the cultural past who, through processes of reuse and re-interpretation, take on new meanings and are put to new uses. It is remarkable that, today, many of these figures indicating cultural change are historical baroque figures: Gracián, Caravaggio, Gregório de Matos. The first two, a Spanish writer and an Italian painter, are enjoying an intense positive reception internationally; the third is a Brazilian baroque poet who has been able to crystallize many issues in the ongoing debate on Brazilian national culture. (see Moser 2013) This glimpse of a complex situation does not, of course, offer a complete listing of all items or names that should be included in a phenomenographic inventory. It does, however, offer enough markers to draw a general picture. And this picture confirms that, in many areas and practices, the baroque is

Introduction

5

present again, not only in historiography and research but also in contemporary cultural life. It has become a positive reference again and attracts scientific as well as artistic interest. It has even reached, locally, the status of a fascinosum. Or, to elaborate on an idea of Francisco Ortega’s, the baroque phantom is out of the bottle again.

Efficiencies of the Baroque

All these examples show that in the present cultural situation, the baroque has a strong historical efficiency. At its core, this argues that it is different from other cultural paradigms of the past. Therefore, it is important to follow up on its historical analysis with an analysis of its contemporaneous effects. As a historically exogenous concept—let us not forget that serious work on the concept of “baroque” started only in the 19th century in history of art—with all its axiological polarizations, with all the debates it has triggered, with all its intermittences and resurgences, the baroque has proven to be historically very efficient.1 What is “historical efficiency”? Let me first illustrate this with one of my favorite epistemic metaphors for the baroque. As an important phenomenon in the sky of cultural history, the baroque is a comet with a relatively small and compact nucleus, and with a long luminous tail. The nucleus is the historical baroque, an object of historiographic research and scholarship, as practiced in The Hispanic Baroque Project. The tail represents the process of its ongoing active reception. This reception can be subsumed under the term of non-indifference, which includes quite different attitudes and operations: axiological polarization, rejection and positive selection, ideological inversion, the return of the repressed, monstrosity and fascinosum, cultural otherness, in brief its permanently reactualized positional and relational value. Today the spectacle of this tail shows no signs of weakening—quite the contrary, as we have already seen. Therefore, the authors of this volume consider it as interesting an object of historical investigation and cultural analysis as the nucleus is. Beyond the metaphor, “historical efficiency” can be conceptualized on the basis of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics. More particularly, in relation to Gadamer’s concept of Wirkungsgeschichte, that has been translated 1 My observation and argument runs parallel here to Gregg Lambert’s, although he resorts to the terms “consistency” and “persistence” rather than “efficiency”: “The consistency of the baroque is not made from the compilation of historical facts that attest to its existence, but rather by the persistence of the concept that gives it a sufficient reason to exist, in other words, a sufficient cause.” (6).

6

Moser

in English as “effective history”. There also exists a free French translation: le travail de l’histoire, which in English would be “the work of history”. Gadamer models interpretation metaphorically as an ongoing dialogue (Gespräch) of a contemporary interpreter with a historically distant object.2 In this dialogic process, meaning is not something given with the object and to be revealed and reproduced through an interpretive procedure. Rather, the interpreter produces meaning in this dialogic interaction. And this meaning only becomes relevant within the interpreter’s own “historical horizon”. Thus, the interpreter effectuates the work of history; his or her endeavor is historically effective, it participates actively in history. However, Gadamer does not consider the historical object as a passive object; on the contrary; it is endowed with an agency of its own. It directs an interpellation at the interpreter who then has to answer the questions emanating from it. It is historically evident that this interpellation is particularly intense and repetitive over the ages in the case of the baroque as a historical object to be understood. There is a strong power, potential, puissance of interpellation emanating from this specific object that asks, over and over again, for answers from the present-day interpreter (see Bukdahl and Juhl). And this interpreter—be it as a scholar, a critic, an artist—is even summoned to apply3 it to the present historical situation. That is how the baroque paradigm is historically efficient; it demands to be hermeneutically effectuated in ever-new historical horizons, even if this effectuation is performed under a negative sign. Thus, although the tail of the baroque comet might be considered as secondary historical material, it is nonetheless part of “the work of history” (le travail de l’histoire). Therefore, to examine the tail is as much a historiographic task as exploring the nucleus. Through the investigation of these secondary processes, the authors of this volume produce knowledge about the comet’s tail and, thus, contribute to its luminosity.

Logics of Cultural Transfers

Empirically, the efficiency of the baroque cultural paradigm manifests itself in the plural, in the form of different cultural transfers. Let us, therefore, briefly consider the logics of such transfers. At the outset, it might be useful to introduce two distinctions: the first is between transhistorical and transcultural 2 Gadamer privileges the textual object, but does not exclude non-verbal objects, although these would have to be verbally mediated in the process of giving them meaning. 3 For Gadamer, “application” is a constitutive part of the interpretative task, as he generalizes it from the work of the judge who, by interpreting the law, always applies it to a concrete case.

Introduction

7

transfers, the second between re-interpretation and recycling of a cultural paradigm. Transhistorical and Transcultural Transfers Cultural transfers can adopt two different vectors of mobility for a given cultural paradigm. The “trans-” can indicate a movement across a distance, either between historical moments or between different cultures. We have to differentiate, then, between two modalities of transfer: transhistorical and transcultural. The efficiency of the baroque paradigm has adopted both modalities of transfer. Therefore, although this categorial difference remains useful for analytical purposes, we have to recognize that, empirically, the two modalities are always manifested in some kind of superposition and interaction. The complexity of these manifestations can be emblematically illustrated with Alejo Carpentier’s novel Concierto barroco (1974). In this novel, the main character, el amo (the master),4 an aristocratic Mexican criollo whose genealogy dates back to the conquest and colonization of Latin America, represents the historical dimension with the complex transhistorical transmission of the baroque heritage. He is a figure of transhistorical transfer. His trip to Europe (and back to Latin America), on the other side, crosses vast geographical distances and overcomes major cultural differences (especially with the help of his servant Filomeno). This trip therefore figures the transcultural transfer of the baroque, although in a fictional inversion of what happened historically. Two explanatory strategies can be used, and have been used, to come to terms with transhistorical transfers. These might help to explain how, and why, a specific historical paradigm can re-emerge in a specific historical situation. The first strategy works with historical analogies, or more precisely, with historical homologies. It identifies a certain type of historical configuration that can be repeated in time. It is based on the assumption that certain historical configurations, if repeated,5 tend to generate the same kind of cultural production or to show an affinity with a certain type of culture. Thus, it can explain the re-emergence of a cultural paradigm, or in more limited terms, the acceptance and the usefulness of re-actualized cultural material coming from a specific historical past. We can find this way of reasoning in Maravall and Ndalianis, who both use the notion of crisis as a historical configuration. Maravall applies this notion to explain the emergence of the historic baroque 4 He might be considered as an anthropomorphic concretization of the somewhat abstract figure “nuestro señor barroco” in Lezama Lima’s essay “La curiosidad barroca”. 5 Historical configurations, as abstract historiographic constructs, can be repeated, not concrete historical situations.

8

Moser

culture, and Ndalianis to explain the contemporary production of a neobaroque entertainment culture. The second is offered by Raymond Williams’ still useful distinction between the residual, the dominant and the emergent in history. While in the context of a historical dominance, the residual tends to be considered inferior, negative, overcome or to be overcome, in the process of superseding a dominant paradigm, and especially its shortcomings and malaises, residual elements might acquire a critical potential that can be applied with critical efficiency in the gestation of a new emergence. This might indeed be the case with residual baroque material that is being re-actualized to overcome the deficiencies of the paradigm of modernity. Transfer as Re-Interpretation and Recycling We have already seen that Gadamer conceptualizes “interpretation”—which usually amounts to “re-interpretation” for him—in a very broad sense that includes a moment of application. Thus his concept of interpretation could bridge the gap separating it from processes of recycling. Yet, there remains a categorial difference. This difference might be captured in the use of two different prepositions. Processes of re-interpretation, re-conceptualization, as well as of knowledge production are usually about a given object. Their practice includes a logical as well as a methodological distance from the material they treat, indeed, as their object. On the other hand, recycling as a secondary cultural practice works with its object; it treats the object as a material, and inscribes it—sometimes quite materially—in its practice on the same logical level. As a consequence, the recycled material remains in contact with the practice of its user and, therefore, always implies the risk of contagion, while (re-)interpretation and knowledge production as practices work at a distance in relation to their object. For processes of cultural recycling, as a modality of transhistorical as well as transcultural transfers, an ideal-typical logic applies. Schematically, these processes unfold in three moments. Firstly, there is a moment of selection and extraction. The selected material must be lifted out from its historical and cultural context and roots. Such a decontextualization entails to a certain extent an obliteration of cultural memory and of historical identity. Yet, the selected and extracted material is only partially de-memorized and de-historicized; otherwise it would not be recognizable in its new use. This moment has sometimes—especially in Hegelian-Marxian historiography—been seen negatively as a pure loss resulting in “cultural amnesia”, “writing in dead languages”, “dehistoricization” (Jameson), while in the logic of cultural recycling, it can and must be considered, more accurately, as a condition for the material to become available for a new use in cultural history.

Introduction

9

Secondly, there is a moment of literal transfer from a point of departure to a point of arrival, or from a cultural giver system to a receiver system. Whatever the concrete technical and other modalities of this ferrying over are, what is at issue is the overcoming of a distance in terms of time, space and culture. Thirdly, there is a moment of reinsertion into a new historical context and/ or cultural system. This re-contextualization necessarily gives the transferred material a new meaning within the welcoming historical horizon and a new function within the receiver system. These are historical and cultural processes over which the individual cultural recycler can only have a partial and precarious control. What is important for us as interpreters and scholars of the return of the baroque, is that the recycled baroque material remains identifiable as such. There must be a moment of minimal cultural anagnoresis that, despite the effacement and the transformation the material undergoes in the recycling proc­ ess, allows us to say: “I recognize this as a recycled Baroque material”, as, for instance for a historian of architecture, is clearly the case with the balustrade in Mexico City.

Cognitive Strategies

On what basis can we make such a decision and identify a cultural material as ‘baroque’? This question in turn opens up an even larger and more comprehensive one about the various procedures to be applied in the research field of the neo-baroque: what different cognitive strategies can be put at work, and are being used, in this field, and what are their respective advantages and downsides? If we consider the contemporary “return of the baroque” as a field of knowledge and as an object of research, we can indeed observe and differentiate between various cognitive strategies at work in it. Some of these are represented in this volume, others are being used elsewhere. It is worthwhile to give an overview here on some of them in an attempt to offer a rough critical mapping of the field of research. Favorite Prefixes This strategy consists in choosing a prefix par excellence and loading it semantically with what is considered a decisive aspect or moment in baroque culture and in its return today. This is not always a deliberate strategy by scholars, but an attentive reading of their works can easily spot it and recognize it as part of a cognitive strategy. Examples are re-, dis-, and meta-.

10

Moser

In the introduction to the anthology Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, the editors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup clearly privilege the prefix re-. Since this extensive anthology considers the baroque from the 17th century to the present day, its editors insist on the re-emergence, the return and the re-elaboration of the baroque. That is, they treat it as a phenomenon of cultural secondarity. This focus as indicated by the frequency of this favourite prefix is certainly justified as long as contemporary culture is concerned. Here, indeed, what we witness is the productivity of a secondary treatment of pre-given cultural material emanating from the historical baroque period. However, it is not quite clear whether the editors also suggest that the historic baroque itself was already a culture of secondarity, working, as Walter Benjamin claims, with what has already the status of fragments and ruins resulting from a process of decay and decadence. In the monograph Barroco. Representación e ideología en el mundo hispánico (1580–1680) by De la Flor, there is a focus on such a process of undoing and decline in the historic baroque. And one can retrace it in the frequency of the Spanish prefix des-.6 More so than in Benjamin, this process thus epitomized by a prefix is semantically underscored by the lexemes “nihilism” and “negativity”.7 Yet his semantization of the prefix enters into conflict with his frequent use of “deconstruction” to describe the historical baroque. At least if we take deconstruction in the Derridian sense of a critical method that re-inscribes the criticized discourse into the critical practice and that, thus, neither results in negativity nor in nihilism. Deconstruction is closer to what William Egginton calls the minor strategy of the baroque. In short, this strategy consists in working with the elements of the representation theory in such a way that the claims of this theory become impossible. The theory is thus deconstructed in its own practice and terms. Since, according to Egginton, this minor strategy, having existed in the historical baroque as a minority strategy, seems to become the dominant strategy of the baroque today, the prefix des- takes on an important value for our object of research, but in a quite different way than in De la Flor’s interpretation of the historical baroque. Meta- is still another prefix that seems to indicate for some scholars a constitutive aspect of the return of the baroque. This is the case, for instance, in Vanhaesebrouck’s contribution to this volume. Unlike Egginton’s minor 6 It is particularly frequent in the first chapter (pp. 43–67). In English this prefix becomes disor de-, in French dé- or des-. 7 Interestingly, in his book Diskurs-Renovatio bei Lope de Vega und Calderón (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1990) Joachim Küpper seems to insist exactly on an opposite force in the baroque.

Introduction

11

strategy, the existence of a meta-level in cultural practices introduces into them a form of an explicit self-critique. While immersing the receiver of neobaroque artifacts in strong aesthetic effects, those artifacts would at the same time critically direct the attention onto the medial and technological production of the very same effects. There are two problems with privileging metaso radically as an intrinsic part of such artifacts. On the one hand, the use of baroque power aesthetics can also exist without this self-critical moment. This is certainly the case in contemporary mega-spectacles that exploit the power of baroque aesthetics for a-critical purposes. On the other hand, as Mary Ann Frese Witt’s book on Metatheatre and Modernity. Baroque and Neo-Baroque shows, forms of metatheatre occur already in the historic baroque, and also in romanticism, modernism and postmodernism; therefore they cannot be used to define neo-baroque culture exclusively. Thus, foregrounding a specific aspect of the phenomena under investigation by privileging a specific prefix in the analytical and critical discourse can certainly be a successful cognitive strategy as long as we agree to focus on this specific aspect, without pretending that it represents the complex totality of the phenomenon. The epistemic price to be paid is a reduction of complexity in the object. Baroque Features Probably the most common cognitive strategy consists in selecting specific features in the historic baroque culture, and applying them to neo-baroque objects for their analysis. The baroqueness of such features is established by induction from their persisting presence in baroque artifacts in the first place. They are then considered typical baroque features. Explicitly or not, this strategy is usually based on a typological approach to baroque culture, such as the one proposed by Eugenio D’Ors. Since this approach presupposes the existence of cultural types, independently of the chronotopes of their emergence and realization, it opens the way for the cognitive transfer of specific features in time and space. Many such features have been identified by the specialists, mainly in the domain of artistic style, and more generally of aesthetics: excess, hyperbole, de-centering, representational framing followed by systemic transgression of the frames, generative proliferation,8 dynamic transformation of forms. Theatricality also holds an honorable place among the baroque features: after all Walter Benjamin’s Barockbuch is on drama in the first place; William Egginton 8 As we find it in the epigraph to Echeverría’s text in this volume, quoted from Lezama Lima’s romanticized version as “the great creative leprosy of our baroque”.

12

Moser

sees the baroque as a “theater of truth” and Vanhaesenbrouck, in this volume, gives it a privileged status in his definition of the baroque. But they can also be extracted from other domains, for instance from architecture, as the example of the baroque balustrade illustrates in this volume. This strategy has a limited scope, and it can therefore give rise to precise analytical work that usually belongs to the category of case studies. The more precisely delimited the baroque feature in question is, the more profiled the analysis and its result can be. Its downside lies in the fact that working with one specific feature makes it difficult to argue its baroqueness, because certain features that we find in baroque artifacts can also be found elsewhere. So, it might be epistemically safer to work with clusters of features. Also, if the feature identified as baroque tends to be very general, the results one can reach working with such a feature might not be specific enough for our field of research. As examples, if Carpentier (1975) promotes mestizaje to a baroque feature per se, or if Echeverria recognizes a specific dialectics of identitarian inter-action as defining baroque strategy, or if Reddaway sees a baroque trait more generally in intercultural processes—the last two appear in this volume—these features might as much be a characteristic of post-colonial cultures in general, and not specific to the baroque. Not every post-colonial condition produces baroque culture. Operational Concepts This strategy consists in accepting the baroque and the neo-baroque as a fertile field of research on the one hand, whilst bringing to it, on the other, a new concept, free of connotations from former debates, that is supposed to produce new knowledge if used as a working tool. Let me mention two examples here: For Deleuze, the baroque has no fixed historical identity. Therefore, he rejects a historical conceptualization for it. However, he sees the need for a concept opératoire, which would allow him to approach the baroque in his own way as an object of study. And he chooses a semi-metaphorical concept, the fold, which he then applies to many aspects of culture, which he considers baroque. Also, his book on the baroque is substantially informed by Leibnizian philosophy. All of this together makes his book The Fold a completely new and highly original contribution to baroque studies, applicable both to the historic baroque and to its return in contemporary culture. It is certainly interesting to read, and full of new suggestions. But it is no easy matter to operationalize “the fold” in one’s own investigations on the neo-baroque and to avoid the seduction of playing with its metaphorical side. In his studies on the baroque, Bolívar Echeverría has developed what might be considered to be an operational concept: the baroque ethos. It relates more

Introduction

13

particularly to a special kind of behavior, and even more generally to a sociocultural practice in baroque societies. Echeverría himself deems it a “survival strategy”. With such an operational concept, as was already the case with Deleuze’s, we move away from the restricted domains of art, aesthetics and even culture, from where most of the “baroque features” came. New and broader domains are included in the study of the baroque: philosophy for Deleuze, the history of socio-cultural strategies for Echeverría. In fact, Echeverría’s “baroque ethos” can be considered an operational concept, but at the same time it is more than that, because it expands into an inclusive theory on baroque society and culture. It is, in principle, applicable to baroque behavior in any chronotope, but it clearly comes out of Latin America, and has its origin in the indigenous communities that were exposed to the stress of colonization, as Echeverria’s polemic with O’Gorman in this volume shows. It therefore comes with an identitarian component or claim that makes it difficult to be applied to cultural areas outside Latin America. Linking the Baroque to Other Contemporary Theories There is still another cognitive strategy that might yield interesting results. It consists in trying to understand and to know the neo-baroque object by connecting it with recent theories that have been developed after the historical baroque. This connection either establishes analogies and affinities with what is considered baroque, thus making the baroque appear as comprising and practicing those theories avant la lettre. Or it proposes the new theory as an epistemic tool for a new and better knowledge production on the baroque, mainly because of its higher explanatory power. Rather locally, possible world theory and fractal theory have been roped in to elucidate specific aspects of baroque culture. Fractal theory can help us to understand the principle of generative proliferation of forms in the baroque artwork, and more generally it might help to explain the relationship between the micro- and macro-levels in various domains and sub-systems of the baroque. In 1975, inspired by the then recent book by Benoît Mandelbrot on fractal objects, Severo Sarduy gives it a more general meaning when he creates the term “a fractal baroque”. The theory of possible worlds can be called upon to come to terms with a common aesthetic feature in many baroque artifacts, that is, the puzzling multiplication of levels of reality in a fictional universe. In my own contribution to this volume I am referring to this specific feature as an aesthetics of ontological instabilities. Chaos theory can give us a better understanding of the baroque because certain aspects and processes manifested in baroque culture have an affinity with

14

Moser

chaos theory, and can therefore be approached from the point of view of this new theory. In his contribution to this volume, Reddaway, for instance, puts it in narrative terms: he was familiar with chaos theory not with the baroque, so chaos theory became his epistemic bridge to the baroque and opened up for him a way into our field of research. A far more inclusive—and I would even dare to say holistic—issue is the use of the theory of complex systems as a cognitive access to the baroque, as illustrated in this volume by Reddaway. It can easily be said that the baroque, globally—that is, in all domains of human culture where it is manifested as well as in their interactions—behaves like a complex system. The Hispanic Baroque, then, appears like the cultural prototype of such a system as the subtitle of the project suggests: Complexity in the first Atlantic Culture. Therefore, scholarly work in this field can and should take advantage of the concepts, the models and the methods that the theory of complex systems has developed recently and is offering us to look into the functioning of the baroque as one integrated cultural system. This is certainly a most powerful cognitive instrument that will further the understanding of the global systemic logic and functioning of the baroque. Yet, as a theoretical umbrella, can and should it supersede and eventually replace the plurality and variety of approaches that exist in this field and that have proven their epistemic effectiveness in relation to objects of more limited extension that could be considered partial objects or subsystems of the all-encompassing baroque system? A general comment on the cognitive value of the concepts used in baroque studies might be added at the end of this section. In all these strategic choices and options it is important to distinguish between the explanatory value and the strategic value in the use of specific concepts and of cognitive strategies. We can choose concepts to operationalize them in the analysis of particular empirical objects; in this case we try to give them a strong explanatory value. But we can also use concepts as arms of intellectual combat; they then have more the value of positional flags in the controversial exchange with other scholars and positions. In this case they mark more our interest of knowledge than our endeavor to produce knowledge. Later on, in the section on “modernity”, I shall give an example of such a strategic use. Again, this listing and discussion of cognitive strategies in our research field is not complete. However, it is rich and diversified enough to give us an idea of the many scientific challenges that lie in wait for the researcher, and of the possible responses to them. None of these strategies is perfect, but all, to a certain extent, further our knowledge in the field. The individual researcher has to make strategic choices. And more importantly, these choices must feed into an ongoing debate, on a methodological and even epistemological level,

Introduction

15

to explore the best ways of examining the return of the baroque today. But this debate should never usurp the priority that should be given to the analytical and interpretative work in the first place.

Special Issues

Some special issues within this field of research have come to the fore, either as special cognitive challenges, or as areas of open debate engaging conflicting strategies of research and also interests of knowledge. They are like hot nodes in the neo-baroque research network. In the last part of this introduction, I shall try to give a quick overview of some of these special issues, particularly of those which our work in general, and this volume in particular, cannot by-pass, nor set aside. Baroque and Neo-Baroque In this text I have been using the shorthand expressions “the return of the baroque”, sometimes almost synonymous with “neo-baroque”, to refer to the presence of the baroque in contemporary culture; and “Neo-baroque” to refer to a double focus on the historical baroque and its contemporary return. Should we give the term “neo-baroque” more conceptual autonomy, and separate it historically, culturally and aesthetically from the term “baroque”? Some authors in our field have done so. Severo Sarduy, in his book Barroco is certainly one of the inventors and originators of the “neoBaroque”.9 He has given it a solid semantic consistency by contrasting it with the historical “baroque”. Very broad considerations, going into the domain of the history of science in general and of cosmology in particular, world-view and economics, among others, support his work on differentiating the two concepts. Basically, he argues on the basis of historical homologies: a certain unstable historical configuration in the 17th century is the context of baroque culture; major changes in this configuration, resulting in an altogether new unstable configuration, have brought about a neo-baroque culture in the 20th century. To argue this he resorts to his somewhat provocative concept of the retombées, which would designate the set of historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of a new culture. Omar Calabrese’s book L’età neobarocca is first of all an exploration of a complex Zeitgeist, and more precisely of the taste of the present time. In his 9 Although, contrary to earlier writings (see Fernández Moreno, c1972), he does not use the term “néobaroque” in his book Barroco.

16

Moser

introduction he opts for the common denominator “neo-baroque”, and against “postmodern”—in his view too vague in its divergent uses—to describe this taste. To construct his paradigm he collects data from many heterogeneous domains, but his nuclear argument resides in bringing together new sciences and aesthetics. He discovers an affinity between the theories of fractals, chaos, catastrophy and dissipative systems on the one hand and an aesthetics of what he calls the “proteiform” on the other. What is at stake in both is the overcoming of stable models (the classic) and the creation of complexities, change, instabilities that precipitate the system towards systemic transformations. While Calabrese had already included popular culture and mass products of the culture industry—mainly television series—in his study, Angela Ndalianis deliberately focuses on mass culture and entertainment. When she constructs her concept of the neo-baroque in the realm of aesthetics, she goes back and forth between 17th century high art and 20th century mass culture. Despite the historical distance and the transfer from one cultural system to another, she is able to show decisive aesthetic continuities. It is as if the entertainment industry had exploited the potential of the historic baroque aesthetics and, through modern technologies, brought it up to its full realization. She elaborates her main argument on the basis of historical homology—the paradigm of crisis being common to both historical moments—but has to shift the motor behind the neo-baroque spectacle from Church and State to big capitalist Corporations. These are three serious full-book theories of the neo-baroque. They are by far not the only proposals to see a neo-baroque culture as different from the historic baroque culture, and different from a return of the baroque in contemporary culture. Quite different from one another, what they have in common is to give the neo-baroque a certain autonomous status as a concept, as a theoretical endeavour and as a cultural paradigm. They represent one particular research strategy. Another strategy consists in making the emergence of the baroque coincide historically with the early modern period and then carrying on a baroque element that undergoes major transformations but somehow remains dialectically related to modernity. And this continues through to today. In this case, it is less important to distinguish between an autonomous neo-baroque paradigm and the transformation of a baroque tradition. But this is at stake in another of the important issues in neo-baroque studies. Baroque—Modern—Postmodern What are the relations and interactions between modernity and baroque? And what between the return of the baroque and/or the neo-baroque and

Introduction

17

postmodernism? These are two different issues, although they are to a certain extent interconnected. First, a clarification on the use of the term modernity among the specialists of the neo-baroque is necessary because there are two rival concepts of modernity in circulation in their debates. “Modernity”, thus, becomes a good example for the strategic use of concepts. On the one side, there is the modernity of the Enlightenment philosophers—from the opposite side identified as HegelianNorthern-Protestant—that would consider baroque culture as exterior to it, as its other. Echeverría affirms that this modernity is a Weberian reduction of a much broader and more inclusive concept of modernity that we find on the other side. The issue is that this second concept of modernity would or could include the baroque. And this would make it possible for a researcher from a background with a self-assumed, rich baroque heritage not to be “excluded” from modernity. This “alternative modernity”10 makes it possible to be in the modern and in the baroque tradition at the same time. A good illustration of the use of this inclusive concept of modernity is offered by Lezama Lima who has written his Expresión Americana (1957) explicitly against Hegel, and who, in his essay “La curiosidad barroca” includes in his baroque paradigm various elements claimed by the first concept of modernity, such as curiosity as a motor of scientific research, a positive appreciation of modern science, emancipation, counterconquest and the fight for political independence. Are we dealing here with a Southern-Catholic type of modernity?11 This is not the place for this issue to be decided, but it is important to recognize these two different “modernity-claims” if we are to articulate the relationship between the baroque and modernity. There are schematically two ways of thinking of this relationship. There is the easier, the vulgata-type version, which would see the baroque as a premodern paradigm (in caricatural simplification: irrational, aristocratic, elitist, politically retrograde if not reactionary) that would be historically overcome by modernity (rational, democratic, politically progressive). This way of thinking of the relationship is partly responsible for the negative filter that is at work in the reception of the baroque. And its echoes are still present in the 20th century, for instance when, for Guy Scarpetta, the main issue of the “return of

10 11

In the title of her recent book, Monika Kaup puts the term into the plural : Neobaroque in the Americas. Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Arts and Film. In the introduction to his book Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America John Beverly criticizes this strategic use of the concept.

18

Moser

the Baroque” is to get rid of the modern avant-gardes, and to liberate cultural production from their tyranny. Moreover, this version of the relationship between modern and baroque allows for interesting positional reevaluations of the baroque12 when it comes to the appreciation and the meaning of the baroque today. In its return, it undergoes an ideological inversion whose narrative unfolds thus: when modernity became the driving progressive force of Western history, the baroque appeared as retrograde. Now that modernity has fossilized into a bureaucratic “iron cage” (Max Weber), the baroque returns as a liberating force (see Guérin). Also, it makes it possible to see the baroque as the typologically other of modernity, but interacting with it dialectically. Or, in psychoanalytical terms, to consider the resurgence of the baroque as the return of the repressed of modernity. A second version of this relationship has been proposed. It is more complex and more difficult to apply. Its most profiled representative is Walter Benjamin. For him, inasmuch as the baroque, coinciding with the entry into modernity, faces a loss of pre-modern transcendent certainties, that is, of a transcendent protective horizon, mankind is thrown into the contingent condition of natural decay (Verfall). Melancholy thus defines the historical baroque subject as its main affective condition. At the same time this derelict subject has to take its own history into its own hands by projecting into the future a self-made utopian horizon of security. The baroque thus appears as the melancholic moment of modernity. After the baroque period, the utopian moment has been dominant until the present times when, concomitantly with the crisis of the big utopian projects, the melancholic side of modernity returns with the baroque.13 In two recent publications, the baroque is seen as part of modernity still in another logic of relationship. For William Egginton, the baroque would be modernity’s theater of truth: “the Baroque must be understood as the aesthetic counterpart of a problem of thought that is conterminous with that time in the West that we have learned to call modernity” (1). And this problem of thought revolves around the modern theory of representation. That is why, as has already been mentioned above, the so-called “minor strategy” of the baroque amounts to a self-critical deconstruction of this theory. This baroque strategy, then, could be said to pursue a common cause with certain claims of postmodernity. 12 13

In my essay “The Modern is the Baroque?’” (2014) I have gone into more details in analysing these re-evaluations. On the alternating relationship between melancholia and utopia within modernity see also Lepenies.

Introduction

19

Gregg Lambert also announces his main thesis in the very title of his monograph: The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. For him, the baroque “names a topic (…) that returns quite often in critical representations of historical change in the concept of Culture.” (2). Therefore, so his argument goes, the return of the baroque within—or could we say at the end of—modernity confirms the typological opposition of a culture of unity and a culture of multiplicity and ‘vitalism’, which can be recognized again in the opposition of modernity and postmodernity. And this brings us immediately to this other relationship whose articulation is even more open to debate. Neo-Baroque and Postmodernism Some scholars have treated neo-baroque and postmodern as nearsynonymous terms to refer to the same thing, such as Calabrese or Scarpetta when they opted for neo-baroque instead of postmodern merely in favor of a more precise terminology. Such a synonymy would amount to a terminological as well as an intellectual shortcut, because the relationship we have to think of here is somewhat more complex. And the continuation of Lambert’s argument gives us an example, although, for him, the return of the baroque and the postmodern sometimes seem to coincide. But he introduces this difference: since “versions of the European Baroque (…) have been employed by many critics and writers to define the aesthetic sensibility and historical force behind the emergence of postmodernism” (14), “the category of the Baroque (…) can be used to examine other categories, such as postmodern” (6). In other words, the presence of the baroque in contemporary criticism and theory offers us a critical point of observation on the postmodern. If the question is formulated in terms of inclusion: does postmodernism include the neo-baroque, or is it the other way around? I would definitely opt for the former. Under the condition, however, that we extend the predominantly aesthetic term postmodernism to postmodernity as the historical challenge to overcome modernity in a non-modern way. In fact, postmodernity seems to develop a strategic affinity with the return of the baroque inasmuch as, in the cultural domain, it positively selects baroque cultural material and procedures to give these residual elements new meaning in the overcoming of a dominant paradigm towards the historically emergent. In this sense it is historically and argumentatively too short if we describe the postmodern as the paradigm where “everything goes”. In Heideggerian terms we could then say that the positive reactivation of the baroque today has to be historically located in late modernity as participating in the process of the Verabschiedung (literally: sending off) and Verwindung (literally: getting over) of the modern paradigm.

20

Moser

Critical vs Instrumental Value of the Baroque Today However, we have to recognize that not every reactivation of the baroque is automatically a critical one. Many scholars working on the “return of the baroque” or even on the historical baroque endeavor to give their object and work a positive value, and thus a “nice face”, by insisting on its critical value and power. This is not only the case in Latin America where the baroque is still very much tied into identitarian issues and where Lezama Lima’s phrase of the baroque counterconquest extends the critical value of the baroque into the political realm, even with military connotations. There is a more general tendency to see everything neo-baroque as a deconstruction of hegemonic cultural paradigms and of their cultural dictatorship, or of their mystifications. This critical value might be there, but not per se. Sometimes one gets the impression that, where this critical dimension is not in the object, it still is in the eye of the beholder as critic. Riding on this tendency, we might forget that there are also, very present in contemporary culture, clearly instrumental uses of the baroque and more particularly of the power of baroque aesthetics. We have to be reminded that, according to Guy Debord, we live in a society of the spectacle. Great spectacle very often includes learning from the baroque and even enhances the powerful baroque aesthetics of the effect with up-to-date technological means. Nietzsche already told his readers to be aware of the overpowering display of what he called “the baroque style”. More recently, Angela Ndalianis has pertinently shown that behind the production of spectacles for entertainment there is an industry whose driving force is capital gains. And what about official state visits, mega-spectacles that accompany the Olympic Games, the sophisticated staging of inner spaces of shopping malls, etc.? They all recycle elements of baroque power aesthetics. And they include instrumental appropriations of the neo-baroque aesthetics by non-aesthetic instances such as corporative capitalism and the Nation State. In relation to these spectacles, on the one hand, what Maravall said about the historical instrumentalization of the baroque in a “guided culture” still has some validity, and on the other, we might need the critical eye of Walter Benjamin, who warned his readers against the danger of an aesthetization of politics, favored by the then (1936) new mediascape. Our new mediascape creates the condition and sets the stage for increasing this danger even further. The power of neo-baroque aesthetics can be used in both ways, critical and instrumental. It is our task as critics to give equal consideration to both potential uses where this applies. This brings me to a last special issue in neo-baroque studies.

Introduction

21

New Technologies and the Neo-Baroque The questions here are: to what extent, and how, is the return of the baroque related to, and even conditioned by, the development of new technologies and media? How important are technologies in general for the realization of specific cultural paradigms and artefacts? On answering these questions, we certainly should avoid the avenue of pure technological determination of culture. Again, the issue is not causally so mono-dimensional, it is more complex. For instance, with each new media and each new technology we should differentiate between what new possibilities of expression and articulation, and what new limitations each new media and technological development brings with it. With this general caveat in mind, there remains a daring—as somewhat anachronical—hypothesis: it is only the development of present-day new technologies and new media that has made it possible to realize the full potential and extent of baroque aesthetics. Let us think of the production of special effects, of illusionist and immersion techniques, of the multiplication of reality levels, of the production of enhanced and virtual reality, of the multimedia multiplication as well as the intensification of the aïsthesic interpellation of our body—all these rely today on powerful new technologies and can be related to particular aspects of baroque aesthetics. Only detailed empirical research will be able to bring here precise partial answers and a possible confirmation of the general hypothesis. In this volume, more particularly, it is Colletti’s contribution that focuses on this aspect of the neo-baroque, both in its creative and reflexive dimensions. His artistic experience in working with new technologies and also with new materials can give an indication on how the potential of the baroque aesthetic paradigm still yields a wealth of experimental developments. This introduction, as a multiple crossing of an exciting, and to a certain extent controversial field of research—with some glimpses of specific contributions to this volume—should have shown the diversity in which the return of the baroque manifests itself on the level of cultural practices, and the complexity of issues and strategies on the level of scientific challenges. This volume can merely offer some samples of research in this field, they were chosen as representative of the variety of its objects and methods. In a sketchy way, the introduction adds the rationale allowing to connect them and to cover the interstices between them. These open spaces can be considered as invitations for more research in this particular aspect of contemporary culture. This aspect is first of all a witness to the efficiencies of the baroque paradigm, it derives from the historical baroque, takes up and at the same time questions the baroque as

22

Moser

a cultural model, a predecessor and an affinity that can be put to various uses and, thus take on new functions and meanings that need to be investigated. Following the thematic divisions of The Hispanic Baroque Project, this volume is organized in three sections: constitution, religion and cities. In a short introduction to each section the single contributions will be presented. Bibliography Armstrong, Elisabeth and Victor Zamudio Taylor (eds). Ultra-Baroque, Aspects of PostLatinamerican Art. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000. Beverley, John. Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America. Woodbridge GB: Tamesis, 2008. Bukdahl, Else Marie and Carsten Juhl (eds.) Puissance du Baroque. Les forces, les formes, les rationalités, Paris: Galilée, 1996. Calabrese, Omar. L’età neobarocca. Bari: Laterza, 1987 (in English: Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Carpentier, Alejandro. Concierto Barroco. La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975. Castillo, David R. Baroque Horrors. Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010. Chemris, Crystal (ed.) “Transatlantic Baroque”, (Special Issue), Calíope. Journal for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry 18:2 (2013), pp. 9–258. Cicelyn, Eduardo and Maria Codognato (eds.). Barock. Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Naples: Electa, 2009. Curiger, Brice et al (eds.). Deftig Barock. Köln: Snoeck, 2012 (English Title: Riotous Baroque). De la Flor, Fernando R. Barroco. Representación e ideología en el mundo hispánico (1580–1680). Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. Edelstein, Susan and Patrick Mahon (eds.). Barroco Nova. Neo-Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art. London (Ontario): Artlab Gallery, McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario & Museum London, 2012. Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth. The Ideology of Neo-Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Folie, Sabine, Michael Glasmeier, et al. (eds.). Eine barocke Party: Augenblicke des Welttheaters in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Vienna: Kunsthalle, 2001. Frese Witt, Mary Ann. Metatheatre and Modernity. Baroque and NeoBaroque. Lanham, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, 2nd ed., New York: Crossroad, 1989.

Introduction

23

Guérin, Jeanyves. “Errances dans un archipel introuvable. Notes sur les résurgences Baroques au XXe siècle”. Jean-Marie Benoist (ed.). Figures du Baroque, Paris: PUF, 1983, pp. 339–359. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism. Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Johnson, Christopher D. Hyperboles. The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Kaup, Monika. NeoBaroque in the Americas. Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Arts and Film. Charlottesville and London: The University of Virginia Press, 2012. Küpper, Joachim. Diskurs-Renovatio bei Lope de Vega und Calderón. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1990. Lambert, Gregg. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, London & New York: Continuum, 2004, reprinted 2006. Lepenies, Wolfgang. Melancholie und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, new edition, 2006. (in English: Melancholy and Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Lezama Lima, José. “La curiosidad barroca”, La expresión americana. México DC: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993, pp. 79–107. Mandelbrot, Benoît. Les objets fractals. Forme, Hasard et Dimensions. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del Barroco. Madrid: Editorial Ariel, 1975. Martín, Jouve, José Ramón and Renée Soulodre-Lafrance (eds.) “La constitución del barroco hispánico. Problemas y acercamientos”, (Special Issue), Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 33:1 (2008), pp. 1–280. Moser, Walter. “The Fabrication of ‘New Cultural Heroes’. The Case of Gregório de Matos”, Calíope 18:2, 2013, pp. 119–244. ———. “‘The Modern is the Baroque’? Überlegungen zur Positionalität in der Debatte über die Beziehungen zwischen Barock und (Post)Moderne”. Von Flemming, Victoria and Alma Elisa-Kittner (eds.). Barock—Moderne—Postmoderne: ungeklärte Beziehungen, Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2014, pp. 27–46. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Ortega, Francisco A. “History of a Phantom”. Castro-Klaren, Sara (ed.). A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 182–196. Panera Cuevas, Francisco Javier (eds.). Barrocos y neobarrocos. El infierno de lo bello. Salamanca: Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de la cultura, 2005. Parkinson Zamora, Lois. The Inordinate Eye. New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

24

Moser

Parkinson Zamora, Lois and Monika Kaup (eds.). Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Sarduy, Severo. “El barroco y el neobarroco”, César Fernández Moreno (eds.). América Latina en su literatura, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1980 (c1972), pp. 167–184. Scarpetta Guy. L’Impureté. Paris: Grasset, 1985. Scarpetta, Guy. L’artifice. Paris: Grasset, 1988. Parkinson Zamora, Lois et al. “The NeoBaroque and the Américas,” PMLA 124:1 (2009), pp. 127–188. Von Flemming, Victoria and Alma Elisa-Kittner (eds.). Barock—Moderne—Postmoderne: ungeklärte Beziehungen, Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2014. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Part 1 Neo-Baroques

∵

Introduction to Part 1 Walter Moser This section brings together four texts and an artistic contribution that can conceptually fall under the heading of ‘constitution’. Referring to the question of the baroque, constitution here means the make up of its central concept, as determining the nature and the character of the baroque. This section, then, takes up issues related to the definition of the baroque, adding to an already eventful conceptual history. More particularly, on more uncharted grounds, it traces a way leading from ‘baroque’ to ‘neo-baroque’. These texts explore the transhistorical dimension of the baroque. Moreover, all five contributions presented in this section do not indulge in purely byzantine debates on a concept. They all develop conceptual questions in direct relation to empirical and creative cultural processes and objects. Each one in its own way, they propose a dialectical movement back and forth between establishing a conceptual frame and engaging in empirical cultural analysis. Bolívar Echeverría’s “Meditations on the Baroque” explores the transhistorical dimension of the baroque by backtracking in historical time from the 20th Century Spain to the 16th Century Latin America. That is where he locates the emergence of a socio-cultural survival strategy for which he has developed the concept “baroque ethos”. This ethos emerges in situations of mixed cultures, typical of colonial and postcolonial contexts, where it represents a ­resistance to capitalist modernity. It manifests itself in an absolute theatricality by which two identity projects in cultural contact are preserved in a reciprocal ­integration of otherness: “the basic project of the Indians orphaned of their annihilated world and the mirror-image project of the Spanish expelled from theirs”. In polemic opposition to O’Gorman, who sees in the “Novohispanic Creole” the bearer of this new development, Echeverría identifies the Indians as the ones who assumed the agency of this process. He analyses this in 16th Century documents that illustrate the emergence of the Mexican guadalupanism, a cultural mestizaje that still lives on in the domain of religion as a manifestation of the baroque ethos. In “Baroque Affinities” Rita Eder recalls some meanders of the conceptual history of the baroque. She starts out with Wölfflin, one of its key representatives, links him up with Warburg, thereby combining an approach focused on form and style with an approach focused on pathos, that is on the effect

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_003

28

Moser

­baroque art produces on its audience. She thus shifts the question from a work-oriented concept to a psychology of art. Retracing the Brazilian reception and translation of Wölfflin, and evoking Echeverrías ethos barroco, Eder transfers her field of investigation from Europe to Latin America. Here she chooses, as her main object of investigation Glauber Rocha’s new film aesthetics, her thesis being that this aesthetics has affinities with the baroque. She analyses both, Glauber Rocha’s writings—among them an essay on Visconti’s baroque—and his cinematographic work, and the film Terra em Transe in particular. As the historic baroque moved away from the stability of classic art towards a more dynamic artistic process that aims at producing emotions, the cinema novo breaks with a conventional film aesthetics, as found in the Italian Neo-realism. In Terra em Transe, the author analyses Glauber Rocha’s innovative visual language that corresponds to a new sensibility in the Latin America of the 1960s, both in aesthetic and in political terms, and causes an emotional impact on the viewers. In his text on “Metatheatricality”, Karel Vanhaesebrouck proposes not to consider ‘baroque’ as an historical term, but as a concept with a transhistorical potential. At the core of this concept he sees metatheatricality, as a play with and a reflection on the codes and the medium of representation themselves. More precisely, the baroque is characterized by the paradoxical co-existence of immersion and metatheatre. Due to its constitutive intermediality between polychrome sculpture, painting and theatre, it also ruptures the principle of medial purity. Vanhaesebrouck then illustrates and operationalizes this theoretical approach in two main analytical probes. The first one deals with early French baroque tragedy. The second one with theatre performances produced by the contemporary Belgian theatre company Abattoir Fermé. In this second case, he brings Lehmann’s concept of the post-dramatic theatre in near synonymy with the neo-baroque. Saige Walton’s text offers an analysis of the French filmmaker Claire Denis’ 2001 film Trouble Every Day through the looking glass of what Gilles Deleuze has proposed as a concept opératoire to deal transhistorically and transculturally with the baroque. In this film analysis, the fold, operationalized here both as a sensuous and thoughtful figuration of the baroque, becomes a vital structuring principle combined with embodied film theory and a phenomenological approach to the “visually tactile experience” of cinema. This essay, too, reconnects the historical baroque with contemporary neo-baroque culture— in this case in the medium cinema—here more specifically on the basis of a common material visuality and the texturing of the image. In this perspective, both baroque painting and the neo-baroque film acquire a strong sculptural

Introduction To Part 1

29

quality and produce an intense sensual as well as emotional effect. “Such a cine-aesthetic is entirely befitting of the liberation of matter and the textural infinite that Deleuze conceptualizes as the baroque fold”. Concluding on this section, it can be said first of all that it covers a vast field of cultural objects and processes: painting, cinema, theater, performance. ­Applied to this object field, the four texts presented converge in a common effort to rethink the baroque and its resurgence in contemporary culture since the 1960s, both in Europe and Latin America. They all engage in a movement back and forth in historical time in order to identify common baroque features that are shown to be transhisorically reactivaded, although in a completely different historical situation, and in a new cultural context in terms of technoscape and mediascape.

chapter 1

Meditations on the Baroque Bolívar Echeverría1 (translated by María José Giménez) They are the sparks of the rebellion, which emerging from the great creative leprosy of our baroque, is nourished, when pure, by the gusts of the true American rainforest. josé lezama lima (106) 2

i

Alonso Quijano and the Indians

Almost exactly 100 years ago, in Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho, Miguel de ­Unamuno embarked on a task that fell somewhere between prophetic and literary. Reacting against the trends of the time, he set out to re-enchant and re-mythicize Spain’s social life. For Unamuno, Spain had sunk into a dull, hazy pragmatism founded on a ‘good’ sense that was hostile to all metaphysical insight, the enemy of myth (350). In its own way, it reinforced the disenchantment that, according to Max Weber, characterized the modern world and merely repeated the scientific debates born in the Age of Enlightenment and fossilized in 19th century positivism.3 Unamuno attempts to construct the re-mythicization of the Hispanic world around the central figure of Don Quixote, in particular his most distinctive trait: his peculiar madness. For Unamuno, the madness of Alonso Quijano, the Good, does not arise in a psychological phenomenon that lies outside him (his body, his moods), but is rather a type of insanity that—like Hamlet’s— “follows a method” or results from the consistencies of his own character. Alonso ­Quijano loses his mind on his own volition; he deliberately chooses to become Don Quixote, and he does so according to a complex strategy of survival. Alonso Quijano cannot bear what his Spanish contemporaries are doing 1 Editors note: This is an edited version of a paper that was presented at the conference Moving Worlds of the Baroque, University of Toronto, October 2007. Sadly, Bolívar Echeverría was unable to review the final version of this article. He passed away on June 5, 2010. 2 The original reads: São as chispas da rebelião que/surgidas da grande lepra criadora do barroco nosso, estão nutridas na/sua própria pureza, pelos bocados do verídico bosque americano. 3 See Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. E. Fischoff, introduction by Talcott Parsons, Methuen, London, 1971.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_004

Meditations On The Baroque

31

to Spain. As Shakespeare with the England of his time, he disagrees with the pragmatic and commercial Spain that is beginning to rise from the buried ruins of a former time, one in which the affirmation of humanity was an achievement exposed to the perils of death. Alonso Quijano resists the emergence of a Spain whose patron saint would be—according to Unamuno—his own niece, Antonia Quijana, a paragon of good sense and realism, manipulator of priests, barbers and bachelors, and enemy of poetry; a woman who, had she lived in the 20th century, would have sought refuge from communism by embracing General Franco’s call for help. Don Quixote—that is, Alonso Quijano’s ­madness—is for Unamuno the result of this nobleman’s refusal to allow the burial of his heroic Spain, a Spain inspired by the ‘tragic sense of life’ and open to the world and to adventure. Alonso Quijano’s madness manifests in the creation of an imaginary reality, designed according to the world described in and coded by chivalric literature. For him, this implies staging or re-enacting the reality of his niece, the priest, and bachelor Carrasco, that overwhelming reality around him whose very essence, according to Unamuno, denies the deep reality of Spain—that heroic and tragic vision of reality. Alonso Quijano can succeed in reclaiming and living in that reality he finds so painful and unbearable only through its re-enactment—once it has been transfigured, stripped of its realism, re-created as a different reality through performance, and ultimately transcended. He does not do this to flee or escape from reality. Alonso Quijano becomes Don Quixote to free that reality from the spell that has rendered it unrecognizable and detestable: not to deny that reality, but to re-create it and re-live it, and to undo the injustices done to it whenever it is reduced to the dying reality of Antonia Quijana’s world. This chapter seeks to demonstrate a particular homology that can be drawn between the behaviour Cervantes devised for his character Don Quixote, on the one hand, and a far from fictitious social behaviour that emerged in a specific sector of everyday life in early 17th century America, on the other. The key to identifying this homology—and the ensemble of suggestions and associations it carries—is the baroque, understood as the spirit of the historical times and of geographical globe typical of 17th century Mediterranean world. This has been deeply and widely studied, at least in its particular manifestations through art and literature. Practically all attempts to describe the baroque work of art emphasize its ornamentalism as a characteristic and distinctive feature that expresses a profound theatricality. When the question is posed regarding specific aspects of the decorative and theatrical nature of baroque works of art (there are, of course, other decorative forms of art other than the baroque, such as Mudéjar

32

Echeverría and Giménez

art), I recall T.W. Adorno’s chapter “Paralipomena,” in his book Aesthetic Theory (1970). Adorno says: To point out that the baroque is decorative does not say everything about it. It is decorazione assoluta; as if it had emancipated itself from every purpose and had developed its own law of form. It ceases to decorate anything and is, on the contrary, nothing but decoration… (390) Adorno points out the paradox of baroque decoration: even though it emancipates itself from the centre of the work of art and the essential core it ought to serve, it does not cease to be a decoration, a serva (servant), an ancilla ­(auxiliary) of that very centre. Without becoming a different or independent work within the basic work, it remains linked to the latter as a subtle but radical transformation of the same, a completely different approach from the one it appears to be at first sight. It is distinct from a simple decoration (that is, one that is not absolute or baroque in the manner of its service or mode of performance): an exaggerated way of serving that re-shapes the recipient of the service. The absolute manner in which the essential core of the baroque work of art is decorated does not seek to annihilate the work itself, but simply to go beyond it. It does not deny or destroy it; it transcends it. It asserts and develops its own autonomous law of form within the very heart of the central law of the work of art. This is nothing but a special way of decorating that seeks to prepare the essential core in order to optimize its viewing. On the mantle of his famous Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a seemingly innocent decoration sculpted by Bernini (an array of twisted folds that is even more elaborate in his Blessed Ludovica) introduces a sub-coding that, beneath a narrower ascetic interpretation, hints at the sensory, corporeal or mundane substance of the mystical experience represented in these works. Without abandoning the Christian motif, the Cornaro chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria (where the sculptural group can be viewed) surreptitiously becomes a locus for pagan, and even anti-Christian, aestheticization of life. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the ornamental element in the baroque work of art is only the most salient aspect of a more significantly determining feature. In this sense, Adorno’s statement on the decorazione assoluta should be rewritten or paraphrased so that it speaks, not only of absolute decoration, but also of the absolute theatricality of the baroque work of art. The statement should then be: “To point out that the baroque is decorative does not say everything about it. It is messinscena assoluta [mise en scène]; as if it had emancipated itself from every service to a theatrical purpose (the imitation of the world), and had created an autonomous world. It ceases to stage anything

Meditations On The Baroque

33

(that imitation) and is, on the contrary, nothing but staging.” In this sense, the theatricality intrinsic to the baroque work of art would be purposely different, that is, an absolute theatricality, since in it the role of service with respect to real life—which corresponds to the scenic event itself—has undergone a crucial transformation. Indeed, in the space defined by the stage, a new event has occurred which unfolds autonomously from the central event, albeit as a sort of parasite, together with and within the latter. It is a different event: an alternate version of the same event. In baroque art, even architectural works—despite being made of long-­ lasting materials—have the formal consistency of ephemeral art. Baroque works of art are works whose effect on the receiver must be imposed by means of an immediate, fleeting experience, a psychological shock. This introductory experience is the experience of paradox; in other words, a crisis of perception. The absolute nature of the ornamental-theatrical—which, according to Adorno, is characteristic of the baroque work of art—becomes manifest in this profound but fleeting initial disturbance of the receiver’s psychological balance. As way of example, in Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño, which of the two worlds—both perceived as equally plausible by Segismundo—is in fact real and which one only a dream? (The one of the prison tower or the one of the King’s court?) The fact that both worlds are disturbingly convincing in their ambivalence, says Gracián clarifying Calderón de la Barca’s idea, is the first step in a peculiarly baroque wisdom. One important concern in baroque art is to emphasize the theatrical and scenographic aspects in all forms of performance, even those that do not necessarily require the use of a stage. This is because the “absolute staging” the baroque aims to achieve starts from the premise that all artists, by definition, perform the role of actors, of theatrical performers. In essence, even painters and poets are theatre performers, except that their work—the result of their act of representation—has become separated in time and space from its performance and survived it. What is it, when baroque art is concerned, that renders this theatricality— inherent to all artistic works—a truly absolute theatricality, a messinscena assoluta? The answer may lie in Don Quixote’s unique “melancholic strategy for transcending life.” For him, the imaginary nature of a poetically transformed world—a world staged based on chivalric novels—has become a thousand times more necessary and justified than the real world of the empire of Felipe ii, whose world was necessary only because of gold and sustained mainly by the force of arms. The messinscena assoluta is that in which the service of performance itself— the act of converting the real world into a represented world—is achieved in

34

Echeverría and Giménez

such a way that it develops its own need, an autonomous law of form that can alter the representation of the world mythicized in everyday life to the extent that it transforms it into a different version of itself. By revealing the intrinsic legitimacy—a necessity or ‘naturalness’—in something as unfounded, contingent, and even improvised as a staged world, absolute theatricality invites us to reverse the status of things and, at the same time, to question the legitimacy of the real world. “Absolute staging” reveals that the world itself is also essentially theatrical, or staged, and ultimately contingent and arbitrary. Rather than arising out of a creative copy of European art, or embellished importation, the baroque first emerged and developed in the Americas through the construction of a social ethos characteristic of the lower, marginalized classes in the mestizo cities of the 17th and 18th centuries. The baroque developed in America as part of an everyday life whose effective legitimacy necessarily implied a break from the legal structure imposed by Iberian monarchs— an odd transgression which, although radical, did not purport to impugn the latter. Founded on an informal economic world whose informality took advantage of the narrow limits of the formal economy in place, the baroque first appeared in the Americas as a survival strategy, as a way of life spontaneously devised by that tenth of the indigenous population that managed to survive the annihilation of the 16th century and had not been driven out to inhospitable regions. Once the great indigenous civilizations of the Americas had been erased from history, the enterprise of the Conquest post 16th century—almost completely neglected by the Spanish crown—faced a plausible threat of falling into an era of barbarism. Integrated as servants or marginalized in colonial city life, the remaining population of Indians would soon accomplish a civilizing feat of the highest order. In the late 16th century, the first Castilian poet born in Mexico, Francisco de Terrazas, reproaches New Spain: To us a harsh stepmother you have been, a mild and loving mother to the stranger. On him you lavish all your treasures dear, with us you only share your cares and danger. Ungrateful Fatherland, Adieu! With your adopted sons live long and well, while we, consumed by unrelenting spite, departing one by one, from this sad world take flight.4 4 Translation taken from Keen 90.

Meditations On The Baroque

35

After the Conquest, the Creoles (American-born Spaniards) felt rejected by Spain. The carrera de Indias (route to the Indies) and its naval fleets with ­military escorts had begun to decrease in volume and frequency; Europe’s interest in American silver was waning; the umbilical cord connecting ­European ­Europe with American Europe was thinning, depriving it of elements ­indispensable to its growth and development and threatening to leave it high and dry. Salvaging the social fabric from the threat of barbarism that accompanied Spains’ rejection and neglect had become a matter of survival—it threatened not only the Creoles but the entire population of the so-called new world. And it was precisely the indigenous sector of the population, the descendants of those defeated and subjected during the Conquest, who spontaneously endeavoured to rebuild civilized life in the Americas. Proclaiming neither plans nor projects, they effectively prevented the demise of the new civilization imposed by the Conquistadores. To that end, and facing the impossibility of rebuilding their ancient worlds—rich and complex, yet so fragile—they mobilized the greatest resource in the history of human civilization, cultural mestizaje, or multiculturalism, and thus founded what would have to be the first commitment to defining an identity by those who would later recognize themselves as Latin Americans. What multiculturalism accomplished was not a transfer or extension of European—in this case Iberian—civilization in the Americas, but a distinct repetition or re-creation of it. Uprooted from their communities of origin, the urban Indians who had arrived to work building churches, convents, streets and mansions, and who had settled in cities as workers, artisans, servants and unskilled workers, allowed what remained of their ancient code of civilization after the cataclysm of the Conquest to be consumed by the prevailing code of the Europeans. In other words, as the ways of their ancestors became increasingly faded and distant, the Indians who were essential to the existence of the new cities allowed their traditional ways to succumb to the European way to sub-code and specify that elemental symbolization with which humanity builds itself when tasked with the construction of a cosmos within chaos. They allowed their original languages to yield to that of the Europeans, along with that particular European way to express the inexpressible, to give name and meaning to the elements of the cosmos. The most important and surprising aspect in all of this is that it was the Indians themselves who assumed the agency of this process, and thus it was carried out in such a way that what the resulting reconstruction was something completely different from the intended model. The result was a Western European civilization reworked within the very core of its code precisely by the survivors of the same indigenous code of civilization that needed to

36

Echeverría and Giménez

be a­ ssimilated in order for European civilization to be renewed. Playing at ‘being’ Europeans, rather than copying or repeating European artefacts and customs, assimilated Indians staged a peculiar performance of Europe. Their ­performance had ceased to be an imitation and become its own reality—a new original—at the precise moment the now transformed Indians realized they were in a performance they were unable to stop or escape. It became an “absolute staging” that transformed the very theatre in which it took place, swapping the reality of the stalls with that of the stage. In this “absolute staging,” the Indians who mixed with the Europeans and with one another joined those who during that time period were trying to build a truly modern identity upon the foundation of a capitalist modernity. One of those attempts was the baroque ethos, which emerged in the late 15th century in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, the indigenous acceptance of this alien civilizing form—an acceptance that not only transformed it but also reshaped it—followed the same peculiar baroque strategy adopted by certain societies at the time as they internalised capitalist modernity, which demanded the sacrifice of a natural way of life (and the values for people who live in it) in the interest of the accumulation of wealth. Accepting this sacrifice thus became for modern humans a compromise that nonetheless enabled them to reclaim their everyday life and its assets. Similarly, American mestizos settled for a compromise: in sacrificing their ancient code of civilization and building upon it a new civilization, they, too, found a way to reclaim what they had lost. In staging himself as Don Quixote, Alonso Quijano in his imagination transforms the historic misery of his world in order to survive. By dwelling in that alien dream world—that of the Europeans—the urban Indians in the ­Americas also save themselves from their misery. However, the time they spend there does not end: they never awake from their dream or return to their “good sense”; they do not “fall into the abyss of reason” or “die at the sanity of life,” as Unamuno says of Alonso Quijano when he renounces the Quixote in his deathbed. The Indians do not return from that reproduced, performed world, but remain immersed in it and sink further as it gradually becomes their real world. Moreover, the “Creole Spanish” are born into this performance, with the “splendours and miseries” of the colonial world, so rich, sharp and exquisite in its artistic and literary manifestations. That is where we, the Latin Americans of today, still find ourselves after so many centuries. Like Don Quixote’s madness, the performance staged by the Indians was and continues to be an “absolute staging,” according to Adorno’s definition. The Latin American world is a truly modern world: suspended in midair—that is, contingent, lacking a foundation in any “natural” or ancestral identity—and

Meditations On The Baroque

37

improvised since the beginning of the 17th century by the Indians who were defeated and subjected in the cities of Mesoamerica and the Andes. It was born along with capitalist modernity and developed within one of its modalities. The identity being forged in Latin America reclaims mestizaje as the basic nature of Universalist humanity itself. Mestizaje both embraces and multiplies all possible identities, provided that, in defending its own self-determination, each identity does not set as a condition the rejection or exclusion—whether hostile or simply ignorant—of other identities. ii

Guadalupanismo and the Baroque Ethos in the Americas

Historians increasingly prefer histories based on conclusive evidence—­ documents are not to be trusted; traces must be deciphered—because time and time again they encounter far from innocent discrepancies between what a time period purports to be and what it in fact was, between what it officially claims to do and what it actually does (even if it does so unofficially). For instance, no one would dispute the secular nature of economic and political life in modern states: that is, the supernatural and the sacred have been, when not completely eliminated, systematically neutralised or questioned. In the 19th century, it was only thanks to certain traces of a particular fetishism that Marx was able to reveal both the central role of the supernatural or the miraculous in economic life and the deeply religious nature (not in the archaic, but in the modern sense) of capitalist society. When Pope John Paul ii exclaimed during one of his many visits to M ­ exico: “Mexico, semper fidelis,” he merely reiterated the official, substantiated truth: the Mexican religion is the Apostolic and Roman Catholic religion.5 The ­validity and vitality of its articles of faith, doctrine, rituals, and ecclesiastical structure are unquestionable, despite some alarming statistical data that suggests they may be in decline. However, beyond a mere discrepancy, there is indeed a vast distance between what is formally known as Mexican Catholicism—which so delighted the Pope—and the form of Catholicism unofficially but undeniably practised by Mexican believers. Without having to seek proof at the Tepeyac Basilica (the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe) on a 12th of December

5 Eucharistic Celebration, Homily Of His Holiness John Paul ii, The Cathedral of Mexico City, Friday, 26 January 1979. Pope John Paul ii’s sermon is published online by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana: http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1979/documents/ hf_jp-ii_hom_19790126_messico-cattedrale.html.

38

Echeverría and Giménez

(her feast day), it would suffice to examine the everyday religious customs of Mexican Catholics. It has been said many times that Mexican Catholicism is unique: it is not only Marian in nature, but ‘Guadalupan’ (of Guadalupe). Furthermore, upon closer examination, its Guadalupan manifestation seems to reach beyond a superficial, idiosyncratic, and thus harmless modification of the dominant form of Catholicism. It seems to go beyond being simply a peculiar use of the orthodox Catholic code—which aside from certain divergences would remain unchanged—and introduces strong features of a substantial and radical, albeit apologetic, type of idolatry that results in the formation of an alternative Catholicism that “dares not speak its name” (or at least chooses not to). Guadalupan Catholicism is exaggeratedly Marian in nature and, as such, manifests at its core a peculiar type of idolatry. The worship of Mary implies a denial of the monotheistic synthesis of the Holy Trinity, of the One and Triune God, a synthesis that is accepted only on a formal, not internalised level. In reality, what is accepted is Mary’s place in the order of a multipolar pantheon: Mary is a goddess, Jesus Christ is a god, and so are God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and many major and minor saints. It is a sort of polytheistic constellation whose form changes depending on the time and place of worship. At the pinnacle or in the depths of the abstract, incorporeal supernatural sphere is God the Father, together with the Holy Spirit—so high or distant so as to be practically unreachable, and therefore only ‘count’ on Earth as a last resort, in cataclysmic situations. On a central plane, having an intermediate density, as it were, is God-Saviour, Jesus Christ. On a lower level and closer to mortals—which in the formal hierarchy would be the least supernatural level, although unofficially or in practice is the most crucial, as it is more closely connected to human beings—there is Mary, “Mother of God” and “Our Mother.” Among and in direct contact with human beings we find the entire constellation of major and minor saints, the beatified, and the pious; having a concrete supernatural nature and limited power, they play the role of angels, attending to those in need of miracles and referring the most serious ones to higher, ­subtler impenetrable levels. In Mary-worshipping Catholicism, the centre of heaven (or Christian pantheon) has undergone a substantial shift, with the ­Virgin Mary as its determining figure—i.e. the dominant one, if not in absolute terms like God the Father, at least as an exceptional case. The central goddess in an indefinite juncture that in the end becomes a permanent state, Mary is the Empress of Heaven, Daughter of the Eternal Father. I propose that a large sector of the Latin American population across significant time periods adopted a baroque identity that became manifest in its magnificent artistic and literary works, in addition to its linguistic usage, ways

Meditations On The Baroque

39

of life, and politics. This identity would have emerged in the 16th century as a form of behaviour spontaneously invented by the Indians who survived in the new cities after their predecessors were defeated in the Conquest of America by Iberian Europe. This form of behaviour, originating primarily in Mexico and Peru, would then take root and spread throughout the Americas in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. More specifically, I would like to emphasize the idea that this baroque form of behaviour—whose precursor would have been Malintzin, the ‘tongue’ of Cortés—first appeared in the 16th century as an early but clearly identifiable manifestation in the Guadalupanism of mestizo Indians and Mexican Creoles. Understandably, the discussion of Guadalupan devotion has produced a vast number of books and articles, an extensive body of literature that continues to grow and fill entire libraries. I would like to touch on just two important texts here: the first, of course, is the Nican mopohua, by 16th century Indian Antonio Valeriano, and the most recent to date, Destierro de sombras, by 20th century Creole Edmundo O’Gorman. The first text in Guadalupan literature is the brief, delicate account of the apparition of the Virgin Mary by macehual Indian Juan Diego. The account is known as the Nican Mopohua (Aquí se relata/Here it is Told)6 and was recorded in 1556 by Antonio Valeriano, an Indian who was educated—although not pilli or of noble birth—at the famous Colegio de Tlaltelolco, an exceptional disciple of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, author of the Historia general de las cosas de la nueva España.7 According to Miguel León Portilla, the Nican Mopohua can be said to contain four chapters (83). The first relates the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego and reproduces the first exchanges between them, in which she makes him her messenger to convey to religious authorities her desire for a shrine on Tepeyac Hill. It also tells of the failure of his first exchange with Zumárraga, “governor of priests.” The second chapter recounts Juan ­Diego’s second encounter with the Virgin, where he tells her about his failed attempt—which he blames on his humble origins—and asks that she send in his stead a worthy, more distinguished person. Instead, she instructs him to return and insist on her behalf before the prelate, because it was her will that he, a humble Indian, be her ambassador, and not others of higher status. The third chapter relates Juan Diego’s second meeting with Bishop Zumárraga and the latter’s demand for a sign to prove her identity and message. It reproduces 6 The tract is written in Nahuatl, a language belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language family that is indigenous to Mesoamerica. 7 The Nican Mopohua was published in 1649 by Luis Lasso de la Vega. His manuscript is currently at the New York Public Library.

40

Echeverría and Giménez

the third exchange between the Virgin and Juan Diego who, once comforted by the healing of his gravely ill uncle, is sent back to San Francisco carrying the miraculous proof in the form of some impossible flowers. The last chapter relates the execution of her request “and all that subsequently occurred at the prelate’s palace: the final dialogues and the one described as denouement, the wondrous image of the Virgin left by the flowers on Juan Diego tilma (cloak).” Among all the astounding and interesting details of Valeriano’s beautiful ­account, I would like to highlight the following five: 1.

2.

3.

4.

First, the Virgin Mary’s seemingly whimsical wish to appear at that particular spot, which had once been the place of worship of Tonantzin, and to insist that her “little temple,” as she calls it, be built there, “on the summit of Tepeyac Hill.” Second, her undeniably significant decision to appear before a macehual Indian, Juan Diego, a poor simple believer and recent Christian convert, and to choose him as her messenger, instead of a “well-known, revered, honest” member of the indigenous nobility who had converted to Christianity out of convenience. “I have no lack of people of a high status among my servants, among my messengers, whom I can entrust to carry my breath, my word. But it is very necessary (absolutely essential) that you go, that with your mediation my wish, my will is granted (thanks to you).” Third, she defines herself as the “compassionate young mother” of natives and Spaniards, “of all of you who live together in this land,” as consoler of the afflicted (consolatrix afflictorum), a doer of good deeds and righter of wrongs (virgo potens). Fourth, her decision to miraculously emblazon her image on Juan Diego’s coarse cloak, with the new Franciscan Bishop Juan de Zumárraga as witness. “And he then spread out his white cloak in the hollow of which were the flowers. And as the varied flowers fell to the floor like those of Castile, there on his cloak remained the sign, the precious image of our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of God, as can be seen today, where it is now kept, in her precious little house, in her little temple, in Tepeyácac, where she is known as Guadalupe.”8

Among the details of this account, it is worth pointing out the metaphorical charge clearly suggested by the allusion to the top of Tepeyácac Hill—the 8 An English translation of Nican Mopohua is available online through the University of California, San Diego: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/nahuatl/nican/NicanMopohua.html.

Meditations On The Baroque

41

l­ ocation of the Virgin’s apparition—as a special land, where flowers “like those of Castile” can bloom out of place and out of season: something European (as the metaphor would suggest) can overcome all obstacles and be revived anew. According to O’Gorman, twenty years after the fall of Tenochtitlán, the Indians had renewed, “in their full idolatrous splendour, their ancient periodic pilgrimage from faraway lands to the Tepeyac Hill.” (139) However, they now did this pilgrimage to worship, not Tonantzin, as had once been their custom, but the Virgin Mary. What had changed? The Indians had converted or been converted to Christianity, a religion they appeared to practice in the orthodox way, but which couldn’t hide various surviving “idolatrous” elements. Pure, authentic or orthodox Christianity proved to be incompatible with the everyday lives of the Indians, both in the city and in the country. Paradoxically, to adopt it implied being rejected by it and condemned to eternal suffering because of their inability to practice it properly. Indeed, their reality was unbearable without access to their own technical elements, without practising their ancient customs and traditions even at a basic level or preserving a minimum identity of their own. To adhere to any such traditional elements would betray a recalcitrant loyalty to “idolatry,” which led to a state of mortal sin. On the other hand, doing away with that dramatic dilemma—to shed their basic identity and become pure Christians—meant for them a sort of “soul replacement,” which could only occur through a transitory state of “emptying” their soul, a kind of death. It implied to no longer be a human being, to invalidate oneself in order to freely accept and adopt Christianity. For Indians, to become Christian—a condition for physical survival—didn’t mean to disappear or die as people of the Americas and be replaced by a copy of Europeans, but rather, to become European without ceasing to be ­Americans. In order to undergo this process of becoming Spanish, Indians had to carry out a structural transformation of the same Christianity they were forced to internalise: they had to re-create it to be able to accept it as human beings that, despite having been defeated and subjugated, identified themselves precisely with the acceptance of their own defeat; they had to rebuild Christianity so that it positively integrated their voluntary denial of their own religion. In this sense, it was natural for the form of Christianity adopted by n ­ ewly converted macehual Indians to have a strong Marian emphasis. On the ­deepest, most distant plane of the heavens, the one and triune God in the orthodox order of the Catholic myth—whose power didn’t need any formalities to ­condemn them to hell—was to be left intact. This form of Christianity thus remained on a lower celestial plane, absorbing all its faith and ritual observance. This more accessible plane of the celestial sphere presupposes the first and esoteric plane, but it downplays it to disguise or set aside certain mortal

42

Echeverría and Giménez

sins by the scales of the final judgment, especially the type of sin as the one implied in remaining loyal to a basic non-Western identity. This celestial plane or circle—which was closer and less demanding—was ruled by the Virgin Mary. It would be difficult to find a clearer example of baroque ethos in Latin American societies since the 17th century than this modification of the Christian religion by Guadalupan Indians in 16th century Mexico. Indeed, following a trail left by Theodor W. Adorno, we can locate the baroque essence in the “absolute staging” of a performance, in the very nature of those representations of the world which stage it with such vigour that its virtual “reality” or imaginary validity becomes equivalent to its “real” reality or objective validity. And we can achieve this by taking into account not only works of art recognized as baroque—those with a clear presence of “absolute staging”—but also baroque ethos that spread through Europe from the south, in the second half of the 15th century (the period known as the Counter Reformation). Life on Earth for human beings, which the established order—Christianity—defined as the road to salvation, as a positive life, is lived by many sceptical Christians in modern times in a baroque manner. Their circumstances force them to live their life as if it were, in fact, what its definition says it should be: they live a performance of that life on the theatrum mundi, and by so doing they become so deeply immersed in it that they turn it into an “absolute performance” where a different, autonomous meaning of life emerges. In the 17th century, American Indians who had been integrated into the urban life of their Iberian victors and conquerors undertook the task of reconstructing European civilization in practice—a spontaneous, informal endeavor in which they engaged American-born Spaniards. However, already in the 16th century, they had begun to use baroque ethos to restructure roles and functions within what was European: they reinvented Catholic Christianity by translating it into a performance or “absolute staging”—that of Guadalupan Catholicism—in which they lost themselves and at the same time eliminated any possibility of returning to the pure, orthodox Catholicism of “real life.” In the 17th century, Jesuit theologians9 embraced this theological turmoil and take it to delirious extremes when they—following the practice of the macehuales, and accepting and surpassing Fray Juan de Zumárraga’s evangelization efforts in 1531—substituted the cult of their ancient gods with the worship of some peculiar, reconstructed Christian gods. It would be irrelevant to praise or overstate the magnitude or importance of the historical fact in question in the mestizaje of human identities—of which Guadalupanism was a clear, early 9 Compiled by David A. Brading, Siete Sermones Guadalupanos (1709–1765). México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 1994.

Meditations On The Baroque

43

sign—fostered by the baroque ethos in the daily life of low and marginalized classes in the colonial cities of the Americas. Modern civilization would be unthinkable without the American Indians’ efforts to emancipate that interpenetration of identities. The most original and incisive of historians of the origins of Guadalupanism, Edmundo O’Gorman, accurately identified this historic novum in the Americas after the Iberian conquest. According to O’Gorman, the event “came to enrich the stage of world history” with the introduction of a “new model” for being human, a modern humanity with its very own historical subject.10 If there is an error in his historical account, it lies where and how O’Gorman identifies the agent in that new historical subjectivity: the New-Hispanic Creole. In my opinion, he mistakenly recognizes and attributes that identity to the SpanishAmerican subject, a historical figure that is only a reflection and not the one that engendered that new subjectivity—that is, the people of the Americas who chose to become Spanish of their own volition, the Indians who survived the catastrophe of the Conquest and, by practising a mestizaje of identities, managed to re-create themselves at the heart of the Spanish city. It is the new “historical” identity of the mixed Indians which, camouflaged within the historic identity of American-born Spanish subjects, made way for the figure of the Creole, that “new Adam” that O’Gorman prefers to place in their stead. O’Gorman focuses his attention on the alteration that, in some way or another, Spaniards carried out on the Indians’ new Christian faith. However, he neglects to address that faith as such. He doesn’t see in that faith—that “incipient indigenous Guadalupanism,” as he calls it (60)—an exercise of agency on the part of the Indians, an act that they performed. He only examines it as the object of that alteration, whose agent or subject, naturally, could only possibly be the Spanish in their emerging Creole version. First, the Indians’ faith would serve as material for the various evangelizing orders seeking a swift, extensive Christianization, as was the case of Fray Zumárraga (1531). Twenty-five years later, it would serve as material for creolized Spanish prelates (such as Archbishop Montúfar in 1556) in their conspiracy to unify the Mexican church, and pocket the tithes in the process. By the early 17th century, according to Serge Gruzinski (201), idolatry was not a central concern for the Spanish noble authorities. Urban Indians, the population they were concerned with and in interaction with, showed no resistance against the Catholic religion. The level of idolatry present in their Catholic practice was not greater than the usual level found in Mediterranean Catholic 10

Translation of Edmundo O’Gorman. Meditaciones Sobre el Criollismo. México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, 1970.

44

Echeverría and Giménez

communities as a result of pagan resistance to Christianization. It is relevant to note, however, that the Indians’ resistance to Christianization in the 16th century was not only direct and open—as was the case of the “lineage idols” or tlapialli, the tonalli (introductory baptism) or the ticitl or shamans. In addition to being a resistance against the Conquest, or mestizaje by absorption of the other (the European), it manifested as an indirect or hidden resistance, that is, a trans-Conquest resistance or mestizaje by infiltration of that European other. It is precisely this resistance to protect the subject’s own identity by distilling it and injecting it into the identity accepted as valid that is evidenced in the indigenous creation of guadalupanism. A resistance—a “deaf rebelliousness,” as he calls it—that O’Gorman himself understates when he interprets it solely as the result of the “powerful incentive” that was for the Indians “to feel prejudiced” when they were “excluded from the practices and religious pomp of the Spanish, in which they wished to partake.” (148) In 1556, Fray Francisco de Bustamante gave a sermon—causing outrage both in the auditorium and in the city—against the growing, and in his view idolatrous, devotion to the image of Guadalupe on Tepeyácac, “worshipped there as if she were God” by both natives and Spaniards, she miraculously healed. Archbishop Montúfar took advantage of this outrage to promote the “Information of 1556” in which its Procurator, Juan de Salazar, concluded with the claim that it was wise to censor Bustamante. His reasoning was that the devotion, widely spread by now, had grown uncontrolled and out of proportion, and that ­Guadalupan devotion could be used against overt, pre-Christian idolatry, which Salazar euphemistically termed “people of excess” who performed before the Mother of God who was venerated at Tepeyac. Bustamante shares with Fray Bernardino de Sahagún the justified suspicion that there was a conspiracy among the Indians. According to Sahagún in his Historia general de las Cosas de la Nueva España of 1576, Mary should not be called “tonantzin” (“our mother”)—the goddess that together with Totahtzin, “our father,” forms the supreme double god Ometeotl; instead, she should be called Teotl Inantzin (“mother of God”), says Sahagún. More malicious than Zumárraga (in 1531), for him (in 1576), worship of the Guadalupana was in fact an attempt to “conceal idolatry beneath the error of that name, Tonantzin.” (90)11 For bishop Montúfar, on the other hand, this devotion actually succeeded in guiding Indian fervour in the right direction (of orthodoxy), to “­Christianize 11

Now generally known as The Florentine Codex, due to the fact that the best preserved copy is held at the Laurentian Library in Florence. The codex was translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble and published as The Florentine Codex: Introduction and Indices, (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982).

Meditations On The Baroque

45

them.” He may have also noticed that this effect of Guadalupan devotion was accompanied by another effect: to “indianize” Christianity and encourage it to “creolize.” Indeed, as Gabriel Zaid writes, it can be said that if “there was a conspiracy [in all of this], it was by the Indians.” (n.p.) As O’Gorman says, they were the ones who spread the “wondrous works of an unknown image that usurped the title of the ancient and revered Spanish Guadalupe” (1970, 104). But theirs was an odd ‘conspiracy’ that was not confabulated but carried out, and woven, not to obtain an image, but to give up one goddess in order to create another. They stole and appropriated the name and reputation of the Spanish Virgin and in the process discarded those of their own goddess, Tonantzin. Their goal was not to make the Spanish Guadalupana into a mask for their Mexican and everalive Tonantzin; they aimed to re-create the Guadalupana through the death of Tonantzin, to have one goddess devour the other and absorb her supernatural energy and thus be recreated and revived. Undoubtedly in connection with Archbishop Fray Alonso Montúfar’s strategy to “creolize” the new Indian-mestizo worship of the Mexican Guadalupana (against the interest of Franciscan evangelizers), that same year in 1556, I­ ndian author Antonio Valeriano wrote, in tecpilahtolli (the elevated or noble language), the Nican Mopohua. Valeriano did not think, as his master did, that this was a simple return to idolatry; he saw Guadalupan worship as a resource that could serve a new, special Catholic “orthodoxy.” In drafting the narration of the appearance of Mary he aimed to formalize—to “make decent”—a proc­ ess of mestizaje of religious forms that macehual Indians had already been ­using since 1531, when they identified as miraculous the image they saw, with evangelizer Fray Juan de Zumárraga, depicted on Juan Diego’s tilma. The image, stunningly fabricated from the colourful outline that could be seen on the cloak, was formed by marks left by the crushed flowers that had been wrapped in it. This image, it is worth noting, is not the one we know today. As O’Gorman demonstrates, the latter is from 1556, when the tilma was removed from its protective storage and exhibited in the hermitage, and may be the result of an attempt by the Indian Marcos to paint over the original on the old cloth or to copy it onto a new piece of linen, correcting and augmenting it according to Spanish descriptions of the Guadalupana’s image. Only his master’s resistance in 1567, and the danger that could result from “bending the branch too far” in defense of the new cult, would convince Valeriano to abandon his project, leaving it for others to complete later (such as Scholar Miguel Sánchez in 1648, with his work Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios Guadalupe, and chaplain of the Sanctuary Luis Lasso de la Vega, who published the Nican mopohua in 1649.)

46

Echeverría and Giménez

The account of the Nican Mopohua gathers two projects that took a similarly baroque approach when facing an ontological identity crisis: the basic project of orphaned Indians in their destroyed world, and its mirror image, the project of the Spanish who had been expelled from theirs. Paradoxically, it can be said that the first Creole was, in fact, an Indian, Antonio Valeriano, an “odd contradiction” that O’Gorman himself explicitly acknowledges, (1970, 61) but which, in his Creole unilateralism, he fails to explain.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Originally published as Aesthetische Theorie in 1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag). Alberro, Solange. El Águila y la Cruz: Orígenes Religiosos de la Conciencia Criolla: ­México, Siglos xvi-xvii. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999. Brading, David. La Virgen de Guadalupe, Imagen y Tradición. Mexico City: Taurus, 2002. Carranza, Francisco Javier. “La transmigración de la Iglesia a Guadalupe.” Siete Sermones Guadalupanos (1709–1765). Ed. David Brading. México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 1994. Castañeda, Juan José Ruíz de “Sermón panegyrico en glorias de María santíssima bajo el título de Guadalupe.” Siete Sermones Guadalupanos (1709–1765). Ed. David Brading. México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 1994. Castillo, Ana (Ed.), La Diosa de las Américas. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 2001. Goicoechea, Juan de. “La maravilla immarcescible y milagro continuado de María santísima señora nuestra en su prodigiosa imagen de Guadalupe de México.” Siete Sermones Guadalupanos (1709–1765). Ed. David Brading. México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 1994. Gruzinski, Serge. La colonisation de l’imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard 1988. Keen, Benjamin. The Aztec Image in Western Thought. New Brunswick: Rutgers ­University Press, 1990. Lazcano, Francisco Javier. “Sermón panegyrico al ínclyto patronato de María señora nuestra en su milagrosísima imagen de Guadalupe.” Siete Sermones Guadalupanos (1709–1765). Ed. David Brading. México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 1994. León-Portilla, Miguel. La California Mexicana: Ensayos Acerca de su Historia. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995. ———. Tonantzin Guadalupe. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000. Lezama Lima, José. A Expressão Americana. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988. Lockhart, James. Los Nahuas Después de la Conquista. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999.

Meditations On The Baroque

47

Maza, Francisco de la. El Guadalupanismo Mexicano. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981. Nebel, Richard. Santa María Tonantzin, Virgen de Guadalupe. México: Fondo de C ­ ultura Económica, 1995. O’Gorman, Edmundo. Meditaciones Sobre el Criollismo. México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, 1970. O’Gorman, Edmundo. Destierro de Sombras. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986. Sahagún, Bernardino de Anderson, The Florentine Codex: Introduction and Indices. Trans. Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982. Torre Villar, Ernesto De La and De Anda Ramiro Navarro. Testimonios Históricos G ­ uadalupanos. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004. Unamuno, Miguel de. Ensayos (Vol.2). Madrid: Aguilar, 1951. Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Trans. E. Fischoff. London: Methuen, 1971. ­Originally published in 1920. Zaid, Gabriel. “Milagros certificados.” Reforma. México DF, 27 de Octubre de 2002. ­Available at: http://reforma.vlex.com.mx/vid/gabriel-milagros-certificados -81902701.

chapter 2

Reconsidering Metatheatricality: Towards a Baroque Understanding of Postdramatic Theatre Karel Vanhaesebrouck The term ‘the baroque’ has gained increasing importance as a transhistorical concept. Not only within this present volume, but also within the humanities at large, the term raises more and more interest, popping up in different ­scientific fields and paradigms, while at the same time it has been gradually disconnected from its original historical context. However, as with any kind of “travelling object” (Bal 2002), the term risks being subject to some sort of semantic hyperinflation. Moreover, the use of the term within the broader field of cultural analysis also raises a number of methodological and terminological challenges. In this chapter, I will approach the idea of the baroque along a specific line, as I will define it first and foremost as a theatrical experience. In the first part, I will argue that the baroque differs from the associations traditionally adhered to this term, i.e. exuberance, opulence, plain irregularity, etc. The baroque should be considered initially as a metatheatrical exercise, as a game with the codes of representation themselves. The analysis of 16th and 17th c­ entury baroque, whether in visual arts or in performing arts, offers interesting opportunities to reconsider the idea of metatheatricality in contemporary performing arts. As a historical overview largely exceeds the scope of this article (its main aim being an evaluation of the transhistorical potential of the notion of ‘the baroque’), I will develop my argument along two concrete examples: the French tragedy baroque or tragédie sanglante (Biet 2006; Biet and Fragonard 2009) on the one hand and the insights provided by a 2009 exhibition at L­ ondon’s ­National ­Gallery on 17th century Spanish religious art, The Sacred Made Real on the other. This second case taken from art history will serve as stepping stone to rethink the idea of baroque theatricality, and more specifically, its intermedial aspects. In the second part, I will evaluate the possibility of using this particular interpretation of the baroque along transhistorical lines by taking a closer look at the current discourse on the neo-baroque, now widely popular in humanities. In a third and final part, an analysis of the theatre of the Belgian company Abattoir Fermé indicates how early modern theatre can provide help in understanding contemporary postdramatic theatre as defined by the German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_005

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

49

Terms such as ‘immersion’, ‘visuality’ and ‘intermediality’ are easily and ­often used when one tries to describe artistic practices by artists as diverse as Romeo Castellucci (Crombez 2008), Pippo Delbono (Vanhaesebrouck 2009), Abattoir Fermé (Vanhaesebrouck 2012) or Crew (Vanhoutte and Wynants 2011), to name just but a few haphazard examples. It is on the basis of these characteristics that the qualification ‘baroque’ is used as an analytical term to describe and understand these specific theatrical ‘regimes’. Even though these artists do not share the same language or aesthetics, it seems that they all aim at creating a ‘borderline’ experience during which the spectator—or visitor—is immersed in a visual and sensory universe different from his own. This ambition is of course far from new. As I will argue, early modern baroque theatre (16th—17th century) aimed at a similar liminal experience, be it through completely different means and in a completely different contextual environment. In this article I would like to investigate the similarities and transitions between early modern baroque theatricality on the one hand and the immersive experience aimed for in some contemporary performances on the other. In other words: can the increasingly popular analytical category of ‘the neo-baroque’ help us to re-evaluate recent developments in contemporary (postmodern) theatre? Within the broad fields of cultural history and cultural analysis, a very rich and constantly expanding body of literature has developed over the last decade, with studies exploring neo-baroque tendencies in visual arts (Lambert 2009; Purgar 2009), investigating the link between the (neo-)baroque and Latin American art (Sarduy 1975; Sarduy 1978; Kaup and Zamora 2006; Kaup 2012; Zamora 2006) or between the neo-baroque and modernism in Latin ­American literature (Salgado 2011). Other authors have analyzed Islamic art in term of the baroque and neo-baroque (Marks 2010) or have written about the use of metatheatrical strategies in African American fiction in, for example, the work of John Edgar Wideman and Percival Everett (Feith 2009). Other author have used the term ‘neo-baroque’ to describe the formal qualities of present-day popular entertainment—especially in the work of Angela Ndalianis (2004) and Omar Calabrese (1992)—insisting on the importance of baroque aspects such as polycentrism, seriality, intertextuality, hypertextuality, etc. Both Calabrese and Ndalianis use this semantic frame of reference in their analysis of different emanations of contemporary pop culture, such as movies like The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999), Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) and many others. However, the question then would be if the word ‘neo-baroque’ could be considered as an adequate term to categorize and describe these contemporary performance practices. In this article, I will therefore defend the thesis that the baroque can be considered a conceptual tool that allows us to describe

50

Vanhaesebrouck

a particular mode of theatrical representation in more precise terms, rather than as a historical category. The baroque, I will argue, is characterized by a tension or co-existence of two seeminlgly contradictory phenomena: immersion and metatheatricality. At the same time, this approach allows me to leave behind the idea that the neo-baroque would be a reconstitution or a reminiscence of its early modern variant and thus a simple reiteration of a particular episode taken from art and theatre history, a popular misunderstanding that is at the basis of the current popularity of ‘baroque’ historical reconstructions of 17th century plays, like for example Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme ­(“version originale et intégrale de 1670”), by Vincent Dumestre, Benjamin Lazar and Le Poème Harmonique (2005), in which artists recreate the presupposedly original circumstances of representation. An important part of neo-baroque studies has focused on the inherent semiotic characteristics of neo-baroque cultural practices. However, I will argue that rather than being a sign language, the neo-baroque is foremost a liminal experience, a performative in-between-state (Schechner 66–70). I will first try to provide a sketch of baroque theatricality, while at the same time paying attention to the problematic aspects of an all-too-easy adaptation to contemporary performing arts. This sketch will be far from complete. Some specific problems immediately related to the concept of baroque theatricality will not be tackled, such as for example, the striking effect (of utmost importance to understand early modern theatre), the concept of camp (Vanhaesebrouck 2010) and the baroque’s relation vis-à-vis mannerism (Falguières 2004). Rather than providing the ultimate analysis of baroque theatricality, the ambition of this article is to present first a conceptual exercise indicating possible critical problems as well as opportunities for a new, historically grounded understanding of contemporary performing arts.

Defining Baroque

The baroque is everything and nothing. Even as a historical category it is a very complex and problematic term.1 Academics have struggled to reach a consensus with regards to the baroque’s defining principles. Approaches differ and offer different perspectives, but attempts at defining the term often remain implicit or are of negative (or are at least of evaluative) nature. In this essay, the baroque will be approached as a fundamentally paradoxical, liminal experience that is defined by the co-existence of metatheatricality and i­ mmersion. 1 Levaillain (2003) and Snyder (2005) both offer interesting insights on these discussions.

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

51

The baroque is in the first place a self-reflexive experience, ­questioning its own intermedial and theatrical nature. This position aligns with current ­research on the baroque, more specifically on the ideas of theatricality and self-­referentiality (Egginton 2009), on intermediality and bel composto (Careri 1995), and, more generally, on the exploration of representation as a staged event. However, let us start by having a closer look at the problems with regards to the definition of the term. This complexity is related to a number of questions. First, the baroque does not refer to a homogenous style or aesthetical category. Rather is it a patchwork of styles and characteristics of different if not opposing tendencies, an amalgam in which the highly focused realism of Caravaggio takes sides with the sculptural extravaganza of Bernini. Second, baroque does not correspond to a homogenous, clearly identifiable geographic entity. For example, Rembrandt’s work is generally not described as ‘baroque’, even though it bears the characteristics that are commonly associated with the baroque (think of the highly focused theatricalisation at work in his paintings). The same accounts for the 17th century religious visual art in Spain. In the catalogue of The Sacred Made Real (Bray 2009), a recent exhibition on this specific historical corpus that will be discussed in a next paragraph, the term is not used at all, even though these works too bear utterly ‘baroque’ characteristics, or, to put it more accurately, envision a ‘baroque’ impact on the viewer. The baroque is thus a term that is difficult to define. It seems to coincide with a different historical period depending on the geographical context. Likewise, the baroque does not seem to coincide with a uniform style. Diversity is its essential characteristic. Or, more correctly, within the current artistic discourse, there seems to be a consensus on which characteristics might be considered as typically ‘baroque’ (such as the interplay between illusion and reality, its performative modus operandi, polycentrism and seriality, its outspoken theatricality), whether it is performing arts or visual arts. However, these characteristics are not equally or uniformly present in all ‘baroque’ phenomena. The definition of what might be described as ‘baroque’ can only be a relative one, of which the parameters change in degree and in combination. Not only is ‘the baroque’ a highly complex term that seems to escape a clear and straightforward definition, it has a whole string of negative associations: the baroque is bizarre, extravagant, and erratic. Some find it kitschy and consider it a degenerate version of Renaissance or—as in France, where baroque in some contexts is demeaningly called ‘pre-classical’—as a barbarian, imperfect prefiguration of the classical pantheon that would succeed it. In his seminal Social History of Art (1951), Arnold Hauser points out that these persistent pejorative connotations are the product of an art history predominantly

52

Vanhaesebrouck

informed by 18th century rationalism and neo-classicist taste2 and too easily perceived as “merely the tokens of illogicality and lack of structure.” Hauser pointed out that these advocates of classicist taste: … see only the volumes and pilasters with nothing to support, the architraves and walls bent and warped, as if they were made of pasteboard, the figures illuminated artificially and conducting themselves unnaturally, as on stage, the sculptures with their search for the illusionistic surface effects, which belong by right to painting, and which, as the critics have emphasized, should remain its preserve. hauser 61

A number of presuppositions tend to reappear constantly in the discourse on baroque art. The baroque would be chaotic and illogical, not well thought through, out of balance. Furthermore, its preoccupations would be exclusively artificial, immaterial and thus illusionistic, and, first and foremost, it ­contaminates, damages the pristine ontology—the often debated medium specificity—of the different art forms. The baroque, so it goes, disintegrates, or blurs the differences between distinctive media. Rather than focusing on the materiality of the medium itself, as would defend Clement Greenberg who considered medium specificity as a state of ideal purity, baroque art addresses goals external to itself: it aims at a sensory, immersive experience, or in other cases, it is solely associated with its goal of (religious) propaganda. However, the very idea of medium specificity has been subjected to critique throughout the second half of the 20th century by, for example, Marshall McLuhan in his seminal 1964 book Understanding Media. In that book, he explained that a medium is specific through its effect, and not through its content. More recently W.J.T. Mitchell (1994) argued that, even for abstract painting (the art form so heavily favoured by Greenberg), this idea of medial purity is nothing but an illusion. The baroque and its historical legacy constitute a true challenge to this discussion. As a conceptual rather than an art historical category, ‘the baroque’ could thus contribute to a better understanding of contemporary performing arts and its position vis-à-vis the ongoing intermedialisation of different cultural practices. The baroque as a concept constitutes a true challenge to the paradigm of performance studies, as it seems to defy the very notion of medium specificity, while at the same time adding more precise insights to the discussions on intermediality. The baroque operates in the twilight zone between performing arts 2 See: Lessing, Winckelmann, Burckhardt, and Groce.

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

53

and visual art, constantly questioning its own representational nature. Indeed, even though the baroque cultural objects and practices cannot be reduced to a homogenous style or a clearly identifiable aesthetical category, they share one common feature: their medial self-awareness. Rules and conventions are of utmost importance within the specific visual culture of the baroque. The baroque is essentially about playing with rules, showing them, making them explicit and, where necessary, turning them upside down. It necessarily implies the presence of a meta-conscience, a medial self-awareness, both on the encoding and on the decoding side. It cannot be equated with an uncritical, almost senseless immersion. On the contrary, the baroque experience presupposes an awareness of medial codes and rules; it is a coded game with the limits of representation, a game in which the spectator is willingly implied in order to unveil the mechanisms of the game. This opposes the baroque to Mannerism in which the artist explicitly demonstrates his presupposed virtuosity and in which the spectator is kept at a distance. The baroque thus presupposes a meta-medial or—in the case of early modern theatre—a metatheatrical conscience by means of an immersive involvement of the spectator.

The Paradoxical Nature of Baroque from a Historical Perspective

In the introduction I have insisted that the baroque will not be used to describe a specific historical corpus or a particular style with a clear set of distinctive categories. Rather is it our aim to put forward the baroque as a conceptual tool that could allow us to (re)define a specific mode of representation in which theatricality and self-reflexivity serve as key-elements. Even though our main object of focus in this article is theatre, it might prove helpful to be aware of the fact that also in early modern baroque painting these two central categories are of utmost importance. Or, in other words, one should be aware of the fact that what is commonly described as baroque theatricality does not only concern early modern theatre but that it applies to the visual art of the same era as well. Both share a continuous experimentation with time and movement. Indeed, time and movement are crucial elements to further distinguish the baroque from Mannerism. Mannerism functions through the principles of accumulation and simultaneity; time is, as it were, frozen. Every mannerist painting is a technical and skilful demonstration of the possibilities of the medium itself. Pontormo demonstrates the possibilities of colour, Parmigianino experiments with scale in his Madonna with the Long Neck. Baroque visuality entails a momentary snapshot, a visual elaboration of one particular episode in which the dramatic tension of a story, is, as it were, condensed in one image

54

Vanhaesebrouck

Figure 2.1  Filippo Vitale, Martirio di santa Barbara e punizione del padre Dioscuro, first half of the 17th century Image from Ritorno al Barocco da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli, Artem, 2009.

or moment. The baroque is in other words fundamentally dynamic and utterly theatrical. In Martirio di santa Barbara e punizione del padre Dioscuro (The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara and Punishment of Father Discurio) [figure 2.1], a painting by the Neapolitan Filippo Vitale (1585–1650), Father Dioscuro is looking in awe at something that is not to be seen on the painting. The result is a highly dramatic and intense scene in which the depicted moment is only a part of a larger action. Or take Martirio di San Lorenzo (The Martyrdom of Saint Laurence) by Massimo Stanzione (1585–1658), a theatrical and action-driven scene that hints, via this single image, at a larger string of actions and performative moments. In some cases the spectator is very directly implied in the depicted dramatic scene. A considerable amount of baroque paintings consciously play with this immediate presence. An example of this wilful immersion of the spectator can be found in the then widely popular story of Judith and ­Holophernes. Not only is it a very popular trope in early modern theatre, the Biblical story concerns the beautiful Judith who, in an attempt to break the occupation of her city, decapitates the Babylonic general Holophernes. This story is represented on several paintings stemming from different early modern cultural spheres throughout Europe, as for example in Judith and Holophernes (1625) by Valentin de Boulogne [Figure  2.2] or Gerrit Pieters Sweelinck’s Judith Shows Holophernes’ Head to the People of Bethulia (1605). In both cases,

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

55

Figure 2.2 Valentin de Boulogne, Judith and Holphernes, 1625 © Web Gallery of Art

the ­spectator is hailed by the corpse-less head of Holophernes, his deadly eyes staring back at the one looking. The result of this choice is what Barbara Freedman described as the “purloined look”, as if the spectator is looking at the spectacle from within, “the result being a refusal of the observer’s stable position, a fascination with representing presence, an ability to stage its own staging, rethink, reframe, switch identifications, undo frames” (73). Both de Boulogne and P ­ ieters were fully aware of the rhetorical impact of this choice and willingly experimented with the conventions of representation itself. Moreover, the spectator was to be struck by the totally unmoved gaze of the woman chopping of Holophernes’ head in de Boulogne’s painting, or holding his head, as is the case in Sweelinck’s depiction. The same seemingly unmoved expression can be found in Filippo Vitale’s Giuditta e la fantesca con il capo mozzato di Oloforne ( Judith and her Maid with the Severed Head of Holophernes). All these examples make use of a very conventional, non-naturalistic representation of emotions, just as early modern actors based their practice on rhetorical devices borrowed from priests and lawyers, who both made use of an emphatic and even hyperbolical mode of speech. These paintings illustrate how the baroque mimetic machinery that tries to install a clear link between the depiction and the depicted reality can only

56

Vanhaesebrouck

function through the use of conventions. The baroque is an utterly performative paradigm, in the sense that it tries to install an effet du réel through nonnaturalistic, conventional depictions of real emotions, both in visual arts, and as we will see, in early modern theatre. Immersion, the term so often coined in the context of baroque visual culture, can only function through the use of a conventional and sometimes hyperbolical system of representation. The utterly cruel or hideous can only have an impact when combined with conventions that are readable and credible; only the conventions make the mimesis work. In baroque theatricality, artificiality is the ingredient that actually installs this effet du réel, permanently oscillating between sensuous immersion and medial self-reflexivity. The same theatrical mode of representation can be found in the early modern French baroque tragedy. This corpus of often extremely violent plays had long been ignored in the history of theatre (Biet 2006; Biet and Fragonard 2009). Highly imaginative plays like Tragédie française d’un More cruel envers son seigneur nommé Riviery, gentilhomme espagnol, sa damoiselle et ses enfants (anonymous, ca. 1610) (Biet 555–591), Les portugais infortunés (Nicolas Chrétien des Croix, 1608) (Biet 711–804) and other plays consist of a paratactic sequence of performative tableaux, a succession of violent but occasionally humorous moments standing in disconnected juxtaposition. La maccabée: Tragédie du martyre des sept frères et de Solomone leur mère (Jean de Virey) (Biet and Fragonard 132–181) for example consists literally of a non-narrative sequence of seven torture scenes. Using a pronouncedly visual theatrical language with exaggerated gestures borrowed from preachers and pleaders, the actors of that day appealed directly to their viewers’ sensationalism, to what the 17th century libertarian described in his remarkable text De l’usage de l’histoire (Saint-Réal) as “le plaisir du mal”, the pleasure one experiences—willingly or not—when standing eye to eye with vice. The viewer had to be overwhelmed by an accumulation of impressions, submerged. So, rather than aiming at the oftendiscussed catharsis (a key term in French classicist drama), these baroque tragedies aimed at a shock effect. And, again, this experience is two-fold: the shock articulates or stimulates the immersive experience proper to the baroque mode of theatricality. At the same time, it contributes to the very pleasure inherent to this experience, a pleasure that presupposes a self-reflexive awareness both on the part of the spectator as on the part of the performer. Here again, immersion and meta-theatrical reflection go hand in hand. Hence, these tragedies could be considered as another example of the ‘baroqueness’ inherent to early modern visual culture, the central parallel being the importance of the effet du réel: both painting and theatre insist on their own artificial nature, by means of conventional, non-naturalistic r­ epresentations of emotions or spectacular

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

57

(and often violent) visual tropes, while at the same time provoking a credible illusion of reality. The depicted violence is, in both cases, utterly realistic and highly spectacular at the same time. Two issues are important for understanding the corpus of French baroque tragedy, as its mode of representation was directly linked to the problem of ­religious violence. First, this theatre practice operated within the specific historical circumstances of the religious wars, a series of eight extremely violent conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that turned France into a battlefield in the second half of the 16th century. This violence also affected the ­visual culture of the time. Engravings of torture scenes and a variety of other ­aberrations (e.g. Richard Verstegan’s well-known Theatrum Crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (1587), or Antonio Gallonio’s 1591 Traité des instruments de martyre et des divers modes de supplice employés par les païens contre les chrétiens [figure 2.3]) were passed eagerly from hand to hand and were used as propaganda instruments; torture scenes were incorporated into theatre texts whether pertinent or not. When, in 1598, Henry iv issued the Edict of Nantes, which alongside religious tolerance also incorporated ‘le devoir d’oubli’ (mandatory amnesia), cultural representation became, more than ever, the avenue of choice for coming to terms with the recent violence (Biet 2006). Stage actors harked back to the Roman period, or situated their stories in the Far East, drawing a detour that allowed them to show the impermissible, the unrepresentable. Baroque tragedy played then the role the horror film plays today: they tried to portray what was legally and morally impermissible, to represent the unrepresentable, so that they could show what they hardly dared to imagine. It was not only the historical context that served as a motor for this ­hyperbolical and self-reflexive mode of representation, which is at the heart of baroque theatricality. The concrete physical circumstances were of utmost importance, too. Early modern French tragedy was often performed in the open air, for a public that by definition was distracted, and so whose attention had to be drawn to the stage with all kinds of hyperbolic language and striking effects. People used a scaffold or échafaud that could serve as well for theatre productions, executions and masses.3 Actors intentionally capitalized on the site’s triple function. The confusion between fake and real blood was eagerly manipulated: theatre was supposed to be a borderline experience, a deliberately confusing and hence baroque viewing experience in which spurious violence 3 For an elaborate description, please refer to Biet (2003). A dictionary from 1690 describes an ‘échafaud’ tellingly as ‘le petit théâtre que l’on dresse en une place publique, sur lequel on roue les criminels, on coupe la tête à un gentilhomme’ (Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel [1690] (Genève 1970). Cited in: Biet and Fragonard, Tragédies et récits de martyres, 86).

58

Vanhaesebrouck

Figure 2.3 Antonio Gallonio. Traité des instruments de martyr [1591] Grenoble 2002

could hardly be distinguished from real. Rather than being declamatory, this was an action-oriented theatre practice that tried to catch directly the viewers’ rapt gaze. In this confused reception lies exactly the essence of baroque theatricality: the tragédie sanglante is an experiment on the art of representation

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

59

itself, as this genre willingly embraced the confusion generated by this new art that was theatre. Each tragedy tried to find new ways to submerge the spectator into this fictional, nearly-real universe, while at the same time making explicit use of a highly conventional and emphatic mode of representation to express the violent emotions this public was not allowed to express or to represent. Hence, the exercise is always double and seemingly paradoxical: the baroque aims at an immersive experience while at the same time consciously investigating the codes of representations itself, permanently oscillating between metatheatrical distance and the pleasant (or disturbing) experience of this effet du réel.

The Baroque as an Intermedial “Regime”

The historical category of the baroque helps us to understand the paradoxical representational system of early modern theatre as well as the double-sided visual regime in early modern painting. Both cases illustrate the paradoxical nature of the depiction of religious violence, simultaneously spectacular and hyperrealistic. The very essence of baroque theatricality presupposes a realistic depiction of biblical passages (the Concile of Trente had decided that the depiction of religion should be credible in the first place), while at the same time trying to impress its spectator through a hyperbolical mode of representation. For this exact reason, the baroque might be described as a visual ‘regime’ that envisions a real impact on the spectator (and the pleasure connected to that impact) and simultaneously imposes a rigorous disciplining effect to his gaze. Hence, the baroque allows us to understand the crucial correlation between visual arts and theatre: both operate as performative regimes, installing an effet du réel through the hyperbolic use of realist effects. 17th century visual culture was a truly intermedial culture in which the category of baroque theatricality functioned as a central point of reference. Or put simply: painting and theatre aspired a similar impact on their spectator. This intermedial intertwinement was very nicely illustrated in a recent exhibition on Spanish religious art mainly from the 17th century. This exhibition, The Sacred Made Real, displayed both religious paintings and polychrome sculptures from the same century, which perfectly correspond to our understanding of the baroque performative regime. It illustrates one of the key issues within the expanding field of baroque studies, the bel composto theory developed by Bernini, which aimed at creating integrated, intermedial ­environments to heighten religious experience (Careri 1995; Deleuze 1993; Ndalianis 2004; Van Tuinen 2012). Neither the commercial blurb nor the very

60

Vanhaesebrouck

interesting catalogue (Bray 2009) use the word ‘baroque’, even though all the artworks at display originate from a ‘Baroque’ era and bear the very characteristics lined out in the preceding paragraphs. While entering the exhibition in the National Gallery in London, the spectator stumbled upon Saint-Franciscus in Ecstasy (1640) a magnificent painting by Francisco de Zurbarán. In a dark, empty space Saint-Franciscus is standing in a long brown monk’s gown, his eye lifted up. In this posture, he was discovered by Nicolas v in 1449, standing up and in a perfect state, untouched by death. Even though the painting is in the first place a reconstruction of a miraculous moment, it envisions first and foremost a theatrical impact on the spectator (partly caused by the life-size dimensions of the painting), rather than presenting a simple illustration of religious devotion. Zurbarán sought to bring about a sensuous impact on the spectator. Other paintings and sculptures in the exhibition illustrate the same envisioned strategy. But rather than bringing about a sense of ecstasy and devotion in the mind of the spectator, other paintings make use of a straight-forward shock-and-awe-strategy in which the wounds of Christ, saints and martyrs are depicted in an extremely realistic fashion. These art works, in which realism is employed as a striking effect, aim at rendering the suffering of Christ and others palpable, as sensuous as possible. Above all, this exhibition showed how early modern sculpture and painting were fundamentally intertwined and how Spanish art from the 17th ­century was in its most straightforward sense an intermedial art. It is no surprise then that painters such as Zurbarán learned their trade in the sculptor’s studio, painting skins and wounds on the wooden sculptures (Bray 2009; Dexter 1986), or that painters of polychrome sculptures studied the paintings of their colleagues and made use of painterly techniques to attain certain effects, such as the illusion of shadow. Most interestingly, painters often took those polychrome sculptures as the very subject of their work, trying to resort a threedimensional effect on a two-dimensional surface, and proving once again that the idea of medium specificity is a problematic concept from a historical point of view, too. Zurbarán, for example, wanted his painting Christ on the Cross (1627) to be hung in a dark porch of a church in Sevilla, to have the same theatrical impact as a polychrome, near-life sculpture. Rather than suggesting the presence of a human body, he wanted his painting to look like a sculpture. The cloth covering the loins of Christ looks stiff and hard, as if it were marble rather than fabric. This effect is not the result of lack of talent on behalf of the artist, but rather is a consciously-envisioned sculptural effect. With this painting, Zurbarán takes the blurry distinction between image and sculpture, between representation and depicted reality, as an experimental starting point for his painter’s craft. In other words, the confusion on the representative status itself

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

61

of this image constituted the essence, rather than a seemingly unproblematic suggestion of realism. Here again, an artist takes the rules of his art, its conventions as the very heart, as the starting point of his work. Again, we have here an illustration of the quintessence of baroque ­theatricality at work: a conscious (intermedial) experimentation with representation itself. Indeed, the baroque aims at a visual confusion that constitutes the very essence (and pleasure) of being a spectator. It is a play in which rules are deliberately circumvented and thus thematised as a contingent mimetic convention: the baroque is thus, as I have explained, all but an art without rules. It wants the spectator to be submerged in what is being depicted, while at the same time doubting the status of what is depicted. It aims at the admiration for the technical virtuosity of the execution. So, rather than as a precise historical category, the baroque should be considered as a theoretical concept which describes a particular mode of theatrical representation that functions by means of a complex and multi-faceted tension between the pleasure of ­immersion on the one hand and a permanent meta-theatrical self-awareness on the other hand. Whether a painting or a performance is the object of his gaze, the baroque spectator both indulges the theatrical experiences and is permanently playing with it. The very idea of the neo-baroque, then, does not refer to a presupposed reappearance of baroque visual traits in postmodernism. It is a term that allows us to indicate the possibility of operationalizing baroque as a concept in contexts different from the historical baroque.

Neo-baroque Theatricality?

In their famous installation Fucking Hell, the Chapman brothers Jack and ­Dinos present eight mini-assemblages, each one presenting a sort of atrocity exhibition. They are highly detailed hyperbolic renditions of Goya’s h ­ orrific universe, somewhere in between Apocalypse Now and The Silence of the Lambs. Their installations are baroque exercises in the proper sense of the word; each one is an experiment in representation, as all eight directly tackle the search for an immediate impact on its spectator, while at the same time questioning the codes underlying this impact. Hyperbolic representation is in this case not just a question of exaggeration; it is, so to say, a meta-medial enterprise, an attempt to question the representation of horror, violence and cruelty. The installations of Fucking Hell operate through “sensational images” that seek to provoke an impact on the senses, to be extreme in their violence, their sensuality and their frankness, “subverting all categories and overflowing all definitions, perhaps also deliberately offending ‘good taste’” (Codognato 24).

62

Vanhaesebrouck

Here too, the desire to overwhelm, to impress, or even to shock the spectator goes permanently h ­ and-in-hand with a metatheatrical self-awareness. And again, this ­metatheatricality serves as a motor for the perceptual confusion ­experienced by the spectator. And it is exactly this confusion that makes the immersive experience possible. Fucking Hell aims at what the curators of the exhibition Barock (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina Napoli, 2009), in which this i­nstallation was recently shown, describe as “sensationalism”: they aim at a willing disorientation of the viewer, they try to confuse his perceptual system, just as the historical baroque aimed at a destabilisation of the spectator’s gaze. The baroque, then, is about demonstrating the contingency of the visible, rather than representing the invisible: it allows us to see the fundamentally constructed nature of our surrounding reality. Exactly this ambition constitutes the nexus of what the German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann described as “post-dramatic theatre” (Lehmann 1999). In Postdramatisches Theater, Lehmann explains that the essence of postmodern theatre is the wilful deconstruction of all dramatic (Aristotelean) conventions, such as narrative linearity organized along the logic of causality, the presence of identifiable characters whose actions are driven by explainable psychological motivations and the figuration of a clearly identifiable fictional universe on the stage.4 Rather than the actual realization of a dramatic text on a stage (the performance thus being nothing more than the materialization of the predetermined artistic intention as it is to be found in the text), Lehmann argues postdramatic theatre is a sensitive visual experience in which the text is nothing more than a peripheral element (sound, image, body, and so on) and which aims at destabilizing the spectator’s frame of reference. Rather than understanding or interpreting, being a postdramatic spectator is about living an experience, a theatrical ritual shared with other spectators. At the same time postdramatic theatre productions fundamentally question their own representational status, insisting on the constructed nature of the theatrical reality produced on the stage. In the last part of this essay, I will explain that the baroque in contemporary performing arts is to be found in this postdramatic theatre which aims at creating an immersive experience, while at the same time demonstrating and questioning its own representational nature. In his recent book The Theater of Truth (2010), William Egginton analyses the basic traits of baroque theatre and offers useful insights to understand the link between theatre and the baroque in a more systematic way. Without referring himself to the idea of postdramatic theatre, he puts forward all necessary elements that will enable me to come 4 See also: Dupont (2007).

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

63

back to heart of the matter: the link between the neo-baroque as an analytical category on the one hand, and postdramatic theatre on the other. Egginton emphasizes the idea that theatricality—or better, the fundamental awareness of theatricality—is a crucial and integral part of baroque ­aesthetics: “[the] baroque makes a theatre out of truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an effect of the appearances from which we seek to free it” (2). In other words, this entails a permanent awareness of the fundamentally contingent status of the reality that surrounds us. Rather than obscuring the truth, as is commonly thought, baroque shows via artifice that there is some truth just behind the artifice. Egginton makes in this context a distinction between what he describes as the ‘major’ and the ‘minor’ strategy of the baroque. The major strategy “assumes the existence of a veil of appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a space opening just beyond those appearances where truth resides” (3). Phenomena such as the trompe l’oeil or anamorphosis are the externalization of a certain “promise of fulfilment beyond the surface.” The minor strategy takes the major strategy too seriously: “it nestles into the representation and refuses to refer it to some other reality, but instead affirms it, albeit ironically, as its only reality” (6). In other words, the distinction between the representation and what is represented is willingly blurred, “not, however, in order to lead us further astray from ‘reality itself’, but rather to make us aware, to remind us that we are always, at any level, involved with mediation.” The baroque tries to “engage or compromise the viewer in the represented space—to try to blend or bleed the distinction between the space of the spectator and that of the representation” (16). The essence of the baroque, in other words, is the game with the limits themselves, with the porosity between representation and what is represented, or between the reality represented on stage and the reality of the spectators, as is the case in our example of the French early modern tragedy. Both the major and minor strategies are an integral part of the theatrical medium on its profoundest level and, more specifically, they are at the heart of these practices described by Hans-Thies Lehmann as postdramatic. Theatrical representation is supported by and functions by means of a constructed reality, but at the same time, it willingly reveals this construction. Even more, the revelation of its constructed nature is an integral part of the pleasure desired and experienced by the spectator. No wonder then that Walter Moser, in his ­introduction to Résurgences baroques (2001), points out that if one takes its metatheatrical dimension as its very essence (rather than its presupposed irregularity or exuberance), the baroque is omnipresent because of new available technological means: “the recent development of the media we have at our disposal allow us only today to realize the aesthetic potential of the

64

Vanhaesebrouck

­ istorical baroque to the fullest” (17).5 At the same time, Moser prefers the idea h of ­“resurgences baroques” to the term ‘neo-baroque’. The latter hints at some sort of cyclical process, as if a specific visual culture, after a period of predominance within a particular historical context, falls into a state of hibernation only to reappear in an identical form in a different context. “There is no preconceived or perfectly conserved idea of the baroque” says Moser, “that would allow whatsoever contemporary phenomenon to recall and reactivate that very same idea” (26).6 In other words, he sincerely doubts the usefulness of attempting to define such a category as neo-baroque in formal terms, he would prefer a mobile, multifaceted and modifiable interpretation of the baroque, rather than limiting specific cultural practices to their presupposed ‘neo-­ baroque’ nature: “the baroque can maybe be thought of as a relational and positional object that can be used in a strategic, agonistic or conflictual way within the broader cultural field” (30).7 For Moser, the baroque is a fundamentally dynamic category that can only be defined in relation to other cultural practices. But, more importantly, the baroque is part of a larger cyclical proc­ ess and is reactivated in times of what one could describe as representational doubt, at moments where the idea of representation is questioned in itself, just as postdramatic theatre criticizes the possibility of a coherent, stable system of representation that would enable us to represent a self-contained fictional reality on the stage. Postdramatic theatre is inherently baroque, I would argue, as it is a systematic self-reflexion on the representational nature of theatre itself, while at the same time aiming at the creation of a shared live experience hic et nunc in which the immersion provokes the spectator to question the theatrical reality as well as his actual reality. Hence, postdramatic theatre is—just as French baroque tragedy was—a form of ‘organized doubt’, an artistic practice through which the spectator is invited to reconsider the contingent nature of his reality. Postdramatic theatre is not in the first place, as is commonly thought, a deconstruction of all traditions past: in fact, it is an attempt to reactivate the regime of baroque theatricality as I have described in the preceding paragraphs. In the last part of this essay, I will illustrate this transhistorical insight through a modest analysis of the work of Abattoir Fermé, a Belgian theatre

5 “Le développement de nos moyens médiatiques nous permet seulement aujourd’hui de pleinement réaliser le potentiel esthétique du baroque historique.” 6 “Il n’y a pas d’identité prédonnée et conservée du baroque que n’importe quelle contemporanéité aurait à sa disposition pour la rappeler et la réactiver telle quelle.” 7 “Le baroque peut-être pensé comme un objet relationnel et positionnel se prêtant à des usages stratégiques, agonistiques et conflictuels dans le domaine de la culture.”

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

65

company whose work serves as a perfect stepping stone to understand the link between the baroque and the postdramatic. The work of Abattoir Fermé shows us that nothing comes from nothing, that every artistic practice has its own unique genealogy, even when this only becomes apparent post factum. As I will demonstrate, a common line runs between Abattoir’s work and early modern baroque theatricality, with its fascination for the abject and the sensational; in it, the visual serves as guide, not the verbal. Indeed, Abattoir Fermé’s theatre aims at creating experiences in which the performative and the ritual go hand in hand.

Abattoir Fermé or the Postdramatic Baroque

The work of the Flemish theatre company Abattoir Fermé corresponds in an interesting way to the definition put forward by Egginton.8 It is a theatre ­collective operating since 1999 from the city of Mechelen, Belgium. Under the instigation of the director Stef Lernous and his companion Joost Vandecasteele (who has now left the company), the company produced a whole string of utterly visual, often violent and sometimes erotic plays at an impressive and almost frenetic rhythm, of which Galapagos (2004), Indie (2005), Tinseltown (2006), Tourniquet (2007) [figure 2.4], Mythobarbital (2008) [Figure 2.5], Snuff (2009) and, Monkey (2012) [Figure 2.6] (a visual non-text spectacle based on the lives and writings of the 17th century libertine writer John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester) are among the most noteworthy. Rather than being stories, these are experiences in which observers are submerged into a shimmery universe, somewhere between death and life, between fiction and reality, between camp and ambitious Gesamstkunst. Clearly identifiable characters are seldom if ever portrayed; identities change continuously, are fundamentally intangible. Constantly oscillating between ironic camp (Vanhaesebrouck 2012) and complex references taken from art history or peripheral cultural practices, the work of this company directly incarnates the preoccupations of early modern baroque. It is not its exuberance, to which this work is all too easily reduced, that constitutes its heart. Rather is it an exercise on theatricality itself, it is a practice that willingly explores the essential traits and conventions underlying the medium itself. So, even though Lernous and his compagnons de route aim for a sensuous immersion of their spectator into their bizarre universe, a metatheatrical ambition is at the core of their work, as they experiment with the 8 A more systematic comparison between the work of Abattoir Fermé and early modern baroque can be found in Vanhaesebrouck (2009), on which a part of the current section has been based.

66

Vanhaesebrouck

Figure 2.4 Tourniquet. Directed by Stef Lernous, produced by Abattoir Fermé (2007) © Stef Lernous

codes underlying theatrical representation itself. How diverse their different productions might be, they share a common goal: the desire to show the excesses of our proper cultural imagination, to confront us with the no-go zones of our cultural memory.

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

Figure 2.5  Mytjobarbital. Directed by Stef Lernous, produced by Abattoir Fermé (2008) © Stef Lernous

67

68

Vanhaesebrouck

Figure 2.6 Monkey. Directed by Stef Lernous, produced by Abattoir Fermé (2011) © Stef Lernous

Abattoir Fermé’s theatre work can be considered as a kind of neo-baroque theatre, an updated version of baroque spectacle as found in early modern tragédie sanglante, but equally in the genre of the Restoration Spectacular and its predilection for effects and machines (the towing scene in Tinseltown). They are all cultural practices that eagerly court the viewer’s gaze. Indeed, Abattoir Fermé’s theatre is a summons to the viewer. This becomes an explicit theme in its own right in the Chaos trilogy, consisting of the plays Indie, Tinseltown and Lalaland (2007). In a post-apocalyptic universe, Lernous and Vandecasteele trot out a carnival parade of freaks and other colourful personages, drawing a picture of the other side of our film industry. They make us aware of the eager gaze with which we are drawn in the real and fictional reality that surrounds us. Abattoir Fermé’s presentations do more than manipulate viewers’ gaze (sometimes intentionally blinding it, as in the masterful closing scene of Mythobarbital), they target their entire sensory mechanism. The viewer must be submerged in sensory experience, must be made to want to surrender. That is the heart of Abattoir Fermé: exuberant figurative language forces viewers to rely on their own resources, on their own senses. Profusion and chaos end in contemplation. Everything in this work revolves around immersion, as if you were to dive into a swimming pool and suddenly become cut off from the world around you. Abattoir Fermé withdraws the viewer from everyday reality, offering a baroque

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

69

borderline experience, a space-time experience in which the parameters of daily life are temporarily suspended. We viewers have no other option than to disconnect the control mechanism that stops us from losing ourselves in a ritual spectacle. Rather than ironic distance, we are immersed in a labyrinthine structure in which viewers must find their own exit. In that universe, camp’s ugliness goes hand in hand with the exalted and the sublime that are starting to play an increasingly important role in the company’s work. Beauty and infinite ugliness are just a fraction of an inch apart. Mythobarbital [Figure 5] is a similar baroque total experience in which text is one of the least interesting aids, as the play consists of images, or more precisely tableaux vivants, in which zombies solemnly wander through a haunting universe reminiscent of David Lynch. In a world seemingly devoid of life, three characters drink coffee, wait, smoke, perform all sorts of mysterious, uncanny actions, as if the outside reality only were a distant reality for these living dead. The viewer is taken into a sleepless and alienating universe, consisting of a sequence of ‘tableaux’ balancing on the border between rest, solemnity and camp irony. Vacant seemingly useless actions follow one upon the other right up to a Dionysian grape ritual and a cleansing, but ice-cold shower. The viewer is put in an associative current of thought comparable to that in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). You can only get a grasp on the individual fragments; you cannot decipher the overarching line however much you try. After the phenomenal apotheosis to the thumping sound of Kreng, there is a moment of silence in the room, as if the public needs to become reacclimatised to its reality, as if each viewer first needs to his body to be sure it is still there. This has nothing to do with escapism. Mythobarbital lets reality return hard. That fact in itself—that you can deal with reality by setting its limits—is the essence of the neo-baroque experience. The same question reappears throughout the oeuvre of the company: what place occupies the individual within (Western) cultural history, what are the foundational elements of our social and individual identity, and, more specifically, what is the position of the outsider, who differs only in minor traits from ourselves? The work of Abattoir Fermé shows us that normality is only a contingent construction and it confronts its spectator with a fundamentally transitive world in which the sacred and the profane, the erotic and the hideous go hand in hand. All these questions are at the heart of their theatrical rituals making use of ancient cultural forms as well as postmodern subcultural practices. And, in that sense, the work of Abattoir Fermé clearly illustrates the basic traits of the baroque as a conceptual rather than a historical category, knowing that none of their performances makes an explicit connection with the early modern baroque. The universe of Abattoir Fermé aims for theatrical impact, as it tries to problematize the presupposed distinction

70

Vanhaesebrouck

between the scenic reality and the reality of the spectator. Even more, the porosity between the spectator’s reality and the artistic reality constitutes the very pleasure of being a spectator. Hence, the work of Abattoir Fermé could be described as an ongoing research on theatricality itself. On one level, it should be considered as a permanent investigation of the nature of representation itself. Every play is, to use their own words, a “fictional documentary entirely based on reality.” Their work deliberately aims at a porosity between what is shown and what is represented, and between the fictional reality of the stage and the reality of the spectators, it permanently aims at a fusion, an integration of reality and fantasy (no wonder then that Lernous’ favourite work of art is Alice in ­Wonderland), and, hence, at a disintegration of the distinction comfortably keeping apart reality and fiction. On a second, more technical level, Abattoir Fermé has ambitions to investigate the possible interferences between theatre and cinema. ­Lernous is not only a notorious B-cinema devotee, but the work of his company is also highly cinematic as it mainly consists of a non-hierarchical accumulation of performative images. With the project Cinérama (2008), Lernous made a first attempt to translate his theatrical language into cinema, or, formulated the other way around, he tried to find an adequate theatrical language to make his own performative cinema, just as the Spanish early modern painters tested their craft on polychrome sculptures and vice versa. From this aforementioned porosity stems the second trait of Abattoir’s baroque: it is a form of organized doubt, it consciously creates confusion, it aims at the disintegration of fixed norms and values. And, again, it is exactly this doubt that constitutes the pleasure of being a spectator. Finally, the baroque theatricality of this company operates by means of a conventional and hyperbolic mode of representation, as their work consciously investigates the codes underlying Western theatre history in general and acting principles in particular, permanently oscillating between the burlesque and the deadly serious. Conventionality is at the heart of baroque mimesis, it is the condition sine qua non that makes the baroque immersion function and this very fact should not, as I have tried to show, be in contradiction with the metatheatrical awareness inherent to baroque art. The suggestion here is not that Abattoir Fermé itself defines its own work in terms of baroque or neo-baroque, nor that this oeuvre would be a sort of reconstitution of the historical baroque. Rather, I would want to defend the main thesis that this work—too often reduced to its peripheral characteristics of violence, camp, exuberance and eroticism—can be situated on a longer historical thread, a line that could be described as the ‘baroque’ but that, first and foremost, articulates itself as a meta-artistic enterprise that is all but self-contained, that simultaneously stimulates immersion

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

71

and metatheatrical self-awareness. And it is exactly at this point where the work of Abattoir Fermé reveals itself as postdramatic and, hence, neo-baroque: it questions the essence of its own medial status, it is a conscious experimentation with this one mechanism so crucial to theatrical representation. The idea of doing ‘as if’ or, to use Richard Schechner’s idea (Schechner 2002), that performing is all about “showing doing”, that it is a conscious reflexion on what it means to do things with words and/or images. Most importantly, this selfreflexive exercise reveals to us that our perception of the world surrounding us is nothing more or less than a fundamentally contingent reality that is both unstable and inaccessible. It is at this very point that the intersection between neo-baroque theatricality and postdramatic theatre articulates itself, as both try to represent, by means of a shared live experience, these realities that we do not dare to imagine. Conclusion As we have seen, the baroque cannot be reduced to its presupposed traits of opulence or extravaganza: these are only minor traits of an art form that tries to represent what cannot be represented, that tries to express what is inexpressible, that tries to question the nature and status of its own r­ epresentational system. Hence, the baroque aims not at a critiqueless, s­ enseless immersion of the ­spectator as is often thought. It aims for a conscious reactivation of the spectator’s gaze, making him, through the use of conventions, aware of the conventionality of his own perspective and that of his Umwelt. Maybe the ultimate example of contemporary baroque is to be found in the Neapolitan Madre, in the museum’s permanent collection (it was, ironically enough, not explicitly included in the aforementioned Barock exhibition): Dark Brother (2006) by Anish Kapoor, a rectangular, pitch-black surface on the museum floor. At first sight the visitor thinks that the black surface is the start of an immense depth, of an enormous volume of which the dimension cannot be measured. It is only when taking a closer look that one sees that its surface is flat, and, hence, that there is no depth or three dimensionality. Abattoir Fermé too wants to ­confront his ­spectator with his own frame of reference, with his own perspective. It tries to destabilize the sensory apparatus of the spectator, immersing him in a ritual experience both temporary and spectacular. Via the exuberant formal language and the hypercodified acting language, the spectator can only fall back on his own pre-conceived perspective. It is exactly here that lies the essence of the baroque experience: not in the spectacular, fictional immersion, but in its introspective, self-reflexive consequences.

72

Vanhaesebrouck

The theatre of Abattoir Fermé shows us that there is profound link between postdramatic theater and the neo-baroque. Even more, its theatre reveals to us that the term postdramatic is somewhat of a problem when seen from a historical perspective (Lehmann is aware of this problem, but chooses not to address it in his Postdramatisches Theater). Anyone regarding postdramatic theatre as a new phase in the history of theatre quickly encounters problems with history. But anyone who starts digging in the same history—thus in the official version in which an extensive dramatic period, extending from the renaissance to deep into the 20th century, invariably precedes postdramatic theatre—will encounter numerous theatre practices with many similarities to postdramatic theatre. Baroque theatre, which flourished in Europe at the end of the 16th and at the start of the 17th centuries, has much in common with the performative practices we know today. Thus rightly so French theatre historian Romain Jobez (Jobez 2012) speaks teasingly of pre-postdramatic theatre. Behind the line of balanced, classical, Aristotelian discipline—in which the viewer must be lead as unambiguously as possible to the desired interpretation—hides a pronounced performative and visual practice. An alternative historical line runs from early modern baroque spectacle to the work of Abattoir Fermé. Its practice does not necessarily correspond to theory (classical and neo-classical normative poetry were no more than a theoretical fiction until deep in the 18th century). Sometimes this line seems to shelter behind the broad shoulders of official history, sometimes it steps forward in panoply, as in Romanticism, Surrealism, post-ww i variety theatre or in the work of Abattoir Fermé. But most of all, it reveals us that behind this dominant perspective on theatre history, in which the history of theatre is too often reduced to the history of modern drama, lurks an alternative practice of which the postdramatic theatre is not a new phase but a reactivation of an alternative, non-narrative and highly visual genealogy that directly stems from early modern baroque.

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Biet, Christian. “Naissance sur l’échaffaud ou la tragédie du début du XVIIe siècle.” ­Intermédialités 1 (2003): 75–105. Biet, Christian (Ed.). Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècle). Paris: Laffont, 2006. Biet, Christian and Marie-Madelein Fragonard (Eds.). Tragédies et récits de martyres en France ( fin XVIe siècle—début XVIIe siècle). Paris: Garnier, 2009.

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

73

Bray, Xavier. “The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700.” The Sacred Made Real. London: National Gallery, 2009. 15–43. Calabrese, Omar. Neo-baroque: A Sign of the Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Careri, Giovanni. Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Careri, Giovanni and Ferrante Ferranti. Baroques. Paris: Editions Citadelles & M ­ azenod, 2002. Cicelyn, Eduardo. “The Barock Affair.” Barock. Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Ed. Eduardo Cicelyn and Maria Codognato. Naples: Electa, 2009. 11–17. Cicelyn, Eduardo and Maria Codognato (eds.) Barock: Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Naples: Electa, 2009. Codognato, Mario, and Luigi Ficacci. “Barock Sensation.” Barock: Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Ed. Eduardo Cicelyn and Maria Codognato. Naples: Electa, 2009. 19–33. Crombez, Thomas. Het Anti-theater van Antonin Artaud. Een onderzoek naar de veralgemeende transgressie toegepast op het werk van Romeo Castellucci en de Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Gent: Academie Press, 2008. Dexter, E.C. The Relationship Between the Arts of Painting and Sculpture in SeventeenthCentury Spain 1600–1675 (2 vol.) M.Phil thesis. London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1986. Dupont, Florence. Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidentale. Paris: Abier, 2007. Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. ­Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Falguières, Patricia. Le maniérisme. Une avant-garde au XVIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Feith, Michel. “Blueprint for Studies in the African American (Neo)Baroque.” Transatlantica 1 (2009) 24 November 2012. http://transatlantica.revues.org/4266. Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Gallonio, Antonio. Traité des instruments de martyre. Grenoble: Editions Jérôme ­Millon, 2002 [1591]. Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. London: Routledge, 1999 [1951]. Jobez, Romain. Le théâtre baroque allemand et français: Le droit dans la literature. Paris: Garnier Classiques, 2012. Kaldunski, Nick, Stef Lernous and Nathalie Tabury (eds.). Abattoir Fermé. Anatomie. Tien jaar slachten. Tielt: Lannoo, 2009. Kaup, Monika. Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film. Virginia: Virginia University Press, 2012.

74

Vanhaesebrouck

Kaup, Monika and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Lambert, Greg. On the (New) Baroque. Aurora: Davis Group Publishers, 2009. Lehmann, Hans-Thiess. Postdramatic Theatre (translated and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby). London: Routledge, 2006 [1999]. Levillain, Henriette. Qu’est-ce que le baroque? Paris: Klincksiek, 2003. Marks, Laura U. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. ­Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Moser, Walter. “Baroque: l’anachronie du contemporain.” Résurgences baroques: Les trajectories d’un processus transculturel. Eds. Walter Moser and Nicolas Goyer B ­ ruxelles: La Lettre Volée, 2001. 7–20. Moser, Walter and Nicolas Goyer (Eds.). Résurgences baroques. Les trajectories d’un processus transculturel. Bruxelles: La Lettre Volée, 2001. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. ­Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Niola, Mario. “Baroque Becomes Naples.” Barock. Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Ed. Eduardo Cicelyn and Maria Codognato. Naples: Electa, 2009. 61–71. Purgar, Kresimir. The Neo-Baroque Subject. Zagreb: Meander Media, 2009. Saint-Réal, César Vichard de. De l’usage de l’histoire. Eds. René Démoris and Christian Meurillon. Paris: GERL 17/18, 2001 [1671]. Salgado, Cesar Augusto. From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima. ­Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Sapio, Maria (ed.). Ritorno al barocco: Da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli (two volumes). N ­ aples: Electa, 2009. Sarduy, Severo. Barocco. Paris: Editions du Seui, 1975. ———. “The Baroque and the Neobaroque.” Latin America and Its Literature. Ed. C ­ esar Fernandez Moreno. Madrid: Siglio XXI Editores, 1978. 115–132. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction (Second edition). London: Routledge, 2006. Synder, Jon R. L’estetica del Barocco. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. Vanhaesebrouck, Karel. “The Greedy Gaze: On Abattoir Fermé’s Neo-Baroque Theatre.” Abattoir Fermé: Anatomie. Tien jaar slachten. Eds. Nick Kaldunski, Stef Lernous and Nathalie Tabury. Tielt: Lannoo, 2009. 128–135. Vanhaesebrouck, Karel. “The Personal is Political: Pippo Delbono.” Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times. Ed. Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2010. 69–79.

Reconsidering Metatheatricality

75

Vanhaesebrouck, Karel. “Le regard avide. Kitsch, camp, Abattoir Fermé.” Kitsch et théâtre. Ed. Isabelle Barbéris. Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon, 2012. 91–101. Vanhoutte, Kurt and Nele Wynants. “Performing Phenomenology: Negotiating Presence in Intermedial Theatre.” Foundations of Science 16 (2011): 275–284. Van Tuinen, Sjoerd. “Cinematic Neo-Mannerism or Neo-Baroque.” Image and Narrative 13: 2 (2012): 53–75. Verstegan, Richard. Le théâtre des cruautés. Ed. Frank Lestringant. Paris: Editions Chandeigne, 1995 [1587]. Viola, Eugenio. “Neo-Baroque Versus Post-Human.” Barock. Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age. Eds. Eduardo Cicelyn and Maria Codognato. Naples: Electa, 2009. 89–97. Wacker, Kelly (ed.). Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholarly Publishing, 2007. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Inordinate Eye: Text and Image in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

chapter 3

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis Saige Walton Is it a texture, or a fold of the soul, of thought? —gilles deleuze

Those familiar with the work of contemporary French director Claire Denis will be well aware of her appeals to the body. Together with her long-running cinematographer Agnès Godard, Denis is known for eschewing dialogue, ­character psychology, and narrative causality in her films in favor of crafting elliptical and yet “vivid sensory worlds” (Beugnet Cinema and Sensation 82).1 Of particular interest to this essay is how Denis’ immanent expressions of flesh, fabric, and materiality resonate with the visually-tactile and textural effects of the baroque. To date, Denis’ cinema has often been aligned with a set of contemporary European directors who engage with the embodied dimensions of film—including Bruno Dumont, Philippe Grandrieux, Gasper Noé, Lars von Trier, and Marina de Van. These filmmakers are at the forefront of what has come to be known, variously, as the ‘new’ European extremism, the French cinema of sensation or cinéma du corps (‘cinema of the body’). These contemporary film movements that are best characterized, to quote Tim Palmer, by their “on-screen interrogation of physicality in brutally intimate terms” (57). This essay harnesses the aesthetics of the baroque to deepen and expand on what constitutes a cinema of sensation. Concentrating on Denis’ moody art/ horror effort, Trouble Every Day (2001)—a film whose controversial premiere at Cannes has since given way to critical approbation—I develop a ­materialist ­account of the baroque and its sensuous re-surfacing in Denis’ film.2 Interestingly, film scholars such as Martine Beugnet and Douglas Morrey have also identified a “baroque sensuality” at work in Trouble Every Day (Cinema and Sensation 44; “Textures of Terror”). Beugnet, however, connects the baroque 1 On Denis’ interest in the body see also: Elena del Rio, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 148–177; Judith Mayne, Claire Denis (Urbana: Indiana University Press, 2005). 2 Reports of mass walkouts and fainting accompanied the initial Cannes screenings (see Mayne, 107.) On the controversy of the film in the press, see Palmer.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_006

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

77

inflections of this film to Georges Bataille-related readings of cinematic excess and chaos. In these terms, the film is permeated by “sensation-filled audio-visual chaos”; its “baroque audio-visual excess” muddies the formal and philosophical borders between the figurative and the abstract, thereby pulling us towards the irrational (Cinema and Sensation 33, 40).3 Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s ­philosophy of the fold, together with historic and contemporary baroque scholarship, this essay will examine how the textured effects of Trouble Every Day move between film and viewer in alternately painful and pleasurable ways. While not discounting Denis’ films as flitting in and out of abstraction, I argue that Trouble Every Day actually possesses an alternate aesthetic structure or, more, precisely, a vital structuring principle—that of the fold, or, what I ­refer to here as the neo-baroque fold. ­Denis’ activations of the fold in this film spur mobile and material engagements with vision that elicit our embodied as well as thoughtful comprehension of the image.4 As Deleuze writes in the quotation that begins this essay, the fold—at once a material phenomenon and a figuration of the baroque, as well as a metaphysical concept—is steeped in the world of matter and transitions in embodied thought, or what Deleuze (following Leibniz) calls the inner “folds in the soul” (“Fold” 4). It is by way of the sensuous logics of the fold that I am able to articulate a cinema of sensation that need not be divorced from figuration, genre or narrative (as Beugnet suggests) nor experienced only through a proximate abstraction, as Laura Marks’ influential model of a haptic cinema implies.5 Characteristically baroque actions of “folding, unfolding, refolding” occur throughout Trouble Every Day, through techniques that foreground the sensuous lures of texture, movement, scale, matter, and surface (Conley 204). Through Denis’ appeals to the immanence of flesh, folds, and fabrics, and the revelation of thoughtful textural patterns, film, body, and world become intimately enfolded into one another. Denis’ Trouble Every Day can rightly be

3 For Beugnet, the French cinema of sensation is shaped by the Batillean principle of the informe. See also: Martine Beugnet, “Evil and the Senses: Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre and La Vie nouvelle”, Studies in French Cinema, 5.3 (2005): 175–184. 4 This essay builds upon Morrey’s interpretation of the film as he reads its sensuality through Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold. See Morrey, “Textures”. 5 According to Marks, in haptic visuality, “vision can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes”; this occurs usually in relation to viewing proximate and indeterminate imagery. See Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), xi. On the neo-baroque as an aesthetically complex but non-narrative form, see Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Cambridge: mit Press, 2010), 168–188.

78

Walton

considered an instance of neo-baroque cinema—its folds move between film and viewer and twist and torque between sensuous and thoughtful purpose.

A Material Visuality

By turns beautiful and horrifying, Trouble Every Day couples quietude and waiting with graphic scenes of death, desire, and eroticism. The film inter-cuts between two different sets of lovers, revealing their past and present interconnections. Léo Semeneau (Alex Descas), a radical French scientist, spends his time caring for and attempting to cure his wife Coré (Beatrice Dalle). Coré suffers from an unnamed disease—she is compelled to hunt for men, biting them to death during lovemaking. An American doctor and Léo’s former colleague, Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo), is in the early stages of this affliction. Alarmed by his violent desires, Shane journeys to Paris with his new bride June (Tricia Vessey) to seek answers from Léo, only to find that the scientific community has shunned him. Distressed by his psychological battle with the illness, Shane’s actions become increasingly erratic and predatory towards women. We later learn that the disease that has infected Coré and Shane was contracted in Guyana where Léo and Shane once worked together and Shane and Coré once desired one another. Shane, at some point in the past, stole and profited from Léo’s research. Anticipation of the film’s ‘trouble’ begins with a kiss. Before the title credits appear, we encounter a dimly lit scene in which an anonymous couple embraces in the backseat of a car. This is one of the few kisses of Trouble Every Day that does not then open into a bite and we will not see this couple again (Scholz and Surma 11). As their lips touch, the gentle and somber score of the Tindersticks (Denis’ frequent musical collaborators) sets in: ‘Look into my eyes/you see trouble everyday/I get on the inside of you’, sings the lead.6 Combined, the kissing couple, the darkened atmosphere and the intimation of close bodily warmth inside the car appear serene and romantic. Yet, there are also glimmers of something more sinister through the intimated “connection between desire and violence, and desire is, quite literally, a deadly force” in this film (Mayne 113). The couple’s preoccupation with each other, oblivious to all but the press of their own bodies, suggests that the look of the camera/ viewer is where it is not wanted and that it is voyeuristically preying on this 6 The Tindersticks have also scored Denis’ Nénette and Boni, 35 Shots of Rum, White Material and Bastards. In another indication of the sensory aesthetics of Denis, they were involved in the conceptualization of Trouble Every Day as well. See: Mayne, 23.

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

79

Figure 3.1  Water as Material. Trouble Every Day Claire Denis, 2001

couple as it will stalk the hotel maid, Christelle (Florence Loiret Calle), later. While the faces of the couple are difficult to discern, the intentional focus of the camera comes to rest, repeatedly, on the flesh of the woman’s neck before tracing its vision up and down her body as her lover’s fingers do.7 Against the sound of swelling violins, the couple cedes to a scene of complete darkness. This long sequence of black that could belong to an entirely flat surface or contain ­voluminous shadows. Similar shifts between the two- and the three- dimensional are implied by the images and sounds of water that follow. A series of soft dissolves and gradual revelations of scale help re-orient the imagery as the waters of the Seine, gently lapping beneath the signature bridges of Paris. When it first subsumes the screen in close-up, however, the moving waters of the Seine resemble nothing so much as a ream of rippling fabric that moves across the surface of the screen [Figure 3.1]. This tactile association is furthered by a stark filmic interplay of light and shadow as the streetlights of Paris at dawn cast dappled effects across the surface of the water and deep furrows of purplish shadow. Rather than the substance and the materiality of water, Denis cultivates the impression of a moving textile. Both the representational content of the ­images and the screen itself take on the physical qualities of a moving fabric—replete with a sense of surface patterning and texture, as well as depth, tactility, and motion. Subtle transitions between the surface and depth of the 7 The film never mentions ‘vampire’ or ‘cannibal’ in its sparse dialogue, although it makes ­constant allusions to the horror genre.

80

Walton

image and an emphasis on gradual movement in the images themselves (fades to black, flowing water, clouds drifting across the sky) enhance the film’s sense of supple movement. As our view of Paris and its bridges disappears, the title credits begin to rise and fall out of the darkness. Tinged mauve and black (colors that can be connected to the vampiric time-keeping of dawn and dusk), the film’s title credits also evoke sensuous impressions of water-as-fabric and as worldly material. The surface of the image is animated, stirred into swells of movement by unseen energies below. At the same time as the eye is drawn to the rippling surface of the image, its anterior contours give us the illusion of submerged depths. By endowing her composition with a mutable, textured appearance that shifts between effects of the two- and the three-dimensional, Denis encourages the viewer to engage with her film not as “a static object, but a potentially dynamic, tangible form, like fabric” and as a moving site of ­materiality in its own right (Peterson 227). In recent years, the subject of touch has received considerable attention in film and media studies. The work of Laura Marks, in particular, has broken new critical ground in prompting scholars to consider the role that the proximate senses (touch, taste, smell) can play in our inter-sensory reception of a film. For Marks, cinematic meaning is as filtered through its material engagements with the body as it is through intellectual or narrative signification. While Marks is careful to argue that the tactility of the cinema is not equivalent to the literal sensory experience of touch, she and other sensuously alert film scholars do re-configure film and its spectatorship as a site of embodied contact that can trigger inter-sensory translations of sight and sound.8 The potential for a visually tactile exchange in the cinema is synopsized by Marks’ carnally loaded metaphor of the “skin of the film”, wherein “the circulation of a film among different viewers is like a series of skin contacts that leave mutual traces” (Marks The Skin of the Film 121, xii). According to Susan Stewart, the apprehension of tactile qualities such as “roughness and smoothness; sticky things that remain in contact with the skin and slippery things that move readily across it; qualities of wetness and dampness and dryness in relation to each other; heaviness and lightness, hardness and softness; clues as to position and states of motion” can often be triggered by sight (163–164). Similarly, phenomenological film scholar Vivian Sobchack has observed how vision in the cinema also involves inter-sensory expressions 8 On the tactile and inter-sensory capacity of the cinema see Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 53–84; Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley, University of California Press) and Beugnet.

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

81

and perceptions of “texture and solidity. This is a vision that knows what it is to touch things in the world, that understands materiality. The film’s vision thus perceives and expresses the ‘sense’ of fabrics like velvet or the roughness of tree bark or the yielding softness of human flesh” (Sobchack Address 133). Marks’ considered emphases on the contact that can occur between film and viewer, as well as the inter-sensory relationship between vision and touch that is staked out by thinkers such as Stewart and Sobchack resonates with Denis’ fabrications of film. Of particular interest to this essay is how Denis’ attention to the visual-tactility of human and cinematic perception re-­activates the baroque. Denis’ film reprises the baroque through its privileging of s­ urface appearances, material textures and a heightened ­fabrication of the image. ­Although a focus on the body is typical of Denis’ works and the French cinema of sensation, the fabric-like and texturally ­enfolded effects of Trouble Every Day can be more suitably re-calibrated as neo-baroque. ­Furthermore, Denis’ return to and reliance on literal or representational ­bodies-in-touch (kissing, killing, biting, loving, caressing, strangling)—not to mention their tactile t­ ransitions through “the pleasure and pain of contact with others”—recalls European ­baroque art, especially in terms of its exuberant figurations of materiality (Mayne 129). The historic baroque age reveled in creating textural illusions, so much so that stylized drapery makes for one of its foremost signatures. Mastering the depiction of elaborate folds of fabric was an essential skill in the artist’s apprenticeship. The rendering of light, shade, movement, and texture was a mark of their virtuosity and “allied to the study of nature, but a composed nature, an artificial nature as it were” (Zamora 267). In her book Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Mieke Bal has observed one of the persistent features of the baroque to be its privileging of matter and materiality, as evidenced by its “attractive, sensuous textures … luscious forms, its veneration for the human body as flesh—sensuous and beautiful” (73). I would add that the sensuality of baroque art (which can be seductive and horrific) often looks to the skin/surface of the body as well as the surface textures of the world to couple materiality with movement. Baroque figures are often captured in states of bodily transition, suspended mid-flight or mid-gesture; garments flutter, water overflows and “a flamelike sense of movement” ignites baroque sculptures, as with the flames that erupt through the agitated surface of Saint Teresa’s robe (Fleming 128). One need only think of the “voluptuous movement of nude flesh” in the paintings of Rubens or how Bernini’s use of cold hard marble gives us the impression of morphing into soft, yielding flesh (simultaneously glowing, like a translucent skin) to realize how the historic baroque arts expressed a restless materiality (Martin 48–50).

82

Walton

In her study of 17th century Dutch art, Svetlana Alpers has ably documented how it is the “surfaces, the materials of the world that [catch] the eye” in many of the genre and still life paintings of the period—artworks that seem fit to burst with tactile detailing (31). What Alpers identifies as the Dutch art of describing was, significantly, achieved through the play of different textures against one another and the fibrous rendering of “apparel … satins, furs, stuffs, velvets, silks, felt hats, feathers, swords, the gold, the embroidery, the carpets, the beds with tapestry hangings, the floors so perfectly smooth, so perfectly solid” (31). Whether capturing the movement of human flesh or drapery-inmotion, curls of lace, luxurious textiles of satin and velvet, animal furs, the complex patterning of intercultural objects (Chinese ceramics and Oriental carpets), collectibles of glassware, pewter, and watches or edibles in varying states of life and decay, the historic baroque was entrenched in what Marks calls a “material visuality” (Enfoldment and Infinity 108). The material visuality of the baroque creates a heightened texturing or ­fabrication of the image. A cinematic extension of that material visuality persists in Trouble Every Day through its neo-baroque activations of texture and its alternation between effects of surface and depth. Playing to the “intensely tactile quality of [Godard’s] photography”, the image is presented as a deeply enfolded surface, akin to the rich hues and darkened folds of drapery in baroque art (Beugnet Cinema and Sensation 43). Take, for instance, the ‘baroque’ manner in which we first encounter Shane and June. Romantically absorbed with each other on their journey to Paris, Shane is seen placing his mouth over the flesh of June’s upturned arm. The scene of the happy honeymooners gives way to Shane’s fantasies of a bloodied yet blissful June. After Shane retreats to the bathroom the image of a hand suddenly appears. It feels its way across a fabric that is sodden and slippery with blood and then disappears into the darkness. What is remarkable about this sequence is how explicitly it recalls and re-stages the iconographic heritage of the European baroque. In the still and dimly lit setting of Shane’s vision, the limp body of June is seen literally coated in blood and partially covered by a bed sheet. Through its textural and enfolded effects, the scene calls to mind historic baroque works such as The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia (Stefano Maderno, 1606) where Cecilia lies positioned on her side, her face and body completely covered by a sculpted shroud [Figure 3.2]. Denis’ conjunctions of flesh, fabric, blood and bodily comportment reprise the enwrapped and enshrouded saints and martyrs of historic baroque art as well as their scared and sacrificial poses; June is pictured variously on her side, her front and her back, with her eyes alternately open and closed. Inter-medial associations with the historic baroque are enhanced by the film’s soundscape as it shifts from the drone of

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

83

Figure 3.2 Textured Saints. The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia Stefano Maderno, Church of Santa Cecilia, Trastevere, Rome [1599–1600]

the airplane-in-flight to the whistling sounds of wind, bringing with it sonic suggestions of a tomb. As with the lush, tactile rendering of drapery, clothes, carpets and human flesh in baroque art, Trouble Every Day mobilizes its material visuality to engage us in the “sensuality of the image” (Morrey “Textures of Terror” 5). Denis underscores the intensely physical and disturbing nature of the scene through the perceptual immediacy of its textures. Freshly drawn blood sticks to the surface of June’s skin and visibly soaks the cloth, its vibrant hues of red standing out against the surrounding darkness of the image. Enthralled with an exploration of the surfaces of body and world, the camera slowly moves its vision over the contours of June’s inert body. In close-up, we discern the heaviness of the wet, blood-soaked fabric that clings to June as well as subtle patterns in the blood that coats her like a second skin (a light splattering here, a denser coagulation over there). Continuing down June’s back, the camera’s vision reveals how individual streams of blood join together, flowing like a river down the crease of the spine. Following on from this highly textured vision, Trouble Every Day then devotes its attention to the multiple folds of scarlet fabric that cover June’s lower back and legs, expressing, in turn, all the micro-indentations and creases that appear in the cloth [Figure 3.3]. Here, Denis interweaves some of the most well recognized tropes of the historic baroque with the visual-tactility of the cinema; from the energetic surfaces of Bernini’s drapery to the vibrant, bloodied wounds of Caravaggio’s art and the iconography of baroque shrouds. Once again, Denis activates sensuous effects of perceiving surface and depth through her overt fabrication of film. The materiality of the image comes to the fore through the textured and proximate vision of the camera, as it r­ eveals

84

Walton

Figure 3.3 A Material Visuality. Trouble Every Day Claire Denis, 2001

small-scale variations in the surface of the sheet and June’s skin. At the same time, the darkness that engulfs June and the scene as a whole creates the impression of an infinite depth; an effect that is also alluded to through the deep shadows that appear amongst the folds of red fabric. As with the illusionistic push towards three-dimensionality in historic baroque art, perception is tugged between the depths of perspective and the material details of the surface. The intertwining of surface appearances with recessive depths also lends Denis’ fabrication of the image a strong sculptural quality, as if its folds were actually three-dimensional. While the cinematic image cannot be literally or directly touched, Denis’ activations of a material visuality encourage sensuous contact between film and viewer. It is noteworthy then that Denis’ fabrication of the film returns, again and again, to the motif of white or bloodied bed linen in Trouble Every Day. Graphic sequences of violence, death and eroticism are staged against the imagery of bedclothes; so much so that this fabric texturally connects many of the film’s characters. The textile features in Shane’s violent vision of June, described above; later, Shane wipes his bloodied hands and mouth on a set of bed sheets after murdering the maid; Coré kills one of her lovers on the white sheets of her bed, while the film cuts to a shot of Coré’s bedclothes, splattered with blood and catching fire during her death. Whether it appears as white, clean and smoothed out or as a bloodied, crushed and enfolded fabric, this textile is marked by its passage between bodies. For myself, Denis’ use of this textile can be interpreted as a figural expression and a materialization of the neo-baroque nature of the film itself. It recalls the ways in which life and death frequently

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

85

crossover for the baroque, whereby beautifully draperies can serve as an erotic drape as well as death shroud. It is an appropriately tactile and fittingly sensuous emblem for how film, viewer, and world are materially enfolded into one another in Trouble Every Day, in both seductive and deathly ways. After all, as Mieke Bal has observed: In painting, as well as in sculpture, drapery and folds are notoriously, indeed quintessentially, baroque figures in the popular imagination—they are emblems of ‘baroqueness’. But these well known figures are just that, figures—formal elements that embody a philosophical, epistemological and aesthetic position of much greater depth. Rethinking the Baroque 184

Enfolding In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze explores the trans-­historic persistence of the baroque in art, architecture, music, costume, science, ­mathematics and design. Through the infinitesimal thought of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Deleuze understands the baroque as a particular “operative function, a trait. It endlessly produces folds” (3). For ­Deleuze, Leibniz is the foremost thinker of a world of lively and divisible matter and one who forms an intrinsic “part of this [baroque] world, for which he provides the philosophy that it lacks!” (126). As a thinker and a mathematician “of the pleat, of curves and twisting surfaces … An exquisitely sensuous view of the world is obtained through the curved shapes that Leibniz creates with calculus” (Conley Translators Foreward xi–xiii). For Deleuze, the fold is a charged figuration of the materiality, texture, and movement of the baroque; for myself, the sensuous logics of the fold that are articulated by Deleuze re-surface as a formal and conceptual feature of Trouble Every Day. Interestingly, Deleuze’s use of the French monosyllable pli invokes a pleat or twist of fabric and the origins of life (Conley “Folds and Folding”). Scale, ­movement and the vitality of the world become almost palpable qualities in Deleuze’s various descriptions of the fold. Discussing organic and inorganic substances, for instance, Deleuze refers to veins running through blocks of marble; to folds “of winds, of water, fire and earth”; to matter as an “infinitely porous, spongy or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns”; to the delicate paper folds of origami and the ­billowing cuffs, cloaks, and shirts of historic baroque costumes (Fold 5, 121). In a nicely evocative link with the treatment of water-as-material in Trouble

86

Walton

Every Day, Deleuze via Leibniz envisions the universe as a “pond of matter in which there exist different flows and waves” (Fold 5). Connections with the materiality of the world (and the physical communication between brain, body and world) as well as a re-generative sense of movement are not just formal elements of the fold, they are indicative of the “very fabric of ontology” that Deleuze is proposing (Conley “Folds and Folding” 173). In this regard, as Tom Conley has noted, “philosophy finds in the fold the expression of a continuous and vital force of being and becoming” (“Folds and Folding” 180). If Deleuze’s articulation of the fold can be connected to larger issues of ­ontology, what is distinctly ‘baroque’ about the fold? Deleuze himself helps clarify this tension in interviews. He maintains that while folds can be found everywhere in worldly and artistic phenomena (in rocks and rivers, in the brain, in souls, and in the plastic arts), this does not make the fold a universal. “No two things are folded in the same way”, he states, before going on to identify Leibniz as “the first thinker to ‘free’ the fold by taking it to infinity. The baroque, similarly, was the first period in which folding went on infinitely, spilling over any limit, as in El Greco and Bernini” (Deleuze “On Leibniz” 156–159). Given that Deleuze’s fold is a visual, mobile and textured figuration of the baroque, his sensuous conjunction of infinite movement with materiality is of particular interest to this discussion of Denis. For Deleuze, the baroque can be defined as the potentially infinite process of folding. The baroque is a “trait that twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold upon fold, one upon the other” (Fold 34–37). As it moves between macro- and micro- scales of matter and enacts a material visuality, Denis’ layering of the image produces effects of a textural infinite. Shifting between visceral, horrifying, and seductive textures that are felt, up-close and personal, to more distanced depictions of the world and its patterning, the neo-baroque folds that move between film and viewer in Trouble Every Day are alternately beautiful and devastating. It is through both extremes that Denis appeals to and activates corporeal connections between film, body, brain and world, “realizing something in illusion itself … tying it to a spiritual presence that endows … spaces and fragments with a collective unity” as Deleuze writes of the historic baroque (Fold 125).9 Deleuze’s materialist understanding of the baroque fold can be extended to the strongly felt presence of matter in Denis. Referring to the 17th-century art of Bernini and Caravaggio, for example, Deleuze rightly describes h ­ istoric baroque art as being invested in “not an art of structures but of textures” 9 Deleuze, The Fold, 125. See also: Beugnet, (32) on the more life-affirming traits of the French cinema of sensation.

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

87

(Fold 115, 112). Examining the sensuous significance of clothing, mise-en-scène, ­architecture, and design as well as the ways in which filmic “[i]mages are fabricated as if they were textiles”, film and visual culture scholar Giuliana Bruno has also looked to the fold to help develop a sartorial approach to the cinema (“Surface” 85). When Deleuze speaks of the fold, he goes well beyond mere form, shape, exterior appearance, or décor. If we listen closely to his words, we can sense the actual fabric of the fold …. The fold, in Deleuze’s conception, is a textured philosophical fabrication. It has a palpable quality, a material culture, a tissue-like texture. …This material unfolding finds correspondence in film. bruno “Pleats” 144

While sharing Bruno’s enthusiasm for the cinema as an affective and tactile force, this essay is concerned with the neo-baroque folds and fabrications of film. Trouble Every Day enacts not only a material visuality but also a ­“liberation of folds”—or what Deleuze has asserted as the very “definition of the Baroque—the fold to infinity” (Fold 122). Extending on Bruno, it is not only the texture of the fold that is of great relevance to Denis but the loosened and free reign that is given to expressions of materiality. Unlike other folds, Deleuze maintains that it is only in its baroque iteration that the fold “knows unlimited freedom … Folds seem to be rid of their supports—cloth, granite, or cloud—in order to enter into an infinite convergence” (Fold 34). In Trouble Every Day, Denis’ material visuality is loosened from the demands of plot, characterization and causality so as to develop as a font of sensuous meaning in its own right. Like the baroque fold, Trouble Every Day privileges the liberation and sensuality of “expressive matter” (Deleuze Fold 34). Matter precedes structure here or, more precisely, it accords with the vital structuring principle of the fold. Chiaroscuro lighting effects and engulfing shadows darken and obscure the film’s representational content, while sculpting the impression of unplumbed material depths to the image. Often, the lines and contours of on-screen bodies are blurred, as if lost to the materiality of their surrounding environments: a body hunched over Coré is indistinguishable from the natural landscape of her hunting grounds, while the blacks, blues and grey of Shane’s costuming match the dull metallic sheen of the airplane, the urban architecture, and the hotel basement. Such techniques are indicative of Denis’ consistently “non-hierarchical visual register, in which human beings seem to have no greater claim to the image than other elements of the décor. … it is the non-anthropocentric focus of Denis’ mise-en-scène that [re-configures

88

Walton

her characters] as bodies in a landscape, bodies in, or as, space” (Morrey “Open Wounds” 12–13). In one sequence, Shane carries June over the hotel threshold to lie on an unmade bed. Christelle is seen beside them, unfolding a set of sheets. All three are dressed in a similar color palette that matches the wallpapered surfaces of the room. As June and Christelle begin to make the bed, the vision of the camera concentrates on the white stretch of the bedclothes—texturally recalling Shane’s earlier fantasy of a bloody, cloth-covered June. As the sound of crumpled sheets fills the silence of the room, the camera continues to focus on creases being eased out on the surface of the linen. A shot of June reveals the edges of her white-clad body as virtually indistinct from the film’s background, appearing to merge with its depths [Figure 3.4]. As Douglas Morrey observes, the “more sensational areas of the film [are] somehow [also] contained within these folds of linen, the layers of whiteness that take over the screen between the blank white wall, June’s white dress and the newly-made bed” (“Textures of Terror” 4). Attending to macro- and micro- scales of matter, Denis foregrounds an intentional switch in Shane and the camera’s vision, as they are suddenly arrested by the maid’s presence in the room. As Shane runs his fingertips along the linen, the soundscape combines the rustling of the sheets with low rumbling sounds. Having featured, earlier, in Shane’s bloodied vision of June, these sounds create the sonic effect of a larger and more deathly space than the small Paris hotel room, predicting events yet to come. As if affirming this deadly association,

Figure 3.4 Flesh, Folds and Fabrics. Trouble Every Day Claire Denis, 2001

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

89

Denis then cuts from a shot of fabric in Shane’s hands to a view of Christelle, catching her breath and aware of Shane’s look. The background of the scene becomes hazy, as Christelle’s loose tendrils of hair and the smooth expanse of her face-in-profile come into view. A loaded and poignant scene follows, with the maid slowly pushing her cart down the empty hotel corridors. This imagery will recur again and again. Shot from behind and up-close, interspersed with the forlorn music of the “Maid’s Theme”, the camera revels in the delicate nape of Christelle’s neck. As Steven Shaviro remarks, Denis’ understated, affectively atmospheric take on the “vampire/cannibalism film … has more in common with, say, Bresson’s Pickpocket or Antonioni’s Eclipse” than with most horror (“Trouble Every Day”). It also has much in common with the textural infinite of the baroque fold, as it gives free reign to aesthetic expressions of materiality. No dialogue is spoken in the scene above yet Denis’ attention to the surfaces of bodies and to the materiality of the objects that surround them make for some of the most sensuous and frightening moments of the film. There is a lived sense of gravity to this sequence, as I am encouraged to feel the smoothing out of creases of bed linen, the bumping of the metal cart against Chritelle’s legs, the presence of bodies-in-space reacting to each other and the dawning awareness of Shane’s first possible kill. The rhythmic and haunting return of the film to the soft and vulnerable surface of Christelle’s neck foretells us of her sure and imminent death. By the film’s end, Shane succumbs to his illness and murders Christelle in the hotel basement. Afterwards, he is presented as being at both physical and mental ease: “I feel good”, he tells June as he embraces her and they agree to go home. The close-up of June’s eyes that follows is held just long enough for us to register their small and slight contraction. Framed against her set of brightly colored red gloves (a chromatic stand-in for Shane’s recently bloodied hands), June’s flicker of uncertainty is the last image of this film, before Denis’ film enigmatically fades to black. No resolution is given as to what awaits these characters, or if the fatal transitions between desire and bloodshed will halt. If anything, it seems “there is no end to it. Trouble everyday” (Nancy 7). Fittingly, Denis includes within this last sequence a small-scale fabrication of the image that is seen in the form of tiny droplets of blood, running down the plastic folds of the shower-curtain. The image of blood-on-plastic functions as yet another textual infinite and a concretization of the baroque fold, as it occurs across multiple levels of matter, from the “cosmological to the microscopic, but also from the microscopic to the macroscopic” (Deleuze Fold 87). The film’s trouble is contained within the textural infinite of this image—assuring us that the horror will endlessly repeat, as infinite and regenerative loops of bloodshed.

90

Walton

Inside/Out In Trouble Every Day, the layering of images and sounds defies the presumed flatness of the cinematic screen, enacting a textual infinite and furthering the embodied enfoldments of film and viewer. I am not alone in noting the resonant inter-connections between Denis’ film and Deleuze’s concept of the fold. Morrey, too, has written of the film’s recurrent fascination with fabrics and with the sensuous surfaces, pleats and wrinkles of matter. As he remarks, this is a “film of surfaces” and one whose heightened physicality corresponds with the “fertile conception of matter” put forth by Deleuze (“Textures of Terror” 4–5).10 Morrey, however, does not address the larger neo-baroque nature of Denis’ film (its material visuality; its re-activations of a baroque iconography; its vacillations between pleasure and pain and its suggestions of a textural infinite). The neo-baroque folds of Trouble Every Day run much deeper than Morrey suggests, at an embodied as well as an aesthetic level. Material and mobile reversals between the inside and outside—the surface and depth of the image—abound in historic baroque art. Here, we might consider the erupting folds that drape the body and the sarcophagus of The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1671–1674): folds that incarnate for us the (immaterial) depths of the saint’s soul, through a textural movement that occurs on the surface of the sculpture. In a similar fashion, Dutch still lives—a veritable “study of folds”, as Deleuze reminds us—will stage sensuous reversals between the inside/outside of the aesthetic experience through the techniques of ‘flaying’ of worldly objects (Fold 122). Through a peeled lemon, the Dutch still life shows us the hardened outer rind of the fruit as well as its inner pulp; cheeses are sliced into and pies depicted with their fillings spilling out; fish are cut open and expose, simultaneously, their gleaming skin, fleshy interior and tiny sets of bones. Containers and glassware are toppled over and watches opened, showing us the intricate mechanics of their interior. Through the use of light and shadow, baroque still lives encourage us to discern the material-make-up of different worldly textures—to distinguish glass from the glint of metal or the texture of a finely woven cloth from that of a crumbling pastry (Alpers 90–91). As Bal comments, only “a superficial vision of baroque would stop at the surface; the surface, after all, is where the ‘depth’ of what baroque means and does is hidden” (Bal “Baroque Matters” 200). Rather than halting at the surface, then, it is necessary to move between surface and depth, the material and the immaterial to understand Denis’ neo-baroque folds. 10

See also: Beugnet 44.

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

91

A thickening affective atmosphere of anxiety and anticipation envelops the film, as “one [has] a pervasive sense of … something about to happen, of a disturbance in our fields of sound and vision” (Mayne 110). Lingering shots of the hotel seem de-populated; its corridors and basement flicker in and out of darkness, reverberating with ominous off-screen sounds. Meanwhile everyday or familiar spaces “pulsate” and our impressions of “[c]alm and tranquility are underscored by a sense of foreboding” (Mayne 110). Depicted as if waiting for something to happen, the languorous gestures and movements of many of the film’s characters, together with the recurrent rhythms of the film itself—­ especially as it lyrically enacts repeated musical refrains and a patterning of camera movement and editing—help craft a tensile mood. The successive build up of “rhythms of waiting … emptiness, [the] time of desperation and fear in which nothing happens” are then ruptured, palpably, by the film’s explosive scenes of sexualized violence that rent the tactile surfaces of the skin and that of the film itself (Shaviro “Trouble Every Day”). According to Deleuze, “such is the Baroque trait: an exterior always on the outside, an interior on the inside”, adding that the “fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade, and the closed room, the outside and the inside” (Fold 35).11 Following on from the sensuous logics of the fold we can approach the inside and outside—the surface and its depth—as being intimately connected in baroque forms, wherein a “topology is created by which inner and outer spaces are in contact with one another” (Conley “Folds and Folding” 174). An intertwining of the inside/out is likewise crucial to the neobaroque folds of Trouble Every Day—as a literal breaching of the representational ­surfaces of the body on-screen and the sensuous enfoldment of film and viewer as well (metaphorically, rather than literally). As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (another close collaborator of Denis) points out, Denis’ film “is made entirely on and about the skin. Literally: exposed skin. (Pellicula, little skin). Not only is the skin present in the image in extreme close-ups […]. It is also the image itself, the film, its skin, that caresses and ravishes and tears” (4). Consider the scene in which Coré seduces and murders one of the neighborhood boys that have been obsessed with her. Destabilizing any fixed sense of scale and foregrounding the materiality of its images and sounds, another textural infinite is staged here. As Coré and the boy begin their erotic tryst, the image is filled, variously, by what appears as the huge indentation of a bellybutton; by valleys of skin and bone; by differing shades of body hair and various markings that pocket the skin. The extremely tight, up-close and material vision of the camera presents us with unfolding topographies of flesh meeting 11

See also: Conley “Folds”.

92

Walton

flesh. Both the scale and surface of the human body are rendered strange, reconfigured as a vast dermal “landscape or a constellation of planets” (Beugnet “Cinema and Sensation” 45).12 Longstanding artistic techniques of the baroque re-surface to initiate sensory shocks in the viewer and heighten the physicality of the aesthetic experience (a material visuality, the intertwining of ­surface with depth, transformations of scale) (Bal “Baroque Matters” 188).13 What ­Deleuze describes as the baroque “transformation of a cosmos into a mundus” and vice versa is performed by the film’s oscillation between the scales of matter, as it moves from a “caressing closeness to the bodies” and proximate attachments to textured surfaces to a larger and depth-full tearing of the image (Deleuze “Fold” 29; Beugnet “Wounded Screen” 38). For the baroque, the surface enwraps inner tumults of feeling and the detail of matter. That said, baroque surfaces also intimate or open up upon the experience of larger perceptual, emotive and aesthetic depths. As with the varying surface textures and flayed objects that belong to the Dutch still-life tradition or the gaping mouths and wounds of Caravaggio’s art (where darkened chasms of the body “insist on the force of the surface” while conveying to us their fleshy interior), the sensuous effects perceiving surface and depth combine in the ­baroque.14 As with the inherently reversible figure of the fold, the baroque ­exposes inter-connections between the inside and the outside of worldly phenomena and its own aesthetic experiences. In the sequence described above, Denis’ extended takes of the scene and the brutality of the soundtrack, together with the micro-scale and materiality of vision make it incredibly difficult to entangle oneself from the affective force of the composition. As Coré runs her hands up and down the body’s torso and neck, their mouths find each other in the darkness. The repetitive beat of the Tindersticks’ soundtrack takes on the ticking sound of a timepiece, as if anticipating the shocking and horrendous bites that follow. The gentle score gives way to yelps of pain; to the boy’s screams, thick and almost asphyxiated with blood; and Coré’s own agonized cries, unable to control her own blood lust. Throughout, the camera’s vision is unrelentingly close to the murder and to the cruel orality of Coré biting at and pulling flesh from her lover’s face. As a series of sensory shocks unfurl between film and viewer, we are intimately enfolded into the horrific textures of this encounter. 12 13

14

See also: Morrey, “Textures”, 5. Bal, “Baroque Matters”, p. 188; see also Bal’s Quoting Caravaggio on enfoldment or entanglement as being the most appropriate figure for baroque aesthetic relations between bodies. See Davide Panagia, “The Effects of Viewing: Caravaggio, Bacon and The Ring”, Theory and Event, 10, 4 (2007) on surface and depth in Caravaggio.

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

93

In her book, Emotion, Depth and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space, Susan Cataldi usefully details how the ‘deeper’ that an emotional state is felt, the more likely it is to be experienced as an immersive spatial location that we feel ourselves to be inside (27). The spatial/emotive immersion of feeling ourselves ‘in’ horror certainly occurs here. In the killings of Coré and Shane, the young boy and Christelle become “skins offered up, the exposed skins … the skin, instead of an envelope, becomes a surface to break. The mutilated body reveals its interiority, its depth, the secret of its life” (Nancy 8). Given its rupturing, breaching and tearing of surfaces—both the surfaces of the body and the phenomenological borders of the film experience—Denis’ texturing of horror runs ‘deep’, as do the neo-baroque folds that occur between film and viewer. Just as the kiss wants to bite, the film’s depiction of “touch wants to split, break or tear the skin … the skin is here to be broken and explored, under as well as on its surface” (Morrey “Open Wounds” 17).15 For instance, Coré, at one point, literally opens a fold of flesh that she has torn from the young boy’s body. Placing her fingers inside the wound, she probes around its innermost reaches. As Nancy asserts, these murder scenes are indicative of “a bitten, broken screen” whereby the dense materiality of Denis’ composition can tear “forwards from it toward us, but also backwards, toward a background that is all the deeper and more distant for being contained within the image, on the surface or the skin of the image” (6). Through its skin-deep evocation of open wounds, torn or ripped flesh and bloodied, hungry mouths Trouble Every Day enfolds the inside/out of the image and works to erase both spatial and emotive distinctions between an interior and an exterior of the representation. Although the viewer is not literally or directly touched by this assaultive sensuality, we are physically immersed ‘in’ visually tactile scenes of horror. That is, Denis’ film reaches into the corporeal depths of the viewer to elicit visceral sensations of wounding in our “bone and guts”; simultaneously, our limbs might tense up, shift with disgust or physical discomfort; we might instinctively cover our mouth or look away (Leder 36). As Shaviro aptly remarks of our bodily engagements with horror, all the “jolts and spasms that run through my body at the sight of all this gore, threaten to tear me apart as well” (The Cinematic Body 103). Alongside its horrific textures of sensation, Trouble Every Day incites more vital, seductive and intimate absorptions ‘in’ the sensuality of the image. Such absorptions are instigated, for example, by its very first images and sounds as 15

Morrey, “Open Wounds”, p. 17. Morrey also notes that Nancy uses the French verb ‘fouiller’ in his essay on the film; this also boasts nauseating connotations of a skin-deep excavation, as in “to dig in and root around”.

94

Walton

we are beckoned into the velvety darkness of the scene, its faint flecks of light, the soft pulse of the soundtrack and the intimate atmosphere of the lovers. By way of Denis’ privileging of the surface textures of body and world and the blurring of their distinctions between one another, I become enfolded ‘in’ the film through the exquisite beauty and sensuality of the audio-visual composition. Whether attending to the waters of the Seine (made to resemble a moving fabric at dawn), the plush toys that adorn the truck windshield of one of Coré’s victims, the fuzz of Coré’s blue suede shoe, or the glistening viscosity of blood upon blades of grass, Trouble Every Day is imbued with a materialvisuality that enfolds film and viewer into a shared sensuality. Often, I find myself ‘deeply’ absorbed in Denis’ film because of its attention to the lures of material details—the eroticized images of skin brushing against skin, a bright green scarf that is lost to the breeze of a cold grey sky or the touching collection of small soaps and jams that Christelle pockets on her rounds of the hotel. Recalling Cataldi on the immersive spatiality of the emotions, the feeling of oneself ‘in’ deep states of emotion can be extended to the neo-baroque folds of Trouble Every Day; as we feel ourselves physically and spatially immersed ‘in’ its horror, disgust, revulsion, beauty, melancholy and so on. Such immersions ‘in’ the cinema are only possible due to the embodied and emotive linkages that can occur between a film and its viewer. As Sobchack writes, watching a film “we can see the seeing as well as the seen, hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movement as well as the moved” (10). It is, however, by way of Denis’ particular fabrications of film, her intertwining of surface and depth and her attention to “textures of the material world”— as these foster depth-full emotive and spatial encounters—that Trouble Every Day can create a heightened enfoldment between film, body and world ­(Morrey “Textures” 3). Denis’ cine-aesthetic is entirely befitting of the liberation of matter and the textural infinite that Deleuze also conceptualizes as the baroque fold.

Conclusion: Denis’ Baroque House

In The Fold, Deleuze discusses the baroque as an organization of the world along two vectors. This organization is what the philosopher describes as the external “pleats of matter” and the inner “folds in the soul” or what Leibniz would identify as the monad, as it expresses a unique but interconnected point-of-view on an infinite world (“Fold” 3, 23). The two levels are separate but united by the “fold that echoes itself, arching from the two sides”, as in a crease that appears in the surface of a cloth (“Fold” 4, 29). Following Deleuze, we can understand the fold as not just a potent figuration of the baroque. It is also a

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

95

metaphysical idea that interweaves between the material world of the body and the immaterial realm of the mind/soul. According to Deleuze, the fact that “one is metaphysical, dealing with souls, or that the other is physical, entailing bodies, does not impede the two vectors from composing a similar world, a similar house”. (“Fold” 29) Of particular relevance to this essay is how Deleuze’s dynamic and materialist grasp of the baroque entails a mutual and embodied communication between the pleats of matter and the realm of spiritual/mental experience, for these are joined by “the fold of the two levels” and overlap each other (“Fold” 120). Interleaving world, body and soul, Deleuze proposes that matter can ­trigger vibrations in the mind/soul while “folds in the soul resemble the pleats of matter, and in that fashion they are directing them” (“Fold” 98).16 In Trouble Every Day, Denis’ neo-baroque folds are steeped in pleats of matter at the same time as matter gives rise to new fabrications of thought. In the airplane sequence, for instance, the camera lingers on the shapes, contours and surfaces of the plane—as well as the bodies housed within it—to showcase textual divergences; from the contrasting black-and-white clothing of the couple to the soft skin of an upturned arm, so unlike the heavy wet cloth that covers June in Shane’s fantasy. Throughout, the material visuality of the film generates textural patterns of experience that creates its own modes of critical interpretation. Our glimpse of the vertical light path of the airplane floor resembles the geometric order and precision of the cityscape that is seen outside the plane, as well as the rational, white and ordered spaces of science and medicine that recur in the film. Similarly, the bloodied shapes coating June in Shane’s vision texturally anticipate Coré’s monstrous drawings, later on ­[Figure  3.5]. Seen pacing back and forth, her nightgown and body streaked with blood, Coré is positioned against a wall marked with abstract patterns. Coré has traced huge semi-circular shapes across one of her household walls, leaving her handprints and smudges behind, as well as the freshly drawn blood of her victim. The curved patterns and drips of her frenzied, bloodied painting texturally resonate with other moments in the film—with the bite-mark seen on June’s shoulder; the cut on her lip, sustained by Shane’s ravenous kiss and the endless rivulets of blood that close the film, as it pre-empts a violent future that “will not be washed away” from sanitized spaces (Beugnet “Wounded Screen” 38). Comparing shifts and speeds in thinking to the unfolding of a fabric, D ­ eleuze asserts that “knowledge is known only were it is folded” (“The Fold” 49). In the exchange between the two vectors of the baroque (the sensible and the intelligible) there is always a “depth or …material fabric between the two ­levels … we can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins”, writes 16 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 98; see also Conley, “Folds”.

96

Walton

Figure 3.5  Textural Patterns. Trouble Every Day Claire Denis, 2001

Deleuze (“The Fold” 119). Here, the philosopher alerts us to the ways in which the comprehension of matter and materials can stir folds in the soul, just as the movements and modulations of thought are textured. Given their interest in the embodied nature of human and cinematic perception, Denis (like other directors of the French cinema of sensation) has been read through the critical work of Bataille and, in particular, his concept of the informe as it blurs distinctions between figure and ground and self and other through sensual chaos.17 Unlike the informe, Denis’ film is not resistant to formal categorization. Rather than the formlessness of the informe, Trouble Every Day can be approached as neo-baroque through its multiple and materialist folds. The fold—at once a sensuous and thoughtful figuration of the baroque— is of great relevance to Trouble Every Day. Unlike the irrational seductions of chaos and the void in Bataillean interpretations of the film, Denis’ audio-visual compositions are dense and multi-layered. After all, according to Deleuze, “the Baroque Leibniz does not believe in the void. For him it always seems to be filled with a folded matter … For Leibniz, and in the baroque, folds are always full” (“The Fold” 36). Similarly, Denis’ neo-baroque enfolding of surfaces, spaces and materials is thick with a layering of matter and meaning. It is for this reason that the killing sequence of Coré, for example, does not “veer towards the formless” as Beugnet has claimed (“Cinema and Sensation” 107). While ­noticeably dark and folding in and out of visibility—like the undulating tonalities of a historic baroque drapery—this scene does not entail an experience 17

See Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation, pp. 22–62; see also “Evil and the Senses”.

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

97

of abstraction. The faces of Coré and her lover/victim are visible, if obscure, partially framed or hidden behind hair. Furthermore, the camera insistently returns its focus throughout to a tight close-up on their mouths, as these become progressively bloodied, torn and gaping open. This same motif or textural pattern appears again in the shocking imagery of Shane’s open mouth, as it emerges into view directly after his killing and mauling of Christelle. As Nancy suggests, the “entire carnivorous breed” of the vampire and precinematic histories of the devouring kiss are encapsulated by Coré when she raises her coat to the sky, in a pointed homage to Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) (Nancy 1). Similar allusions occur through bloodied kisses and a persistent textural patterning. Locked up in her house and peering out through its bars, Coré recalls traditions of the literary Gothic, while the repeated circular movements of the film in the empty hotel evoke The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Likewise, the scratch-marks that Coré tears into her furniture and bedding evoke the dangerous feline sexuality of Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942); as do her panther-like gestures or those moments when Coré and Shane crouch, like animals. Shane, at one point, impersonates iconic figures of horror such as Frankenstein and Count Orlok during a visit to Notre-Dame Cathedral. Denis herself has cited a number of important influences including vampire and horror films, fairytales and childhood stories about monsters, African stories about half-human and half-panther creatures and the alienated landscapes of Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (Mayne 109). In Trouble Every Day, the restaging of key images, sounds, textures and gestures from all these influences appeals to the immanence of embodied experience and to our recognition of a self-reflexive patterning. These textual patterns move back and forth in time and across artistic media, activating the baroque and forming a composite enfolding that connects pleats of matter to folds in the soul. As I have argued, throughout, Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day can be considered an instance of neo-baroque filmmaking. Having approached Trouble Every Day through the sensuous logics of the fold, my bringing together of work in embodied film theory with baroque studies has also proved a productive coupling for this essay—one that assists in identifying just what a neobaroque cinema involves at the level of the body, while opening up different aesthetic modalities to a cinema of sensation. Through the heightened fabrication of film, a material visuality and the enfolding of film, body, brain and world, ­Denis’ film functions as deep-seated, surface-driven and highly textural encounter that a­ ctivates sensuous as well as thoughtful folds. Here, film and viewer ­become akin to a reversible twist of a fabric—they are materially enfolded into one another, like the intricate and tactile creases of a Bernini ­statue. As with the folds of the baroque that historically preceded it, Denis’

98

Walton

Trouble Every Day bestows upon cinema the “gift of perceptual intensity in order to strengthen [our] bond with matter” (Bal “Baroque Matters” 197). * Sections of this article have previously appeared as part of “Enfolding Surfaces, Space and Materials: Claire Denis’ neo-baroque Textures of Sensation” in Screening the Past 37 (2013).

Works Cited

Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth-Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Bal, Mieke. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: ­University of Chicago Press, 1999. Bal, Mieke. “Baroque Matters”. Rethinking the Baroque. Ed. Helen Hills. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 183–202. Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 2009. Beugnet, Martine. “Evil and the Senses: Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre and La Vie n­ ouvelle”. Studies in French Cinema. 5.3 (2005): 175–184. ———. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007. ———. “The Wounded Screen”. The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Eds. Tanya C. Horeck and Tina Kendell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 29–41. Bruno, Guiliana. “Pleats of Matter, Folds in the Soul”. Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Ed. D.N Rodowick. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 213–233. ———. “Surface, Fabric, Weave: The Fashioned World of Wong-Kar wai”. Fashion in Film. Ed. Adrienne Munich. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011. 82–105. Cataldi, Susan. Emotion, Depth and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space. Albany: State ­University of New York, 1993. Conley, Tom. “The Baroque Fold as Map and as Diagram”. Rethinking the Baroque. Ed. Helen Hills. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011a. 203–217. ———. “Folds and Folding”. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Ed. Charles Stivale. ­Trowbridge: Acumen, 2011b. 170–181. Del Rio, Elena. Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles. “On Leibniz”. Negotiations 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 156–173. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993.

Fabricating Film—The Neo-Baroque Folds of Claire Denis

99

Fleming, William. “The Element of Motion in Baroque Art and Music”. Journal of ­Aesthetic and Art Criticism. 5.2 (1946): 121–128. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Martin, John Rupert. Baroque. London: A Lane, 1977. Mayne, Judith. Claire Denis. Urbana: Indiana University Press, 2005. Morrey, Douglas. “Textures of Terror: Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day”. Belphégor. 3.2 (2004): 1–8. 4 March 2008. Morrey, Douglas. “Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis”. Film-Philosophy. 12.1 (April 2008): 10–30. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Icon of Fury: Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day”. Film-Philosophy. 12.1 (April 2008): 1–9. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Palmer, Tim. Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Panagia, Davide. “The Effects of Viewing: Caravaggio, Bacon and The Ring”. Theory and Event. 10.4 (2007): 1–3. Panofsky, Erwin. “What is Baroque?” Three Essays on Style. Ed. Irving Lavin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. 19–88. Peterson, Becky. “Fabric in Film and Film as Fabric: Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon”. Textile. 18.2 (2010): 226–241. Scholz, Sebastian and Hanna Surma. “Exceeding the Limits of Representation: Screen and/as Skin in Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001)”. Studies in French Cinema. 8.1 (2008): 5–16. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. “Trouble Every Day”. The Pinocchio Theory blog. 27 March 2002. 24 October 2010. . Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience. Princeton: University of Princeton, 1991. ———. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

chapter 4

Baroque Affinities: Wölfflin, Visconti, the Baroque and the Films of Glauber Rocha Rita Eder The baroque as an accepted artistic category surfaced in the late 19th century. After being defined in terms of the extravagant or the irregular in the context of art historical texts written a century before, new reflections on the baroque, which appeared in Heinrich Wölfflin’s (1864–1945) well-known texts Renaissance and Baroque (1888) and Principles of Art History (1915) can be identified as a symptom of a turn in aesthetic values. This revaluation of the baroque, which was accompanied by a critical approach to classicism stands at the threshold of an attraction to visual instability and the formless, a precedent of modern theory and practice in the arts.1 In filmmaking, the resistance to the dominant, ‘classical’ stylistic and narrative practices typical of mainstream cinemas through the adoption of baroque practices can be appreciated in a number of filmmakers from different backgrounds and different historical moments. In this chapter I will mainly concentrate on the practice of Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha (1939–1981) by examining a series of theoretical texts and analyzing his film Terra em Transe/ Entranced Earth (1967). This is a film about the 1964 military coup d’etat in ­Brazil, and it invites a consideration of the relations between the modern and the baroque—particularly, the transformation of social and political history into allegorical representation (Xavier 7). Terra em Transe relates to the baroque and the neo-baroque from a ­material and visual point of view in regards to its display of objects and architectural decoration; Rocha uses these in a critical manner to ironize the so-called ­Brazilian national identity, where the baroque as a style has played an ­important role. Visually, Terra em Transe seeks to construct a sense of multiple spaces, where long shots, low camera angles and anamorfosis are used frequently. Additionally, it employs the continuous citation of different literary and cinematic 1 In his essay, “What is Baroque”, Erwin Panofsky delved into the meaning of the word ‘baroque’ and the negative historiography around it until the late 19th century. Panofsky is critical of Wölfflin’s set of opposed categories and proposes the baroque as the third stage or dialectical synthesis where baroque brings back a sense of order in opposition to mannerism. See: Erwin Panofsky: Three Essays on Style, Ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge: mit Press, 1995): 17–90.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_007

Baroque Affinities

101

genres, an intertextual method attributed to the baroque as it contributes to an increase in both physical and ideological instability: perhaps one of Rocha’s major ambitions as a filmmaker (Avellar 137). Omar Calabrese’s rich theorization on the subject in La Era Neobarroca outlines Heinrich Wölfflin’s opposition between the classical and the baroque. For Calabrese, the classical aims to categorize judgment-oriented homologations ordered in a stable manner. The baroque, however, reinforces categorizations that excite the system: they destabilize order, submit to fluctuation and the suspension of a decisive schema of values (43). Calabrese’s emphasis on Wölfflin’s contrasting visions of classical stability and the baroque (conceived as a fluctuating style that contravenes the law of the frame and invades space), suggested Wölfflin’s perspective on the baroque could be analyzed, p ­ articularly as a means of clarifying the formal categories that irrupted in the classical humanism of the Renaissance. The incidence of this formal analysis is directed to highlight Wölfflin’s identification—tangential though it may be—of the emergence of a new sensibility that would have an effect on modern art, and in the longer term, in considerations of the neo-baroque that have arisen more recently. The pathos and dramatic effect that interested Glauber Rocha was also the principal field of research for German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929). Both Wölfflin and Warburg detected a certain malaise in classical art, and are partly indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) of an opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as aesthetic categories in Classical Greek culture. While Wölfflin is considered a formalist and Warburg a cultural historian, they are brought together by their interest in the psychology of art; that is, the effect of artworks on their audience. Another connection between the two is the fact that both were interested (albeit using different methodologies) in the crisis of classical forms and its meaning for Western civilization as a whole. In this regard, Glauber Rocha’s texts—written from the standpoint of a new art form such as cinema and based on his vast background in this field—analyze films from different countries that break with narratives that remain faithful to the rules of the linear narrative and harmonious image that typifies classical forms of film narration—most successfully, the classical Hollywood film. They do this via strategies that recall the baroque, understood here as the embellished and intricate, and that transgress rules in a manner that permits invention. The forms of baroque appropriation in Latin America are relevant to this discussion on Glauber Rocha. Similarly, so are the interrelationships with the European tradition tangible in the reception process of Wölfflin’s work in ­Brazilian art historiography, specifically essays written by Lourival Gomes

102

Eder

Machado. This prominent Brazilian intellectual demonstrated a profound knowledge of European art historical texts such as Wölfflin’s writings, which were important in how the originality of Brazilian baroque were formulated (very close to metropolitan Portuguese models).2 Alternatively, Juana Gutierrez Haces (2001) developed an interesting method for approaching Mexican baroque as a question of local singularity and differentiation. She tracked how and when the term ‘baroque’ arose in Mexican literature, and how it was defined by art historian Manuel Revilla in his treatise on Mexican art written in 1893. Despite his intense admiration for classicism, Revilla approached the baroque—particularly the baroque variant Churrigueresco—as a well-defined Mexican stylistic alternative, marked by a rejection of straight lines, its abundance of curves, twisted columns, and extreme decoration. An abundance of baroque painting and sculpture in Latin America with different regional characteristics gave way to conceptions of the baroque as a style that adapted to new needs and expressive modes of this emerging mixed society where the workmanship of black slaves and/or indigenous artisans modified these metropolitan models. From a contemporary philosophical and sociological perspective that stems from Latin America (beyond art history but not excluding an aesthetic approach), Ecuadorian-born, Mexican-based ­philosopher Bolívar Echeverría (1941–2010)—whose essay appears in this anthology—understood baroque modernity as the form of a new civilization that was born out of a colonial structure. From Echeverria’s point of view, that which is American (in the sense of Latin American) is that which emerges from opposing cultures: whose mixture of different bodies and faces, suppressed religious beliefs that rebel against the invention of new notions of art, and the 2 The source of Gomes Machados knowledge of Wölfflin has been attributed to Hannah Levy, a former student of Wölfflin. Having fled Nazi Germany, Levy settled in Brazil between 1937 and 1948, and translated to Portuguese Wölfflin’s Principals of Art History and wrote three essays on the Swiss art historian’s aesthetic thought. Hannah Levy, through her work, influenced the conceptualization of Brazilian baroque. Reflections on Wölfflin and recognition of Levy’s work are contained in the texts of Lourival Gomes Machado particularly the 1953 essay on Teorias do Barroco (theories of the baroque) and a few years later and more specifically Gomes Machado wrote on the baroque of Minas Gerais. See: Lourival Gomes Machado, Barroco Mineiro, Sao Paulo, Editora Perspectiva, 1969. This edition contains the essays and articles Gomes Machado wrote on the baroque where Wölfflin is often cited in the already mentioned Teorias do Borroco (29–78) and O Barroco e o Absolutismo (Baroque and Absolutism) (79–150). The historiography of Brazilian baroque is indeed enormous, but for a conceptual and bibliographical synthesis, Marcia Bonnet’s Reflected Images: Approaches to Colonial Art in Portuguese America in 20th century. Brazilian historiography. Available at: http://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/3740357.pdf.

Baroque Affinities

103

emergence of ambiguous linguistic structures that conceal forms of resistance, all form part of the cultural make-up we are dealing with. For Echeverría, the baroque appears to be the dialectic itself: it affirms itself, negates itself, and is resolved into a new synthesis when faced with colonial structures such as the Church and the modern capitalist State.3 Echeverría’s “baroque ethos” is a form of subsistence, based on a resistance that must in turn coexist with superimposed structures. As a filmmaker, Glauber Rocha made use of a discontinuous, allegorical narrative in an attempt to stage the drama of Latin America, and Brazil in particular. While Rocha’s texts can be connected to the anti-classical emergence as analyzed by Wölfflin and Warburg, Terra em Transe (a film that addresses historical and political issues) establishes points of contact with Echeverría’s reflections on culture and the meaning of the baroque as a regime of forms inspired by what is different and opposed. Through images, this film uses the baroque as a critical method clearly seen in his parody of baroque courtly fashion, architecture and sculpture.

Glauber Rocha: Post-neorealist Narrative in Cinema and the Baroque

The written works of Glauber Rocha total over 1,000 pages, and were published in three volumes between 2003 and 2006,4 with prefaces by Ismail Xavier. ­Rocha’s articles, most of which first appeared in magazines and periodicals, are concerned with the theory and criticism of film language, and include dialogues and debates on the Cinema Novo movement that emerged in ­Brazil during the mid-1950s. Some of these texts are written as manifestos, highlighting the avant-garde nature of his writing and his intention to move and call people to action.5 These express the principles of his revolutionary and pro-Latin American vocation by articulating a new aesthetic for the Left that 3 This notion of the baroque as dialectics is itself contrary to the idea of opposing categories. It coincides, albeit with a different perspective and inference, with Panofsky’s “What is Baroque”. 4 These are: Glauber Rocha, Revisao crítica do cinema brasileiro, Sao Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2003; Glauber Rocha, Revolucao do Cinema Novo, Sao Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2004; Glauber Rocha, O século do cinema, Sao Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2006. 5 Rocha’s best-known manifestos are “Aesthetics of Hunger” (“Estética do fome”) in: Revolucao do Cinema Novo, Sao Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2004, pp. 63–64; “Aesthetics of Dreams” (“Estética do sonho”) in: op. cit. pp. 248–253 and “Revolution is Aesthetics” (A revolucao é uma eztetyka) op. cit. pp. 99–100.

104

Eder

e­ mphatically rejects ­socialist realism and demands a language constructed out of the fracturing of visual elements and conventional narratives. The third volume O Século do Cinema Novo (The Century of New Cinema) reveals what a passionate cinephile and expert observer Glauber was, with essays about innovations in form, technique and content in world cinema: from Chaplin to Eisenstein, Hollywood to Orson Welles, the Nouvelle Vague (particularly JeanLuc Godard) to Jean-Marie Straub. It also covers at length his Italian contemporaries: Pasolini, Fellini, Antonioni and Visconti. Rocha dedicates many pages to the latter in particular, and appears to find Visconti’s films exemplary of his own greatest preoccupation: a cinema that is revolutionary not through its story but by its invention of a cinematic language. For Rocha, revolutionary cinema meant auteur cinema in the Nouvelle Vague sense, where the director works independently of the industry’s commercial demands and focuses on their vocation for transforming cinematic language. The neo-realism of Rossellini that launched a new way of making film—using non-actors and without all the paraphernalia of the studios and the demands of the market—had to be surpassed for R ­ ocha, not in its critique of commercial cinema but in the way it articulated plot through images. For Rocha, Visconti succeeded in doing this through a technique Rocha called the “Viscontian baroque” that he described in the essay “O Barroco Viscontiano”, reprinted in O Século do Cinema (229–235). This view of Visconti’s work seems to be related in the first instance to what Rocha called the Italian director’s “screenwriting”, a technique that reveals the tensions and conflict between frame and composition. Rocha described this in the essay ­“Screenwriting: Visconti”, also reprinted in O Século do Cinema (216). For young Brazilian filmmaker Rocha, Visconti’s Senso (1954) is an example of screenwriting as the lineal structure of the exterior montage takes place with a slow measure of saturation, a rhythm of exposure that allows—through the time devoted to the visual—the birth of a new universe. According to ­Rocha, Visconti’s contribution to filmic language was to incorporate dramatic developments into the visual dynamic, distinguishing it from literary drama. Visconti moved away from the tired narrative tradition in the way he marked time and constructed his scenes: his vision merges with the pictorial representation, and his extreme psychological functionality revitalizes an “avant-garde path in an exhausted age” (“Screenwriting: Visconti” 217). Visconti’s shots lead us in unexpected directions: where the focus should be on a military march, he focuses instead on a landscape or an individual face as a way of subverting narrative grammar. In terms of pacing, he destroys the illustrative nature of pictorial representation, and allows the drama to become a heightened, sophisticated fable of the real: this melodramatic element in turn confers absurdity upon the real.

Baroque Affinities

105

If melodrama plays an important role in Senso, it is therefore useful to reconsider the meaning of this genre as defined by Peter Brooks. He a­ cknowledged the rising cultural importance of melodrama as a category that pointed to ­complex obsessions and aesthetic choices central to modernity, where a dramaturgy of hyperbolic excess, excitement and acting out (in the psychoanalytic sense) may be the essence of melodrama (vii). Senso is, from this perspective, a melodrama to a certain point and shares baroque characteristics prominent in the sinuosity of its deep space, the sense of illumination that distorts architectural forms, and its sense of tragic drama, where opera unfolds with allegorical purpose.

Visconti and the Passion of Rocco

Rocha considered one of the strengths of Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers, 1960) to be the construction of the character Rocco Parondi (Alain Delon). He is one of five brothers, four of whom (Simone, Rocco, Ciro and Luca) emigrate with their mother from southern Italy to Milan. The fifth, Vincenzo, has already moved to the city, a space characterized by rapid industrial growth in the post-war period. Shots of the city underscore the run-down neighborhoods and the new building developments laid out in their monotonous grids. Visconti offers a surprising, if brief, counterpoint with aerial shots of Milan’s Duomo that emphasize the gracefulness of the capricious and spectacular late-Gothic architecture, which form a lasting visual experience for the viewer. Placed between the ancient and the hyper-modern, Rocco is, according to Rocha, the Viscontian offspring of the Biblical saga of Joseph and his brothers, or the fraternal tragedy of the Brothers Karamazov. Rocco is a drama of passion in which jealousy and guilt are set against each other: there is cruelty, violence, submission and an incomprehensible love that goes beyond the complex relationship between Cain and Abel. Visconti takes melodrama to new heights in order to instill in the viewer a sentimental empathy that becomes an instrument for calling into question the veracity of suffering and sacrifice. With Rocco, the polemic between film and fiction is expanded. For Rocha this converts the film into a modern movie in the sense that it is a cinematic transformation of narrative processes, such as that also achieved by Alain Resnais and (naturally) Sergei Eisenstein, the latter with the internal monologue that irrupts into the flow of time, when the Soviet filmmaker attempted to adapt Joyce’s Ulysses for the cinema. If the value of Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) was bringing a new narrative process to the cinema, Rocco’s worth lies in the way it unshackles

106

Eder

knowledge using an apparently traditional cinematic language. It breaks free of the old order of events in film and imposes the meandering timeline of the novel. It rejects the academic logic of sentiment and achieves a great tableau of Latin culture, without abiding by the statutes of Rossellini’s neo-realism. ­Visconti’s film thus gives birth to Rocha’s new “Viscontian baroque” ­(“Visconti e os nervos de Rocco”, 232). In terms of character construction, Rocha’s admiration for Rocco Parondi or Studs Lonigan (a 1960 film by Irving Lerner that Rocha wrote about extensively) reveals his interest in the tragic hero.6 In ­Allegories of Underdevelopment (1997), Ismael Xavier establishes the connection between Cinema Novo and the baroque via the allegorical, alluding to ­Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) where exaggeration and theatrical effect correlate with violence, suffering and death. According to Xavier, baroque tragedy has as its objective historical life and redemption secularized by the profane desire for power, which defines the hero of Benjamin’s histories as the double face of Janus, where hero and martyr seem to be interconnected (Xavier 73). This duality is evident in Rocco’s plight in Visconti’s film and it also applies to Martin’s, the hero of Terra em transe. Rocha’s film can also be seen as a system of forms that focus on architecture (the modern skyscraper or the Milan Duomo), and extends its lines—be they reticular or capricious—as a constant flow that overtakes in certain moments the fixed image of the closed space of the asphyxiating room where the family lives. Formal and spatial strategies (as well as the drama of the narrative) establish tension, and the memory of the film seems to be overtaken by spatial oppositions: open versus closed, 6 On Lerner, Rocha wrote an article entitled “A Masterly Film”. The film in question is Studs Lonigan (1960), which Rocha praises in the highest terms: “a modern, revolutionary film, which is to cinema what Joyce is to literature”. Rocha’s passion for this film is sparked by the revelation of a new American cinema that seeks to reveal the degrading side of American social and individual conformity. Studs contains something that spoke to Rocha and that he would later come to distill in his own films: the presence of a tragic hero who moves in the filmic universe that Lerner creates around his character, from the framing to the sound design, “without even considering the montage, which fractures the grammatical punctuation, overwhelms the sequences and makes use of interior monologues as a realist element”. Furthermore, Rocha sees a virtue in Lerner’s reconstruction of an epoch by way of poetic visualization, abandoning a meticulous “historicism”. It may be that Rocha’s enormous enthusiasm for Irving Lerner’s film lies in what he sees as innovation in cinematic language without abandoning the political relevance of a portrait of his times that penetrates the suffering found in industrialized, capitalist societies. In “A Masterly Film” we find the roots of the extended analysis Rocha would come to make of the films of Luchino Visconti: Senso (1954) and Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960).

Baroque Affinities

107

and contrasting forms of industrialization that can be described as linear in the midst of the reigning architectural fantasy of the Duomo, overflowing without any sense of order because of its many angles and unexpected turns.

Rethinking the Baroque: From Wölfflin to Rocha

In the preface to the first edition of his book Renaissance and Baroque (1888) that he published at the age of just 24, Wölfflin claimed the fundamental question concerned the disintegration of the Renaissance, and the symptoms of its decadence. The task was to discover the reason for the return of chaos to artistic production, along with the caprice of nature, a law that explained the intimate vision of art processes—this was for Wölfflin the true aim of the history of art. He understood the transition from the Renaissance to the baroque (he ­always refers to the Roman baroque) in psychological terms, implying an understanding of the reception of works of art in the subject and his individual identification as body or nature with artistic ideas. Wölfflin confesses at the last moment that he abandoned his original plan of including a parallel study of the baroque in ancient art, an undertaking he hoped to pursue in the future. Occupying barely a page, with these few introductory words he advises the reader that the dialectic of opposites will be part of his modern, experimental approach, and openly sets out a psychological method to attempt to understand the fall of Renaissance order by way of the appearance of certain features that involve subjectivity. In reality, he claimed, the baroque is not only a style that belongs to a particular historical period, but also a process that established itself in the art of different epochs. In his theoretical texts (especially his manifestoes), Rocha reflects on how to surpass Rosselini’s neo-realism, how to be loyal to the film d’auteur, and how to project a new method of politically relevant films outside of the parameters of the official aesthetics of the left. In The Revolution is an Aesthetic, Rocha analyzes politics and a new cinematic methodology conformed by the dialectics of image oppositions in constant flow. Reading Wölfflin enables us to connect Rocha’s method of opposing images with what filmmakers can transform into discontinuous visual narratives. Unlike the Roman Renaissance that was governed by set artistic principles, baroque style is not accompanied by theoretical rules, and develops without models. This is why the new style was not accorded a name until much later, although it is true that its difference from Classical form led to the use of new

108

Eder

terms (such as capricious, bizarre and extravagant, all that was unusual and non-canonical.) Following Wölfflin, it may be said that these modifications and transgressions were, as Walter Moser outlines in the Introduction to this anthology, positively received by art historians: “the enchantment or spell of the formless began its work” (Renaissance and Baroque 23). Wölfflin indicated that the modern meaning of the term “baroque” is of French origin. Although he cites its different meanings and its etymological uncertainty, he seems to find in Diderot’s definition (found in the Encylopédie) closer in spirit to his own reflections and intellectual needs, where the baroque is a nuance of the bizarre, an impersonation of excess that seems contain a sense of the ridiculous (Renaissance and Baroque 23). At the time he wrote, Wölfflin claimed, there was no distinction made between the baroque and the bizarre. As an art historical term today, however, the baroque remains charged with a certain sense of the repugnant and abnormal. Visconti’s early films of the 1950s thrive and indicate an extreme development of these more negative aspects of the baroque, where melodrama distorts feelings and creates through its heightened exaggeration a distance from extreme passions. In his early films, Visconti succumbs to the repugnant and the abnormal. His use of the baroque can be seen both as a visual method and a critical perspective. One of the characteristics Wölfflin attributes to the baroque is its pictorial effect, given that baroque architecture and sculpture are based on the illusion of movement. This illusion of movement stands in opposition to what he calls the linear style, where each object is delineated in a clear and continuous manner, with a well-resolved outline. In the baroque, figures are broad and vague, and outlines are not indicated: lines are tentative, and repetitive brushstrokes are omitted. Composition relies on lighting and the effect of chiaroscuro. The static lines of the old style are replaced by the blurring of limits. Wölfflin’s observations bring to mind certain aspects of film theory, where images dissolve and chiaroscuro becomes a resource in film narrative similar to that previously discussed in Visconti’s film. Senso involves the baroque through its subjectivity (passion as formless), and its visuality as a persistent chiaroscuro where Livia (the female protagonist) wanders in the night with the ubiquitous masculine personage, Franz Mahler. Here, the spectator has a sense of the darkened atmosphere of the narrow streets of Venice illuminated in a sudden and unexpected way by fire torches. The baroque implies the dissolution of regular forms, of symmetrical compositions and structural framing. There is a lack of definition and an increase in the number of overlapping objects, contributing to a sense of the transitory.

Baroque Affinities

109

Wölfflin frequently uses the terms “undefined” and “unlimited” in connection with pictorial works, which does not imply they are colorful or lightweight: the baroque is potentially expansive (Renaissance and Baroque 37).

The Grand Manner

According to Wölfflin, Renaissance art is the art of calm and beauty, and bestows a sense of freedom over us that makes us feel alive and at ease. It is perfect: the arches are semi-circular and the proportions are ample and delightful. The baroque seeks another effect altogether. It desires the power of immediate and overwhelming impact, and is imbued with ideas of excitement, ecstasy and intoxication: its impact fades and leaves us desolate. We have no point of arrival, but rather we have been enfolded in an emotional state of tension as the result of the treatment of form: the scale and the movement of the maniera grande (“grand manner”) of Vasari (Renaissance and Baroque 39). Emotional tension and psychological impact is also crucial to Visconti’s aspirations of his own particular maniera grande. He reveals the complexities of excessive drama and undermines filmmaking’s narrative conventions. This fits well with the idea of the baroque in Wölfflin’s terms as a style that discards individual parts, and where the function of its formal characteristics is to impress and overwhelm by way of the principle of the massive (Renaissance and Baroque 44–47). Renaissance art expressed its perfection in the harmony of all its parts, as Alberti would say, and sustained the impossibility of change without the ­destruction of meaning (Renaissance and Baroque 66). Proportion and harmony lose their meaning in the baroque, which does not seek a state of ­perfection but rather seeks an incomplete state. The baroque transforms ­harmony into ­dissonance through the use of imperfect proportions ­(Renaissance and B ­ aroque 66). How and why does this change come about? This was the question Wölfflin asked. What are the causes of the end of the Renaissance and the emergence of the baroque? Why did the change take place in this way? His answer lies in the arrival of what he called a “decisive sensibility”, caused by the widespread loss of refined perception and a high level of emotional indulgence (Renaissance and Baroque 67). This claim, resulting from his interpretation of a specific type of collective behavior, is banal. Rather, as we shall see, it would appear to be a form of justifying his interest in something that was outside the accepted norms of his day.

110

Eder

Having named and described the characteristics of the baroque (highlighting its transgressive character and the rules of a style that aspires to perfection), Wölfflin concludes that the baroque has great affinities with the characteristics of the arts in the late 19th century, “otherwise how to explain the success, for example, of the works of Wagner?” (Renaissance and Baroque 72). Locating the baroque is to write about a modern sensibility; part of the legitimacy of the baroque and its formal and emotional characteristics from the viewpoint of the history of art is a product of the late 19th century.7 This will powerfully reemerge as part of postmodern reflection at the end of the 20th century in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies and literature.8

7 Kurt W. Forster, Introduction to Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (translated by David Britto), Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, 1999, p.7. In his 1886 doctoral thesis, The Psychology of Architecture, Wölfflin asked why architectural forms are capable of expressing an emotion or sentiment. This question caught the imagination of his contemporary, Aby Warburg (1866–1929), who was deeply interested in the use of dynamic form in images to express inner states. He focused on the details of representation in Italian art from the Quattrocento: flowing hair, drapery in movement covering female bodies, cascades of flowers and tree branches bent by the wind, all elements he saw as evident in Botticelli’s painting Primavera (1477–1478), which was the subject of his doctoral thesis in 1893. In this work, Warburg pointed to the traces of pagan antiquity. These imply the study of emotions by visual means, leading him to a novel approach to Renaissance art by indicating a process of modification and disruption in the dynamic conflict between ancient and modern. Warburg was not interested in observing the Renaissance as a moment of incomparable splendor in European history, but rather as a battlefield where ideas and power faced off, or in other words, as a world of cultural subversion in transition. The decisive point resided in the relationship between artworks and human beings, something that Burckhardt had already noted in a vague sense: that art cannot only be understood according to philosophical or aesthetic categories, but also in terms of psychology also. Taking this to its logical conclusion would transform the history of art, insofar as it could no longer be seen as merely as a passive object, but rather also in terms of the sensations and effects they evoke in the viewer. Perhaps only in this way could Burckhardt understand how the intellect, the soul and the imagination are related to the comprehension of art (Georges Didi Huberman L’Image Survivant). 8 In this exploration, pathos occupies an important position. In Georges Didi Huberman’s book on Aby Warburg L’Image Survivante (2002), the author dedicates an extensive chapter to analyzing pathos (or Pathosformel) that appears early on in Warburg’s works (Georges Didi Huberman L’Image Survivant 195). Why did modern man go back to Antiquity in search of an affective gesturality? Why did the ancient voice survive in the tensions that existed within the hybrid, volatile Renaissance style? George Didi Huberman asked these questions in the wake of Warburg, to whom he dedicated countless pages in his extensive work. According to Huberman, Warburg and his fundamental concepts such as the Pathosformeln have been exorcized: in defense of an alternative tradition in German art history, Huberman claims

Baroque Affinities

111

Wölfflin presents us with well-defined formal categories that illuminate the baroque, apparently representing the decline of the Classical order and at the same time indicative of the period in which Wölfflin was writing. Warburg’s focus seeks to understand the living soul of images by means of what—rather than referring to classical Antiquity—he chose to call “pagan”. However, both are searching for a new sensibility that destabilizes the Renaissance: whether in the Quattrocento (by way of what Huberman has called the ghosts that live on in Warburg’s approach), or via Wölfflin’s baroque that breaks with the harmonious aesthetic of the Cinquecento. Both speak of powerful emotions and differentiated formal strategies; while there is formal innovation in the baroque, both involve a rupture with the present order. The idealization of the Renaissance as the representation of a near-perfect world is what is in question. This is what German thinkers on art at the turn of the 20th century bring to modernity: the notion of something extravagant, impure, and dark but at the same time grandiose and massive. It brings the expression of emotional complexity to the fore, involving the terrible and the triumph of the informal or the transgression of limits in which exaggeration, melodrama and pathos occupy a central place. The connection between Rocha’s analysis of film and an alternative paradigm in art history addressing from a specific perspective transgression and disruptions (the baroque and the traces of pagan antiquity) inflicted on the classical order a formal paradigm considered stable and ideal, coincides with Rocha’s search and detection of a new language in film that can actually bring instability to the viewer: this is a baroque characteristic. The anxiety of industrial society present in Visconti’s Rocco e suoi fratelli stems from unsolved religious tensions in the scene of religious sacrifice at the end of the film, when Nadja (who has brought discord between brothers) opens and stretches her arms emulating the symbol of the cross, while Salvatore (Rocco’s ­jealous brother) stabs her with a knife. This is a strong image that involves both the ­baroque and what Aby Warburg the art historian called Pathosformeln or ­Pathos ­formula—expressive formulas of emotion.

From the Labyrinth of the Baroque to Rocha

Rocha’s extreme admiration for Visconti and Lerner has its roots in the ability of both these filmmakers to incorporate the darker side of industrialized societies into their characters and their humanity, embodied above all in the we can follow a step-by-step the negation (or dilution) of formulas relating to pathos in the works of outstanding art historians (L’Image Survivant 196).

112

Eder

tragic hero and in the unrestrained display of emotions. When Rocha speaks of his admiration for these two directors, he reflects on their capacity to break with the conventional narrative order and to transform it into a different cinematic language, one that fractures conventions with an extreme presentation of emotions. It is also due to the spatial framing they used for their characters, with bird’s-eye shots that cause vertigo, combined with forms from other times (such as the unforgettable scene in which Rocco meets Nadja high up on Milan’s Duomo to talk about the impossibility of their love.) In Senso, a melodrama that carries emotions to an unbearable extreme, the principal character is not only a disillusioned woman in love and a sympathizer with the Risorgimento, but also a woman capable of forgetting her political convictions for the sake of a cynical love and for someone who confesses he does not really know who he is when he looks in the mirror. The flood of emotions and the chiaroscuro shots of the streets of Venice stage the forms and sinuosity of the baroque. For Rocha, it is this sinuosity that breaks with neo-realism and opens up a new form of creativity. The Classical or humanist order that has been discussed is seen as something problematic for the cinema. The continuous narrative structure is the paradigm to be broken up as a means of opposing this cinematic system and proposing a procession of images as they appear in the mind or in dreams where realities and memories face off and overlap. Perhaps this is what ­Rocha wanted to say when he referred to the Viscontian baroque, which certainly takes pathos to its extremes with the intolerable suffering of his profoundly tragic heroes and heroines, whether this tragedy is inscribed in the modern capitalist world (Rocco and His Brothers) or in bourgeois life (Senso). There is something else, too: the idea of the massive causes an emotional impact (which Wölfflin points to as characteristics of the baroque) makes up part of the cinematic aesthetic that Rocha admires in Visconti, and which he will transpose onto his own films. This manifests in the notion of the image having the force of an epic, unending and grandiose pronouncement.

Rocha as Filmmaker

The central concepts that underscore Rocha’s criticism of cinema as developed in his films and writings call for certain forms of narration to be dismantled in order to rediscover reality from the perspective of the gaze. This takes into account the impossibility of finding harmony between subjectivity and the world within a capitalist, bourgeois social structure. This is a theme he explores not only for the Cinema Novo but also for the various other types cinemas that from different perspectives can be seen to examine the crisis of institutional

Baroque Affinities

113

s­ tructures, the family or personal relationships. This is a condition that closes in around his characters, and is expressed through suffocation, in the dislocated dialogues of failed communication, in the crime that is the effect of a double standard, and in the destruction of the individual by the bureaucratic and military apparatus of the State. Rocha reinforces awareness of this disharmony in his manifesto-like texts where he considers the significance of filmmaking in Latin America. Notable among these are “Aesthetics of Hunger” and “The Revolution is an Aesthetic” (both reprinted in Revolucao do Cinema Novo). The former, the longest and perhaps most widely-known of his written work, uses dependency theory to consider the continued existence of colonialism in Latin America (even if the colonizers are other, belong to another age, dress in different clothes and speak other languages.) As a response to dependency, developmentalism considered the economic and social stagnation of Latin America from the perspective of both the center and the periphery, and the unjust set-up of the world economy. Intellectuals designed the necessary state strategy of industrialization, and promoted the creation of an educated bureaucracy capable of interacting with elites and contributing to the formation of a middle-class that could drive the internal market. A later stage in dependency theory turned its gaze toward the internal colonialism promoted by Latin American elites linked to the State and foreign capital. This second phase, as we shall observe below in some detail, impinges on the story of Terra em Transe. In The Revolution is an Aesthetic, Rocha analyzes the options intellectuals in the underdeveloped world had, and asks how to overcome their alienation and these contradictions, and how to acquire revolutionary lucidity. To achieve this aim, the intellectual or the artist must use the dialectic to bring together—in a constant back and forth of oppositions—two propositions: a didactic one (required to educate and spread awareness), and an epic one (which is poetic practice.) Both must function simultaneously. Rocha treats the epic as a visual and narrative strategy on the basis of its etymology (epicos or epos, which means word, story or poem), or the subjective retelling of legendary deeds and imaginary elements that blend reality and fiction from diverse times and spaces. Rocha’s epic reinforces the meaning of images and the construction of discourse in order to dismantle nationalisms and their structures of power that exercise control over the imagination.

Trance: The Death of the Poet

Terra em Transe has been translated in several ways. In English, it has been rendered Entranced Earth or Land in Anguish, however the idea of transe in

114

Eder

Portuguese (or trance in Spanish) is more complex, referring not only to crisis but also to the idea of entering a trance as a state of hallucination or a distance from reality. A transe is also a journey towards death, and it might be said these three senses of the word are part of the story and general atmosphere of the film. His Terra takes in different times and spaces. It is all places: mountain, jungle and the endless desert that is opposed to the sea, an absence/presence of other lands. Terra, Rocha will say, is unstable; it was created to insert the deepest instability. This would be a definition, in fact, of transe as movement and surprise that aspires to the self-transformation of the spectator. In full awareness of being a creator and inventor who wants to revolutionize cinema to develop a vision of the world (of the Latin American world in particular) at just the age of 28 Rocha created a vision of history that brought together past and present through the use of images that develop a singular synthesis of Latin America, especially Brazil. The starting point was the colonial origin and the Neo-colonial condition of modernity. By way of the exterior of actions and the interior of a labyrinthine thought that disconcerts the spectator, it approaches the notion of the violence of the political process interpolated by subjectivity. The first impression of the film—in its scenarios, narrative and characters—is that it is removed from any understanding of a realist and didactic visual aspect, even though we know the film has a historical and political basis in the 31 March 1964 coup d’état that carried General Castelo Branco to power. During this military government, left wing culture persisted although not without limitations. There was the possibility of an alliance with the State, with the intellectual middle-class, or with Developmentalist businessmen. According to film historian John King, in this sense the film: …explores the contradictions of a socially engaged artist who, misinterpreting himself as a decisive agent in the struggle for power in society, is obliged to confront his own illusions concerning the ‘courtly life’ in an underdeveloped milieu and discovers his peripheral condition within the small circle of the mighty. Defeated, the artist enacts the agony of his illusory status, the death of his anachronistic view (113). Paulo Martins, the poet of this story, is identified through a brief reference literally inscribed upon the film: a few hand-written pages that occupy a prime place on the screen, with verses by the Brazilian poet and journalist Mario Faustino. His poem is a premonition of his early death in 1962 at the age of 32, in which he undergoes mystical experiences and foresees his end. He will feel like the new Christ who is abandoned and betrayed. His via crucis does not succeed in resolving the enigma of life and death, and he heroically accepts

Baroque Affinities

115

his fate.9 This is one of many insertions from other genres that are placed on the great expanse of the screen in fulfillment of the director’s notion of oppositions as a dialectical movement that moves between the visual and the metaphorical shot, an issue we shall return to below. Martins, who lies dead on the pavement a few minutes into the film, invalidates and lucidly recreates in the mirror of memory, his truth as well as his clumsy actions, his struggle for change and his relationship with power, framed in the neo-baroque stages of ‘Eldorado’. These are stages with ample spaces, interrupted by collisions with fragmentary architectural elements, as well as truncated columns that have lost their function and become mere decorative supports. The poet’s progress is observed in different spaces, including the urban misery of the city with its class contrasts, and his modern apartment, a location in which the sound of his deep, broken voice goes over the dialogues of his conscience in a lengthy flashback that recreates the interrelationship of stories of failed political renewal processes and his own fate together with his weapon in the immensity of the desert. This is a key to his own transe, and that of the history inscribed on the earth.

Terra or the Reincarnation of the Tyrant

Removed from the context of the images, the story is one thing; but the way in which the images are superimposed and the rhythm of the camera make it impossible to summarize them in any manner faithful to the richness of the artist’s imagination. The film is located in what Rocha calls the inner country of ‘Eldorado’, that is, all places and no place, because, in his own words, he was interested in the inner transe of Latin America, and not specifically that of Brazil. The 115 minutes that the film lasts take in a cyclical story from the arrival of the Europeans to unknown lands across a vast sea, up to the modern day, showing the factors that affect under-development and a fatal circularity from which there is no exit. Possibility lies in the creative process of using an innovative visual language to recreate other critical approaches that make it possible to understand how internal and external colonialisms are formed. The film’s first scene shows an aerial shot of the sea. It appears that this beginning to the film, which frames a spot on the coast amidst the immensity of the ocean (the location of Eldorado) refers to the origins of Brazil in the ­European imagination. Thus, from the outset, Rocha confronts the m ­ ythical 9 Albeniza Chaves is cited by Mario Faustino in his article “Amante da norte”, available at: http://www.uniblog.com.br/mariofaustino/84437/mario-faustino---amante-da-morte.html.

116

Eder

and historical origin of modern Latin American in the crossing of the Atlantic and the search for new wealth and the expansion of power. It is at this point that Echeverria’s conceptualization of the baroque as a social and political strategy of resistance is pertinent in terms of the encounter between two wholly opposed civilizations, a process that involves the imposition of different economic and religious systems and relations that creates the possibility of transforming and appropriating the imposed through the subversion of language and symbolic counterproposals. When the shot of the sea turns towards land, we see a splendid landscape that is soon transformed into desert and enslaved by the sword and the cross, in a subverted citation of a well-known 1860 academic painting, Victor Meirelles’ The First Mass Celebrated in Brazil. This is natural and human landscape of plants and trees, and is the stage for half-naked Indigenous people wearing feather headdresses (some of them perched in the trees), while armor-clad conquistadors surround the principle scene of the foundation of the Catholic creed pay homage to a large cross. For the Brazilian historian Jorge Coli, the discovery of Brazil as represented in paintings and later in film (O descobrimento do Brasil (1937) by Humberto Maura) is a 19th century invention that fits the nation-building project. The arrival of Portuguese ships on the shores of Brazil for the first time was an event accompanied by an extraordinary document written by Pero Vaz de Caminha, who in his role as the chronicler of that voyage, sent the King of Portugal a narrative description recounting his experiences of seeing these new lands between 21 April and 1 May, 1500. This text is rich and diverse, and is of particular interest insofar as it is linked to that first mass that brought together sailors and Indians. Coli’s article traces the origins of this first document as it reappears in the 19th century in relation to Victor Meirelles’ painting, Primeira Missa no ­Brasil, which he began in Paris in 1859 and completed in 1861. His patron, Araujo Porto-alegre, insisted Meirelles read Caminha’s text and reproduce the exuberance of tropical plants and palms in order to endow the scene with its own geographical character. Thus the original chronicle of Caminha and the image come together in an emblem of the birth of Brazil. Meirelles opts for a gentle image of harmony, light and colour to accompany the figures that form chains and rhythms that bring the participants together in a kind of “fertile uterus”. The Primeira Missa of Meirelles is transformed into the visual truth of that letter to the king. Terra am Transe subverts this image and merges the Church and colonialism into a single figure, the clergyman becoming the politician/dictator who unites all the powers and rules over oppression. Meirelles’ Primeira Missa no Brasil is transformed by Rocha in the insertion of the cross by the dictator par

Baroque Affinities

117

excellence, dressed in modern clothing and raising a fascist standard, accompanied by a soldier in powerful armour and a richly-dressed Indian. His particular version of the foundation of Brazil contradicts the nationalist mythology and is interwoven with the myths and idiosyncrasies of the Indigenous and black population. These later became The People to the rhythm of Yoruba songs and the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos. As Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup explain in their book Baroque New Worlds, the transculturation of the baroque in the New World resulted in the emergence of a neo-baroque that applied decolonizing strategies in Latin America. Reflecting what Wölfflin locates at the fragmented, multilinear logic of the baroque, the constantly interrupted narrative is subject to unexpected juxtapositions, while the voice of the deceased poet who reflects upon his life, sets up another narrative line in the figure of the tyrant. He appears in the abovementioned scene as the founder of Brazil, presented as the one who possesses all the attributes of the Church as indicated by the cross. This is an element of dominance that throughout the film comes to be reinscribed as the faith of the people and the emblem of their sacrifice. This character wears a modern suit and tie, though over them are placed the royal emblems of another time. He bears a crown and appears in numerous settings: crossing the land with a conquistador’s steps; living in a palace from where he exercises power. His name is Porfirio Díaz—a politician who served for more than twenty years as President of Mexico. The interference caused by the name is effective, as it establishes the tension of different identities, one of the central themes of literature and history in Latin America: the dictator and the continuation of political power under numerous disguises. In this film, Díaz is a character with many faces, but ultimately he is the symbol of the impossibility of change, and as such he embodies the involution of politics.10 10

It is possible to draw similarities between Terra em transe and Carlos Fuentes’s novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962). The most obvious association concerns the structure of the novel, which uses flashback during the twelve hours for which the old man suffers an agonizing, grotesque, death to recall the twelve key days of his life, a narrative guided by his internal reflection and the subconscious, “a kind of Virgil”, in Fuentes’ own words, “who leads him through the twelve circles of his own hell” (Benítez) His character, Artemio Cruz, represents the rise of a new social class, as a man who has fought in the Mexican Revolution and who since 1920 has made a large fortune. He gathers power about him and his struggle is betrayed. At the same time, it is a novel that takes in half a century of Mexican life and whose principal theme in the world of the bourgeoisie enriched by corruption and disdain for everything that dies not concern their class complacency. One of the twelve days involves the celebration of San Silvestre and in this chapter Fuentes constructs a scenario of limitless money and reflects on the taste for and attachment

118

Eder

Genres within the Genre, or the Instability of Meaning

Halfway through his dream of his own death, Martins meditates on his many political reversals, including his ambivalence towards his friend Díaz and the moment when he decides to abandon him. The viewer does not understand what brings together a poet and a dictator until a moment half-way through the film when Martins appears as a journalist, producing a television biography on Díaz’s life. It tells the story of a man who was once a left-wing militant who took up right-wing causes. The short scene is presented as heralding the military coup, and is a kind of simulated documentary written as anti-­propaganda that shows him as a delusional figure wandering in his garden and embracing a giant head of Baco. The tone of the voiceover recalls that of cinema n ­ ewsreels, an insertion of one film genre within another that evokes a similar strategy within Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941) when the millionaire magnate decides to enter the political arena. This baroque intertextual insertion of a range of visual and literary genres in Terra occurs frequently, and apparently functions as a way of introducing different themes. In part, the film’s overall discontinuity is anchored by the presence of these references that impose a structure—as has been suggested by Ismail Xavier—in which the viewer, true to baroque form, has to complete the whole from the fragment. This is what gives the film its allegorical character (Xavier 31–56). Leaving Díaz behind, Martins is pushed by Sara (who appears an honest example of left-wing militancy) to seek another solution to the problem political leadership by her side. As proof of his intentions to fight for justice for the people, and his renewed hope of political renewal, he reads to the populist Viera (whom he will support to escape the greater evil of Díaz taking power) lines from the narrative poem Martín Fierro. This is a touchstone of Argentine national identity that concerns the independent and heroic character of the gaucho. Given Rocha’s concerns with the difference between the national and nationalism, this citation of Martín Fierro may be understood as a didactic attempt to show an example of national sentiment suitable for an aware and critical people. ‘The People’ play a central role in Terra, and following their appearance as a reference in the verses of Martín Fierro, Viera and Martins head for the outskirts of the city of Alecrim to campaign. The direct gaze and the beauty of the popular types in some scenes produce a fleeting sensation of the future. These utopian scenes are scarce and give way to moments of to colonial-period objects. This ironic consideration of the appropriation of the colonial with baroque highlights, as a false sense of national identity is, together with the premonition of death a long flashback, something both works share.

Baroque Affinities

119

greater tension when peasants are dispossessed of their lands and invoke the discourse of hunger, a discourse that is punished with death. At this time, Martins in his internal reflection expresses his doubts about the people, thinking there is not enough courage or strength within them to change the situation.

Aleijadinho and Developmentalism

These individual characters are by and large parodies of figures from the film’s contemporary political and social canvas. Perhaps the greatest parody of all is the businessman Julio Fuentes, who declares he is a man of the left. Rocha’s discourse on the end of the illusion of Developmentalism is centred on this figure. Fuentes is the owner of a media corporation that also has oil and gold interests, and which depends on a vast u.s. multi-national. In the upperclass parties organized by Fuentes, to which the left-wing militants who work for his newspaper are invited, there are reminiscences of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), where bodies fall one on top of another and the viewer is ­uncertain if he is witnessing an orgy or a suggestion that these bodies are smothering one another as they disappear on the floor in a pile of arms. In another shot, a sober and combed Fuentes speaks from an office in front of vast tropical paintings—almost like dioramas—and a life-size sculpture (a copy) of one of the prophets carved by Aleijadinho. In this case the baroque and the tropics discovered for painting by the Cannibal Manifesto of Oswald de Andrade and for popular culture by Tropicalism, is transferred to this ­modern world with its sentimentalism towards itself is wholly contradicted by the decisive shots of the television antennae that progressively rise higher in an interplay of geometric forms. They allude to Concretism, the avant-garde visual movement in Brazil that was closely identified with Developmentalism, and which is seen by Rocha as the stunted philosophy addressed in his manifesto The Revolution is an Aesthetic. The works of art in Rocha’s office function as a kind of supplementary motif or false addendum that is repeated in different ways in the scenarios he has chosen, particularly the grove and the baroque or neo-baroque architectural elements: columns in different styles and sizes, decorated arches and the differences between civil and religious architecture. Ismail Xavier has pointed out that the palace from which Martins imagines Díaz ruling is the Municipal Theater in Rio de Janeiro. This building was inspired by the neo-baroque style of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris, the construction of which was ordered by Napoleon iii (72). Rocha has stated that the whole film was shot in Rio de Janeiro in houses dating from the 1930s.

120

Eder

In this film, the theatrical and operatic play a key role, as confirmed by the ­addition of music to the scene of confrontation and death between Díaz and ­Martins that incorporates a fragment of Verdi’s Macbeth. This music accompanies the dream in which the poet kills his former friend on the staircase of the great palace. This operatic insertion is without doubt a homage to Visconti, whose Senso opens with Verdi’s Il Trovatore, and in both films the effect is to accentuate the grandiloquence of the drama. Díaz, however, will return almost at the end of the premonition of the poet’s death, dressed in royal attire and b­ earing a crown, surrounded by immobile figures who wear costume from different periods as if they formed part of a great court painting. Martins, however, grows smaller and smaller, and calls upon Díaz with his weapon in his hand. We do not know if he is there to kill him with his last breath or if has perhaps been overwhelmed by nostalgia for the all-powerful figure of Díaz, the farcical representation of absolute power. Conclusions In making Terra em Transe, Rocha declared his intention was to deeply destablize the viewer. He achieves this insofar as the film can be seen as the assembly of a range of visual resources that break with the plot by way of a rupture in the visual narrative (or what in cinematic language is known as a jump cut). He presents an epic of the colonial condition from the arrival of the Spaniards to the emergence of the modern state by availing discontinuities in his narrative’s periods. The religious emblems inscribed in The First Mass Celebrated in Brazil and the High baroque sculptures of the prophets carved by Aleijadinho establish the fusion between the cross and Developmentalist capitalism, with which Martins debates in order to create another project, though at his last breath the structures of power embodied by the figure of Porfirio Díaz remain in place. The emblematic scenes of the baroque that slip into what Echeverría called the modernity of the baroque are precisely this blend of systems and idiosyncrasies of modern capitalism. They are combined with anti-modern factors such as the power of the Church at different levels, and a people who have been dispossessed of the power of the word, as made clear in the scenes where the peasants who protest at the loss of their lands are punished with death. The absolute power reincarnated in Díaz shows that the power of the state grows in inverse relation to the power of the people. The final scene of the film embodies and at the same time mocks the baroque aesthetic: Díaz ascends the staircase of the neo-baroque palace dressed in royal attire; a long ermine cape covers his modern suit and he wears a crown. Those surrounding him,

Baroque Affinities

121

including­the rich industrialist Julio Fuentes, are also dressed in these courtly robes, and once the retinue have climbed the stairs, the viewer is left with the image of an eccentric and ex tempore courtly painting, a grotesque and implacable critique of a political system without structure or definition. Rocha’s images highlight the baroque style as luxury and imitation, melodrama insofar as Martins’ body is superimposed on the scenes of Díaz’s unstoppable rise to power. The body of the poet and militant shot down on the highway by the soldiers’ bullets is transported, by a dream-like aesthetic, to the desert, and from the desert to the palace staircase. Here, having ascended them, Díaz is transformed into a structure for the Mannerist image of Martins’ body. It is Mannerist in the sense that the body is distorted in a useless gesture that is amplified by the pathos of his expression. Martins drag himself along with his gun; we never learn whether to kill Díaz or to join him. The few moments for which Martins—this tragic hero whom Xavier places in his critique of Walter Benjamin and his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (57–94)— provide a certain inner harmony, and are moments in which he attempts to accomplish his duties as a left-wing militant. These moments are soon transformed into tragedy: being no more than a poet, he is one who transforms ­language and reflects on the depths of his existential tragedy. Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe is a constant system of oppositions that avails to the full power of the discontinuious image, using cinematic language to construct a work that seeks to be grandiose, eloquent, and more powerful than any official history in penetrating the tragedy of politics. In this sense, construction becomes an excavation of what underlies the appearances of the real. It has not been my intention here to pursue the route of the baroque categories as they appear in Glauber Rocha’s film, but rather to display the spirit of the affinities between the anxiety to achieve cinematic innovation by means of rupturing its traditional parameters, and the baroque reflection that focuses on opposition and extravagance and pays homage to all that is created outside of the rules, as a means of reinventing both politics and art.

Works Cited

Avellar, José Carlos. Glauber Rocha. Madrid: Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, 2002. Benítez, Fernando. “Interview with Carlos Fuentes”. Siempre: La Cultura en México. 14 (23 May 1962): n.p. Bonnet, Marcia. “Reflected Images: Approaches to Colonial Art in Portuguese America in 20th Century”. Brazilian Historiography. Available at: http://dialnet.unirioja.es/ descarga/articulo/3740357.pdf.

122

Eder

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Calabrese, Omar. La era neobarroca. Madrid: Cátedra, 1987. Originally published in Italian as L’Età Neobarocca, Bari: Editori Laterza, 1987; and in English as Neo-­Baroque: A Sign of the Times, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Coli, Jorge. Como estudiar a arte brasileira do século XIX. Sao Paulo: Editora SENAC, 2005. Echeverría, Bolívar, La modernidad de lo barroco. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1998. Faustino, Mario. Amante da norte, n.d. Available at: http://www.uniblog.com.br/ mariofaustino/84437/mario-faustino---amante-da-morte.html. Forster, Kurt. Introduction in Aby Warburg’s The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Translation by David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999. Haces, Juana Gutiérrez. “Algunas consideraciones sobre el término estilo en la historiografía del arte virreinal mexicano”. Ed. Rita Eder. El arte en México. Autores, temas y problemas. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001. 90–193. Huberman, Georges Didi. Devant L’image: Questions posées aux fins d’une histoire de l’art. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990. ———. L’Image Survivant Histoire de L’Art Et Temps de Fantômes Selon Aby Warburg. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2002. Iversen, Margaret. “Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition”. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Donald Preziosi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 215–226. King, John. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London: Verso, 2000. Panofsky, Erwin. “What is Baroque”. Three Essays on Style. Ed. Irving Lavin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. 17–90. Rocha, Glauber. Revisao crítica do cinema brasileiro. Sao Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2003. ———. Revolucao do Cinema Novo. Sao Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004. ———. O Século do Cinema. Sao Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006. Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Translation by David Britt. Los A ­ ngeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999. (Introduction by Kurt Forster). Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance und Barock. Eine Untersuchen über Wesen und ­Entstehung der Barockstil in Italien. Munich, T. Ackermann, 1888. [English version: Renaissance and Baroque. London: Collins, 1964]. ———. Principles of Art: History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. New York: Dover, 1932. Originally published as Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neuren Kunst. Munich: F. Bruchmann, 1915. Xavier, Ismail. Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern B ­ razilian Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Zamora, Lois Parker and Kaup Monika. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, T ­ ransculturation, Counterconquest. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

chapter 5

Artist’s Essay—The Neo-Baroque and Complexity Richard Reddaway Accounts of what we call the baroque often attribute the first use of the term to art critics of eighteenth century as they discuss the art of the previous century, suggesting the baroque has always been after the fact (see, for example, Helen Hills). This is something I recognise: I made some art that looked baroque; I hadn’t been planning to; I didn’t decide to become a neo-baroque artist. Rather, I was exploring an interest in Chaos Theory. But to me the visual similarities between my space-filling sculptural installations and the signature indicators of baroque style, particularly the architectural interiors of the Catholic clerical architecture of Southern Germany or colonial Mexico, were unmistakable. This “discovery”, arising out of a cohabitation of art and science, opened up a world of exciting possibilities: Complex Dynamical Systems Theory (to use the other and more useful name for Chaos Theory) and the baroque could be used to investigate each other. Art History becomes once more useful to artists, and a fragment of Science, one of its more interesting ways of understanding the world, can be used to find baroque tendencies in contemporary art. It was not until I visited the seventeenth century pilgrimage church the ­Wieskirche, near Füssen in South Germany (figure  5.1), that I understood Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the monad. Deleuze remained cerebral without the ­concrete, bodily experience of this building’s overwhelmingly complex, folded space almost uncontained by its un-preposing exterior. Inside happens a riot of feeling as ornamentation proliferates, smothering the fabric of the building and good sense. This turbulent space is hard to see, hard to see in: hard to see where pulpit becomes wall, wall becomes become ceiling, where three-dimensional putti float amongst two-dimensional clouds. But where at first I saw chaos, I now see Complexity: multiplication of finite elements, nonlinear bifurcating compositional structures, folded fractal density and, almost, an infinitely recursive strange attractor described as wonder. I think I understand how this comes about: not as the result of an overall concept, designed to be realised at the level of detail complete in its entirety, but of an ‘operation’, a set of serial actions that expose the creation of art as relational. Perhaps I can explain what I mean by describing the making of No-one believes they are Evil (figures 5.2a–c), a viral infection of the gallery with numerous small fluorescent red coloured wax “trees”. This isn’t a static artwork with permanent form; I didn’t make these things beforehand in my studio,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_008

124

Reddaway

Figure 5.1  Zimmermann, D. (construction 1745–1754). Wieskirche (Pilgrimage Church of Wies) Füssen, Germany.

Artist’s Essay—the Neo-baroque And Complexity

125

Figure 5.2a Richard Reddaway (2002), No-one believes they are evil. [Wax installation, dimensions variable] In the exhibition No-one believes they are evil, ­C hristchurch, New Zealand: Physics Room 12. June 12–July 6, 2002.

126

Reddaway

Figure 5.2b

but took to the exhibition an operation in the form of a kit that contained a plaster mould, a block of coloured wax, a pot and a hotplate. The hotplate melted the wax in the pot, which was poured into the mould to create a tree that then adhered to a piece of the fabric of the building. Sometimes, the wax, still warm, distorted, it flopped on its way to being stuck to a light switch or long-redundant gas pipe. Other times, upon cooling and hardening, it became fragile, breaking apart to create a penumbra of fluoro-fragments that littered the massed forest floor. This action of melting and casting and then melting again is serial and potentially infinite, these flawed waxy infections could go on finding imperfections in which to inhabit, thwarted only by the mathematical frock-coat of architectural linearity and my all-too-real human frailty, for there is a limit to the casting and placing I can perform. The work untitled (pornography) (figures 5.3a–d) is performed in a similar way, but using the pornographic body as material to be fragmented and reassembled. The operation in this case builds three-dimensional cubic boxes out of magazine pages, beginning by cutting, folding and gluing, pinning first one piece of paper to the wall, then another, and another to the previous, then on to the next, and the next, and the next, and so on. The form of the pieces and their placement is governed in part by simple rules: the units are rectilinear (squares forming cubes), use the Fibonacci sequence (The sequence of numbers in which each number equals the sum of the two preceding numbers:

Artist’s Essay—the Neo-baroque And Complexity

Figure 5.2c

127

128

Reddaway

Figure 5.3a Richard Reddaway (2004). untitled (pornography). [Paper installation, dimensions variable] In the exhibition untitled (pornography), Dunedin, New Zealand: the Blue Oyster 3–21 August 2004.

Artist’s Essay—the Neo-baroque And Complexity

Figure 5.3b

Figure 5.3c

129

130

Reddaway

Figure 5.3d

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13…) to expand, and so on, and in part by intuition. While I have some idea where this trail of paper boxes will go, its final form depends on the space of the gallery: walls, floor, ceiling and the folds between, the corners and edges of things. I have installed untitled (pornography) twice in different galleries, and each installation was different but also the same. Like our fingerprints, or the shape of our ears, each individual installation takes on a unique character whilst following similar essential form. These artworks have non-linear structure: unpredictable, never repeating and unidirectional (I can’t ‘go backwards’ in time by removing pieces from the wall, replacing them and expect to get the same result). Like the non-linear equations that describe complex dynamical systems, the set of rules that perform the operation that creates the artwork is relatively simple, yet produces an infinite variety of forms. And, although it is difficult to see due to the small number of iterations of cutting, folding and gluing I am capable of producing, these works are fractal: images of arms and legs, cocks and cunts mimic the small material branches that in turn mimic the branching sprawl of the work overall. I had in mind the putti in St. Mang Basilica, also in Füssen and near to the Wieskirche, but untitled (pornography) is the product of the relationship between parts, love degenerating into endless Internet fucking. Classical certainty is replaced by baroque desire, an unfolding tumescent infinity of material stuff. If traditional photography captures a moment in time,

Artist’s Essay—the Neo-baroque And Complexity

131

Figures 5.4a–b J.H. Lee (2011). Root [Digital photographic print, installation dimensions variable] In El Barroco de Aotearoa. Mexico City, Mexico. Museo Universitario de Ciencia y Arte muca Roma. 1 December–28 February 2012.

then Jae Hoon Lee’s photographic constructs are about material expansion over time. What at first appears so unbelievably real becomes, on close inspection, the unreal product of synthetic digital proliferation laboriously worked up in Photoshop. When applied on an architectural scale, works such as Root (figures 5.4), which was installed as a photomural in the exhibition El Barroco de Aotearoa at muca Roma, Mexico City, achieve an overwhelming intensity. Entering the gallery through a small doorway, I feel down in the mud like a hobbit out of Lord of the Rings or, more sinister, as though I had fallen into Pan’s Labyrinth through a hole in the world. But perhaps I was responding ­emotionally to a

132

Reddaway

space that is strikingly similar to the colonial baroque churches that are to be found in almost every town and city in Mexico. Once recognised, it’s difficult not to see the baroque everywhere, and particularly in places where cultures rub against each other. Coming out of information technology theory, Juan Luis Suárez identifies the Latin American baroque as a complex dynamical system emergent out of the trans-Atlantic flow of people, goods and information. Back and forth between Europe and the Americas, back and forth, back and forth and over time the baroque persists to this day. At least it does in Mexico. While Aotearoa New Zealand has no equivalent baroque history, it does have a becoming bicultural present where national identity is constructed out of the relationship between the indigenous peoples, Maori, and those that came with nineteenth century colonisation. Artist Reweti Arapere exemplifies the result of this relational identity: confidently aware of his whakapapa, his history and the history of his people, he is also a young man of the world listening to the sounds of Global culture. His art (figure 5.5) references and yet exceeds the designs of traditional Maori carving; his characters engorged and full of mana, wear sneakers. And the materials he uses are those familiar to the street artist: spray paint and paint-pen, hoarding plywood and cardboard boxes. Graffiti and camouflage are as much the patterns he follows as the spiralling complexity of the carved Maori whare, or meetinghouse.

Figure 5.5  Reweti Arapere (2010). Pou 1, 5 and 7. [Acrylic and enamel on plywood, 640 × 1200 mm approx.] In Urban Kainga, Wellington, New Zealand. City Gallery Wellington, January 2010.

Artist’s Essay—the Neo-baroque And Complexity

133

Using a piece of brocade fabric scavenged from an old armchair in a derelict opera theatre in Vienna, Catherine Bagnall makes an animal suit to wear over her favourite COMME des GARÇONS skirt (figure 5.6). She then goes for a ‘tramp in the bush’, as we say in New Zealand, a hike in the forest as you might say. Bagnall borrows the concept of ‘alternative hedonism’ from Kate Soper to try to understand how we may be in the world but sustain the world. We live with the contradiction that animals are slowly destroying our natural heritage: where once birds were everywhere, now introduced rats, stoats, weasels and possums prosper and multiply. Bagnall explores the contradiction of being an introduced animal, always identified in relation to the native. She is Pakeha, a Maori word for non-Maori that we have adopted with sometimes mixed enthusiasm. This is a baroque operation focussed on the idea of self, engaging with the sensuality of wearing one’s best on the muddy track, down with the twigs and the leaves and the moss and lichens. If the baroque no longer follows the Renaissance, then it was here with us all the time. Like me, the artists above made some art that looked baroque, even though none of them planned to. After Modernisms often singular, ­almost monolithic vision of the world, this ‘after the fact’ attribution suggests

Figure 5.6 Catherine Bagnall (2010). in the forest. [Digital photographic print. Installation dimensions variable] In El Barroco de Aotearoa. Mexico City, Mexico. Museo ­U niversitario de Ciencia y Arte muca Roma. 1 December–28 ­F ebruary 2012.

134

Reddaway

the neo-baroque exists as an after-postmodern pluralism, only one of many possibilities; it encompasses a viral proliferation of other, whilst allowing that this other may in turn encompass the baroque, dependent on one’s point of view. Within the baroque itself, as the history of the baroque is written and re-written, its territory re-mapped, it is becoming non-linear history, bifurcating into a collection of many baroques, various baroques, of which this Neo is but one. Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of ­Minnesota Press, 1993. Hills, Helen. “The Baroque: Beads in a Rosary or Folds in Time”. Fabrications. Vol.12, number 2, 2007: 4–71. Suárez, Juan Luiz. “Hispanic Baroque: A Model for the Study of Cultural Complexity in the Atlantic World”. South Atlantic Review. Vol.72, no. 1, 2006: 31–47.

Part 2 Religion

∵

Introduction to Part 2 Angela Ndalianis The cultural system and production (of art, theatre, architecture, technologies, scientific thought, philosophy) witnessed during the historical baroque is one often associated with what Thomas Kuhn famously called a “paradigm shift” in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While Kuhn referred specifically to the Scientific Revolution, the rough confines of the 17th century were accompanied by major cultural shifts: the Counter Reformation and Catholicism’s emphasis on the creation of works of art that reflected and encouraged the passionate expression of Faith; the invention of optical technologies that made visible objects on micro and macro levels and thus altered perceptions of Earth and the universe; and the colonization of New Worlds in the Americas and Asia that created new hybrid cultures and religious belief systems. In addition, these radical transformations occurred in the context of the beginnings of the modern world that witnessed the slow but steady destabilisation of aristocratic and religious power structures. Part 2 of this book deals with the theme of religion, but not necessarily ­religion in the strict sense of the word. The Counter Reformation reforms ­certainly impacted on the creation of spectacular, affective works that aimed to transport the spectator to ethereal spaces that evoked the Divine. However, religious experience was also expressed through wondrous, transcendent and sublime sensations when confronted with new optical technologies that made the stars in space visible, or, in the case of new scientific theories, when the place of the Earth at the centre of the universe was replaced by a heliocentric one. Our era has dealt with its own radical shifts—digital technologies, the Internet, globalization, new corporate economies, national identity and the aftermath of postcolonialism—that have impacted dramatically on cultures and cultural production. Religious narratives found new forms of expression as they were transformed and shaped by different neo-baroque systems. Part 2 of this anthology explores some of these transformations. In his chapter “Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel” Hugh Hazelton offers a close analysis of Alejo Carpentier’s novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and Alfonso Quijada Urías’s Lujuria Tropical (Tropical Lust). Carpentier’s novel, which is set during the Haitian Revolution, addresses the clash of Faiths in the hybrid, multi-ethnic world of the late 18th century-early 19th century that eventually led to the abolition of slavery in the French colony. Like the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, El reino de este mundo is itself a hybrid, dialogic text that reflects on the ‘­conquering’

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_009

138

Ndalianis

of the New World. Weaving together multiple literary traditions including Surrealism and the baroque, the text is a proponent of what Carpentier called “lo real maravilloso” or “the marvelous real”, which creatively imagined the fantastic nature of everyday Latin American culture. Hazelton argues that in Carpentier’s aesthetic, the marvellous real merges with the baroque, the marvellous often being associated with the slaves and Voodoo religion and white culture being associated with the real. Voodoo and African religious beliefs are also at the centre of Alfonso Quijada Urías’ Lujuria Tropical, however, this “­transcendent work of metafiction” adopts a ludic, parodic approach that ­fluidly shifts in style and mutates from representational and surrealist form, to prose poetry and stream-of-consciousness. As Hazelton lucidly explains, Urías creates a fantastic and self-reflexive world that references the baroque and neo-baroque and, ultimately, African-based religious beliefs are represented as capable of altering reality through a “constant play with the most outrageous fantastical and hallucinatory elements of magic realism as the narrative capriciously transcends the material world”. In his essay “Temporal and Local Transfers—The Neo-Baroque Between Politics, Religion and Entertainment” Jens Baumgarten focuses on the theatricality and staging of baroque worship by analysing the 20th century church Nossa Senhora do Brasil. In doing so, Baumgarten reflects on how this famous church in São Paulo Brazil represents a modernist, neo-baroque (re)staging of the Brazilian colonial baroque. Arguing that Nossa Senhora do Brasil combines different elements that reflect a political, religious, and aesthetic project of Brazilian culture and history, Baumgarten concludes that the church’s decorative system also reveals the combined elements of the historical baroque as well as a transcultural and historical neo-baroque. The architecture, iconography and decorations generate a dialogue between Brazilian and European art history, particularly its baroque commonalities. As Baumgarten explains, “the visual discourse of the church aims to establish a political, religious, and aesthetic position for the city with respect to its many and varied immigrant groups, which must also be seen as part of the Brazilian ‘national project’”. The staging of this neo-baroque space addresses the cult of saints, modes of w ­ orship and divine revelation that align Nossa Senhora do Brasil with its surrounding social worlds past and present—from colonial Portuguese Latin America to 20th and 21st century Brazil. Walter Moser’s chapter “The Religious Shines Through—Religious Remnants and Resurgences in 90s Cinema” turns to examples of contemporary mainstream cinema. Through an analysis of The Matrix and eXistenZ Moser proposes that during the 1990s a new cycle of science fiction films emerged, which he characterises as evolving thematically around the question ‘what

Introduction to Part 2

139

is real?’ Repeating iconographic and plot elements that include character types, cutting edge special effects, action, violence, and a refusal to answer the central question regarding the nature of reality that the films pose, the films ­narratives inevitably become entangled in a series of “labyrinthine uncertainties about what is real”. This film cycle, Moser argues, presents a ‘return of the baroque’ as neo-baroque by reproducing “basic features of the historic­ baroque ­aesthetics”—evident most famously in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’a La vida es sueño/Life is a Dream (1635) and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Part 1:1605 & Part 2:1615)—that reflexively constructed an unsettling number of levels of reality concerned with ontological instabilities. In doing so, the films deliberate on fundamental religious and philosophical questions regarding life, the fragility of existence, and the nature of reality. The final contribution to this part of the anthology is “Towers, Shipwrecks, and Neo-Baroque Allegories” by the artist and academic Patrick Mahon. Through examples of his own work—which are “highly embellished, ­printed wall sculptures”—Mahon explores key baroque concepts, in particular, Walter Benjamin’s concept of baroque allegory. Rather than focusing on explicitly religious content, Mahon turns instead to an alternative metaphysical theme that explores the relationship between human culture and nature. The two series or artworks—titled Water and Tower Allegory and Voyager—express a state that vacillates around the transitional conditions of destruction and ­becoming. Arguing a case for these art pieces as neo-baroque objects he draws upon Benjamin’s concept of the ruin and the function of the fragment. As such, the works simultaneously give expression to the past and “the possibility of a future”. As Mahon compellingly explains, “The specific cultural and environmental preoccupation with which I am involved is water. I acknowledge the present socio-cultural moment as one in which water is a subject of discussion and contestation in public discourse”. Ultimately, he is inspired by the possibilities inherent in the neo-baroque as a conceptual framework that offers its own distinctive aesthetic, socio-cultural, and political modes of engagement.

chapter 6

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the NeoBaroque Novel: The Duel of Faiths in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo and Ludic Voodoo in Alfonso Quijada Urías’s Lujuria tropical Hugh Hazelton It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Afro-Caribbean belief s­ ystems in understanding the Caribbean world and mind-set. Following the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of the islands, the Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Danes repopulated the area with slaves imported from many regions of the African coast, from Senegal to Angola. A large number of these slaves came from the already densely populated areas of what are now Benin (formerly Dahomey), Togo, and the Niger Delta, which were highly developed and had a long history of city-states, nation-building and local empires. Moreover, though the slave trade took place on the coast, many of the slaves were actually from the interior, having been captured during raids launched by coastal states that became specialized intermediaries in the trade. The captives were transported to the Americas and sold as chattel, mixed ­together with Africans of other ethnic and linguistic groups of which they knew nothing, and forced to struggle for survival in a completely alien and hostile environment. There was only one common recourse to which they could turn: their religious beliefs. Moreover, since slaves represented such a heterogeneous mixture of African cultures, even though they often worshipped similar gods, a great deal of fusion among deities and rituals took place, all of which formed what became known as vaudou, or “voodoo” in the French Caribbean, from the Fon word vodû for god or spirit (Métraux 21). This was the bedrock for the slaves’ psychological and physical endurance, and later of their revolutionary force, first in the Maroon Wars in Jamaica and then in the Haitian Revolution, the only successful national slave revolt in human history. Alejo Carpentier’s novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) runs parallel to the Haitian Revolution and includes a number of key historic events and figures in its fictional narrative. Carpentier himself, born in 1904 in Lausanne, Switzerland, to parents of French and Russian heritage who had emigrated to Cuba, was raised in Havana, but spent a decade in self-exile in France in the 1930s, during which he was in contact with both the surrealists

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_010

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

141

and the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias. He was also fascinated by African cultural traditions in the Caribbean: his first novel, Ecué-Yamba-O (1933) was an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions, and a prolonged visit to Haiti in 1943, during which he met the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain and other figures, inspired him to write El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World), his second novel, which was published in 1949, sixteen years after the first. It was in this book that Carpentier reached a remarkable literary crossroad, combining elements of African and French culture, surrealism, “the marvelous real” (“lo real maravilloso”), considered the forerunner of magic realism, and the baroque into a single narrative. The specifically neo-baroque character of the novel, as well as its tremendous force, results from the juxtaposition of the decadence and empty refinement of French culture and religion during the Ancien Régime with the vitality, complexity, and existential power of African ways and beliefs at the precise moment when the two peoples were locked in a war to the death. No matter how bizarre the occurrences in the book, however, the underlying reality of the struggle is never compromised by fantasy: rather, hallucination and reality exist simultaneously. Despite the irony and grim humor that permeate the novel, its neo-baroque exuberance is deadly serious. Carpentier’s prologue to The Kingdom of This World is key to understanding the novel. He describes his voyage to Haiti and the intense effect that both its ruins—including Sans Souci, the palace of King Henri-Christophe—and its people had on his imagination as he experienced this “maravillosa realidad,” or “marvelous reality” (El reino de este mundo 1). For Carpentier, Haiti and its history vastly surpass the inventions and artifice of the French and European tradition of fantastic literature, be it surrealism or De Sade, Alfred Jarry or even Lautréamont. As an example, he compares the tired monotony and repetitiveness of Tanguy’s forced surrealism with the mysterious jungle luxuriance of the paintings of the Afro-Chinese Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. A true sense of the marvelous, he affirms in a later essay, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” needs to grow out of faith: “[T]he phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints” (86). This is the circumstance he found in Haiti, in which he was “in daily contact with something that could be defined as the marvelous real” (86). The critic Federico Acevedo notes that this was the first time Carpentier, or indeed anyone else, had ever used the terms “marvelous” and “real” as a unified phrase (Acevedo x). Carpentier then extends his interpretation of the “marvelous real” to include all of the Americas, which he believes are still in search of their own cosmogonies (Kingdom, 4). The confluence of literary tendencies in The Kingdom of this World makes it one of the key novels of mid-century Latin America. The term “magic ­realism”

142

Hazelton

had already been coined by the German expressionist painter Franz Roh, who used it in his book Nach-Expressionismus (1925) to describe a new post-expressionism “when that which lies within is fulfilled outside,” (my translation) thus instilling it with wonder (Barroso 14). Roh’s book was translated into Spanish and published in the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente in 1929 (Birkenmaier 133). Eventually, the term “magic realism,” enriched by indigenous myth in the work of Asturias and elements of the “marvelous real” of Carpentier, was to transform itself into the dominant current of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Magic realism, however, involves actual forays into the inexplicable and arbitrary, whereas the “marvelous real” deals with the psychological heightening of extremes within the natural world. Moreover, in Carpentier’s aesthetic, the “marvelous real” blends into the baroque, both of which he considers to be quintessentially Latin American. In his essential essay “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” published in 1975, Carpentier fuses the two concepts, so that the “marvelous real” becomes a catalyst for the multidimensional exuberance of the baroque. Basing himself on the Catalan essayist Eugenio d’Ors’ concept of the baroque as a metaphysical “eon,” a historical constant that endlessly recurs as an artistic and cultural spirit and style of expression (d’Ors 67–68), Carpentier views the baroque (and, by extension, its contemporary manifestation as the neo-baroque) as part of a “creative impulse that recurs cyclically throughout history in artistic forms, be they literary or visual, architectural or musical” (“Baroque and the Marvelous Real” 90). The baroque, a constant of the human spirit[,] is characterized by a horror of the vacuum, the naked surface, the harmony of linear geometry, a style where the central axis, which is not always manifest or apparent, … is surrounded by what one might call “proliferating nuclei,” that is, decorative elements that completely fill the space of the construction, the walls, all architecturally available space: motifs that contain their own expansive energy, that launch or project forms centrifugally. It is art in motion, a pulsating art, an art that moves outward and away from the center that somehow breaks through its own borders. “Baroque and the Marvelous Real” 93

Using this dynamic and inclusive interpretation of the baroque, Carpentier steps far beyond the usual definition of the term to include artistic traditions such as that of India, Mesoamerica, medieval Russia, and other countries and epochs as manifestations of the baroque “because it is a spirit and not a historical style” (“Baroque and the Marvelous Real” 95). For him, “America,

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

143

a  ­continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, has always been baroque” (“Baroque and the Marvelous Real” 98). It is of note that Carpentier constantly uses the term “baroque” when referring to Latin America, even to events and artistic works from the 20th century; he almost never refers to the “neobaroque.” Presumably this is because he felt that the influence of the baroque was so pervasive in Latin American culture: indeed, that it formed a quintessential part of the Latin American identity. Carpentier’s universalist approach to the baroque is essential, because it ­permits him to incorporate the rich tradition of the Francophone Caribbean, with its mixture of African and French culture, into the “marvelous real” of the Latin American neo-baroque. Carpentier’s interest in the writing and culture of Haiti and other parts of the French Antilles coincided with the development of a new, highly experimental literary and artistic style that was developing there in the 1930s and 40s, a spirit that was intuitively and spontaneously neobaroque in its nature. The fascination with the tropical fecundity and human variety of the Islands, fully and vigorously expressed in written form through a mixture the avant-garde, social commitment, verbal pyrotechnics, and neo-­ baroque imagery by the Martinican Aimé Césaire in his foundational long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in 1939, was shared by F­ rench-speaking ­writers throughout the region and gave rise to a cross-fertilization with Spanish-­ speaking writers in Latin America in both literature and painting: Aimé ­Césaire and the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, for example, became close friends while Lam was living in Martinique in the 1940s. Césaire’s poem, which was accompanied by an introduction by André Breton in a reprint in 1943 in which he spoke of “La parole d’Aimé Césaire, belle comme l’oxygène naissant,” partially grew out of surrealism but immediately also transcended it in its search for its own uniquely Caribbean voice to speak of its quintessential experience: geography is blended with the body, sounds and sonic devices with words, prose with ­poetry, African rhythms with erudite vocabulary, a profusion of words that combines the superabundance of sensory experience and  the anguish of ­history (“TOUSSAINT! TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE!”) (­Césaire 69) with a call for action to end oppression and social inequality. The c­ hurrigueresque cathedral is here the world itself, both in its n ­ atural and human aspects; the intricacy of adornment and subtlety of balance of baroque sculpture are now inherent in physical reality. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to the groundbreaking anthology Nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, published in P ­aris in 1948, which included work from francophone Africa and the Caribbean, ­describes how Césaire’s poetry “éclate et tournent sur lui-même comme une fusée, des soleils en sortent qui tourent et explosent en nouveaux soleils, c’est un perpétuel dépassement” (xxvi). The baroque ethos was thus transplanted

144

Hazelton

and recreated in the francophone A ­ ntilles in a wholly new c­ ontext that paralleled the ­neo-baroque esthetic that was simultaneously evolving in the writing of Spanish-speaking Caribbean authors such as Asturias and Carpentier, with which there was growing mutual influence. The ancestors of the vast majority of francophone inhabitants of the ­Caribbean were, of course, mainly from West Africa, and here again Carpentier’s inclusiveness in his definition of the baroque and neo-baroque is key, ­particularly for The Kingdom of This World, which is set during the Haitian ­Revolution. For Carpentier, West African culture—like its Caribbean ­offshoot—is also inherently baroque, particularly in the complexity, shifting variation, and overlapping mythologies that underlie its belief system, which rivals those of India and Mesoamerica in its multiple manifestations, particularly in view of the numbers of different peoples and cultures that have followed it, adapting it to their own ways. In fact, it is one of the most open-ended of the great religious nuclei, far more heterodox and freely interpreted than more authoritarian, written traditions. The extreme cultural mingling and métissage that took place on the Antillean plantations, in which peoples from scores of different cultures and languages found themselves living intimately with one another and sharing and borrowing beliefs, both enriched the possibilities of cultural variance and brought about a new cohesion and focus among the inhabitants. Carpentier sees the revolutionary struggle in Haiti as a conflict between two innately baroque cultures and systems of spiritual belief, that of West Africa and that of Europe, for although the novel takes place at the close of the 18th century, the French population in Haiti and the Spanish in eastern Cuba are isolated from the European Enlightenment and identify much more closely—and anachronistically—with the older, decaying European baroque culture than they do with that of the Age of Reason. Living far from the metropole in the wealthiest colony in the world at the time, the French slave-holder plantation owners of Haiti rejected the rationalist thought of the Encyclopédistes and had little in common with the universalist discourse of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, let alone Paine’s The Rights of Man. With the advent of the French Revolution, they were even further cut off, defending an atavistic ideology and way of life that was under attack in France itself, and which would eventually incite their own slaves to revolt. The stage is set, then, for a multileveled, p ­ luralistic, highly symbolic and even ritualized struggle ­between two peoples, in which victory depends essentially on the depth of religious belief and spiritual commitment more than on arms or technology. In contrast, the Salvadoran writer Alfonso Quijada Urías, one of the most distinguished Central American novels of his generation, employs African religious beliefs, especially voodoo, as an essentially ludic and satirical, even

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

145

parodic device in his novel Lujuria tropical (Tropical Lust), published in 1996. However, as in The Kingdom of This World, the results of a voodoo ceremony, in this case one to win over a lover, are central to the novel’s plot. Quijada Urías— who also goes by the pseudonym of Alfonso Kijadurías—was born in 1940, and became active as a short story writer and poet in the 1960s. His work evolved in another temporal and geographical context than that of Carpentier, coming two generations later and emerging from a Central American rather than purely Caribbean tradition. Although he was part of the Generación Comprometida (Politically Committed Generation) in El Salvador, he has been an outstanding stylistic explorer, consistently experimenting with form and meaning in the dozen or more books that he has published and has remained on the cusp of the avant-garde in Central America. His work has varied from the surrealistic and fragmentary to the representational, from short, two-line prose poems to long, exuberant stream-of-consciousness remembrances and descriptions, and is characterized by its capricious inventiveness, wordplay, neologisms, playfulness, cryptic asides, references to popular culture, use of slang from a variety of strata of society, creation of clusters or constellations of words rather than linear development, and blending of literary genres. Q ­ uijada Urías went into exile during the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s, l­ iving in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua before settling down in Vancouver a decade later. His work has been published and republished in both Central and South America and has been translated into a number of languages, yet only two books of short stories and a few poems are available in English. Curiously, though he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Cultura in El Salvador in 2009, Lujuria tropical, published in El Salvador in 1996, has received little critical notice. For Quijada Urías, surrealism, the “marvelous real,” and magic realism have long since run their course: the boom years of Latin American writing, driven by authors of a previous generation such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and José Donoso are over. Lujuria tropical, however, creates a f­antastic world out of all these currents and frames it within an extreme, e­ xaggeratedly outré neo-baroque which he simultaneously subverts and embellishes to the fullest in an effort to incarnate the spirit of the neo-baroque itself. The work fuses the borders between literary genres, evolving into a hundred-page prose poem in which he draws on the innovation of his previous work in order to create an experimental apotheosis, a transcendent work of metafiction. The novel itself consists principally of elaborate, evocative portraits of characters or florid descriptions of states of being, linked together by a few salient events: it is a work that favors imagistic portrayals over action. The linguistic structure that underlies its carnival of words pushes the neo-baroque esthetic into what might be termed the ‘ultrabaroque’, a self-referential p ­ arody

146

Hazelton

e­ mploying a profusion of poetic techniques, metaphor and metonymy, and baroque rhetorical devices such as hyperbaton and anastrophe, as well as word games that include bustrophedon and alliterative inversions such as “He would continue failing. Failing from failure to failure until making a great and brilliant failure from failure itself”* (Quijada Urías 102), ending the novel with the neologism “fincipio” (“endginning”) (115). The work also abounds in selfconscious winks and references to the baroque and neo-baroque themselves, as if the author were holding a mirror up to the style he employs: within this ludic profusion, the world of the great gods of vodûn is largely vitiated of its power and reduced to the subordinate state of personalized voodoo, one costumbrista ­religious and cultural phenomenon among many associated with supernatural and paranormal events that surpass reality and embody the fulfillment of fantasy. Far from its original powers, much of voodoo is now largely a confidence trick, which the narrative playfully and deftly implies is true of all religions; however, it still retains some of its original power, especially as a source of metaphors enhancing beauty and artistic creativity, and one particularly successful voodoo ceremony is a pivotal point in the book. Although based in a historical context, The Kingdom of This World is not a historical novel, nor is it limited to the confrontation between Africa and France on Haitian soil. Carpentier has chosen to focus on four key events—­described in an equal, but sometimes overlapping, number of parts—in the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath: the early rebellion led by François Mackandal, who was executed in 1758 for organizing a systematic (and highly successful) campaign to poison the whites and their animals; the outbreak of the Haitian ­Revolution in 1791, which was organized by the Jamaican slave Bouckman; ­Napoleon’s ­campaign, led by his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to retake the country, capture the revolutionary general Toussaint L’Ouverture and re-­impose slavery; and the rise and fall of Henri-Christophe, who was proclaimed King of Haiti in 1811. Although the principal focus of the novel is on Ti Noel, a slave who is a witness to all these events, it abruptly swerves in the latter half of Part Two, which is told from the point of view of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister, who accompanied her husband Leclerc to Haiti but was sent off to L’Île de la Tortue to guard her from an epidemic of yellow fever. Part Three, though it begins through the eyes of Ti Noel, quickly changes focus to concentrate on the apogee and fall of Henri-Christophe himself when the Haitian population revolts against his autocratic rule. Finally, Part Four shifts once again, this time to follow the exile of Henri-Christophe’s family in Rome, where it concentrates on Pauline’s valet slave, Solimán; afterwards it returns to Ti Noel, who has taken up residence in the ruins of his former

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

147

master’s plantation and confronts the new tyranny of the mulatto republic. The reader may at first be mystified, even irritated, at abruptly having to leave the epic struggle between Leclerc and Toussaint, which ended in Toussaint’s betrayal and capture, in ­order to focus on the frivolous Pauline; or at following the tragic tale of Henri-Christophe and the anti-climax of independence rather than the final battles between the ­implacable Haitian general Dessalines and the sadistic and ruthless Rochambeau, the last French commander on the island. Yet Carpentier’s true intention is not simply to follow the t­ emplate of the Revolution, but to create a baroque counterpoint between African and European beliefs and philosophies in which the interplay between Pauline Bonaparte and her masseur Solimán and the confrontation between the Westernized and anti-vaudouisant Henri-Christophe and the Haitian people offer superb opportunities for artistic development (the saga of Henri-Christophe was later to be the subject of writers as diverse as Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and Eugene O’Neill). Each of the four parts of the novel, then, offers an opportunity to develop the African/European dichotomy, clash, and at times even tentative synthesis within a different context: variations on a theme painted in fire (Mackandal), sketched in filigree (Pauline Bonaparte), or chiseled in stone (Henri-Christophe) against a backdrop of hallucinatory faith, tropical luxuriance, and cultural decadence. A history of the Revolution itself, such as the dramatic and deeply moving The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, by the Afro-Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, provides an altogether different experience. The axis of Part One of the novel is the story of Mackandal, the leader of the first great rebellion in Santo Domingo (which was only given the indigenous Taíno name Haiti by Dessalines when independence was officially declared in 1804). The events are narrated from the point of view of Ti Noel, a young slave who initially works with Mackandal on the plantation of Lenormand de Mézy, a French planter (who actually existed) on the northern plain of the island. When he loses his arm in the sugar-cane press, Mackandal is assigned to animal herding, which provides him with the opportunity to experiment with a variety of poisons, a craft which he perfects after frequent visits to Mamán Loi (Mother Law), a mambo, or female voodoo priestess, who lives alone in the mountains—most probably a maroon, or runaway slave (the term itself comes from the Spanish “cimarrón,” used for wild animals and runaway slaves) (Real Academia Española 475). Mackandal himself escapes from the plantation (“A  one-armed slave was a trifling thing,” opines Lenormand de Mézy) (Carpentier Kingdom 26) to live in the mountains and study natural poisons as ­thoroughly as possible, while at the same time making clandestine contact

148

Hazelton

with co-conspirators in plantations across the plain. When Mackandal does unleash his panoply of poisons in a synchronized attack on the livestock, food, and wells of the white planters in the area, the effect is devastating to the colony: The poison crawled across the Plaine du Nord, invading pastures and stables. …In the shadow of the silver crucifixes that moved up and down the roads, green poison, yellow poison, or poison that had no color went creeping along, coming down the kitchen chimneys, slipping through the cracks of locked doors, like some irrepressible creeper seeking the shade to turn bodies to shades. From Miserere to De Profundis the voices of the subchanters went on, hour after hour, in a sinister antiphony. carpentier Kingdom 33, 35

Eventually Mackandal is betrayed and captured. The French assemble all the slaves from the northern plantations and bring them to the city of Cap-Haïtien in order to witness his execution by being burned at the stake. Their object is to teach the slaves a lesson they will never forget, but the force of the slaves’ faith in the houngan (voodoo priest) Mackandal and his supernatural powers, ­particularly in his ability to change himself into different creatures and animals, is so powerful that at the moment of his death they undergo a collective vision and see him magically released from the pyre: The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves. A single cry filled the square: ‘Mackandal saved!’ carpentier Kingdom 52–53

It is a triumph of the intensity of faith over objective reality, a defeat transformed into victory by a people with only one power left to them, that of hallucinatory faith. Carpentier points out that, in the ensuing chaos and struggle between soldiers and slaves, Mackandal’s actual death goes almost unnoticed, as if it were no longer important. Yet this same observation underlies his vision of the “marvelous real” as being the transcendence of physical reality rather than a fantastical substitute for it. This, then, is the structure of the section on Mackandal, but its elaboration is enriched by both a constant contrast between the two cultures and a neobaroque interplay of intense images and recondite vocabulary arising both from the extreme, multifaceted complexity of African religious belief and the intricacy and decadence of 18th century French planter culture in Haiti.

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

149

The dual axis is symbolically reflected at every turn: in Ti Noel’s amazement at the  resemblance between the pig’s heads for sale in the butcher shop in Cap-Haïtien and the white manikin heads in the wig parlor next door; in the contrast between the pallid conventions of European aristocracy he finds in a display of engravings and other pictures depicting bowed European ­diplomats being ­received by proud, authoritative African monarchs; in his recollection of Mackandal’s powerful stories of African warrior kings riding into battle, rendered immune to wounds by the spells of their priests, compared with the houngan’s descriptions of the sickly royalty of the French and Spanish courts, incapable of even dispatching a deer without the aid of their huntsmen. The exoticism of the impressions of the city; the long, twining sentences with ­images piled one upon the other; the elaborate, erudite language, both in describing Africa and Europe, all function as baroque adornments, spreading out like vines over the historical and narrative framework. In episode 6, “The Metamorphosis,” of Part One, the baroque elaboration of both soldiers’ legends and Mackandal’s powers is ingeniously balanced. In the first section, the French troops sent to hunt down the houngan spend their time recounting tales rich in imagery and names of pirates, buccaneers, battles, women, and heroes of the past as their fruitless pursuit of the maroon gradually subsides into inefficacy. This contrasts with the exuberant stories told in the slave quarters as drums resound through the night, of the strange behavior of animals that could only be multiple incarnations of Mackandal, augured by the birth of monstrosities such as “a child with a wild boar’s face” or the appearance of “a black goat with fire-tipped horns” (Carpentier Kingdom 42). Mackandal’s powers have gone beyond the human, transforming him into a loa, or voodoo deity, of illimitable force, who will soon “give the sign for the great uprising, and the Lords of Back There, headed by Damballah, the Master of the Roads, and Ogoun, Master of the Swords, would bring the thunder and lightning and unleash the cyclone that would round out the work of men’s hands. In that great hour—said Ti Noel—the blood of the whites would run into the brooks, and the Loas, drunk with joy, would bury their faces in it and drink until their lungs were full” (Carpentier Kingdom 42). Beneath the monotony of the slaves’ existence lies another world of West African gods unknown to the French, as intricate in its lore and knowledge as that of the Europeans, a world that gives the slaves the courage and faith to endure their unending humiliation with the knowledge that the powers they secretly worship will ultimately save them from their bondage, destroying the enemy. Most of all, their culture is as rich in imagery and detail as that of the French, and it is on the ascendant, as they wait for the “voice of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Mackandal

150

Hazelton

had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses, and stood poised once more, sinewy and hard, with testicles like rocks, on his own human legs” (Carpentier Kingdom 43). The second section of the novel sharpens the European-African contrast even more, as Carpentier prepares for the final confrontation between the two cultures, culminating in the slaves’ revolt. The utter vacuousness of ­Lenormand de Mézy’s plantation life is now set against the call to a general insurrection organized by Bouckman, the Jamaican maroon who has escaped into the mountains from his Haitian master. The French Revolution has broken out, and the slaves have heard that the Declaration of the Rights of Man has been proclaimed in Paris, but the plantation owners, all staunch defenders of the Ancien Régime, ignore it. Lenormand de Mézy, whose first wife died in the Mackandal poisonings, has now taken a petulant failed opera singer as mistress and has sunk into a morass of alcoholism, during which he has r­ outinely begun to rape adolescent slave girls and torture their fathers. The arias his mistress forces the slaves to listen to during her own drinking bouts, often consisting of passages of portending doom from Racine’s play Phèdre (1677), which were used in the lyrics of Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733)— both works tellingly antiquated and anchored in the baroque rather than the ­Enlightenment—foretell the plantation owners’ fate and contrast with the ­vital, life-affirming power of the voodoo incantations of the slaves. Ti Noel and one of the women from the kitchens have raised twelve children, again emphasizing the contrast between European debauchery and cruelty and the vitality of African sexuality. The central scene in the first half of Part Two is the ceremony at Bois C ­ aiman (“Crocodile Wood”), which in fact took place in a corner of Lenormand de Mézy’s property, a historical event of which there are a number of testimonial descriptions, in which slaves from all over the island pledged to fight in the rebellion as Bouckman summoned every power of the African gods to give them victory over the whites. The secret meeting is held at the height of a tropical storm, and Ti Noel is one of the conspirators. In the longest direct speech in the novel (which has almost no dialogue), Bouckman thunders that The white men’s God orders the crime. Our gods demand vengeance from us. They will guide our arms and give us help. Destroy the image of the white man’s God who thirsts for our tears; let us listen to the cry of freedom within ourselves! carpentier Kingdom 67

A voodoo priestess then calls upon Ogoun, the war god of the Yoruba, in all his plethora of incarnations and combinations with other gods, to aid the warriors

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

151

in their struggle, after which the conspirators pledge themselves to the cause and to Bouckman by smearing their lips with the blood of a freshly sacrificed pig. Since a full voodoo ceremony consists of the loas coming down to earth and possessing or “riding” their human worshippers, the power of the event is overwhelming. Eight days later, the conches sound across the northern plain and the slaves of Lenormand de Mézy’s plantation burst through the doors of the mansion, machetes in hand. The owner manages to survive by hiding in a well while his white employees are massacred, his wife is raped and murdered by Ti Noel and his sons, his livestock and dogs are slaughtered, and his crops burned. The revolt is at first put down by the French, and Lenormand de Mézy saves Ti Noel and other slaves from execution so he can use them as capital in his exile in Santiago de Cuba. Ultimately, however, the revolution triumphs, symbolized succinctly by Carpentier as the strength of one culture’s beliefs in vanquishing that of the other’s: Now the Great Loas smiled upon the Negroes’ arms. Victory went to those who had warrior gods to invoke. Ogoun Badagri [the loa’s incarnation in the region around Badagri, on the Nigerian coast] guided the cold steel charges against the last redoubts of the Goddess Reason. carpentier Kingdom 103

In the second half of Part Two, the focus abruptly changes to Pauline Bonaparte and takes on an overwhelmingly sensual tone that is quite unexpected after  the ferocious scenes of the insurrection. This section, together with its ­sequel at the beginning of Part Four, edges closer to a mutual attraction ­between the two cultures, based on sexuality. The flirtatious Pauline revels in the attention of the sailors as the French fleet of her husband General Leclerc crosses the A ­ tlantic. Her languid voluptuousness (described with a refined elegance worthy of Pierre Louÿs) and hopelessly spoiled, narcissistic, and yet ingenuous character, together with her imagination fed by the tropical edens described in period novels such as Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, thoroughly marginalize her from the military struggle. When the French troops begin dying off from yellow fever, she is sent to l’Île de la Tortue, an old pirate haunt lying off the coast, accompanied by her Haitian servant S­ olimán, a former bath-house attendant, who bathes and massages her like an odalisque and with whom she shares an intensely erotic but (presumably) unconsummated passion. A curious fusion takes place on the island refuge, as her Corsican skin ­becomes as tanned as “that of a splendid mulatto” (Carpentier Kingdom 97). Her fear and horror at the gruesome deaths of the victims of the fever, including that of her husband, and the inability of the French doctors to cure them, drive her to Solimán’s voodoo homeopathy and ceremonies, and she eventually

152

Hazelton

participates in voodoo rituals, including possession by the loas, along with him. When Pauline re-embarks for France in a British ship, she is “thin, h ­ ollow-eyed, her breast covered with scapulars. …In the hamper that contained her Creole disguises traveled an amulet to Papa Legba [the Dahomeyan loa of crossroads, hearths, and voyages, gate-keeper to the realm of the gods, whose principal symbol is a phallus (Métraux, 1958, 88)], wrought by Soliman, which was destined to open the paths to Rome for Pauline Bonaparte” (Carpentier Kingdom 101). A prediction made in irony, or with a wink to the “marvelous real”? In ­effect, the historical Pauline later married a Borghese and posed partially nude for the sculptor Antonio Canova. An epilogue to her relationship with Solimán takes place in the first episode of Part Four, which describes the exile of the deposed Haitian king Henri-Christophe’s family in Rome, accompanied by Solimán, who has taken a serving girl from the Palacio Borghese as a lover. One night the two of them drink heavily and then ramble through the semi-deserted building. Solimán suddenly recognizes one of the statues as being that of Pauline, and compulsively begins caressing and ­massaging the marble body until he confuses the cold of the stone with that of a cadaver, which he then ­attempts to call back to life. Symbolically, the parallel worlds of voodoo and high European culture can link, but their actual fusion is unrealizable. The last two parts of the novel are largely dedicated to the post-revolutionary struggle between Westernizing and autochthonous forces within Haiti i­tself. After the death of Lenormand de Mézy in Santiago de Cuba, Ti Noel returns to Haiti and, homeless and disoriented, builds himself a shelter in the ruins of his master’s old estate. He is soon press-ganged, however, along with a large part of the population of the northern part of the country, into working on the construction of Henri-Christophe’s monumental palace of Sans Souci and the citadel of La Ferrière that rises above it. Ti Noel remembers when Henri-­Christophe, a former freeman of Grenadian origin, had a r­estaurant in Cap-Haïtien, but later became one of Toussaint’s chief generals and, after the assassination of Dessalines, proclaimed himself Henri i, King of Haiti. Yet Henri-Christophe’s taste for opulence and the finest and most refined ­aspects of European culture put him at odds with his subjects, whom he ruthlessly exploits. As he watches a mass within his castle, the self-proclaimed king ­wonders whether In some remote house … there was probably an image of him stuck full of pins or hung head down with a knife plunged in the region of the heart. From far off there came from time to time the beat of drums which he felt sure were not imploring a long life for him. carpentier Kingdom 136

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

153

Immediately afterwards the king has a stroke, during which he sees the ghost of a former confessor he has entombed and a lightning bolt strikes the church tower. Interestingly, in contrast to Mackandal’s transformation at the moment of death, which is depicted as a collective hallucination, the apparition of the putrefied confessor is described as an objective event witnessed by everyone at the mass: the reader is left to interpret whether this is simply Henri-­ Christophe’s disoriented perception, or whether it has actually happened. If it is the latter, then Carpentier has finally crossed the line from the subjective perception of the “marvelous real” to the objectified fantasy of magic realism, one which he was loath to traverse at the beginning of the book. HenriChristophe’s last musings as he wanders through the sumptuous rooms of his deserted palace while the torches and roar of the pillaging crowds below wind their way implacably closer, constitute the final confrontation between European and African civilizations. Ultimately, he fires a silver bullet through his head, and his body is hidden in the cement being used to complete the citadel. In the ensuing chaos, Ti Noel himself is among the looters of the palace and carts off fine clothes, tables, furniture, and even volumes of the Grande Encyclopédie for his hut in the ­ruins of the former plantation mansion. There he makes a last stand against the ­surveyors and officials from the mulatto republic to the south that have come to restore forced labor in the cane fields. As he makes a solitary declaration of war “against the new masters” (Carpentier Kingdom 185), a hurricane blows in off the sea and sweeps away the looted belongings from Sans Souci and Ti Noel along with them, implying that the spirit of the people will remain ­unbowed, or perhaps that Ti Noel has become a minor loa himself, even though the ­tyranny of the West is again on the ascendant at the moment of his death. The overwhelming, tragic seriousness of the role of African belief in The Kingdom of This World is not, however, the only role that voodoo can play in neo-baroque fiction. In Alfonso Quijada Urías’s novel Lujuria tropical, Africanbased religious beliefs—basically voodoo, with a few references to santería, a syncretic blend of African beliefs and Catholicism in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean—definitely have the force to alter reality, thus severing the link between belief and objective fact that is the basis of the “marvelous real” and allowing constant play with the most outrageous fantastical and hallucinatory elements of magic realism as the narrative capriciously transcends the material world. Lujuria tropical is a prose poem in praise of the eternal feminine and its manifestation in art, embodied in Lulú, the beautiful singer of boleros and opera who is the protagonist of the novel and, as such, is eulogized with a full flowering of esoteric vocabulary, constant word play, and eclectic imagery. Only

154

Hazelton

a few events actually take place in this book: the majority of the work is dedicated to florid descriptions of characters and the celebration of Lulú herself, who has some characteristics of a mambo priestess, combined with the powers of an ancient fertility goddess symbolized by Luna Mhar, one of her alternate names. In a sense, she is the personification of the sexual e­ xuberance of the tropics. In keeping with its anonymous mainland setting, there are also frequent references to Central American traditions of necromancy. Lulú’s ­music teacher himself, The Professor, is overcome with passion for her and ­visits a clairvoyant in order to develop transformative powers and gain access to her. The Professor, however, makes the mistake of telling the story of his secret powers to his rival in love, The Painter, who quickly takes advantage of them to enter Lulú’s room through the window as a hummingbird, and explores its intimacies in ludic detail as Quijada Urías nods to two great authors of the Cuban neo-baroque, Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima, describing Lulú drinking beer in the bathtub “muy sarduyanamente” (“very sarduyianly”) (41) and then trying on different clothes with an “obsesión lezamesca” (“a lezamian obsession”) (41) before finally going out into the street dressed as a “bestia fabulosa, en animal barroco” (“fabulous beast, a baroque animal”) (42). Like Mackandal, in fact, Lulú is described as a character capable of therianthropism, or shape-shifting between animal and human forms, often with a specifically baroque quality that derives from the transformative power of voodoo. She changes into a bird when she sings, with “wings like no others. Feathers of all kinds, iridescent, green. Feathers of the bird of paradise, the peacock, the macaw and toucan. Feathers with the colors of paradise. F­ eathers of all the angels and archangels in Saint Cecilia’s choir” (9). She “changes at the speed of light. She becomes a butterfly, mare, bird, water, tower, stone. … He saw her one afternoon transformed into a cinnamon flower …, a star, a snake, the goddess Proserpina herself” (55–56). Just as Mackandal was a houngan, or voodoo priest, Lulú is a “witch …, a priestess of freedom” (11) and “a living book,” “the voice of consciousness, the voice that calls the supreme presence of the spirit, that knows how to touch the delicate filaments of matter, that, in undressing herself, undresses others” (11–12). The adjective “baroque” is constantly ascribed to her, from her “baroque lucidity” (43), to being “the queen of the baroque” (59); she is “a painting by Archimboldo,” and her voice is “the voice of the jungle. The jungle with its cries of monkeys and jaguars, the jungle and its snake cries, the jungle and the cries of its plants, insects and water” (114). In this way, she embodies Nature itself, a frequent trope in the neo-baroque poetry of the French-speaking Caribbean. In her younger years, Lulú was the mistress of General Canales, also known by a constantly altering neo-baroque profusion of nicknames based on his

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

155

­attributes: El Supremo, El Mandamás (The Boss), El Inexpugnable (The Impregnable), El Inmenso, El Gran Perseguidor (The Great Pursuer), and El Sabelotodo (The Know-It-All). Whether any or all of these names are used by others to refer to him, are simply inventions of the author, or are sobriquets he gives himself to flatter his own self-importance is never made clear. He is, however, the center of authoritarian power in the unnamed tropical capital in which the novel takes place, and embodies the essence of corrupt authoritarianism, with “his small Prussian moustache perpetually covered with the whiteness of Colombian powder” (25). He spends his time in cafés and bars talking, drinking and conspiring with his friends. These include Alexis Cendras, an exiled Haitian army colonel and godson of “Papa Doc” Duvalier; Frogface, also known as The Scourge of Saigon, who gradually swindles The General and takes over his businesses; and Colonel Botero (with a nod to the bloated figures of the Colombian painter Fernando Botero), an international financier, gangster, and glutton. These chthonic characters are in perpetual conflict with Lulú’s two artist lovers, The Painter and Professor Berganza, her music teacher and composer, who adore and celebrate her through their art and encourage her to free herself from The General’s control. The novel also contains a proliferation of humorous, capricious references to literary, artistic, cinematographic, political, and religious figures and movements of both Occidental and Oriental cultures, which provides a constantly changing backdrop. These references are often playfully modified to give ­multiple resonances: The Painter, for instance, is suddenly referred to as “Lucas ­Cranach (60)” presumably by analogy with the sensuality of the German ­Renaissance artist, but the name then changes to Lhu Kash Kra Nhach (65), which has certain Tibetan overtones. All of the principal characters are in fact defined by a constantly growing collage of adjectives and images that builds up into a palimpsest. The effusiveness of these descriptions underlines the true artistic and profoundly neo-baroque esthetic of the novel, which is the pure enjoyment of creating layers of descriptive nouns, adjectives, and verbs in a protean variety of elegant and ironic combinations, all honed by constant wordplay. Much as the pillar in a baroque colonial church—­especially one worked on by indigenous artists—served as a ground on which to twine unending variations of adornment that ultimately eclipsed its utilitarian function, the linear aspect of Lujuria tropical is completely overwhelmed by the b­ aroque inventiveness of its decoration, transforming the framework of the novel into an endless extravagant crescendo of words and emotions. For this reason, the novel could be qualified as ‘ultra-baroque’, for its neo-baroque ­proliferation ultimately substitutes the plot and narrative of the novel with a series of ­artistic word clusters. Lulú herself, the singer of boleros and operas, is replaced

156

Hazelton

by i­ ncrustations of metaphorical and metonymic attributes, so that the s­ ignifier itself becomes tangential as it is transformed into a constellation of signified elements, an extreme process that Severo Sarduy associates with the neobaroque (170). ­Moreover, the abundance of poetic techniques and wordplay, including alliteration, assonance, paranomasia, repetition, rhyme, and evocation, are themselves consistently undercut by changes in register and incongruous additions that deflate, twist, satirize, and transgress them. Given the parodic, hyperbolic, self-referential tone of the novel, the role of voodoo in Lujuria tropical is ambivalent: it serves as a catalyst for the ornate descriptions of Lulú and other characters, particularly in terms of their shape-shifting and artistic abilities, and is also the nexus of the rivalry between her lovers, yet it is at times far different—indeed, almost diametrically opposed—to that of The Kingdom of This World. Rather than a deeply felt religious ­belief invoked to aid and defend the collective, it is presented as an entertaining and sometimes dangerous magical tool used for individual ends which is nevertheless capable of producing profound results. Despite the fact that Lulú is The General’s mistress, her music teacher, Professor Berganza, becomes so o­ vercome with passion for her that he experiments with voodoo in order to obtain her love. “Passion is blind and clandestine; it subverts every order, breaks all the rules. Because passion is death,” announces the narrator (22). Yet the seriousness of Berganza’s quest is seemingly undercut by his willingness to search for help from any superstition available, “invoking the aid of sorcerers and spiritualists, black Africans, Hindu clairvoyants, snake charmers, witchdoctors of ‘[el] gran burundún burundanga’ (‘the great good-for-nothing ­scopolamine’ [an incapacitating drug]”) (22). The anaphoric echo in the description of the drug echoes the derisive, mocking tone of the African-sounding words used. Finally, “a black woman told him that she could do the job. […] All she needed was a photo and a pubic hair and he’d see how in a couple of days she’d be at his feet” (20). A more demeaned, disparaged form of voodoo would be hard to imagine: a simple gimmick to seduce a woman, a superstitious vehicle for self-aggrandizement and exploitation no better or worse than a dozen other types of sorcery. Yet the spell that the priestess casts actually works and ­profoundly effects the action of the novel. The Painter tricks The Professor and obtains the pubic hair during his hummingbird visit to Lulú’s apartment, after which he leaves it with the priestess, who goes through a serious, solitary ritual of p ­ ossession as she casts her enchantment to assure that Lulú falls in love with her client. She metamorphoses, “transcending matter” (49) as she shape-shifts through seven animals. A cackling rooster emerges from her vulva, and its heart burns on the coals as she goes into trance and is ridden by the gods: “she jumped, danced, gasped, sweated the sweat of the ­possessed and

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

157

epileptic” (50). Finally, the saxophone music of Felipito Domínguez floats up to the room to accompany her in her possession as she begins “her discourse of tongues, followed by roaring bursts of laughter” (50). This joyful, positive, voodoo experience is also successful: Lulú frees herself from The General and falls in love with The Painter, as The Professor composes music about them. Ultimately, however, the transformation of reality proves to be so abrupt and powerful that it induces a violent counter-reaction, and The General and his friends terminate the idyll by planting a bomb and blowing the Painter to bits. Voodoo in its more frivolous, unscrupulous form is closely associated with colonel Alexis Cendras, the exiled Haitian army officer and drinking companion of The General. Cendras is given to exclamations of “Long live Shango!” (an interjection continually associated with his name), referring to the West ­African god of thunder, fire, and anger, who is actually more revered as a war god in santería than in Haitian voodoo, which favors Ogoun for fighting. Yet the voodoo of Cendras is of a degraded variety, far from the worship of the great loas of Africa; it is satirized by the author as “budú” and principally used to chase, catch, and enslave women—a goal that his friend The General most enthusiastically espouses. It is primarily used, in fact, to pillory its proponent and other enthusiasts. Cendras invites The General to see a priestess of santería in order to win back Lulú’s affection, but the spectacle that ensues, although it includes the woman’s possession by the gods, lacks both the ingenuous spontaneity of The Painter’s spell and the gravitas and depth of belief of the Haitian rituals in The Kingdom of This World. Moreover, the voodoo-influenced party that Cendras proposes after The General’s funeral is a decadent mix of salsa dancing, secret societies, drugged chickens, cocaine, endless rum, cardplaying, and off-color story-telling that seemingly deflates its power. Despite its banality, however, there exist a few solemn moments, as Cendras purposefully accelerates the bacchanal, offering it up as a final send-off to his friend The General’s soul on its way to the afterlife. Voodoo, then, has multiple uses in the Caribbean novel, particularly when combined with elements of the “marvelous real,” magical realism, and the ­neo-baroque. At its deepest level, it embodies the most passionate religious beliefs of the descendents of the African slaves, fused together in the crucible of their ethnic multiplicity, yet still surprisingly close to the religious beliefs found in large parts of West Africa today. In this sense, voodoo (and santería) ­belong to the African sphere of the great world religions, with clearly defined deities, often perceived as descended from or subservient to Damballah, the father of the gods, that communicate with humankind through ritual possession. At  ­another, more superstitious level, that of magic and witchcraft, ­voodoo can be used as a literary device that enables a narrative to switch into

158

Hazelton

fantasy as  lovers seduce one another, tyrants subject others to their wishes, or ­libertines indulge themselves—or to parody those who use it for their own ends. ­Whatever the use or level of meaning of voodoo, however, its plurality of interpretation, imagistic power, cathartic possession, and richness of reference make it a natural part of the neo-baroque artistic experience in the Caribbean. Works Cited * All translations from Lujuria tropical are by the author of the present study. Acevedo, Federico. Introduction to El reino de este mundo, by Alejo Carpentier. Río ­Piedras, Puerto Rico: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994. x–xlix. Barroso, Juan. “Realismo mágico” y “Lo real maravilloso” en El reino de este mundo y El siglo de las luces. Miami: Universal, 1977. Birkenmaier, Anke. Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina. ­Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2006. Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. Trans. Harriet de Onís. New York: ­Noonday, 1957, 1989. ———. El reino de este mundo. Introduction by Federico Acevedo. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994. ———. 1995a. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” Trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Eds. Lois ­Parkinson Zamora and B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 89–108. [Print trans. of “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso.” Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier. Vol. 13. México City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1990. 167–193]. ———. “On the Marvelous Real in America.” Trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois ­Parkinson Zamora. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 75–88. [Print trans. of “De lo real maravilloso americano” (1949). Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier. Vol. 13. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1990: 100–117]. Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Return to My Native Land. Prol. André Breton. Trans. Émile Snyder. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971. Chao, Ramón. Conversaciones con Alejo Carpentier. Madrid: Alianza, 1985, 1998. Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of ­California Press, 1995. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson, 1953. D’Ors, Eugenio. Lo barroco. Prologue Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. Madrid: Tecnos, 2002. Dorsinville, Roger. Toussaint L’Ouverture. Montreal: CIDIHCA, 1987.

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel

159

James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1963. Lienhard, Martin. “Traditions africaines et ‘Jacobinisme’ dans les mouvements de révolte d’esclaves aux Caraïbes et au Brésil (1791–1840).” Vodou. Eds. Jacques H ­ ainard, Philippe Mathez, and Olivier Schinz. Geneva Switzerland: Infolio and Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, 2008. Márquez Rodríguez, Alexis. Lo barroco y lo real-maravilloso en la obra de Alejo Carpentier. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1984. Mead, Robert F. Jr. “Miguel Ángel Asturias and the Nobel Prize.” Hispania. 51.2 (May 1968): 326–331. Mennesson-Rigaud, Odette. “Le rôle du Vaudou dans l’indépendance d’Haïti.” Vodun. Ed. Gilbert Rouget, Roger Bastide, and Claude Souffrant. Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1993. 275–303. Métraux, Alfred. Le Vaudou Haïtien. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. Owusu, Heike. Rituels et Symboles Vaudou. Trans. Anne Charrière. Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 2001. Pluchon, Pierre. Vaudou: Sorciers Empoisonneurs de Saint-Domingue à Haïti. Paris: ­Karthala, 1987. Quijada Urías (Kijadurías), Alfonso. Lujuria tropical. San Salvador, El Salvador: ­CONCULTURA, 1996. Real Academia Española. Diccionario de la lengua española. Vol. 1. Madrid: RAE, 1992. Rigaud, Milo. Secrets of Voodoo. Trans. Robert B. Cross. New York: Arco, 1971. Sarduy, Severo. “El barroco y el neobarroco.” América Latina en su literatura. Ed. César Fernández Moreno. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1972; Paris: UNESCO, 1988. 167–184. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Orphée noir.” Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de la langue française. Ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor. 1948. Paris: P U de France, 1969. Wakefield, Steve. 2004. Carpentier’s Baroque Fiction: Returning Medusa’s Gaze. ­Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2004.

chapter 7

Temporal and Local Transfers: The Neo-Baroque between Politics, Religion and Entertainment Jens Baumgarten Staging and question of display appear to be inherent to the baroque. Baroque religiosity, worship and the material side of religion are the visible face of the baroque that captures the admiration of its latter-day audiences. This is true even more so in the case of Latin American and especially Brazilian colonial art. Given the intrinsic role of theatricality in baroque style, the staging of baroque worship may be fruitfully analyzed by reflecting on a modernist, neo-baroque (re)staging of the Brazilian colonial baroque.1 The first part of this chapter will focus on the architecture, decoration, and other visual materials of the 20th century church Nossa Senhora do Brasil, one of the most well-known and im­ pressive churches in São Paulo, which can be classified as neo-colonial neobaroque. After this, the notion of denomination (especially the relation between neo-colonial and neo-baroque) will be discussed. The church combines different elements that reflect a political, religious, and aesthetic project of Brazilian culture and history. It also reveals configurations within the discourse of the historical baroque and a transcultural and historical neo-baroque. Built for the upper classes, Nossa Senhora do Brasil is situated in an upscale area of São Paulo and is famous for its wedding celebrations, which sometimes can be watched on national television. The architecture and decorations clearly reflect a relationship between Brazilian and European art history, especially with regard to the concept of a single, common baroque. The visual discourse of the church aims to establish a political, religious, and aesthetic position for the city with respect to its many and varied immigrant groups, which must also be seen as part of the Brazilian ‘national project’. This chapter will analyze the architecture and decoration of neo-baroque churches in Brazil and their iconological transformations.

1 See Walter Moser, Résurgences baroques: Les Trajectoires d’un processus transculturel, Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 2001; Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge: mit Press, 2004; Omar Calabrese, The Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_011

Temporal and Local Transfers

161

Prolegomena In her works on the neo-baroque, film, art and cultural historian Angela Ndalianis compares media and entertainment culture of the 20th century (­especially since the 1930s) with the so-called historical baroque of the 17th century. ­Paraphrasing Focillon, she defines a trans-historical and -cultural baroque, where the baroque form has shown dynamic and constant presence across centuries, sometimes with more and sometimes with less intensity. The phases that erupt with intensity are the most interesting to her. In her research, ­Ndalianis works predominantly with two concepts that are related to the trans-cultural concept of the neo-baroque: the “teatrum mundi” and the “Wunderkammer” (“Spaces and Experimental Design” 1, 5). This epistemological interest at the neo-baroque paradigm leads her to the historical relevance and effectiveness of the so-called conceptual baroque, which developed post factum in the second half of the 19th century. This was conceptualized against certain forms of ‘high culture’, and reappeared through the experiencing of contemporary entertainment culture. This baroque created a fascination (faszinosum) on the level of cultural discourse, as well as that of cultural practice. Walter Moser also bases his cultural-theoretic studies of the neo-baroque on the hypothesis that the baroque was conceptualized as a rhetoric and esthetic efficacy (puissance), which was again actualized, and was used differently in different media in relation to its distinctive technical, political and social-economical contexts.2 These approaches analyze modern and contemporary entertainment cultures, allowing an understanding of the whole potential of a baroque aesthetic of efficacy. Considering the political aspects of this neo-baroque aesthetic approach, it can therefore be understood as a ‘democratized Baroque’ that both levels out hierarchical differences between so called high and popular cultures, and also radicalizes its trans-cultural mobility into a globalized paradigm. Thus the neo-baroque in Moser’s trans-medialization recycles the baroque, his production of efficacy and his historical topoi for the contemporary mass culture. Both Teatrum mundi and Wunderkammer were always related to—and therefore contribute to a theoretical debate on—­ reality, virtuality, simulacrum and spectacle.

2 See also one of the most recent examples William Egginton, The Theater of Truth. The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford California Press, 2010, especially (The Corporal Image and the New World Baroque, pp. 69–84).

162

Baumgarten

In Ndalianis’s analysis of entertainment culture (that includes the decoration of casinos in Las Vegas3 with their architecture of effects and structures similar to ‘Wunderkammer’ in the 16th and 17th century), she reveals ­parallels to these historical Wunderkammer. These include especially the interior spaces that evoke and join different fragments together from the whole world, thus creating a source of sensorial immersion. This can be seen in the ­Venetian C ­ asino with its Venetian architecture, or Caesars Palace with its antique Roman and Renaissance architecture and decorations. It is also apparent in Las Vegas’s different interpretations and constructions of architecture, media displays, music, smells and tastes of different food courts or dining halls, the t­ angency of different textures, sculptures, and products of consumption. Like  in early modern Wunderkammer where the macrocosm is represented in the ­microcosm, the complete entertainment world is presented and represented in the microcosm of Las Vegas’s casinos (“Spaces and Experimental Design”, 5–6). Sensorial experience is therefore vital for the interpretation of neo-baroque spaces with their technological and literally spectacular wonders. Multiple perspectives, axes of gaze, and sensorial experiences multiply rare, special experiences, which Decartes in ‘Discours de la méthode’ refers to in his definition of admiration. The spectator shifts to an intellectual mode, evaluating a miraculous, almost mystical, experience. Each saltation in visual observation leads to a shift in the spectator’s sensorial perception, as the position of ­spectator/consumer is changed in a continuous process of evoking other altering, m ­ iraculous experiences. This process ensures the virtuosity of the artist-­ architect as the central to the spectator’s performance (Ndalianis, “Spaces and Experimental Design”, 7).

Neo-Baroque Stagings of the Baroque: Nossa Senhora do Brasil

The church Nossa Senhora do Brasil was inaugurated in 1940, and its first mass was held on 23 September 1954 (figure 7.1). The church’s decorations consist mainly of mural paintings by Antônio Paim Vieira. Produced during the 1950s, it is made from tiles of different colors. Continued through to the present day by different artists, it recalls the panel paintings of the late 80s and early 90s. 3 Concerning the critique of postcapitalist consumption culture, see: Dirk Becker (ed.), ­Kapitalismus als Religion, Berlin: Kadmos, 2011 and Heinz Frügh, Christian Metz, Björn ­Weyand (eds.), Warenästhetik. Neue Perspektiven auf Konsum, Kultur und Kunst, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011.

Temporal and Local Transfers

163

Figure 7.1 Façade, Nossa Senhora do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil Photo by Adilson Fernando Ferreira.

A contract was recently signed to construct a new type of grotto-like crypt, work that will be carried out in the next several years. This latter fact suggests that the church’s neo-baroque project can be understood as an open one with a continuing visual use, re-use and re-re-use of the baroque: or in other words, a re-staging of baroque worship. Designed by Bruno Simões Magro,

164

Baumgarten

its eclectic architecture combines stylistic elements from churches in Minas Gerais and other Brazilian states, as well as being a small-scale copy of Bernini’s ­colonnades from St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome (figure 7.2). The sculptures that decorate the entrance stylistically reference Aleijadinho’s Prophets in ­Congonhas, one of the most important Brazilian artifacts of colonial times and (as will be explained later), the founding myth of a national Brazilian art. The main altar is the central focus of the church, and was transferred to the new building from Church Sant’Ana of Mogi de Cruzes where it originally b­ elonged. (Figure 7.3) According to the description of French scholar Germain Bazin in one of the most important books on Brazilian baroque, the altar was made in 1740 (Bazin 1955). It is important to understand the new display of this piece as a significant inscription into a Brazilian and Paulista (art) history. In 1725, the cult image of The Sacred Heart of Mary was chosen to serve as patron saint of the missionary efforts of the Capuchins in Pernambuco in Northeastern Brazil. Traditionally the image is attributed to the Jesuits, and even specifically to José de Anchieta, the famous, beatified missionary. The original image was transferred to Italy in the 19th century where it was named Madonna del Brasile by the population of Naples. In 1924, when the Brazilian bishop Frederico Benício de Souza Costa heard of the image, he asked for a copy, and this was later installed in Nossa Senhora do Brazil. This cult image raises the question of the authenticity, and specifically the question of the original and copy in the context of display. During the 1958 inauguration, the sermon pointed out the importance of the mestizagem as a national project: “’You are neither Italian, nor French, nor Greek. You are Brazilian. Truly Brazilian, just like your dark child’, referring to the mestizo Christ child of the cult image”.4 The visual discourse of the church thus aims to establish a political, religious, and aesthetic position for the city in regards to its multiethnic immigrants. This question is also indissolubly related to the former question of authenticity, particularly in regards to how notions of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ pertain to debates on national identity. However, there remains a very interesting aspect that must be mentioned: the cult image in the Brazilian church does not correspond to this description. Instead, it refers to its ‘original’ in Italy, which originally had been in Brazil and, according to

4 This can be found in the official material published not officially by the parish. Some part of it can be found under http://www.nossasenhoradobrasil.com.br/ (accessed 2 May 2014). The analysis of the architecture and decoration of the church takes part in a larger project about religious and political visual culture and the reception of colonial art. About this decoration it is also written that “each of the paintings represents one race and one epoch”.

Temporal and Local Transfers

Figure 7.2  Lateral Exterior, Nossa Senhora do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil Photo by Adilson Fernando Ferreira.

165

166

Baumgarten

Figure 7.3 The cult image of the Virgin. Altar. Interior, Nossa Senhora do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Adilson Fernando Ferreira.

legend, was made in the Northeast of the country. The aspect of mestizagem appears only in the paintings of Antônio Paim Vieira. It was important for the modernist movement to analyze and re-­appropriate the baroque and install a neo-baroque. Additionally, the authentic altar and its authentic cult image condensed the main ideas of a trans-historical and -cultural neo-baroque. It reflects an internal and an external transfer in two ways: firstly, the main altar was transferred from Mogi das Cruzes to the newly erected church, and secondly, the city in the interior represents the ‘heroic’ history of the Bandeirantes and their efforts in promoting the myth of a civilizing baroque. The cult image itself is not present, but rather it is only a copy of the Italian original (figure 7.3). It represents a spirit of mutual exchange, and evokes the question of the image itself: one of the crucial concerns of the baroque. The original image in Italy survived in Brazil, recognized in return as a miraculous image in Italy. In Brazil, we find a copy of the image that does not resemble the original as such, but which is represented in the decoration of the apse. The question of the copy in the display and therefore of representation and their value is also emphasized in various parts of the decoration system. In

Temporal and Local Transfers

167

the ‘pinacoteca’—an art gallery in a colonial tradition, of the church—­several paintings are on display, mainly copies of especially 19th century images of the missionary work of the Jesuits and other orders in the 16th ­century. Three paintings, for example a copy of Meirelles “First mass celebrated in Brazil”, ­refers also to the importance of nature within the “civilizing” and “­missionary” ­project in colonial Brazil. The same topic, the importance of nature, is d­ isplayed in another medium: in tiles. These different representations demonstrate the abundant aspects of transfer and translation into different media as a neobaroque concept. The church’s main decoration consists of an original series of tiles (azulejos), which combines important events from the history of Catholicism, as well as Brazilian and church history (figure 7.4). Furthermore, the series depicts the main sanctuaries in Brazil and Latin America, including Guadalupe, and also in Jerusalem and Rome. However, there are also ‘new’ profane sanctuaries included like the building of the United Nations in New York. The paintings of the ceiling were made during the last 15 years and consist mainly of copies of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (figure 7.5), combined with other European artists that belong to the Western art historical canon like Raphael, Zurbarán, and Caravaggio. The European baroque canon is

Figure 7.4 The church’s main decoration consists of an original series of tiles (azulejos). Tiles Cycle, Interior, Nossa Senhora do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil Photo by Adilson Fernando Ferreira.

168

Baumgarten

Figure 7.5  Copies of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes combine with other European artists of Western art historical canon to decorate the ceiling. Interior, Nossa Senhora do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil Photo by Adilson Fernando Ferreira.

represented in a baroque form and decoration pattern of the Brazilian ­baroque architectural structure. The decoration reflects on the specificity of the Brazilian baroque and its relation with and between nature and religion. Not only tiles with butterflies and birds decorates the ‘velorium’, which are typical for a Brazilian flora and fauna, but the painter Vieira reintegrated a Catholic Modernism which is neo-baroque as an answer to Andrade’s and Saia’s concept of ‘mestizagem’, which is analyzed further down. These visualized concepts can also be found in Vieira’s never executed plans of the Madonna cycle and the ceiling painting, which should represent Anchieta’s dreams related to the ­legend of the cult image. What do these neo-baroque visual art histories of the baroque mean for staging baroque worship? The term baroque may be seen in this context from both a historiographical and a theoretical or conceptual perspective. This leads to the question whether there are different, culturally defined ‘baroques’ and different—or conflicting, even contradictory—inscriptions in local discourses. This includes a distinct meaning of the term itself and its cultural meanings and categories. The discourse of the baroque in the Latin American and especially Brazilian contexts reflects these shifting, flickering “baroques”. In the case of Brazil it is evident in the connection of the baroque and the

Temporal and Local Transfers

169

neo-baroque to other terms that are similarly amorphous, like ‘modernity’ or ‘national art’. The style of worship combines European models within a previously defined Brazilian framework, where a European aesthetic and Brazilian art developed in parallel fashion. The neo-baroque as a style was named also neo-colonial and can be inscribed in all Latin America in a national discourse. Its wide ranged repercussion especially can be found in the 1930s and 1940s in Brazil. This appearance is clearly linked to the modernist movement, which had its first and most important appearance in the “Semana de Arte Moderna” in São Paulo in 1922. But the architectural developments are much more complex. It is possible to distinguish between different kinds of neo-baroque forms and different discourses that are juxtaposed. Like many other modernist artists and critics in the 1930s Mário de Andrade and his student Luiz Saia traveled to Minas Gerais and developed the concept of an autochthonous national Brazilian Art on the basis of the ‘Baroque of Minas’ (Barroco Mineiro).5 The work of the colonial era architect and sculptor Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa) served as their main evidence, even though his very existence is doubted by some critics.6 Aleijadinho was an ideal subject for Brazilian apotheosis, since he supposedly represented ‘mestizagem’ in his personality. Nonetheless, he was constructed as an autochthonous artist who worked in the center of Brazil, which served as a nucleus for the birth of the Brazilian nation and their artistic representation especially for the modernists7—but also for the neo-baroque. In general there are two apparently opposing interpretations of the neobaroque: as a rather pre-modernist movement like an anticipation of it as Aracy Amaral describes the objects executed around the commemorations of Latin American independencies or as a result of modernist movement like Maria ­Lúcia Bressan analyzes in her book about “Modernizada ou Moderna? A ­Arquitetura em São Paulo, 1938–45”. Following her interpretations we can understand the renovating and emotional discourse about national identity in an article of Mario de Andrade in 1921 in the review Illustração Brasileira: 5 This refers especially to Mário de Andrade’s travels to Minas and his writings about Aleijadinho; see Andrade, Mário de, Aleijadinho: Posição Histórica, O Jornal, Rio de Janeiro, 1928, Gomes Júnior, Guilherme Simões, Palavra peregrina. O Barroco e o pensamento sobre artes e letras no Brasil, edusp, São Paulo, 1998, pp. 50–63 and Tadeu Chiarelli, Pintura não é só beleza, São Paulo: Letras Contemporâneas, 2006, pp. 69–96 and pp. 247–248. 6 See: Chiarelli, Pintura não é só beleza, pp. 173–175. 7 One of the supporters of this movement and scholar Lourival Gomes Machado, Barroco M ­ ineiro, São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2003, especially pp. 301–360 about Aleijadinho.

170

Baumgarten

But what is the most glorious for us it is the new style (…) that a group of national and Portuguese architects like Mr. Ricardo Severo foremost, are searching to lance (…). It doesn’t seem to be that there ever have been a trial to nationalize the architecture, styling and benefiting from the motives that our small artistic past is offering to us, by forming buildings more adequate to our environment. (…) The neo-colonial that we are here discussing is much more courageous and more farsighted. If the public, very educated, helps this interesting initiative, we will have for the particular edification (and this is what matters) our own style, much more gracious to our eye, hereditarily healthy of ancient lines and proper to our climate and our past. Bressan 67

In this context, it is possible to distinguish with Bressan between the enthusiasm of Mário de Andrade and his search for national roots, which is characterizing the Brazilian modernist movement and the conservatism of R ­ icardo Severo, who joined the neo-baroque to a discourse of re-validation of ideas like “Pátria” against the “destructive cosmopolitism” that in his view was threatening the Paulistana society in the first decades of the 20th century (Amaral, ­150–152). In this sense the Paulistana elite shared the ideas that the neo-­baroque/neo-colonial could function as an affirmative appeal with its character of “a bastion of national values” concerning the threat represented by the wide-ranged European immigration, especially Italian, which occurred in the city in this period. It has happened a mixture and juxtaposition of ideological-political and aesthetic discourses about the idea of national and desires of social reaffirmation: the Paulistas ‘quatrocentões’ (the 400 “autochthonous” inhabitants versus the ‘Nouveau-rich without homeland’). It is interesting that the religious architecture with its own categories and contexts is much more complex and complicated to integrate into these discourses narrated by the historians and art or architecture historians. Perhaps it can be useful to distinguish in the historicist/eclectic style discussion between a European neo-baroque and a neo-colonial neo-baroque. The f­açade of the Church Bom Jesus de Brás, which were founded in 1893, follows European neo-baroque models, which presents a mixture of the façade of the ­Theatines’ Church in Munique and in the interior it reproduces the main church of this order in Rome, Santa Maria della Valle. So far it is possible to point out that the international aspect of the Catholic Church as an integrated Roman baroque style contradicts the secular movement of modernism, but already leads to the concept of an neo-baroque as an integrating aspect for religious ­architecture combining various conservative and modernist

Temporal and Local Transfers

171

­ ovements like for ­example in the architecture and decoration of Nossa Senm hora do Brasil. Returning to the discussion of the neo-colonial neo-baroque it is possible to understand that the first projects of Victor Dubugras were realized in the 1910 and of his student Ricardo Severo of the 1920s. The critics described the monuments erected because of the anniversary of the independence as “­nothing more and less than a marvelous modernized Portuguese Baroque” (Bressan 68).8 It was furthermore criticized the lack of defined norms and a canon what could be a neo-colonial neo-baroque. A certain motto expressed the main ­objective: “If we have to copy styles, at least let us copy what is ours”. This phrase was repeated by most of the students of Severo. But it remained the problem what is “our”. Before the modernist movement the student of Severo, Wasth Rodrigues, received a grant to travel around the country and organize a “Documentário Arquitetônico”(de Toledo 89). Concerning the lack of research and therefore of a unified idea “what is colonial Baroque art” each of the architects developed its own version of the neocolonial neo-baroque, or what they called the traditional Brazilian style. The following generation of architects like Felisberto Ranzini, Bruno Simões Magro, José Maria da Silva Neves and Georg Przyrembel realized different projects for the elite of the Paulistana society—and it is interesting that especially the latter could be inscribed also in the manifestations of the “Semana de Arte Moderna” in 1922. In this context it is not surprising that Georg Przyrembel as well as Bruno Simôes Magro are the main architects of the church Nossa Senhora do Brasil. In the context of religious architecture in Brazil it is possible to distinguish a period of transition from a European neo-baroque to a neo-colonial phase. As a first example can serve the main church from the interior of the state of São Paulo, Americana, a city of US-American immigrants to Brazil. A neoclassical façade combines with a neo-baroque decoration. A second example, also by Przyrembel, is the a small church a few years earlier than Nossa Senhora do Brasil, São João Maria Vianey in Lapa, another quarter in São Paulo. The ground plan as well as the façade refers already to the churches in Minas Gerais, which formed the main source for the modernist movement and its search for the Brazilian roots. In a very rough matter it is p ­ ossible to describe some of the architectonical characteristics of the neo-­colonial neo-baroque by the following. For the discussion of the religious 8 See also: Fernando Atique, Arquitetando a “Boa Vizinhança”. Arquitetura, Cidade e Cultura nas relações Brasil—Estados Unidos 1876–1945, São Paulo: Pontes, 2010, about the ‘Mission Style’ and the Neocolonial in Brazil, pp. 203–288.

172

Baumgarten

a­ spects of a conceptual neo-baroque these afore mentioned characteristics can be analyzed within a cultural and visual system with the potential of free creation to combine elements, which are supposedly or not originated in a ­Brazilian (even inexistent at this time) colonial time with its canons and stylistic options. The application of certain decorative parts follows an eclectic use and re-use of certain historicist movements and debates. Some of these characteristics can be found like Portuguese tile roofs, the use of ‘local’ materials like certain kinds of stone, for example soap stone (to remind Aleijadinho’s sculptures), decorative tiles (azulejos), arches etc. The literature treats almost the profane architecture and ignores completely the large repertoire of religious buildings, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. Not only many new construction of churches like Nossa Senhora do Brasil, Santo Antônio in Americana or Nossa Senhora das Dores in Cambuí/Campinas show the importance of religious architecture, but also a renewed interest in decorating the European neo-baroque churches in the same period like Nossa ­Senhora de Coração in Higienópolis, Igreja Imaculada Conceição in Bela Vista or Nossa Senhora de Brás, all in São Paulo. Gutiérrez writes in relation to the neo-colonial neo-baroque that the potential national manifestations were loosing themselves in the lack of clarity of area of the national, especially when the formal concert adopted by the neo-colonial is amplified generically to the Hispanic and the American. The defense of the ‘national-american’ is defined more dialectically as a confrontation to the cultural dependence of the European model, which is in the re-formulation of a new conceptual proposal as formal as functional. This problematic is the great debility of the neo-colonial, which in the argentine case is foremost, a confrontation with the Francophile Academism than with the modernist movement (Gutierrez, 61–78). It is important to point out that the critique excludes completely the sacred arts, and even the religious meaning within the development of the European and the neo-colonial neo-baroque. Religious arts seem to be—at least since the late 19th Century—excluded from a serious discussion of art history. Especially the neo-baroque concept allows to re-integrate the religious aspects within the discourse in Brazil and Latin America. A next step in the discussions around the neo-colonial neo-baroque was constituted by the journal Acrópole, which was the only architectonical journal in São Paulo in the period of the 1930s and 1940s (Bressan 43–46). Created in 1938 it was published until 1971. The journal was criticized later because of the same eclecticism of its editorial concept—or in the words of Luis Saia because of a “crude stylistic confusion” either philosophically either architectonically. The main focus was to deepen the knowledge about the development of

Temporal and Local Transfers

173

­colonial arts and to find the “real” colonial baroque, especially in the architecture and the so called decorative arts, for example furniture. Since 1941 the articles became more theoretic and José Mariano Filho, one of the main architects of the neo-colonial neo-baroque, published a “Decalogo do Urbanista” (ten commandments of a city planner—a linguistic form that remembers the religious language, which were used to justify the position), which is a development of his ten commandments of neo-colonial style, published in 1920—and should be read also as a comment on display: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x.

Respect the tradition of the people, and the customs of the land. Protect the artistic monuments of the past indispensable for the comprehension of the present. Search for the penetration of the nation’s soul before translating the ­necessities for it. Approach to the nature as a friend and never as jungle. Foresee before realizing afterwards. Search for adapt the strange/other’s experience to your special case. Form your criteria freely facing the local factors. Consider the local architecture as a precious factor of nationalization. Put utility and logic before aesthetic. Search for realizing a definitive work. Grandiose projects are the most economic because they avoid future amplifications. (Bressan)

These commandments focus implicitly on two main aspects for the Brazilian national discourse: colonial culture as already a ‘hybrid culture’, which should be respected and can be seen as the ‘soul’ of the national character and the importance of nature for the civilizing process. This refers also to the afore mentioned mixture of a popular piety with an appreciation of nature in the work of Vieira and the decoration of Nossa Senhora do Brasil in general. This focus continues in the recommendations for the planting of trees in cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—also important that mostly in Rio de Janeiro and the greater area of São Paulo there can be found the most diverse realization of neo-colonial neo-baroque buildings. Guilherme Malfatty, another architect, explained that the nationalized baroque can be understood as one of the most ancient styles and with all possible corrections it was chosen in the colonial era by the Jesuits. In his opinion this would best harmonize with Brazilian flora and by tradition, would most enter in harmony from Brazilian subconscious, and therefore with a wide range with their soul. This is the importance of the “colonial” that, studied more seriously, already would have a national project. Although he is complaining about a

174

Baumgarten

certain hybridism in the execution of the neo-colonial neo-baroque, his own projects or critiques are contradictory by actually using hybrid solutions of different styles as well as the example of Nossa Senhora do Brasil shows. In the following volumes of the journal the style entered even more in the aspect of a conceptual neo-baroque, and therefore, transcending style as a representation and even iconization. In an article about the new building of the Law School the unidentified author writes: No other style talks better about the Brazilian soul than the baroque. The firm Severo & Villares had the work to study the building, which today is our proud. (…) That nothing misses for our taste of arte exclusively Brazilian, Ricardo Severo, one of the most profound connoisseurs of our colonial architecture, was at the pure source of our purest style, searching for motives, copying volutes, designing façades. Ouro Preto, where Aleijadinho left in stone his mark for ever the power of his genius, there was his fountain that never runs dry that gave the artist the motives worked in such a Brazilian way. bressan, 72

There are different levels of the neo-baroque appropriation of the historical “baroque” condensed in the church Nossa Senhora do Brasil. The construction of a visual space is concerned with the interior images via mise en scène/ display of the exterior images. In the case of the N.S. do Brasil it is less the illusionistic construction of space, but rather the differentiation of visual offers as in Jan van Kessel’s famous paintings of a gallery as Wunderkammer.9 This relates also to the show rooms of different high-end luxury shops that are situated nearby the church. The Kessel painting can be understood as an overlying meta-structure. This meta-structure especially favors the idea of a neo-baroque spectacle, which itself is again related with the imminent notion of internal and external images. In Nossa Senhora do Brasil, cityscapes were replaced by pilgrimage sites. Karl Schütz emphasizes the encyclopedic character of the painting with its precious execution, the artistic as well as scientific artifacts and the ­assemblage, which resembles a Wunderkammer cabinet. The church itself would be the cabinet 9 Karl Schütz, Europa und die vier Erdteile bei Jan van Kessel, in: Klaus Bußmann, Elke Anna Werner (eds.), Europa im 17. Jahrhundert: Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004, pp. 289–302. Sobre a ­relação das câmeras de curiosidades e o neo-barroco Sylvia Spitta, Misplaced objects, ­Migrating collections and recollections in Europe and the Americas, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Temporal and Local Transfers

175

and the cult image would be the most precious artifact within the collection. The importance of the representation of butterflies, but also his project about various representations of Mary concerning different regions and different tropical fruits like the Nossa Senhora de Maracujá can be seen within his work for the decoration of main building in the botanical garden in São Paulo and his religious concept, which includes the importance of the Brazilian nature for his religious-national project. A last aspect, here to mention, lies in the metastructure of the neo-baroque church in relation to Schütz’s interpretation. It means that the whole series of continent allegories can be read together with the allegory of the face by Brueghel and Rubens, where the optical sense was prioritized. This seems another important characteristic for the neo-baroque concept of religious experience presented in the church Nossa Senhora do Brasil that allows foremost a visual practice with no more fixed focal points and an interaction between images, between images and spectator and within the ritual between spectators. Conclusion It is important to include the sphere of the sacred and the religious into the formal, aesthetic and political discourses of the baroque, neo-baroque and its modernist translators. Therefore it is not surprising that the religious production of a neo-colonial and modernist baroque can be understood not as a debility of a style but rather should be seen as a visual, religious system. As a main constituent the neo-baroque, it unites formal, aesthetic, political and religious aspects. I speak of a neo-colonial neo-baroque that enables certain liberties of different and distinct discourses that apparently exist as dichotomies like modernism and historicism, European and Latin American (or Brazilian) art, arts and historiography of arts, religion and entertainment.10 It is helpful to consider these different discourses as traces of a visual system constituted by a neo-baroque, where in the Brazilian example especially the sacred sphere—religious architecture with its creation of space, as well as the artifacts with their inclusion in different types of ritual and entertainment—can be analyzed as a complex system of allusions that transfer and transmit different values and ­significations. Modernist decoration belongs to a neo-colonial a­ rchitecture,

10

Entertainement follows here the concepts of Angela Ndalianis concerning Las Vegas culture. The church Nossa Senhora do Brasil in this sense doesn’t follow a religious model, but aims mainly to entertain its observers by means of postmodern media techniques.

176

Baumgarten

while European paintings are presented in a colonial frame, and religious spacing supports a system of entertainment. There are different phases of neo-baroque use and re-use. The first exists alongside modernist ideas, the second as a religious-aesthetic foundation of neo-baroque theology, and the third one what Walter Moser has identified as the neo-baroque aesthetic. The church can be seen a visual construction of this new-baroque aesthetic. But the neo-baroque of the church inscribes itself in the conservative tone of a hierarchical appropriation of the baroque which included its function for mass culture and a parallel appropriation of its subversive character. Just as one example it is worthwhile mentioning the debate between Antônio Candido, João Adolfo Hansen and Haroldo de Campos concerning the baroque as a term and a quality in Brazilian literature and its role in the formation of a national literature.11 The debate concerned parallel epistemologies within a national discourse and, implicitly, the transfer to scholarly debates. The discussion about the baroque is transformed into a political and historic debate about the formation and transformation of a specifically Iberian modernity. It is also revealing that these transformations are widely discussed without the participation of art historians, who should be interested in questions of representation. The character of its own discourse implies that baroque discourse itself created its own corporate identity. It is a construction that includes irresolvable paradoxes between historicist and theoretical approaches, and at the same time tries to overcome them. This identity formation is also linked to these above mentioned different discourses or paradoxes about the baroque and its relations to the neo-baroque and therefore identity formation is inscribed into a discourse that is concurrently historicist and theoretical. The architecture and the decoration of the church of Nossa Senhora do Brasil presents different art histories: aesthetic, religious, and political. They narrate and present visually in a neo-baroque manner the art history of the baroque. They re-negotiate the national and modernist impact, and fashion the baroque discourse as a relation between Europe and Latin America. ­Accordingly, we can speak of a return to and a return of the baroque.

11

See: Antônio Candido, Formação da literatura brasileira, vol. 1, 7th ed., Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1993, João Adolfo Hansen, A sátira e o engenho: Gregório de Matos e a Bahia do século xvii, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989, and Haroldo de Campos, O sequestro do barroco na formação da literature brasileira: o caso Gregório Matos, Salvador: Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado, 1989.

Temporal and Local Transfers

177

The display by staging baroque worship reveals several layers in the analysis of religious material culture. The spatial organization of the staging itself and the intricacies of borrowing and re-deploying European paradigms require a careful historiography of motifs in the colonial period. These aspects affect the study of religious material culture in a broader sense. The superimpositions of a religiously, socially, and aesthetically defined space engage worship, the saints, and divine revelation with interests that integrate the church into its surrounding social worlds—in colonial Portuguese South America no less than in 20th and 21st century Brazil. Works Cited Amaral, Aracy, Arquitetura Neocolonial: América Latina, Caribe, Estados Unidos. São Paulo: Memorial, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994. de Andrade, Mário. Aleijadinho: Posição Histórica. Rio de Janeiro: O Jornal, 1928. Asbury, Michael. “Changing Perceptions of National Identity in Brazilian Art and Modern Architecture”. Transculturation. Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America. Eds. Felipe Hernández, Mark Millington, Iain Borden (eds.), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 59–75. Atique, Fernando. Arquitetando a “Boa Vizinhança”. Arquitetura, Cidade e Cultura nas relações Brasil—Estados Unidos 1876–1945. São Paulo: Pontes, 2010. Bazin, Germain. L’architecture religieuse baroque au Brésil. São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1955. Becker, Dirk (ed.), Kapitalismus als Religion, Berlin: Kadmos, 2011. Bressan, Maria Lúcia. Modernizada ou Moderna? A arquitetura em São Paulo, 1938–45. São Paulo: PhD Thesis FAU-USP, 1997. Bressan, Maria Lúcia. Neocolonial, modernismo e preservação do patrimônio no ­debate cultural dos anos 1920 no Brasil. São Paulo: Edusp, 2011. Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Campos, Haroldo de. O sequestro do barroco na formação da literature brasileira: o caso Gregório Matos. Salvador: Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado, 1989. Candido, Antônio. Formação da literatura brasileira (Vol. 1, 7th ed). Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1993. Chiarelli, Tadeu. Pintura não é só beleza. São Paulo: Letras Contemporâneas, 2006. Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford California Press, 2010. Frügh, Heinz, Christian Metz and Björn Weyand (eds.). Warenästhetik: Neue Perspektiven auf Konsum, Kultur und Kunst. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011.

178

Baumgarten

Gomes J., Guilherme Simões. Palavra peregrina. O Barroco e o pensamento sobre artes e letras no Brasil. São Paulo: Edusp, 1998. Gutiérrez, Ramón. „Una entusiasta introspección: el neocolonial en el Río de la ­Plata“. Arquitetura Neocolonial. Aracy Amaral (ed.). Mexico-City: Fondo de Cultura conómica, 1994. 61–78. Hansen, João Adolfo. A sátira e o engenho: Gregório de Matos e a Bahia do século XVII. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989. Hernández, Felipe, Mark Millington, Iain Borden (eds.). Transculturation. Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005. Machado, Lourival Gomes. Barroco Mineiro. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2003. Moser, Walter. “Du baroque européen et colonial au baroque américain et postcolonial”. Barrocos y modernos. Nuevos caminos en la investigación del Barroco iberoamericano. Petra Schumm (ed.). 67–82. Moser, Walter. Résurgences baroques: Les Trajectoires d’un processus transculturel. Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 2001. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. ­Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Ndalianis, Angela. “Neo-Baorque Entertainment Spaces and Experimental Design”. Design as Rhetoric. Gesche Joost und Arne Scheuermann (eds). Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2008. Schütz, Karl. “Europa und die vier Erdteile bei Jan van Kessel”. Europa im 17. Jahrhundert. Klaus  ­Bußmann, Elke Anna Werner (eds.). Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004. 289–302. Spitta, Sylvia. Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Toledo, Benedito Lima de. Album Iconográfico da Avenida Paulista. São Paulo: Ex libris, 1987. Vivanco, Sandra. “Trope of the Tropics: The Baroque in Modern Brazilian Architecture, 1940–1950”. Transculturation. Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America. Felipe Hernández, Mark Millington, Iain Borden (eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 189–201.

chapter 8

The Religious Shines through: Religious Remnants and Resurgences in 90s Cinema Walter Moser In my research on the ‘return of the baroque’ and on the neo-baroque in contemporary culture, I have come across what I consider to be a cinematic subgenre that was particularly popular during the 1990s. This sub-genre revolves around one specific question: “What is real?” and it uses the whole arsenal of commercial cinema: a storyline, a plot, fictional characters, special effects, action, violence, melodramatic moments, numerous props and the most advanced technologies in film making, and usually some kind of satisfying, if not happy, ending which, however, falls short of offering a clear-cut answer to the central question. But all this is not without immersing the spectator, alongside the protagonist, in labyrinthine uncertainties about what is real. Surprisingly, in this mass media genre, we can find reproduced basic features of the historic baroque aesthetics that was already working with an unsettling number of levels of reality. I am using the term ‘ontological instabilities’ to identify one of the key elements of this sub-genre and which, to a certain extent, determines its aesthetics. Movies belonging to this sub-genre engage in a neo-baroque obsession with levels of reality that, at their core, are concerned with ontological instabilities. They artfully1 produce a complex and intricate set of possible yet contradictory answers to the central question. In their plot structure they deliberately multiply layers of reality, or different and conflicting subjective perceptions of what we might believe to be real. They generate a proliferation of binary choices, such as between illusion and reality, appearance and reality, falsehood and authenticity, seeming and being (Schein und Sein), waking and dreaming, role playing and real identity, and so on. Interestingly, this cinematic sub-genre, belonging to the commercial cinema, and therefore part of the ‘cultural industry’ that—according to some of its critics—is supposed to have as its key mandate to entertain/manipulate while yielding profits, stages in narrative and dramatic manners one of the fundamental questions about our being in the world. Thus, I argue that there is more than just entertainment and profit making in these movies. It is the very process of reality construction—a socially 1 In the double sense of this word: “with art” and “with deception”.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_012

180

Moser

e­ ssential process—that is at stake. I shall approach this question f­ ocusing on its ­religious dimension, important in the historic baroque and re-emerging in some neo-baroque movies dealing with constructing reality. This sub-genre (re)emerged in the 1990s with the utmost urgency and ­intensity. To substantiate this affirmation, here is a list of some of the most successful films belonging to it: Total Recall (Peter Verhoeven, 1990— usa) Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995—usa Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes, Alejandro Amenábar, 1997—Spain/France/ Italy)2 Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998—usa) Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998—Australia/usa) The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998—usa) eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999— Canada/France/Great Britain) The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999—usa) The sub-genre lives on, for instance, as Christopher Nolan’s more recent film Inception (2010) shows. In Nolan’s typical style, this movie succeeds in complexifying and even exacerbating the central question. In order to approach these cultural artefacts in the historical context of a ‘return of the baroque’ and within neo-baroque aesthetics, two preliminary ­developments are necessary: one on the contribution of mass media to the question ‘what is real?’, and the second on historical crises of reality construction that will be considered here as concomitant with the aesthetic response they give rise to, both in baroque and in neo-baroque cultural productions.

Mass Media and Reality Constructions

In his 1995 book The Reality of the Mass Media, the German sociologist and promoter of systems theory Niklas Luhmann links questions of reality constructions with mass media. He does this from the outset, with his deliberately ambivalent title The Reality of the Mass Media that refers to both the reality the mass media are (self-reference), and to their contributions to the social construction of reality (other-reference). I shall focus here on this second ­interpretation of the title because it refers to what the mass media represent and perform aesthetically. 2 See also its us remake, Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001).

The Religious Shines through

181

Luhmann is not a radical constructivist, claiming that there is no world ‘out there’; there only exist constructions of worlds out there. He rather adheres to a softer form of constructivism: The theory of operational constructivism does not lead to a ‘loss of world’, it does not deny that reality exists. However, it assumes that the world is not an object but is rather a horizon, in the phenomenological sense. It is, in other words, inaccessible. And that is why there is no possibility other than to construct reality and perhaps to observe observers as they construct reality. luhmann 6

This means that, on one hand, under normal conditions, each society functions with a relatively stable construction of reality that enjoys a certain social consensus. Although it allows for local questionings and for sectorial differentiations (for instance, science does not construct the same ‘reality’ as everyday perception does), such a construction is presupposed in most social practices and, therefore, has a strong pragmatic value. One can observe a certain tendency, though, to harden this construction into something more substantial, giving it transcendental and/or ontological consistency that would tend to make it the only “real reality”3 possible4. On the other hand, irritability5 is a constitutive aspect of social systems. It introduces a dynamic that makes it possible for the system to register and proc­ ess what is different, deviant and new in relation to a stable assumption of ­reality that is posited as known and to bring about structural changes necessary for its future operativity. Irritation, seemingly a negative aspect, becomes systemically positive inasmuch as it makes the system fit to remain open to changes in its environment (22, 37–38). In another formulation, repeated by Luhmann like a leitmotif, he says that the system permanently “generates and dissolves a self-created uncertainty” (55). Thus, society “stimulates itself into constant innovation” (78), an ongoing process that guarantees its survival through autopoietic adaptation. For Luhmann, mass media represent the social sub-system that, more specifically, has, as one of its functions both to produce and to process irritation,

3 Luhmann differentiates between “real reality” and “fictional” or “staged reality” (p. 54). 4 As this is manifested in David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ, that will be analysed here. 5 On the most general level Luhmann says that “irritability is the most general structural characteristic of autopoietic systems” (p. 98).

182

Moser

and this in its three main areas: news and commentaries, publicity and entertainment. He states quite clearly “that the function of the mass media consists in the constant generation and processing of irritation” (98). Dealing with entertainment as one of the three areas of mass media, Luhmann offers a rare historical retrospective. He goes back to the early modern novel, a genre of entertainment within the mass media of printing, and insists on its generic logic of “generating and resolving uncertainty” (55–58).6 In the 20th century, the novel still holds on to this vocation when the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, for instance, postulates that its task consists in opening up the “sense of reality” (Wirklichkeitssinn) into the “sense of possibility” (Möglichkeitssinn); that is, in breaking up a presupposed singular reality into a plurality of ­possible worlds, thus problematizing the exclusivity of one given reality by fictionally playing with other possibilities. While Musil artfully played this aesthetic game, whether he succeeded in dissolving the instabilities thus generated is not so certain.7 In Luhmann’s book on the mass media, cinema appears as an heir to the novel, largely taking over the social functions of entertainment from its printed predecessor. That is, it can play out the system’s irritability in relation to reality constructions by playfully experimenting with ontological instabilities. ­Evidently, as an audio-visual media, cinema works by quite different means as its interface with the human spectator activates different aïsthesic channels.8 Like the novel though, in its fictional plot structure as well as in its very a­ esthetic, it multiplies antagonistic propositions of reality construction, ­creating a complex intricacy of possible world configurations. Thus it contributes ­towards activating the irritation of the social system it belongs to, although it is not certain as to whether it also contributes towards resolving the uncertainties it proposes in the form of an aesthetic experience. We shall see that  the  historic baroque and the neo-baroque pursue different strategies in resolving the ­irritations they aesthetically produce in terms of reality constructions.

6 It is interesting to observe that, like José Antonio Maravall in Culture of the Baroque (1986 [1975]), Luhmann links early modern mass media up with contemporary mass media in their entertainment function. Except that Luhmann does it archeologically in a historical ­retrospective, while Maravall, more prophetically, makes projections from the 17th c­ entury, with its emerging mass media, to the 20th century, with its strong mass media culture. 7 After all, his masterpiece, the novel The Man Without Qualities remained fragmentary. 8 From “aïsthesis”, referring to the contact of our body with the material world through the senses. All aesthetic considerations include such a contact as their common basis.

The Religious Shines through



183

Historical Analogies

In the cinematic sub-genre presented above, as spectators we rather experience an exacerbation of the uncertainties produced by plural and contradictory constructions of reality. We feel as if we have been left stranded in a labyrinth of possibilities, with the obligation of finding our own way out, or at least of coming to terms with the complexity we are aesthetically immersed in. So, in Luhmann’s terms, we are faced with more production than dissolution of uncertainty.9 Introducing here an historical perspective might help us to explain this effect of exacerbation. Consensual reality constructions, which underlie the normal functioning of social systems, do change over time. They are subject to historical conditions. Since they are factors of stability, however, they do not follow the everyday changing of those conditions; they rather represent a bastion against such contingency. Yet the accumulation of minor changes together with the amplitude of major historical events can bring about the necessity of reconfiguring the deep strata of reality construction. The consensus about reality constructions can be analogically put in parallel with scientific paradigms. Their change might follow a logic similar to the one analysed by Thomas S. Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1950). Once such a paradigm is established, it tends to remain stable, but, little by little, alternative proposals emerge out of specific contexts. Historical change brings about a multiplication of such proposals. Conflict between them arise, agonistic debates prevail until a new consensus is reached. Of course, historical events and changes of greater amplitude have a tendency to accelerate this process. They represent periods of crisis. My hypothesis here, and in this I follow proposals by Maravall and Ndalianis (2004), is that in such periods of major changes, i.e. of historical crises, the mass media not only convey and transmit these major changes, but they also contribute to the working through of such crises. In such situations they become catalysts of historical change. As such, beyond seismographically registering the state of crisis, they problematize a given reality construction and fictionally explore possible new configurations of reality. In this respect, we can establish an historical analogy between the baroque period and the contemporary historical situation. This is not the place to

9 Two examples: at the end of Total Recall Quaid says to Malina: “I just had a terrible thought: what if it is a dream?”, and her answer is: “Well, then kiss me quick before you wake up”; at the very end of eXistenZ one of the players, bewildered by the dramatic events after the video game is over, asks: “Are we still in the game?”.

184

Moser

a­ dequately deal with all the destabilizing factors of the baroque period. It is sufficient to mention just a few: – The questioning of the monopolistic control over the religious orthodoxy and the religious imaginary by the Catholic Church – The ferocious religious wars raging all over Europe10 – In cosmology: the “breaking of the circles”11, that is the emergence of a new cosmological paradigm – Other elements of what amounts to a ‘scientific revolution’ – The massive expansion of the “horizon of experience” (Koselleck) through a huge colonial undertaking by European powers in the ‘New World’ – The decline of the Spanish Empire in the wake of its colonial undertaking. As usual, it is easier and more secure to spell out those destabilizing factors in historical distance than in the immediacy of the contemporary world. In spite of this, I would like to identify here three factors that contribute to the destabilization of what we can take for real in the world we inhabit. They are presented in order of their decreasing historical depth, from longer to shorter duration. But their cumulative effect is felt in contemporary culture and feeds into the neo-baroque aesthetic of the cinematic sub-genre that is at stake here. 1 “L’ère du soupçon” According to Paul Ricoeur, three major thinkers—Nietzsche, Marx and Freud—plunged Western thought into l’ère du soupcon (“the era of suspicion”). This historical concept refers to a specific crisis that is located in the history of ideas more than in that of politics and institutions. Through the works of these three thinkers, a general suspicion has been cast upon our status as cognitive, economical, and psychic subjects, as well as upon the reality assumptions that make those subject configurations systemically functional and efficient. Our cognitive access to the reality and truth of both the inner and the outer world has thus been shown from a critical perspective and has consequently become radically problematic. 2 The Crisis of the Paradigm of Representation The paradigm of representation allows us to not only know and manipulate reality through the mediation of semiotic systems but also to orient ourselves within it. It is based on the existence of a primary presence (the world out 10 11

As reflected for instance in Grimmelshausen’s baroque novel Simplizissimus. Cf. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (1950.)

The Religious Shines through

185

there, God as a foundational instance, the world of Ideas, the experience of our subjective inner life, and so on) that can be copied, by means of semiotic practices or mediations, in a re-presentation. This secondary presence, of ­semiotic nature, then allows us to know the world and to manipulate it in an efficient way, under the condition, however, that it represents it adequately. The paradigm is based on the principle of an ontological difference between original and copy, model and imitation, presence and re-presentation. In various forms of art, it is intrinsically linked to the concept of mimesis. As soon as we start having doubts about this basic difference, or start mixing up its terms, this principle ceases to be operational. The paradigm becomes dysfunctional and we are thrown into the ‘ontological instabilities’ of not knowing what is ‘real’ and what is not, what is a foundational presence and what is (only) a re-presentation. Recently, under the pressure of everyday experiences in all kinds of fields of practice (science, politics, technology, new media, and so on), more and more critical and theoretical works have been appearing that either show the crisis of the paradigm of representation in its practical dysfunctioning and, consequently, subject it to a severe critique, or create new theories to replace it. Among the most radical, the theory of the simulacrum12 proposes a single concept to account for the implosion of the foundational difference (original/ copy) of the theory of representation. It leaves us with only one level of reality, the simulacrum, plus a nostalgia for a ‘real’ which no longer exists. The New Mediascape We live in a cultural and even anthropological environment, where the question of ‘virtuality’ and ‘virtual reality’ has become a major issue in the debate about reality. The general question of ‘virtuality’ has its roots in a long-­lasting philosophical tradition, but its recent exacerbation has been triggered by ­developments that are specific to our times. Among these developments is our capacity to produce virtual worlds with a very high intensity on the basis of recent advances in the areas of information and communication technologies, electronic machines and new media. Our capacity to use the same digital  ­technology to create and to process data of different nature (image, sound and text) and from different sources ‘frees’ them from their stabilizing analogical link with a pre-existing outside reality, which for over a century has g­ uaranteed the documentary truthfulness of photography and film, for instance. 12

For instance, in Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (1981.)

186

Moser

One specific, recently emerging aspect of these developments is the fact that the techno-scientific machines undergo a paradoxical process of dematerialization. On the one hand, miniaturized machines such as, for instance, laptop computers, iPads and iPhones become black boxes within which everything is reduced to sub-sensorial electronic flows, while the sensorial output of the machines becomes aïsthesically more and more intensive. They thus allow us to radicalize a basic feature of baroque aesthetics: the intensity of aïsthesic interpellation of our bodies by hidden means, elaborate calculations and algorithms. We have therefore entered a world of shared agency between man and ­machine. This new situation generates anxieties about losing control of the man-made machine, and about the machines taking over the privileged position of the human subject and depriving it of all agency. In dystopian visions, then, man is becoming the slave of a world dominated by machines, be they man-like (androids, like in Blade Runner) or computer programs (like in The Matrix). Although of different nature, these three factors overlap and have a cumulative negative effect on our capacity to reach a consensus on the construction of a stable reality as, for the reasons sketched out above, this was already the case in the historical period of the baroque. They rather concur to make such a construction more and more difficult and problematic. In this situation, again, the mass media capture and reproduce elements of historically experienced instabilities and of an ongoing debate on them. In their entertainment products, which might have common interfaces with art works, they densify them into complex plot structures combined with sophisticated aesthetic strategies. Thus, they activate the irritability of the social system by producing uncertainties about given reality constructions, but also by exploring possible new ones. Do they also contribute to dissolving the very same uncertainties?

Dissolving Uncertainties

Not necessarily. This is the time to stress that historical analogies contain both sameness and difference. On the side of ‘sameness’ we can indeed observe that the movies displaying ontological instabilities take up two topoi that we have learned to identify as baroque, although they do not exclusively belong to the baroque period: – the theatrum mundi motif: life is (like) a theater where a fictional reality, invented by an author, is being played

The Religious Shines through

187

– the “la vida es sueño” (life is a dream) motif: expressing a radical doubt about the possibility of distinguishing the real of life (being awake) and the nonreal of dreaming. These two topoi are perfectly recognizable, although reactivated in different contexts, through different means. In most instances, though, the Theatre is no longer a ‘theatre’ in literal terms, but rather a new media spectacle, as in The Truman Show and Pleasantville where the main ontological instability ­articulates the difficulty in distinguishing the reality produced by a tv show from ‘real’ life.13 The ‘life-is-(but)-a-dream’ motif is articulated in many v­ ariations14 that, in large part, stem from technological as well as mediatic developments that the baroque period was not yet even aware of. Despite a different historical aetiology for their existence, they are still the same topoi. It is in their treatment that the ‘difference’ of the historical analogy becomes apparent. In the historic baroque there are built-in strategies for dissolving the self-induced uncertainties, while the neo-baroque tends to leave such uncertainties open and to leave it up to the spectator to resolve them. This is where the religious comes in, or more generally, a transcendent horizon that has the function of stabilizing the uncertainties with which everyday life is plagued. The proliferating propositions of ‘reality’—the phenomenological immersion in their conflicting multitude—can only be brought to a halt by means of a projection beyond terrestrial life and beyond sensorial perceptions that always remain suspect of being only illusionary. By referring the question of ‘what is reality?’ to a space below those treacherous evidences, or to a time beyond human life altogether, ontological uncertainties can be dissolved. And this transcendent dimension, in the 17th century—the century most often associated with the baroque—is mostly manifested in religious terms, by faith and in the ultimate authoritative figure of God. To give a few examples: – In El gran teatro del mundo (1633–1648) by Calderón de la Barca, the E ­ pilogue of the play takes place after the death of those who play their role on the 13 14

The TV-genre of the “reality show”, among others, is exploiting this specific uncertainty. Just two examples, from The Matrix: Neo, just after his first waking-up scene, to his friends: “You never have that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming”. ­During his first meeting with Morpheus, while Neo “goes into replication”, Morpheus takes up the dream topos: “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were sure was real. What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”.

188

Moser

World Theatre. This moment of Truth, coinciding with the Last Judgment, re-establishes a stable order of justice and being. – Sigismundo, the protagonist of La vida es sueño (1635) by Calderón de la Barca, is tossed between reality and illusion, dreaming and waking throughout the play but finally endowed with the authority of becoming the King of Poland. At this very moment he refers and submits himself to an even higher authority: God, who can dissolve beyond any doubt the difference between deception and reality. What in its secret wisdom Heaven forecast, By that same Heaven instructed prophet-wise To justify the present in the past. What in the sapphire volume of the skies Is writ by God’s own finger misleads none, But him whose vain and misinstructed eyes, They mock with misinterpretation, Or who, mistaking what he rightly read, Ill commentary makes, or misapplies Thinking to shirk or thwart it (Act iv)15 – In the German baroque novel Simplizissimus (1668) by Grimmelshausen, the hero, during the religious wars raging in Europe (1618–1648), is thrown into an extremely unstable life in which he can never determine his own fate,  let alone stabilize it. Tired of this instability, he decides to “leave the world” with a beautiful recital of the topos “Goodbye World”.16 What ­stabilizes his fate is the fact that he retires from the world as a hermit, awaiting the final passage into a transcendent world of certainties and stable being. – In the French play Le Véritable Saint Genest (1646) by Jean de Rotrou, the ­actor who plays the role of a Christian martyr in front of the Roman emperor, “falls out of his role” while playing. That is, he adopts the fictitious reality he is “playing” (une feinte) as real. At the end of the play, he becomes a real martyr (une vérité), obliging the emperor to treat him as such. After 15 In the original text of La vida es sueño this is even more explicit: God’s writing in the sky does not delude nor lie, it is the earthly life, guided by human interests, that produces those uncertainties [Lo que está determinado/Del cielo, y en azul tabla/Dios con el dedo escribió,/De quien son cifras y estampas/Tantos papeles azules/Que adornan letras doradas;/Nunca engañan, nunca mienten,/Porque quien miente y engaña/Es quien, para usar mal dellas,/Las penetra y las alcanza] (3162–3171). 16 Adopted and adapted by Grimmelshausen from the Spanish baroque writer Vélez de Guevara.

The Religious Shines through

189

Saint Genest’s death, the emperor utters the last line: “il a bien voulu […] d’une feinte, en mourant, faire une vérité” (1749–1750). These are just a few examples that show how, at the end of an impressive ­aesthetic display of ontological instabilities, the intervention of a transcendent instance, or the projection unto a transcendent level—to which a higher ontological status is ascribed—of the debate on realities, has the effect of dissolving uncertainties and of re-stabilizing in extremis what has become a disorienting experience. After such an intervention, if felicitous, the question of reality and truth can again be handled, and representation regains its social functionality. Very often this is the last17 word in plays and novels of the historic baroque. Maravall and Luhmann identify both of these art forms as historic manifestations of proto-mass media in their function of entertainment. Their baroque aesthetic deliberately works with immersion effects into these uncertainties by maximizing the aïsthesic interpellation of our senses and imagination. With modern mass media they have in common the ambivalence of the pleasurably awful (i.e. the ‘awe-inspiring’) that makes the final twist both a reassurance and a disappointment for the spectator or the reader.

Baroque Strategies

Is this final word or final twist, dissolving uncertainties, merely an ideological effect? Is it a superimposed, and systemically interested, closure of a problem that, in fact, is not solved and rambles on in society at large? Is it a form of a superficial blindness conveyed to the public for its reassurance, while a more critical insight of the author would be inscribed on a deeper level of the artwork? This is what William Egginton seems to suggest in his book The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (2010). His main argument is as follows: “the Baroque must be understood as the aesthetic counterpart of a problem of thought that is coterminous with that time in the West that we have learned to call modernity” (1). Besides the fact that, in terms of historical periodization, he superposes baroque and modernity without clear limitations, the baroque seems to offer the aesthetic manifestation of the central epistemological problem of modernity. And this problem resides precisely in the theory of representation: how can we produce a truthful representation of 17

In the sense both of final and authoritative.

190

Moser

the ‘real’ reality without falling prey to mere appearances that both give and deny access to that reality? He thus explains the title, and another key argument of his book: The title of this book, the theater of truth, emerges as the paradoxical name for the baroque as a problem of thought: the Baroque puts the incorruptible truth of the world that underlies all ephemeral and deceptive appearances on center stage, making it the ultimate goal of all inquiry; in the same vein, however, the Baroque makes a theater out of truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an effect of the appearances from which we seek to free it. (2) In the paradox, thus explained, Egginton already announces what he calls two modes or strategies of the baroque. The major strategy “is the basic structure of baroque representation” (5) and, since it coincides with the epistemology of modern representation, it works in all modern mediascapes and therefore mass media: This is precisely how major baroque strategies function: the viewer is faced with a screen [or: theater stage] that is apparently separated from a reality veiled by it; the images on that screen [stage] suggest a certain vision of that reality; and the viewer believes he or she goes on to occupy that real space, a space independent of the screen [stage]. (5) The minor strategy brings about what amounts to a deconstruction of the major one, that is of the basic assumptions underlying the theory of representation: This second, minor strategy does not take the obvious path of denying the reality behind the veil. …Instead, what the Baroque’s minor strategy does is take the major strategy too seriously; it nestles into the representation and refuses to refer it to some other reality, but instead affirms it, albeit ironically, as its only reality. This strategy, then, rather than accepting the presupposition of two opposing levels—a representation and a reality independent of that representation—undermines our ability to make this distinction in the first place. Not, however, in order to lead us further astray from ‘reality itself’, but rather to make us aware, to remind us that we are always, at any level, involved with mediation. (5–6) This second baroque strategy seems to coincide with the concept of the simulacrum, except that Baudrillard developed it with no irony whatsoever. If

The Religious Shines through

191

‘baroque’ is—historically and epistemologically—coextensive with ‘modern’, it would follow that the simulacrum has always already deconstructed representation. Not quite so, though, because Egginton adds an argument about its progressive increase: Those who promoted the minor strategy in the seventeenth century were in a tiny a minority. The promise of a truth just beyond the veil of appearances proffered by the major strategy was powerful and it has held Western culture in its grasp for four hundred years. This grasp has been weakening throughout the last Century, though, and the ascendance of the minor strategy in philosophy, in art, in literature, is a sign that the major strategy may be vulnerable. (7) So, the major strategy is ‘major’ because it is quantitatively dominant in the historic baroque. Yet, qualitatively, that is in epistemological terms, the minor strategy would indeed be ‘major’, because it is performing a much stronger critical task and is thus endowed with more cognitive power. However, Egginton’s affirmation about the proportional shifting between the two strategies is somewhat in contradiction with his reading practice of historically baroque texts, because he only reads texts from the tiny minority. Or, to put it the other way around, in all the historically baroque texts he reads he finds the minor strategy at work. This raises the question of deconstructive readings of baroque texts. Are there baroque texts that function only in the major strategy and that would therefore not respond to a deconstructive reading? Or is the final dissolution of (ontological) uncertainties only a mystification that would always already be demystified on a deeper level of the very same text? And, from the perspective of reception: is the demystification on such a deeper level, or the undoing of the ideological effect, only accessible to the skills of the deconstructivist reader, while the mass spectator or reader would fall prey to it? I would rather suspect that our method and theory of deconstructive reading is itself a late derivative of the ère des soupçons and thus represents a non-contemporaneous projection onto at least some of the historic baroque art works and mass media artefacts.

The Religious Shines Through

To substantiate this suspicion, I am now proposing a partial analysis of two movies. The thrust of my inquiry will be to find out whether the transcendent horizon of religion is manifested in these movies, and if so, whether it has

192

Moser

Figure 8.1  Neo as superman and saviour. From The Matrix (Wachowski and WACHOWSKI, 1999)

an analogous function as in historic baroque mass media art works. The two movies are: The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999) and eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999). They both belong to the sub-genre identified above and offer the most evident cases of embedded religious elements.18 However, what are ‘religious elements’? As an initial, very empirical answer, let us consider two film extracts, one from each movie, as illustrations of quite different religious elements: The Final Scene of The Matrix: The Visualized Ascension as an Apotheosis of the Saviour In this final scene of The Matrix, we see Neo, the former hacker, who has just proven that he is the One who can liberate and save mankind, or at least the clandestine human community of Zion, from the repressive and absolute ­control of a computer system called The Matrix. In his swift ascension, filmed from above, he appears as a combination of Jesus Christ and Superman [figure 8.1].19 1

18

19

Some of the other movies also contain, more erratically, religious elements. For instance, in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, Christopher, the god-like figure directing the “World Theatre” of a tv reality show. He will be destitute when his main actor and character, Truman Burbank, finally liberates himself in the hope of accessing what he considers to be the real world outside the show. This is just one of many “filmic intertextualities”, for example, quite explicit allusions to, or even reuse of other films. We can interpret this ending in many ways: as an apotheosis

The Religious Shines through

193

Figure 8.2 The Chosen video game players as twelve apostles. From eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

2 The Ending of eXistenZ In this final scene, we see the group of the twelve ordinary people who had been chosen [figure 8.2], at the beginning, to test and experience a new video game developed by the famous game designer Nevgueni Nourish, who stands apart. The symmetrically central position is occupied by a representative of the enterprise (its name: Transcendence!) that produces and markets the new game. The fact that this all takes place in the choir of a converted church seems to confirm our suspicions that we are assisting some kind of remake of the twelve apostles reunited around their (spiritual) leader Jesus Christ—here turned into a commercial agent. In these two examples we can see that ‘religious elements’ can be manifested in quite different parts and on different phenomenal levels of the complex audio-visual object that is a film. Here, then, is an incomplete attempt to establish a typology of the manifold manifestations of religious elements in a movie as we perceive it: – verbal elements that appear on the sound track and constitute the semantic  universe of the film. They might be organized in a way and with ­sufficient density to constitute a semantic isotopy of the religious (Greimas) of Neo-the-Savior, as a parody of Superman, as a parody of Christ as Superman, as an attempt to visualize what happens on the phone line when a member of Zion is taken out of its Matrix manifestation and “called back” home.

194

Moser

– narrative elements that belong exclusively or occasionally to religious ­behaviour. They can be structural (such as the narratemes of conversion, ­sacrifice, redemption, treason, and so on) or functional (such as anthropomorphic agents: the believer, the prophet, the priest, the apostle, the s­ aviour, the apostate, the saint, and so on) – visual elements such as symbols of specific religions (the Christian holy cross, the crucifix, the dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit, and so on) – visual elements that evoke religious practices and rituals (such as prayer, blessing, baptism, pilgrimage, and so on), spaces designated for such practices and rituals (such as temples, churches, catacombs), as well as liturgical objects (such as incense, sacred recipients, and so on). Furthermore, the treatment and the manifestation of these elements can be more or less explicit. They are not always explicit or univocal and might require from our part the effort of analysis and interpretation to be identified and given meaning. Let us now consider some of these elements as they are manifested in each one of the two movies. Wachowski and Wachowski: The Matrix I am limiting my analysis here to the first film of the trilogy. Out of the three, it seems to be the most interesting, the least ‘Hollywoodian’, although, compared to eXistenZ, it makes many more concessions to Hollywood film aesthetics and is produced more in an mtv style (film editing based on quick pace and fast cutting). However, in their written introduction the two filmmakers announce a different Hollywood movie: they do not accept the alternative of making either an “idea-less action movie” or an “action-less idea movie”. They wanted to create an “action movie with ideas”, and that is what they did. Their movie may be less dialectical than most of Godard’s movies, but it is as full of ideas, allusions, intertexts, quotations and borrowings that one could also publish, as Godard did for Allemagne neuf zéro, a small book containing the Phrases (sorties d’un film) that would accompany the movie. The inscription of a religious dimension takes place on various levels. It is a dimension that, at the beginning, seems to be completely casual, contingent and marginal, but reveals itself more and more to be not only relevant to the story, but decisive for it. Also, it becomes more and more explicit on the levels of semantics and of narrative structure. There is a first level where the religious appears in discourse as a ­semantic content. But it is as if in dead language. Different characters use idiomatic

The Religious Shines through

195

expressions in dialogue that somehow do not mean what they say. That is, they use discursive remnants of a religious discourse without assuming the religious meaning of what they are saying. For instance, in exclamations like: “Jesus!”, “Jesus Christ!”, or in more elaborate expressions, such as the following: after receiving an important electronic document from the hacker Neo, Choi, to ­express his gratitude, uses religious language in an ironical and parodic way, thus creating a comical effect in the kind of idiolect used among hackers and cyber-punks: “Halleluiah! You are my Saviour, man, my personal Jesus Christ”. Here is yet another example: when Cypher, the future traitor, already jealous of the special treatment Neo receives from Morpheus and his acolytes, says to Neo ironizing: “Jesus! So, you have to save the world!”. Finally, when Neo decides to “go in” to free Morpheus from the powerful agents of the ­Matrix. This undertaking appears so difficult to Tank, who can upload whatever members of Zion need to survive within the Matrix, that he makes the ironical ­remark: “What do you need, besides a miracle?”—Neo: “guns”. None of these characters means what they say as a religious statement. It is rather a figurative use of dead religious language to create a special effect (­emphasis, irony, gratitude) in the conversation. Yet, in the progressive unfolding of the storyline, it becomes more and more evident that their ‘empty phrases’ are filling up with real religious content. Not only does the dead religious semantic content come alive, but all those phrases, while used casually, and quite unconsciously of their possible religious content, reveal themselves retrospectively to have been real prophecies about the true unfolding of the story and the action. This is the case more particularly with respect to Neo’s true role and function within it. Neo, indeed, becomes a Christ-like Saviour figure. And this is inscribed into the movie even in more direct and explicit terms. First of all, Mr. ­Anderson’s— this is his civic identity in the Matrix society where he works in a computer company—hacker name Neo is also an anagram of his messianic mission that is iterated in many forms converging in the phrase: “You are the One”20. ­Already in his first telephone conversation with Morpheus, his future m ­ entor and ­spiritual leader, who plays a symbolic father role to him, tells him: “you have underestimated how important you are. You are the One, Neo. I’ve spent my life waiting for you”. This prophecy about his election for the crucial mission to free mankind from the enslaving force of the Matrix, is repeated throughout the movie, over and over again. It is central to the understanding of the whole movie. 20

“One”, in the English legend of the movie, always with capital O.

196

Moser

Little by little a semantic density with religious content is being constructed; it revolves around a few elements of a religious discourse: election, prophecy, messianic mission, saviour figure. And the plot unfolds in a way that Neo is put into situations where he has to decide whether he accepts this role, whether he actively wants to enact it. At first he is hesitant, does not want to be pushed into it (“this is insane”), does not believe that he is capable. But then he assumes the full—and heavy, because it will also include sacrifice—semantic content of that religious ‘script’. At a decisive turning point in the story, when Morpheus is taken prisoner and is being annihilated by the agents of the Matrix, he takes the initiative to “go in” and to liberate him, and this against all the odds of the overwhelming superiority of the forces of the Matrix. Here, he takes on the full agency of the active role of a Saviour. Here are a few more of those religiously loaded items of conversation: Prophecy Morpheus says, “where they failed, you will succeed, when you are ready”. Oracle The woman called Oracle is an interesting figure. She will give advice and make predictions, but only in veiled, and sometimes ambiguous terms. But she also has a straightforward message for Neo, when she insists on the fact that his election is not a question of fate or predestination, but depends on his freedom to decide on whether to assume the saviour role. She says: “do you think you are the One”, and again: “not fate crap” but: “you’re in control of your own life”. Morpheus, too, stresses the importance of Neo; once he is captured he says to his fellow fighters against the Matrix: “you must get Neo out, that’s all that matters”. Traitor and Saviour The religiously archetypal showdown between Traitor (Cypher) and ­Saviour (Neo). Sacrifice The decision to unplug Morpheus to save the mainframe of Zion (104). Recognition and confirmation of the Saviour figure When Neo decides to “go in”, Tank says: “I knew it: he is the One”. Trinity’s subjective confirmation

The Religious Shines through

197

Trinity says, “The oracle told me that I would fall in love with a man. And he is the One”. In this context, this phrase takes on a slightly different, or double meaning: “he is the one I fell in love with” and “he is the Saviour”. Confirmation through miracle When Neo is able to stop in mid-air the bullets Smith is shooting at him [figure 8.3]—amounting to nothing less than a miracle—Morpheus confirms: “He is the One”. The phrase “He is the One”, announcing, confirming, conjuring, sacralizing the election of the religious leader, is—to a certain extent—an incomplete statement, although it is a grammatically complete sentence. It needs to be completed with a specification about the content of his role “he is the One, who…”. And it can be completed in different contexts with different meanings by different characters: he is the One who will fight and defeat the Matrix; he is the One who will liberate mankind from the Machine; Cypher, jealous: he is the One who receives a special treatment; Trinity: he is the One I love; he is the One who made a miracle. Although the identification—first in prophecy, then in admiring recognition—of his messianic role prevails in the different uses of this leitmotif, its specific form that calls for a concrete specification allows for multiple and quite different contextualisations. There is yet another leitmotif that takes on a religious meaning in this ­movie. It is the frequent use of the verb “to believe”. Here are some examples of its use:

Figure 8.3 Neo’s ‘miracle’. From The Matrix (Wachowski and WACHOWSKI, 1999)

198

Moser

– During his training for his future role, Neo—repeatedly—has to go beyond what he subjectively perceives as the limits of his forces. And this is said to be first and foremost a question of volition and of belief. Morpheus shows him that he can do much more, fight much faster if he believes that he can. Morpheus: “I’m trying to free your mind”. – Another use of the same verb has a personal complement: to believe in somebody. Oracle says, “Morpheus believes in you”. – Finally, there is the intransitive use of the verb that comes closest to stating a religious credo. When Morpheus witnesses Neo’s exceptional fighting capacity in the metro scene, he comments: “he is beginning to believe”. The frequent use of this verb grants it the status of a leitmotif running through the whole movie. Although its uses, in different contexts and with different constructions, show a vast amplitude of variations, its main discursive load is religious. But the verb “to believe” is used in very polysemic ways ranging from a strongly volitive use (if you believe that you can, you can)21 to an exclusively religious one. This is the case when it is used in the intransitive form: “I believe”. It then becomes equivalent to the statement of a credo. Belief turns into faith and reminds us of the Biblical: faith can move mountains. And it is indeed thanks to the increasing intensity of his belief in his own mission, that Neo is able to accomplish it, with a miraculous performance.22

David Cronenberg: eXistenZ

Apparently, David Cronenberg decided to make this movie when he was interviewing Salman Rushdie who at that point was under the curse of a fatwa against his life. Cronenberg was so impressed by the effects of religious fanaticism that he decided to deal with it in his next movie, eXistenZ. This movie approaches the ‘what is real?’ theme from the perspective and in the milieu of electronic video games. In a rather simple storyline, it shows how such games generate ontological instabilities. Cronenberg complexifies this storyline to illustrate how engaging in virtual realities offered by these games 21 22

Which comes close to president Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign slogan “Yes, we can”, carrying the same perlocutionary desire. There is a certain similarity between Neo’s believing and the “tuning” of the extraterrestrials in Alex Proyas’ Dark City: through pure mental strength they can change reality, change the world, create new worlds and bring about the “morphing” of a given material world.

The Religious Shines through

199

can be an extremely pleasurable experience. It has, then, almost the effect of a drug administered directly into the body. To visualize this message, Cronenberg insists on an imaginary of organic injection of the machine-made, altered and enhanced reality of the game into the human body: an animal-like pod is directly connected to the lower spinal cord of the player through a “body-port”. But the drug-like effects of the game can also result in a bad trip and bring about disaster. This ambivalence is shown in the individually different behaviour of Allegra and Pikul, the couple who engage in a meandering and multilevelled video-game trip [figure 8.4]. At a certain moment, Pikul is afraid of the frightening experience he is undergoing and halts the game, which makes them both fall out of the virtual reality. Allegra, on the other hand, is very disappointed at this interruption of what she perceives to be very pleasurable. So much about the subjective experience the film conveys about engaging in altered realities and reality perceptions. But there is a more political side to the story: to alter reality is a powerful undertaking. Whoever has this power can dominate other people23 and, in the context of the entertainment industry, make money. Some people in this movie do not want their reality construction, i.e. what they take for the singular given reality, to be changed or manipulated. They try to resist the power of the creator of the game as well as the power of the company that markets it. It is

Figure 8.4 Allegra and Pikul connected through the video-game console. eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999) 23

This power is the central issue in the plot structure of Dark City by Alex Proyas.

200

Moser

in this resistance to altered reality, in this fight for the one and only reality that seems to be given and must be guaranteed once and for all, that Cronenberg manifests one of the religious moments in this movie: those who fight for the reestablishment and conservation of this reality—the “realists”, consequently, against ontological instabilities—are the most fanatic. They religiously believe in their cause, use fragments of religious discourse, and do not hesitate to launch their own personal fatwa against “the world’s greatest game artist” and to execute him. They become fanatic terrorists for a pseudo-religious cause called “realism”. They behave like believers fighting against infidels when they shout: “death to the demon, to the demoness…”. Compared to the role of the religious in the historic baroque, a total inversion is taking place here. The religious element is no longer that transcendent horizon, on which the hope to reach a higher, and therefore an ontologically more stable, reality can be projected by those who are subject to the uncertainties of ontological instabilities. It has now become a political claim for a worldly reality construction, pursued with religious fanaticism. The “realists” act as a very immanent stabilizing force with their violent intervention in the question ‘what is real?’. This fanaticism not only seeks to stop and to prohibit the proliferation of reality levels that the film unfolds in a parodic conspiracy-like atmosphere full of agents, counter-agents and double agents. It also seems to aim at the ultimate instance that is the moving force behind this production of ontological instabilities. In relation to these virtual realities within the game, there is indeed a game-transcendent instance that controls the virtual enhancement of reality: corporate capitalism. It is an ironical twist of the movie that the name of the enterprise that produces and markets the video game is Transcendence. This might be a hint by Cronenberg at the fact that what has replaced the Church and religion today as an ultimate transcendent instance is capitalist enterprise. It is suggested that, in this movie, it has an analogous function in relation to the neo-baroque aesthetics of the video game, a function that can be said to be ideological. As the 17th century Church assured its grip on the souls by a transcendent projection at the end of a pleasurably destabilizing spectacle (the autodafés), the fictional enterprise Transcendence increases its capital by commodifying the pleasurably destabilizing experience of the video game. There is a final twist, though, to the movie. As spectators, we are indeed ­totally immersed in the virtualities of the video game, and thus, ­phenomenologically, put in the position of the players themselves. The movie, as a cinematic experience, engages us in an aesthetic experience of total immersion. But only up to the diegetic point where the represented players are ‘back’ from their game ride, back in the reality of the marketing operation of the new video game.

The Religious Shines through

201

We seem to have reached the reassuring zero level from which all variations, alterations, and enhancements of reality can be measured and mastered. And here comes the surprising final punch: two of the players transform themselves into “realist” terrorists and shoot the creator of the game. Yet Cronenberg does not let us off the hook of ontological instabilities. He has one of the players, completely distraught by what has just happened, hold his hands up, and ask: “Are we still in the game?”. With this question, of course, the securing frame of the media video game within the media cinema is being transgressed. And this transgression launches an even deeper game of ontological uncertainties, leaving it up to the spectator—and this time as an open question—to decide whether there is any way out of the uncertainties. In Egginton’s terms this would be the moment when the minor baroque strategy prevails over the major. In Luhmann’s terms, the uncertainty produced by the mass media cinema is not dissolved in the movie. The movie leaves it open for the spectator to resolve. We are reaching here a much more radical uncertainty effect than in the major baroque strategy, because the reassuring zero level of reality is being pulled out from under our feet. It is also more radical than in The Matrix where there is hope that a hacker, transformed into a Saviour, can undo ‘false’ reality and re-establish ‘real’ reality. There is still another important religious element in this movie, of a ­completely different nature. The commercial promotion of the video game, that is the beginning and the end of the movie, is set in a converted and repurposed church. This setting seems to indicate that, beneath or behind this ontologically, epistemologically, technologically, politically as well as financially interwoven problematic of virtuality production (as against reality construction), there is something religious. There is—literally—a religious background that shines through a plot that apparently has nothing to do with religion.24 Due to a process of secularization (the church has been converted into—or rented as—a meeting hall for the video game enterprise Transcendence) the religious has stepped back, the church has been emptied of its religious f­unction and reduced to the practical function of a meeting hall. Yet this religious setting, seemingly neutralized through the new function, is still there. It is recognizable as such. Thus, the religious, though reduced to a residual ­existence, is still active ‘behind the scenes’. And Cronenberg seems to be telling us—even warning 24

At a fugitive moment, in the apocalyptic virtual finale, this “shining through” crystallizes in the appearance of a pew in flames in the middle of a fighting scene. Its effect is like that of a Benjaminian Denkbild: a visual literalisation of an intellectual complexity that entrusts us with a task of thinking. As a critic, I try to assume precisely this task by unfolding part of this instantaneously given complexity in an analytical and interpretive process.

202

Moser

us, given the fanatic belief with which the “­realists” ­defend their cause—that it can be re-activated in a surprising manner. ­Religious fervour can violently break out at any time, especially in reaction to the experience of ontological instabilities and in defence of the cause of stabilizing what a specific group deems to be real. This stability, though, is not, like in the historic baroque, offered as the assurance of a transcendent projection, but violently imposed. In both movies, then, the religious—be it as a semantic content, or as a plot structure, or as a mindset, or visualized as a Benjaminian Denkbild—is there, but it is not foregrounded. It is not at the core of the filmic narration; neither does it constitute the main frame of reference. It is rather something that remains underlying, although in a more consistent way than we might have expected in these secular action movies dealing with the question of determining what is real. But, with this double status as an historical residue and a structural substratum, it shines through the main story. And as such it is reactivated in both movies, although differently. In The Matrix this is in the undoing of a machine-made and machine-imposed false reality; in eXistenZ in the action of those who, after experiencing the powerful impact of the virtuality of video games, fight for the re-establishment of what they believe to be real. But ‘shines through’ as a metaphor needs some clarification in order to specify how differently the two movies ‘use’ these religious elements. The ­Matrix uses the religious as the main underlying plot structure that progressively comes to the foreground. And this in a context where ‘reality’ has become problematic, the search for a liberating hero, capable of undoing the false r­ eality by fighting against the political forces that are behind it and, thus, by liberating mankind from the delusion, and from the enslavement through this false reality.25 Mankind is in need of the One who can do this (i.e. a S­ aviour figure). Thus, the religious becomes a functional and structural element that offers a neat script allowing for a ‘Hollywoodian’ narration, with the necessary production of suspense: who will liberate mankind from the enslaving and r­ epressive forces of the Matrix? Is Mr. Anderson the One or not? Will he be able to grow into the role of Neo THE Saviour? Will he be able to fulfil the task even with the implication of having to sacrifice himself? Although The Matrix is full of complex developments, technological novelties, awe-inspiring special effects, as well as of demanding “thought material”, 25

It is interesting to note that the protagonist undergoes a metamorphosis from cyberpunk hacker to religious Saviour. The movie thus operates a transfer of the political motivation of the first hacker generation to a religious mode of action (Cf. Douglas Thomas’ history of the hacker culture in his Hacker Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

The Religious Shines through

203

on the level of the storyline and the plot structure, we somehow fall back into the reductionist opposition of the good guy representing the positive values (freedom, autonomy, self-determination of the human subject) and the bad guy (Smith and his Agents)26 representing the repressive and enslaving forces of the system known as The Matrix. First the good guy takes some heavy punches, but in the end he will prevail in the role of the Savior of mankind. In eXistenZ, the use and the treatment of religious elements is somewhat different. It is more ambivalent and inconclusive, less decisive on the structural level. Its meaning is much more complex. The allusion to the religious and its integration as visual (the church) as well as discursive elements rather functions as a caveat: Be aware, the religious has not disappeared in a technologically secularized society. It is still there, in the background, but it shines through, and it might even break through. As hidden as it may be, it still sets the stage.27 And it can violently come to the fore in fanatic terrorist action, inspired by a religion-like belief in a pre-given, unique, zero level of reality that ought to be re-established. And the authors of destabilizing alterations must be punished! Rather than in a traitor-saviour plot, we are in a crime-and-punishment plot that also uses religious language, at least on the side of the “realists”. But, with the question “Are we still in the game?” at the end, the filmmaker suggests that this violent ending might just have been another fictional development within the entertaining spectacle, just one more twist in the destabilizing multiplication of levels of reality. Quite contrary to the ‘Hollywoodian’ ending in The Matrix, this ending reopens the main question and leaves it up to the 26

27

Through the allusions of their garments, this confrontation could also be seen as a fight between the catholic priest and the protestant pastor: Neo’s black coat combines the ­cassock with the leather coat of the Western hero, while Smith wears a secular and neutral dark suit. This hidden-but-decisive presence reminds us of the first of Walter Benjamin’s theses on history. From “The Concept of History”: “It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a ­counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight”.

204

Moser

s­ pectator to reflect on reality. Thus, in this film about video games, with this open ­ending, suddenly, the framing media cinema and the framed media video game are conflated into one. This anxious question implies that the film is the video game and that there might be no solution to the irritating proliferation of ­reality levels. Conclusion As a social sub-system, the modern mass media have entertainment as one of their key functions. While entertaining in their fictional and ludic mode, they also contribute to the processing of socially important issues such as the construction of reality. This task becomes all the more important in times of crisis when consensual assumptions about reality are seriously questioned and multiplied in conflicting ways. This was the case in the historic baroque with the theatre and the novel, and it is the case again today with cinema, especially in its neo-baroque sub-genre dealing explicitly with reality construction. Although the specific historical conditions for inducing ontological instabilities have changed, and although the mediascape has undergone major transformations, the same topoi are at play again and analogous aesthetic principles—identified as baroque—are being activated once more, such as creating a destabilizing aesthetic experience by multiplying and transgressing levels and frames of reference, by increasing the intensity of aïsthesic interpellation, by overpowering the senses with techniques of aesthetic immersion. In the 1990s, various factors—of natures such as technological, mediological, neurological, and pharmaceutical—converge to create a sense of urgency for the media cinema to produce and process uncertainties about what is real. Interestingly, in this secularized context, some movies reactivate religious contents, figures and images. Yet the status and significance of these elements is radically changed in this neo-baroque resurgence. Seldom do these religious elements restabilise in a deus ex machina-like manner the self-induced uncertainties through an ultimate reference to a transcendent horizon. On the contrary, the religious dimension in the movies The Matrix and eXistenZ does not bring about solutions, but rather new and more complex problems to the question ‘what is real?’ The religious is manifested as a remnant or a residue; it shines through and can come to the fore unexpectedly. In The Matrix it fuels the hope that a s­ aviour figure might be able to undo a false machine-made reality. In eXistenZ, a religious background setting, together with the name of a video game ­enterprise,

The Religious Shines through

205

suggests that the stabilizing transcendence offered historically by the Church might have been transferred to the Corporate Capitalism of the culture industry. This industry stabilizes and increases its profits by offering through its products the ambivalent pleasure of being caught in the labyrinthine uncertainties about ‘what is real’. Such sophisticated entertainment, though, cannot be consumed without inducing an active reflection on our difficulty to reach a consensus about the construction of reality. Works Cited Abre los Ojos (Open your eyes). Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. 1997. (Spain, France, Italy.) Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “ The Concept of History”. 18 February 2014. . Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1982. (USA.) Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. El gran teatro del mundo. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1974. ———. La vida es sueño. 9 March 2014. . Dark City. Dir. Alex Proyas. 1998. (Australia, USA.) Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. ­Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. 1999. (Canada, France, Great Britain.) Godard, Jean Luc. Phrases (sorties d’un film). Paris: P.O.L., 1998. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Grimmelshausen. Der Abentheuerliche Simplizissimus Teutsch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967 [1668]. Inception. Dir. Christopher Nolan. 2010. (USA.) Irwin, William (Ed.). The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. ­Chicago: Open Court, 2002. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Evanston: Northwestern ­University Press, 1950. Luhmann, Niklas. The Reality of the Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 [1996]. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [1975]. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. The Breaking of the Circle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1950.

206

Moser

Pleasantville. Dir. Gary Ross. 1998. (USA.) Rotrou, Jean de. Le véritable Saint Genest. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1999 [1646]. Strange Days. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. 1995. (USA.) The Matrix. Dir. Wachowski and Wachowski. 1999. (USA.) The Truman Show. Dir. Peter Weird. 1998. (USA.) Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Total Recall. Dir. Paul Verhoven. 1990. (USA.) Vanilla Sky. Dir. Cameron Crowe. 2001. (USA.) Yeffeth, Glenn. Taking the Red Pill. Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, ­Dallas: Ben Bella Books, 2003.

chapter 9

Artist’s Essay: Towers, Shipwrecks, and Neo-Baroque Allegories Patrick Mahon Invested in the relationship between human culture and nature, my works demonstrate the potential of graphic art to foreground critical rhetoric through printed visual language. My artworks are highly embellished, printed wall sculptures meant to operate according to a Benjaminian conception of allegory. Alluding to baroque art, the structures and vessels I produce are caught between destruction and becoming. I argue that they are neo-baroque objects that embody a past while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of a ­future—albeit a fragmentary one. The two series presented within the accompanying portfolio, respectively titled Water and Tower Allegory and Voyager, each speak directly to Walter ­Benjamin’s conception of allegory. To articulate the preoccupations inherent to these works, I rely upon Benjamin’s essay, “The Origin of German Tragic ­Drama,” in which the author evolves a conception of baroque allegory based on his interest in the ‘ruins’ of history. According to Benjamin, with the “­baroque it is common practice … to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal” (in Broadfoot 9). Yet, as Lisa Broadfoot notes, Walter Benjamin also acknowledges that, “the paradox of the fragment (rips) the work from its context, yet also ensures (it as) an adequate reflection of its context.” (2) In my artwork, references to the ruins of modernity are not merely about repurposing what has been dissembled, but also embody nostalgic allusions to a freighted history that poses an imagined, if unlikely future. Or, as Svetlana Boym suggests, a future promised by the past, which never came into being. The specific cultural and environmental preoccupation with which I am ­involved is water. I acknowledge the present socio-cultural moment as one in which water is a subject of discussion and contestation in public discourse. As a Canadian I recognize it as a resource that is ubiquitous within our history and an increasingly desirable international commodity. In light of this, some of my work originates within a collaborative research project regarding water and culture, Immersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds, whose title draws on my earlier research on baroque representations of baptism. The water project uses research and practice in visual art to address the subject regarding its ­simultaneous identifications within culture and the environment. At its base,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_013

208

Mahon

the project links the historical practice of picturing nature with the potential of visual representation to offer urgent contexts for aesthetic, socio-cultural, and political engagement.

Locating the Neo-Baroque

Situating my artistic practice within a neo-baroque framework necessitates my engagement with larger questions as to what constitutes neo-baroque in contemporary art. One of the principle investigations that informs my thinking was a project I developed with Canadian curator, Susan Edelstein, that resulted in the exhibition, Barroco-Nova: Neobaroque Moves in Contemporary Art, presented in London, Canada, in 2011.1 To establish the conceptual terrain of the exhibition, Susan Edelstein and I turned to a previous landmark show, Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (2000–2003), which fashioned a visual and conceptual matrix regarding the neo-baroque and representation, and was therefore an important paradigm for our initiative. Here I want to review some of the findings that informed Barroco Nova, especially because they bear heavily on my preoccupations as an ostensible neo-baroque artist.2 The exhibition Ultrabaroque, organized and circulated by the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, was important for audiences throughout the non-Latin world because of the significant complexity its wide range of contemporary art emphasised. Elizabeth Armstrong, one of the curators, noted in her essay for the exhibition catalogue that, “the baroque has been a Eurocentric cliché in reference to Latin American art and culture, [but] the exhibition [looks at] the validity of the baroque as a means of examining our globalizing impulses, particularly in the area of visual culture.” (3) Armstrong further offered that in assembling the show the curators aimed to suggest “the baroque as a model by which to understand and analyze the processes of transculturation and hybridity that globalization has highlighted and set in motion.” (4) The curators sought to propose the baroque as an “attitude rather than a style interdisciplinary in nature and not restricted…to…the fields to which it has traditionally been confined.” (4) 1 The exhibition, Barroco Nova: Neobaroque Moves in Contemporary Art, curated by S. Edelstein and P. Mahon, was mounted in three galleries in London, Canada, (Museum London; McIntosh Gallery and ArtLab, Western University), in 2010–11. The exhibition was a project of The Hispanic Baroque: Complexity in the First Atlantic Culture. 2 A portion of this essay first appeared in Mahon 2011.

Artist’s Essay

209

The interests manifested within Ultrabaroque point to the complex sociopolitical as well as aesthetic terrains within which the works in the exhibition are located. In light of those frames, it is useful to acknowledge the importance of the specific geographic and social context from which the works emanate; their situation whereby the site of the production of the works was largely Latin American, while the eventual exhibition settings were purposefully set in the North. Clearly, the geopolitics attached to such a reality cannot be underestimated, including as it relates of what was, at the time of the exhibition, the recently signed nafta Agreement. To push this line of thinking further, as a North American artist I ask whether, given that Ultrabaroque had at its heart a politically oriented agenda, neo-baroque as a conceptual frame is defensible from my own socio-political and aesthetic standpoint. I argue that such an ‘other’ neo-baroque conception can be supported. Paul Herkenhoff’s contribution to the Ultrabaroque catalogue acknowledges the complexity this position demands: “The baroque was profoundly marked by the world it sought to justify…[and because it was] an inherited conception of the world, [it] often work[ed] as an empathic escape from the malaise of the present.” (138) The foregoing alludes to a complex of histories and situations where cultural advances are contrived from messy inheritances, and are therefore ripe for and demanding of expressive approaches involving reflexivity and hyperbole. This conception readily accommodates the Canadian/North American cultures of the twenty-first century with their seeming ‘post-everything’ preoccupations, and proposes the possibility for artists, such as me, to engage the neo-baroque to both political and poetic ends. Other background questions pertaining to the legitimacy of my neo-­ baroque practice arise. Eugenio d’Ors argued that the baroque appeared during a ­period of European social crisis, and other authors suggest that in its Latin-American incarnation baroque was actually an expression of resistance to the power structures that its aesthetic programs appeared to reinforce. (Herkenhoff 137) It follows that I question whether in North America the contemporary ­neo-baroque is an expression of resistance or capitulation regarding the  ­political and social challenges of our times. And, as an artist, I also wonder whether its political effect is uniform across the multiple fields with which it is identified, especially regarding decolonialism and the environment, for example. My initial response acknowledges these as pressing questions with respect to globalization and transculturation and also posits that such questions can be unpacked via engagements with the artworks themselves. In that regard, preceding the images from the two projects under consideration are my commentaries on the specific terms of the various works, presented as ‘notes.’

210

Mahon

Neo-Baroque and the Return of a Repressed Modernism

Even as I argue for the validity of claiming the neo-baroque as a frame for my practice, I am simultaneously wary of being thought to identify primarily with an aesthetics of decoration and excess, with which neo-baroque is regularly associated. In that light, I am particularly committed to grounding my project in relation to the socio-political precedents of Ultrabaroque while intending, as I have indicated, to clear a space in which to articulate a non-Latin-centric approach. This latter aim necessitates a reading of the neo-baroque as a broad framework that, rather than being determined according to a specific geopolitical locations, takes on complexities introduced by sundry post-modern discourses—with the intention of shifting paradigms, and inferentially, spatial references. In that respect, Walter Moser’s essay “The Concept of the Baroque” is germane in asserting that “in contemporary criticism, affinities between the neo-baroque and post-modernism occupy a privileged position.” (30) Moser also claims that “a specific way of linking the neo-baroque with the postmodern uses the argument of a return of the repressed. Modernity is then seen as a paradigm that set itself up with the high cost of repressing the intensely esthetic side of aesthetics, that is, with a biopolitics intended to control the body. Consequently, the return of the baroque brings liberation of the repressed and is thus seen as an emancipation from modernity.” (31) Moser argues for the potential of neo-baroque to offer tools with which to reproblematize Modernism to culturally complex and critically productive ends. It is within this discursive field, where a revisiting of Modernism with its promises and transgressions is possible, that I situate my artistic investigations. Notes on “Water & Tower Allegory” In Water & Tower Allegory (figures 9.2–9.10) one observes printed sculptures that extend my longstanding commitment to intersecting art and design, decoration and expression, and the singular with the multiple. Here, I index water as both a natural and socially inscribed material, and towers as paradigms of human enterprise and intervention. In the works, the grid-based and the florid, which include photographic details of a carved baroque church ceiling in Brazil, and references to solids and liquids, intersect to produce formal inventions. The objects I fabricate with printed wood—embellished using hand-stamping methods as well as digitally—are meant as dialogical, and to transit between representation and abstraction, poetry and politics. I am ultimately interested in the potential of these works to propose aesthetic engagement that can lead to speculation and discussion concerning the social and environmental moment.

Artist’s Essay

211

Figure 9.1 Research Image (Mahon): Water Tower, Rajasthan, India, 2011 Photograph by Patrick Mahon.

Regarding the development of this work, in 2010 I travelled to India where I photographed water towers (figure 9.1). On the coast of Southern India, I o­ bserved the towers in the area where tsunami flooding had occurred in 2006. So, in that setting, the conception of water as both contained and u ­ ncontainable became

212

Mahon

Figure 9.2 Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower Allegory #1. Ink on wood. 155 × 105cm. 2012

Figure 9.3 Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower Allegory #2. Ink on wood. 175 × 92.5cm. 2012

Artist’s Essay

213

Figure 9.4 Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower Allegory #4. Ink on wood. 190 × 195cm. 2013

Figure 9.5 Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower ­Allegory #3. Ink on wood. 150 × 130cm. 2012

214

Mahon

Figure 9.6 Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower Allegory #3. Detail, 2012

Figure 9.7  Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower Allegory—Water Fence. Ink on wood. 84 × 110cm. 2013

compelling as a premise for a series of works. In light of my interest in water towers, I turned to the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German artists who concentrated on the subject for a sustained period. Surprisingly though, it was their series on ‘mining tipples,’ provisional wooden structures

Artist’s Essay

215

built over mine shafts in America in the nineteenth century,3 that served as a more direct analogue for my works. I wanted them to bear a significant complexity regarding water, given its problematized connections with human culture and notions of sustainability—and also its conflicted status that now situates it within commodity capitalism while also directly connecting it with questions of human rights. Speaking parenthetically, as an artist I am convinced it is important to address ‘art problems’ with the intention of leading publics towards other intellectual and social issues. Admittedly, I am fascinated by the ‘formal’ and material characteristics of water (fluid/flowing) and towers (built structures), and I attempt to intersect the respective ‘visual’ characteristics of each entity. In that regard, I think of my towers as provisional structures to ‘address’ water— though only one of my works suggests the possibility to be used for containment. The rest of the structures propose other possibilities: opportunities for rising above a torrent, or sites of play. Canadian critic, Meeka Walsh, postulated an identification of one of the pieces with a gallows.4

Figure 9.8 

Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower Allegory—Water Fence. Detail, 2013

3 See, for example, Mining Tipple,1920’sBernd and Hilla Becher, Frailey Coal Co., Donaldson, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, usa, 1978, gelatin silver print, Konrad Fischer Galerie. 4 Conversation with the artist, January 16, 2014.

216

Mahon

Figure 9.9 Patrick Mahon, Water and Tower Allegory #3. Detail, 2012

Figure 9.10

Patrick Mahon, Installation View: Water and Tower Allegory #1-3, (University of Winnipeg Gallery 1C03), 2014

Notes on “Voyager” This project also circulates around water-related narratives and extends a neobaroque allegory (see figures 9.11–9.15). I was invited to dig into the collection of the McMaster Museum of Art, (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada) in 2012, and to produce an exhibition involving works from the collection and my own production. When I came across an Albrecht Dürer print entitled Of ­Taking Offense at, but Learning From Fools, from the Ship of Fools series,5 5 For the curatorial component of Voyager, I chose to focus on works in the collection by Renaissance engraver, Albrect Durer, and English (Baroque) engraver, William Hogarth. The four woodcuts attributed to Albrecht Dürer are illustrations for Sebastian Brant’s Ship of

Artist’s Essay

217

Figure 9.11

Patrick Mahon, Installation View (panorama): Voyager (McMaster Museum of Art), 2014.

Figure 9.12

Patrick Mahon, Shipwreck Study #3, ink on balsawood, 28 × 31cm, 2013.

I thought it had particular significance in alluding to the engagement of artists in the modern world, among its other operations. Fools/Narrenschiff, the first version of which appeared in 1494. The Durer pieces are important forerunners to the eighteenth century Hogarth prints, which were singularly important critical works of their time. My treatment here, though brief, bespeaks my admiration for all these graphic works and their continued importance.

218

Mahon

Figure 9.13

Patrick Mahon, Shipwreck Study #1, ink on balsawood, 30 × 56cm, 2013.

Figure 9.14

Patrick Mahon, Voyager #1, ink on hardboard, 230 × 260cm, 2013.

Artist’s Essay

Figure 9.15

219

Patrick Mahon, Voyager #2, ink on hardboard, 2013.

As a contemporary artist, I am interested in my role as a social critic and also fascinated at the idea of the artist as a suspicious figure in culture. In our contemporary context, where the relationship between aesthetics and critique is often misunderstood and undervalued, and art’s function as a commodity appears at times to undermine its critical capacity, I think of artists as curious passengers on the ‘ship of fools.’ Given this, I chose to present works by Dürer alongside the complex, critical engravings of William Hogarth, amidst my new graphic/wall sculptures, produced for the exhibition that I hoped would function dialectically in that context. My works included a series of six studies and two large-scale ‘printed stick drawings’/relief sculptures of voyagers—nominally, shipwrecks. The graphic details on the sticks make reference to some of the Hogarth prints on display in the exhibition. For a publication accompanying the exhibition, I wrote an essay focusing in particular on the numerous Hogarth works presented, including some from the series respectively entitled: The Rakes Progress, and The Harlot’s Progress, and Industry and Idleness, and The Times, Plates 1 & 2. An excerpt from my essay notes that the spectrum of graphic works by William Hogarth in the exhibition conjures the social anxieties and political challenges of the mid-eighteenth century in England during an era that was burdened internationally by the

220

Figure 9.16

Mahon

William Hogarth, “The Times, Plate 1,” 1762

Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763. The war saw Britain experiencing a crisis of stability to which Hogarth responded. The most urgent reference to that context shown in the exhibition was the small work, The Times, Plate 1, (1762) (figures 9.16, 9.17), featured above; it is from the Levy Bequest Collection at McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Canada. Mark Hallett notes that it, “offers an extended allegory of domestic faction and international crisis. The scene is a city representing Europe in the throes of the continuing Seven Years War.” (283) The double-edged capacity of Hogarth’s image to function as a socially inscribed allegory and as a psychologically-charged tableau is powerfully operative. And the print also had the potential to engage the anxieties of the target audience to which it was being marketed. In neo-baroque fashion, my printed shipwrecks made in response to Dürer and Hogarth, Voyager 1 & 2, present vessels in a state of flux, suggestive of both destruction and becoming. Embellished with fragmentary and hyperbolized Hogarth-inspired visual cues, I mean for them to act as bearers of critical messages and also as carriers of the untranslatable and the ‘garbled.’ The last two works in the series, Submersible (Hogarth) 1&2 (figures  9.18–9.20), show the surfaces of the pieces as embellished with ‘drowned’ images of a (copy of a)

Artist’s Essay

221

Figure 9.17

Patrick Mahon, Study: The Times (Submerged), digital photograph, 2014

Figure 9.18

Patrick Mahon, Submersible (Hogarth) #2, ink on hardboard, 260 × 200 cm, 2014

Hogarth print (figure 9.18). In the case of these works, the surfaces display marks from an historical graphic image as seen through water: a critical tableau that is seemingly unfixed, ostensibly illegible, and yet preserved.

222

Mahon

Figure 9.19

Patrick Mahon, Submersible (Hogarth) #1, ink on hardboard (detail), 245 × 240 cm, 2014

Figure 9.20

Patrick Mahon, Installation View: Hogarths and Bounty with Water Table (Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catharine’s ON), 2014

Artist’s Essay

223

Works Cited Armstrong, Elizabeth. “Impure Beauty.” In Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art. Eds. Victor Zamudio-Taylor and Elizabeth Armstrong. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000. Boym, Svetlana. Architecture of The Off-Modern. New York: Architectural Press, 2008. Broadfoot, Lisa. “Allegory and the ruins of Walter Benjamin.” Master of Arts Thesis. Department of English, McGill University, 1991. Available at: http://digitool.Library .McGill.CA:80/R/-?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=60616&silo_library=GEN01. Hallett, Mark. Hogarth. London: Phaidon Press, 2000. Herkenhoff, Paulo. “Brazil: The Paradoxes of an Alternate Baroque.” In Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art. Eds. Victor Zamudio-Taylor and Elizabeth ­Armstrong. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000. Mahon, Patrick. “Finding Outlandish—Charting Other Neo-Baroques.” In Barroco Nova: Neobaroque moves in Contemporary Art. London, Canada: ArtLab/Western University, 2011: 20–30. Moser, Walter. “The Concept of the Baroque.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios ­Hispanicos, Vol. 33, No. 1. Montreal: McGill University, 2008.

part 3 Cities

⸪

Introduction to Part 3 Peter Krieger Cities are functional structures as well as symbolic and affective networks. neo-baroque literary, film and architectural images of neo-baroque entertainment encode existing urban structures as places where visual or imaginary effects overshadow social and cultural decline. A rhetoric of persuasion embodies typical baroque principles such as transgression of spatial limits, the accelerated metamorphosis of polycentric expressive forms, and an overdose of ornament leading to horror vacui. All this creates what Walter Moser has called ontological instability. Contradictions abound in contemporary neo-baroque cities in which the art of illusion decorates decrepit environments. neo-baroque event-cities develop permanent visual spectacles. They create complex images that are instrumental in exercising political and economic power (Guy Debord). This new type of city standardizes and de-historicizes specific baroque artistic and architectural forms and reduces them to contemporary visual formulae suited to the generic city (Rem Koolhaas) with its non-places (Marc Augé) that require spectacular symbolic encoding. The following four essays examine three cities in different frames of media, type, time, and space. All refer to the neo-baroque determinants in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, the last a paradigm of neo-baroque culture. The essays also include the essential models of baroque exuberance and control: Rome and Versailles. Although neo-baroque urban culture is a global phenomenon that has left its traces in China, Australia, and elsewhere, these essays concentrate on the Americas. They were breeding grounds for baroque distortions, especially in the Latino contexts, and in fields of commercialization in the United States. Peter Krieger examines balustrades, a significant neo-baroque ornamental detail in the Mexican megalopolis—the paradigmatic urban agglomeration today. In this eroding hyperurban setting, the neo-baroque balustrade stands out as an ornamental tool to disguise decay. The ubiquitous balustrade is a standardized transhistorical and transcultural element that stimulates insights about the neo-baroque physiognomy of this and many other contemporary cities in which the recycling of historical forms generates an ornamental spectacle. This recycling does not revive collective historical consciousness (in Mexico, for example, that it is about acculturation to Spanish colonial norms). Instead, it is an emptied, decoded tool used in urban areas of decay, erosion, and selfdestruction. The contemporary success story of neo-baroque ­ornament has

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_014

228

Krieger

one conceptual, cultural root in Las Vegas’ commercial architecture, promoted in the visual mass media. Aesthetic mass education—a new, different form of Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour)—corresponds to the mass production and serial distribution of ornamental balustrades. Monika Kaup’s text examines the importance of the baroque from the viceregal period in early 17th century Mexico, to the influential chronicle of Salvador Novo describing Mexico City in the 1940s and 1950s. She relates the trans-historical motifs of the New World baroque to the process of mid-20th century modernization. She analyzes the neo-baroque patterns of the city’s description, demonstrating a transhistorical intertextuality. Her case study shows how the recycling of the baroque past strengthens Mexican modernity. Here, neo-baroque is an affirmative cultural and political tool that determined normative, collective identities of Mexico at a crucial time of transition to modernity. The affirmative employment of neo-baroque principles and tools is inherent in the praise of “prosperity and consumerism.” These were essential parts of the neo-baroque society of spectacle, founded upon the recycling of the historic, colonial baroque. Angela Ndalianis traces neo-baroque theatricality in the movie theaters of Los Angeles and other cities of the United States during the 1920s. She contrasts that theatricality with contemporary themed entertainment environments of Las Vegas’ hotel-casinos. This is another affirmative commercial recycling of Roman Catholic counter-Reformation baroque scenography. She locates “the most intensive eruption of the baroque” in Jon Jerde’s architectural designs for the “spectopolis” that is Las Vegas. She develops a model of transhistorical interpretation from the 17th to the 21st centuries through reference to the practise of baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who tried to abolish the distinction between life and theater in his work. Since the rise of commercial cinema in the early 20th century, this calculated seduction of the senses has generated diverse neo-baroque stylistic phenomena, such as Spanish Colonial, a revival that forms part of postmodern excess. In other media, such as video games and the Internet, the author detects the invasive spectacles of what Norman Klein calls contemporary electronic baroque. Marjan Colletti is an architect, artist, and experimental computer programmer. He concludes this section with a text and image intervention. He seeks to explain the potential of the “post-digital” in contemporary architectural design. Focusing on his own practise as designer and researcher he contextualizes the recent development of computational tools, digital fabrication technologies and simulation methods in architecture as a cultural catalyst that has altered aesthetics and design in present-day society. Colletti believes that post-digital architecture is neo-baroque in essence. His artistic concept is inspired by the

Introduction To Part 3

229

binary categories of Henrich Wölfflin’s influential book, Principles of Art History, published in 1915. A century later, this art-historical treatise supports the intention of a neo-baroque artist/architect to “push 3D rp [rapid prototyping] to its limits.” The texts profile the stimulating conceptual diversity of the neo-­baroque as a tool for understanding contemporary cultural phenomena. The focus on the city reveals the forms and ideas that ontological instabilities are able to generate.

chapter 10

Symbolic Dimensions and Cultural Functions of the Neo-Baroque Balustrade in Contemporary Mexico City: An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas Peter Krieger1

Outline and Meanings

The neo-baroque balustrade is a standardized trans-historical and trans-­ cultural decorative element that fulfills symbolic functions in different spatial and temporary contexts all over the world. Its ornamental uses in all types of contemporary architecture, for any social stratum, in any cultural setting or political sphere, are based on the continuing postmodern ideology where virtually ‘anything goes’. Apparently, there is no determined interrelation between architectural design, ornamental application, and a certain socio-cultural habitus. However, in the cultural territory of the Hispanic neo-baroque—in this article focused on Mexico City—the widespread urban presence of the balustrade reveals a specific construction of visual identity: a baroque ornament is reproduced as a standardized mass product (in different materials, ranging from plaster to Styrofoam) in late 20th and early 21st century buildings making an aesthetic impact on the image of the city. Thus it reveals two opposite and related principles of the (neo)baroque (i.e. encompassing the baroque and neo-baroque): the seriality of an ornament and the polycentrism in urban contexts.2 Within the visual and structural context of the Mexican megalopolis, where different types of buildings with changing heights, materials, and colors produce an image of chaotic urban heterogeneity, the balustrade claims visual attention. Its scenographic character even can be seen as a stabilizing element in a complex hyper-urban system. Yet, to experts in architectural aesthetics, its location on façades appears contradictory, because in many cases, 1 I would like to thank Carol H. Krinsky for her critical proof reading of this text. I also appreciated the constructive comments of Angela Ndalianis and Walter Moser. 2 See the first chapter of Angela Ndalianis. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2005).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_015

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

231

the b­ alustrade increases the banal character of the architectural collages that configure the image of the Mexican mega-city. This aesthetics of extreme heterogeneity determines new modes of city culture, beyond the old European standards that we know from baroque Rome or classical Paris. In those traditional examples, the balustrade still fits the original architectural style system. By contrast, the neo-baroque balustrade in Mexico City and other Latin American cities is an isolated decorative element. It competes with the ‘visual pollution’ of billboards, cables, graffiti, and other self-referential elements in the fragmented cityscape. A complex interpretation of this ornamental element within the neo-­ baroque physiognomy of the mega-city includes inquiries about its cultural, social, and political codifications as well as its uses, effects, and basic principles. We grasp the (neo)baroque character of this small element in the mega-city in relation to general social processes with specific production of forms. This is not limited to the field of fine arts, but includes the abundant and complex aesthetics of urban everyday life. The uses and metamorphosis of a baroque ornament in contemporary urban cultures—not only in Latin America—display how cultural and historical transfers work. The balustrade indeed is a baroque world formula, which emerges under different and contradictory circumstances. In the specific Mexican cultural and historical context, the balustrade serves as a fetish of pre-modern, neo-monarchic, neo-Catholic, and pre-revolutionary nostalgia. Thus, it can be regarded as a neo-colonial pattern. One basic definition of the (neo)baroque decorative element consists in its histrionic effects and efficiency. It is made primarily for admiration, and only secondarily for functional or structural reasons. Architects and builder-owners who attach neo-baroque balustrades to building façades may not be aware of the whole symbolic surplus. They see mainly the economic advantages which representative ornaments guarantee for selling houses and apartments. But indeed they are the contemporary baroque stage designers in the permanent social play which city life offers (Echeverría). They recycle3 the cultural detritus of the past, which becomes constitutive for contemporary culture, determined by (neo)baroque phenomena and principles. As a side effect, the balustrade also serves as a compensatory tool for the damage done by one-dimensional modern architecture to the mega-city. In order to demonstrate these hypotheses about the neo-baroque balustrade, we may first review some characteristic examples, and be aware how this 3 “Recycling” will be understood in the sense of the cybernetic theory of Vilem Flusser, explained at the end of this article.

232

Krieger

contemporary ‘fake’ reproduction of a historical form determines the existing, almost surrealistic collage of Mexico City. We take this mega-city as a paradigm for the neo-baroque city of the early 21st century.

Appearance and Contexts

Selected examples of the balustrades’ urban presence reveals the complex and contradictory uses of this ornamental element. In contemporary housing, the balustrade is often attached to the sober façades of middle-class single-family houses. In this example (Figure 10.1), the visual presentation of brick, plaster, paint and other material on the façades seems to have been insufficient for the self-representation of the owner, who applied a balustrade in order to upgrade the iconographic potential and social pretension of his home. In upper-class residential areas, especially in gated communities with neo-historical building designs, we also find the balustrade as a cultural and visual standard.4 Some balustrades are also located on the top and façades of apartment houses (Figure 10.2). The selected case is an autonomous penthouse on a latemodern high-rise building in a middle-class area of Mexico City. Its balustrade

Figure 10.1

Middle-class single-family house, Mexico City, 2010 photograph: ana garduño

4 For security reasons, it is almost impossible to take photographs inside the upper class gated communities, so there is no visual proof of this phenomenon in this article.

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

233

Figure 10.2  Apartment house with penthouse, Mexico City, 2009 photograph: wolfgang stähler

marks the limit of the balcony in front of the glass cube. The modern architectural formula is ironically thwarted by the nostalgic decorative element. This characteristic combination of late modern and neo-baroque design gestures in an elevated and privileged urban position—the penthouse as a little castle in the air—lets us deduce the aesthetic education of the architect, the symbolic pretensions of the owner, and about the cultural condition of a contemporary city in which these post-modern collages are displayed. The balustrade is a  cultural and psychological counterpart to the iron bars that protect the owner from intrusion by the neighbors in the curtain-walled office building at the left side. Two serial patterns, one in historical plaster design, and the other in functional ironwork, protect the inhabitants of the penthouse—from falling down and perhaps from robbery. While the cultural value incorporated in the balustrade is directed along the façade to the urban public, the lateral protective grid visually prepares viewers for the modular glass and aluminum façade. In a wider sense, this detail displays values of the neo-baroque megalopolis. There, technical installations for crime protection and surveillance are often covered by false historical design, creating attractive spectacles for a ­consumer society. Less socially encoded is the application of balustrades to balconies of apartment houses, especially those constructed in the 1980s, when postmodern

234

Krieger

­architectural ideology flourished and affected the aesthetics of real estate products (figure 10.3). This example makes obvious the modular principle of an established design tool. Industrial perfection determines the nostalgic product, calculated by the builder/owner as a considerable gain in value. A sequence of

Figure 10.3  Apartment house, Mexico City, 2010 photograph: ana garduño

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

235

balustrades all the way up the façades apparently softens the functionalist vertical mass that accommodates the inhabitants in box-like apartments. In some respects, this modular aesthetic reinterprets baroque principles of repetition and standardization. Those are indeed baroque characteristics, but they are hardly present in research on baroque architecture, which normally focuses on individual spectacular forms. The omnipresence of the neo-baroque style even reaches housing for the poor, in the present case, the slum belts of Mexico City (figure  10.4). Those owners of self-built houses who manage to accumulate more money than they need for daily expenses, invest in ornamental embellishment. They apply standardized balustrades that can be bought in huge construction material stores. Following pre-modern architectural rules, all the decorative effort is directed only to the façade, while the side walls remain rough, unplastered and unpainted, revealing the simple, and often badly built construction of concrete and brick. A slum building can also show other neo-baroque ornamental devices, such as the oculus, the baroque ornamented oval or round window frame. The consequent stylistic combination in slum architecture underlines the

Figure 10.4  Self-built house in the slum belt of Mexico City, 2004 photograph: peter krieger

236

Krieger

c­ ollective ­aesthetic and psychological importance of neo-baroque decoration. (figure  10.5) The oculus appears in upper-class mansions of the first half of the twentieth century, where this decoration forms part of the Spanish neo-­ colonial design concept, but it also appears in slum constructions of the last three decades. We find, then, a cultural persistence of these motives in housing in Mexico City. Other building types such as shops or entertainment centers also take advantage of the symbolical value of the neo-baroque balustrade (figure 10.6). A franchised mini supermarket, for instance, receives more public attention when its building is highlighted with an ornament that competes successfully with the visual chaos of cables, traffic signs, advertisements, and banal architecture (figure 10.7). A banquet and dance hall built in the austere architectural design of the 1960s, was converted into an urban eye-catcher by an applied balustrade. That signals a baroque culture of fiesta to be celebrated in this otherwise insignificant building. The balustrade corresponds to wedding or birthday cakes that have ornaments infused with artificial color and other chemical substances. These examples illustrate the unlimited and continuing uses of a baroque ornament in the Mexican architecture of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Beyond the specific ideological tendencies of postmodern architecture,

Figure 10.5  Self-built house in the slum belt of Mexico City, 2009 photograph: wolfgang stähler.

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

237

Figure 10.6  Mini supermarket building in Mexico City, 2010 photograph: ana garduño

Figure 10.7  Banquet- and dance-hall in Mexico City, 2010 photograph: ana garduño

­ eo-baroque balustrades enjoy great and permanent popularity in Mexico n City. These cultural long-term developments take place in a city that offers a chaotic stage setting for any spectacular and anarchic visual presentation. Balustrades even express vividly the metaphor of the city as a theater for public performances of social distinction.

238

Krieger

Codes and Transfers For a deeper understanding of this summary phenomenology and iconography of the neo-baroque balustrade in Mexico City, we may consider three modes of cultural transfer that determine architectural and ornamental fashions: first, the Spanish-colonial tradition, second the French-bourgeois orientation, and third, the US-American references, mainly represented by the architectural culture of Las Vegas. First: The classical and baroque balustrade was mainly configured in renaissance and baroque France, and then imported to colonial Mexico (Nueva España) from Spain in the late eighteenth century during the period when neoclassical architecture was fashionable. Other architectural and ornamental forms may better represent the impact of Spanish baroque culture in Latin America but the balustrade also symbolically embodies the colonial government and implicitly its related religion, Roman Catholicism. Therefore, it was an attractive design tool for all subsequent generations of the Mexican upper class, oriented towards Spanish colonial and Catholic values. Second: Later, in the late nineteenth century when independence from Spain was already established, the neo-baroque balustrade changed its ideological references. Although still an ornamental form only used by rich house owners, the balustrade now reflected bourgeois aspirations determined by French, mainly Parisian culture (figure  10.8). Maximilian’s short monarchy (1864–67) and the decades of Porfirio Díaz’ dictatorship (1876–80, 1884–1911), Mexican elites oriented their architectural and interior design taste mainly towards Paris. In this second phase of cultural colonialism, adopted French cultural references replaced imposed Spanish ones. These references also had a strong social connotation, because French design culture, and thus the balustrade, represented a globalized economic and authoritarian political regime that ignored the dismal living conditions of the poor masses. That neglect provided a breeding ground for the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Even the dictator’s exile in Paris confirmed the French connotations of a decorative form. From the early 20th century on, elaborated techniques of mass ­production made the balustrade available for a wider range of clients. Nevertheless, this neobaroque design tool mainly represented neo-monarchic, p ­ re-revolutionary, and Catholic upper-class nostalgia. Consequently, with few exceptions, the postrevolutionary regime chose the Aztec past to provide political and symbolic identity. Neo-Aztec design fragments replaced the baroque balustrade and the oculus until the 1980s. At that point, the governing pri ­(Partido Revolucionario Institucional) opted for a more globalized economy and politics, and implicitly

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

Figure 10.8  Late 19th and late 20th balustrades of buildings in Mexico City, 2012 photograph: peter krieger

239

240

Krieger

welcomed a wide range of postmodern ­representation, including ­unlimited use of neo-baroque design tools. In 2000, when the p ­ ost-revolutionary regime was replaced by a president from the conservative party, the political iconography of Mexico revalued Spanish colonial and Catholic culture. Although not ­explicitly formulated as a new cultural policy, the reorientation to the colonial and Catholic past had its internal logic, because it followed the program and mental habitus of the governing conservative party. Now, all the bourgeois resistance against the secular postrevolutionary state, which preserved its visual symbolism in the neo-baroque living rooms and ornamented façades of the rich, became socially acceptable. Also in other spheres of cultural policies, for instance the thematic strategies of art exhibitions, the Spanish colonial heritage received major attention. However, any use of a codified ornamental form had to address the postmodern devaluation of all values. ‘Anything goes’, also in architecture and interior design. That relates to the third mode of cultural transfer, which determines the symbolic and cultural values of the balustrade in Mexico. Neobaroque decoration is no longer merely elitist and symbolically nostalgic. It can now be part of a popular playful cultural license. One can use all the stage props of urban history for any contemporary design product. This is a consequence of “Learning from Las Vegas” which means that the most recent neo-colonial reference of the neo-baroque façade is based on cultural transfer from the United States to Mexico (within an economic scheme of strong dependence). Fake and Fictions The Las Vegas hotel and casino architecture has always irradiated an iconic power, globally exported via commercial photographs and films. James Bond movies—particularly Diamonds are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971)—are available to at least one third of the world’s population, as well as Elvis Presley’s musicals, and also more recent comedies like The Hangover (Todd Philips, 2009) and Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) and their sequels have distributed the image of Las Vegas to the global public. There, historically referential but newly invented designs including ornamental neo-baroque façade details, determine aesthetic mass education (figure 10.9). Also the many photographs of the balustrade-framed Bellagio and Venetian hotels in Las Vegas became decisive images for the transfer of neo-baroque fragments to other countries and cultures, such as Mexico. Because Las Vegas’s huge hotel complexes could not be easily reproduced in other cities—maybe only in the Asian gambling city of Macao, where many Las Vegas hotels have similar franchise buildings—it made sense to import only the striking details which would confer spectacular

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

241

Figure 10.9  Terrrace at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, 2011 photograph: peter krieger

effects on any banal building.5 Attached balustrades fulfill this function, and as we have seen from the overview in Mexico City, they fit almost every architectural typology. Postmodern cultural practices culturally rehabilitate this importation of spoils all over the world. However, in Latin American cultural settings, the balustrade reactivates neocolonial architectural and decorative codes. The sign of conquest may become a sign of subjugation; in Mexico this codification is similar to the Aztec ornamental stones that were integrated in the walls of the Spanish colonial palaces. In this sense, the neo-baroque balustrade in Mexico can be seen as part of an acculturation process, which fuses colonial and neocolonial symbolic power. Inserting neo-baroque design particles into contemporary architecture is mostly a phenomenon of the 1980s, when postmodern ideology culminated. 5 I have analized the cultural transfer from contemporary Las Vegas hotel and casino architecture to Mexico City in my forthcoming book Epidemias visuales: El Neobarroco de Las Vegas en la Ciudad de México. Visual Epidemics. Las Vegas Neo-Baroque in Mexico City., Mexico: Daniel Escotto editores, 2016.

242

Krieger

During the first decade of the present century, the design of apartment blocks has become more sober. Concomitantly, the supply of neo-baroque ornaments in the huge stores for construction materials has diminished. However, visual nostalgia for the fragments of a baroque past continues in all levels of society. Empirical observation in the heterogeneous city reveals that the continuing ornamental use of the balustrade is now a way for social climbers to distinguish themselves from the lower and lower middle classes. Even more striking, neo-baroque decoration maintains its presence in interiors, even those of modern and vanguard villas and apartment blocks. Here, the postmodern collage effect appears as an unquestioned cultural standard. The neo-baroque balustrade or neo-Louis xvi sofa in the bourgeois living room, as well as the neo-baroque oculus in the owner-built slum house, can be understood as the consequence of learning from Las Vegas’s artificial culture, where even the most extreme and absurd contrasts attract the public. Fragments from Las Vegas aesthetically educate the masses, as do tourist-aimed reproductions of Michelangelo’s David or of ancient Greek vases (Paul 317). Both modes of popular cultural consumption foster the revival of iconic architecture, with abundant formal quotations of historical decoration—for instance, of the balustrade. Without doubt, and in spite of all cultural marketing of decon or other sophisticated style tendencies, Las Vegas fake architecture is a central cultural paradigm of the late twentieth century. For critical art history, this is problematic.6 Indeed, fictional neo-conservative environments substitute for colonial history in contemporary Latin American societies. Erosion of historical knowledge, replaced by shiny imageries of a fictional past, composed by absurd collages of traditional design elements, the undisputed collective reception of Las Vegas culture displays anti-modern affects, and fosters mostly neo-baroque effects. This architectural ideology and cultural reality is based on Robert Venturi’s rehabilitation of the banal, US-American commercial vernacular in Las Vegas. Once launched as an ironic critique of orthodox modernism in the late 1960s, Venturi’s challenge to learn from Las Vegas has become the blueprint for the anarchic, and completely decontextualized uses of historical design formula, mainly from the built heritage of old Europe, including its colonies on the American continent. Venturi’s book Learning from Las Vegas, written with Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, and Yale architecture students of 1968, justified visual fakery as sufficient construction of history and memory. 6 See: Peter Krieger. “Decoración de la decadencia. La balaustrada neobarroca como síntoma crítico en la mega ciudad de México” (2010).

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

243

Seen as means of visual communication, and not following the orthodox modern rule of honest,7 transparent and functional construction, the essence of architecture switched “from substance to sign”8 (Rem Koolhaas). Postmodern architectural and urban fake collage design, with baroque quotations and other references, generates its own logic, with “complexity and contradiction” (Venturi 1978)—as we have seen in the neo-baroque cases in Mexico City. Every iconographic detail, such as the balustrade, has a significant function, and feeds popular cultural consciousness. As predicted by Venturi, the unlimited use of historical forms exports Las Vegas to any urban place in the world, creating alternative spatial identities, and simulating cultural roots. Venturi himself had cynically stated that the botched-up vividness is more interesting than boring uniformity of architecture (24), but he surely did not ever imagine a Mexican slum construction (figure 10.10) with a balustrade next to a large modernist window, on a colored façade, covered with vegetation. This irrational logic of the façade is a decorative system independent from the Las Vegas hotels, but remotely inspired by them. Even the slum-dweller is able to ascribe to himself the glamour framed by a balustrade. So neo-baroque kitsch even converts the most problematic and depressing parts of the megalopolis—the slum belt—into a spectacle, which allows an emotional connection of the inhabitant to the cultural roots of a fictional past.

Physiognomy and Theming

One of the main neo-baroque design devices, from which the free application of the neo-baroque balustrade emerges, is the so-called architectural theming, experienced and perfected by US-architect Jon Jerde in many entertainment and shopping centers of Las Vegas and elsewhere. Visual fragments of the past combined with functional constructions and installations generate fictional, virtual orientation in sprawling suburban agglomerations all over the United States and in many other countries. A systematic use of cinematographic stereotypes, translated into physical architectural forms and spatial 7 See: Heinrich Klotz (ed.). Vision der Moderne. Das Prinzip Konstruktion. (catalogue Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt/Main), 9–26, especially p. 19. 8 For Robert Venturi, “the essential architectural element is iconography”. See “Relearning from Las Vegas (an interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas)”, in: Judy Chuihua Chung/Jeffery Inaba/Rem Koolhaas/Sze Tsung Leong (eds.) Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Project on the City 2) Köln: Taschen 2001, pp. 590–617.

244

Krieger

Figure 10.10  Self-built house in the slum belt of Mexico City, 2012 photograph: peter krieger

configurations, guarantees high rates of (economic) success in the themed entertainment buildings.9 It is place-making by semantically reprogramming places without qualities, in the sprawling outskirts of Las Vegas as well as in the endless agglomeration of the Mexican capital. While Las Vegas’s projects are outstanding for their perfection of theming, the application of balustrades by chance in the Mexican cityscape seems to be only a poor replica. However, both modes are based on the inflationary use of an architectural pattern with free-floating historical references (Beeck 12–15). And both construct the scenographic cliché as a reality, where history and tradition can be apparently verified. Once again, the Las Vegas scenery, which has shifted from ‘decorated shed’ to sculptural architecture, the overwhelming ‘duck’—reproductions of Egyptian pyramid, Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the Roman forum, Venetian palazzi, etc.—is an outstanding expression with highlevel investment, not comparable to architecture for everyday uses in Mexico 9 See: Daniel Herman. “Jerde Transfer”, and “Separated at Birth” in: Judy Chuihua Chung/ Jeffery Inaba/Rem Koolhaas/Sze Tsung Leong (eds.) Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Project on the City 2) Köln: Taschen 2001, pp. 403–407, and 709–719.

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

245

City. But both are characterized by the cult of the false relics of the past that appear ad libitum in any architectural and urban context. In some respects, the high-level aesthetic (and economic) investment in Las Vegas is producing a cultural pattern that can be traced to the construction markets of Mexico City, which offer a selection of neo-baroque decorative elements for decontextualized uses. The neo-baroque physiognomy of Mexico City—a showcase of the Latin American megalopolis—radiates an enigmatic iconic power with autonomous references beyond old European configurations. Yet, the physiognomic reading of the expressive ornamental detail may be based on European interpretive models of the 1920s. One, by the conservative critic and ideologist Oswald Spengler, stated that seemingly unimportant details of ornament and construction reveal information about the political, economic, even religious character of given cultural settings (163). Physiognomic reading also includes cultural criticism beyond negative typologies developed by racist criminological research of the late 18th and 19th centuries.10 Critic Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, claimed in his short newspaper texts on Berlin of the 1920s that ornamental detail would allow deductions about the whole cultural setting of a city.11 Even residual spaces, absurd details, and trash—neglected in most art historical interpretations—generate significant palimpsests of meaning. In our case, the neo-baroque balustrade is an essential tool for the capitalist spectacle of the real estate market, where the dis- and re-orientation of the consumer-citizen in a hyperurban context “without qualities” has to be disguised by striking visual clichés which stimulate mental escapes from the brutal and omnipresent image of decay. What’s more, the neobaroque detail contributes essentially to the construction of a new cultural memory in the megalopolis, where a normative, globalized, and neo-colonial12 visual identity is inserted—an erosion of structural identity compensated by the effective implementation of ornaments. A parenthetical aspect of media history: The revival of the physiognomic reading of the city in the 1920s coincides with a boom in photography, which questioned the written, literary and philosophical registers. We witness now a 10 11

12

For examples of a racist physiognomic reading, see the writings of Johann Kaspar Lavater and Cesare Lombroso. Siegfried Kracauer, Strassen in Berlin und anderswo (1987). See also Heiko Christians. “Gesicht, Gestalt, Ornament. Überlegungen zum epistemologischen Ort der Physiognomik zwischen Hermeneutik und Mediengeschichte” (2000). My proposal to coin these phenomena “neo-colonial” is based on Jürgen Habermas criticism of the “colonization of the human environments”, and it is stated against the thesis of the so-called “post-colonial studies” (Homi Bhaba et al.).

246

Krieger

similar tendency: a flood of digital images which capture the spirit of the megalopolises and overshadows the usual text-oriented interpretation. Perhaps that is why a neo-physiognomic reading of the cities attracts a wide public.13

Complexity and Entropy

Within the conceptual frame of a research project on the Hispanic baroque and its long-term efficiency, we may consider that this neo-physiognomic reading operates with ideas of complexity theory, although aesthetic, historical, and cultural psychological interpretation of visual phenomena should not be reduced to this method of seeing things. But we can note some of the crucial paradigms of complexity theory in the interpretation of the neo-baroque balustrade. One is the emergence of form, almost self-referential and iterated. Distributed by chance, the balustrade is almost an autopoietic visual event integrated in the entropic aesthetics of the megalopolitan mass of constructions. Beyond rational and linear parameters of development, which do exist in contemporary Mexico City but have a limited effect, complex urban structures emerge, where any element (with its own prehistory and codification) interacts, generating unexpected levels of visual chaos. Traditional production of well-defined design patterns, such as a baroque balustrade in the decorative system of palaces in the historical center of Mexico City, is dissolved into discontinuous and decomposed meaning (Luhmann 1140). Thus, the irregular presence of the neo-baroque façades feeds back the self-generated, chaotic image of the mega city, where a new, independent aesthetics emerges, a possible neo-baroque aesthetics. This evolutionary character is a basic feature of complexity. However, we must take into consideration that complexity is not primarily a characteristic of the described object—the balustrade in the city—but of the description itself (Richter and Ross 112). Once we become aware of that epistemological problem, it makes sense to include other ways of interpretation, and not focus only on complexity theory when we want to understand the functions and symbolic surplus value of a neo-baroque ornament in the megacity. A possible reading of the neo-baroque balustrade in the mega city is inspired by the theorist of the situationist movement, Guy Debord, who criticized the so called society of spectacles. Related to our case study, the spatial distribution of the fake balustrade in the megalopolis generates a semantic entropy, 13

The most representative example of these tendencies are the publications of Rem Kollhaas of the 1990s, designed by Bruce Mau.

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

247

a playful and “spectacular” mode of cultural self-destruction. The neo-baroque particles dissolve the established patterns of architectural and urban identification. Their outstanding presence overshadows the ongoing spatial and social decompositions of historical coherences in urban spaces, thus reviving the baroque topic of dissimulatio of decay (Rodríguez). While traditional landmarks in Mexico City—including colonial baroque churches and palaces—have lost collective mental importance,14 standardized fake products like the balustrade spread and determine new parameters of normative identity. This decomposition of traditional coherences liberates new configurations beyond the established references—an unexpected visual offer to the inhabitants of a hyperurban agglomeration in accelerated mutation. The empty decorative cliché becomes an essential element of visual identity construction. This entropic process even increases because powerful real estate interests destroy historical buildings (some of them with authentic eighteenth-century balustrades). We find a similar cultural mechanism in the industrialized chemical production of food: chemical compounds generate the intense taste of a strawberry; as an extreme consequence, some consumers prefer the artificial product. As a result, fake takes command, and this can be seen as a critical phenomenon in the contemporary Mexican mega-city, where the knowledge and physical presence of colonial history are gradually replaced by the construction of neo-baroque artificial elements. However, for many inhabitants, this visual and mental reduction of historical consciousness and cultural identity to a neo-baroque cliché is an understandable option for symbolical encoding of urban spaces. It is a spectacular mode of erosion diagnosed by Debord’s statement (Number 158) that the spectacle paralyzes history and memory, and predicted by philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach in the nineteenth century, that the image replaces the object, the copy overshadows the original, and the performance substitutes for reality (242). What remains in the collective consciousness is the indifferent pleasure— almost in the Kantian sense of interesseloses Wohlgefallen—of the balustrade as an element of visual wellness, which allows for an uncritical reanimation of history. It is thus not a transhistorical element but an ahistorical one. This condition of the neo-baroque balustrade refers also to the social and economic context of the industrial and high technological societies. The iconic energy of the fake balustrade creates a semantic alternative to the rationalized and standardized configuration of the modern and contemporary cities. Although this decorative element is a standardized industrial product as well, 14

Based on personal observation. Within the limits of an article it is not possible to prove this hypothesis; it would require a larger research and explanation.

248

Krieger

its ­neo-baroque design simulates authentic, traditional craft skills. This highly effective antimodern oxymoron generates a sense of cultural security in an alienated and globalized hyperurban world. Even in the slums of Mexico City, the balustrade fulfills this important compensatory function because it at least promises—not fulfills—humanization of an ugly and hostile built environment. And despite sophisticated cultural criticism of ornamental fake products, cityscapes would be poorer and less attractive without kitsch architecture and false ornaments (Paul 317–319). These escapes from cold modernist and rational urban design ambients continue behind the façades of many buildings in Mexico City. While the design and construction of many department blocks and houses eradicated craftmens’ skills, neo-historical elements of interior design spread in living rooms. ‘Anything goes’ in the emotional composition at home: modernist room-height windows are covered with neo-baroque curtains, and huge sofas with scrolled legs dominate the generous spaces of living rooms where many architects would imagine austere Bauhaus furniture (Warnke 673–687). This cultural schema of many living rooms can be traced in Mexico City but not yet photographically documented15 and published; the interpretation is based on empirical data collected during the last decade. Neo-baroque living room scenographies as well as the covering of modernist façades with balustrades indicate a cultural psychological principle that some authors, including philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, have described with the Latin term horror vacui, fear of the void. It is seen as explaining the longterm efficiency of baroque forms in Latin American, especially Mexican cultures. Like the flat and sober façades of Spanish baroque churches covered by dense plateresque and churriguresque ornament, nearly all public and private spaces, in the city16—and the living rooms—contain decorative objects. Micro and macro levels coincide. Yet the sheer quantity of ornament covering the potentially fearful emptiness indicates a semantic crisis: the inflation and entropy of meaning. All possible codifications—monarchic, Catholic, and bourgeois—of neo-baroque ornament, end in a semantic nirvana, where perhaps only the vague postmodern allusion to Las Vegas’ fake culture persists.

15

16

A striking case that I was not allowed to photograph was the ground floor entrance to the mentioned appartment building with the balustrade-decorated penthouse [fig. 10.2], where the doorman resides in between a set of neo-baroque chairs painted in silver. With the only exceptions of the urban highways and the empty central square Zócalo.

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas



249

Seriality and Kitsch

As we have seen, the neo-baroque balustrade fulfills a compensatory function in a rational, standardized, modern technological society. But this ornament itself is a serial industrial product. Following Angela Ndaliani’s definition of (neo)baroque by seriality, which generates an symptomatic “aesthetic of repetition”, both the historical and contemporary balustrade are playful allusions to and reproductions of a presumed original which does not exist. In the baroque era, this serial production was related to the first capitalist and colonial boom period, when European models were exported. Today, the uses of the balustrade as an element of decoration and representation include this colonial dimension. They reflect the systematic efforts of the colonizing countries— in baroque times, mainly Spain—to standardize any political, economic, and cultural expression in the new territories of Ibero-America. Although the serial reproduction of cultural patterns may be understood as a process of aesthetic democratization (Ndalianis 46) that questions the monolithic expression of classical cultural systems,17 the (neo)colonial impact persists. Indeed, in contemporary Mexico, no balustrades include pre-hispanic designs (not just because there were none in Aztec architecture); people still use the same baroque model, with only very slight variations. This negation of specific ornamental expression, emptied of historic codification, and located in a cityscape without qualities fosters the “ontological instability” (Moser) of all signs and references, of images and meaning in the neo-baroque cultural setting. The combination of characteristics that defines the neo-baroque balustrade is more than a mere symptom of postmodern culture.18 It is an important signature and a critical phenomenon of the early twenty-first century and not only in Latin America. As a trans-geographical form, the neo-baroque balustrade has spread to other parts of the world, especially Asian boom countries, where real estate developers and kitsch architects produce balustrade-framed settings for the new rich. In world mega-cities 17 18

See: Omar Calabrese. Neo-Baroque. Sign of the Times (1992) 68, and Ndalianis (footnote 1), 60–61. I refer to Monika Kaup’s distinction between ‘postmodern’ and ‘neobaroque’: The neobaroque is not primarliy opposed to modernism, but transforms alternative forms of the 17th century baroque cultures into transhistorical visual patterns and principles; i.e. for Latin America, the neobaroque is an important corrective to the limited debates on modern/postmodern cultures. See: Monika Kaup. Neobaroque in the Americas. Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (2012), pp. 10 and 12.

250

Krieger

such as Beijing we find similar tendencies and conditions, for instance in the ­recently-built luxury housing quarter “Regal Court”, where a neo-baroque ensemble of golden painted sculptures displayed an ancient Roman horse-­ carriage driver above a fountain, framed by a wide balustrade and other baroque decoration. Shan Xiu-xian, a landscape architect from Hong Kong who elaborated this design, responded to an increasing demand in the high-priced real estate market for something to replace Chinese dragon decoration.19 He used an established formula of old European fake culture, because neobaroque turns out to be the most effective tool of social distinction for the emerging upper classes in the booming Chinese mega cities. This illustrates an important global cultural paradigm: neo-baroque ornament, an arbitrary pastiche in the heterogeneous architectural and hyper urban contexts, constitutes a virtual reality, one in which the difference dissolves between perception and imagination. And this is precisely one definition of kitsch (as we see for example in the global transfer of architectural motifs from Venice to Macao, where hotel marketing promises “the beauty of baroque ­Venice” (Soler 134)20). Neo-baroque kitsch is a mass medium for the control of consumers’ aesthetic responses by means of staged environments. One detail (Pross 27), the neo-baroque balustrade is one means to bring about virtual harmonization of heterogeneous, contradictory elements (Pross 27–28). Its global impact can even be grasped as an “artistic aspect of totalitarianism without violence” (Moles 37), or it can be “decorazione assoluta”, emancipated from theater, and equipped with autonomous aesthetic rules, where plaster is the presumed material for absolute decoration which ends in a self-destructive cultural process (Adorno 437). Such negative dialectics of the neo-baroque balustrade even inform the interpretation of baroque by the Spanish conservative author José Antonio Maravall, who saw the “efficient action” of baroque visual culture in the authoritarian monarchic and ecclesiastical manipulation of the masses.21 Based on Debord’s manifesto on the spectacle, Maravall’s successor in the realm of Spanish baroque interpretation, Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor, brought it to an extreme; he defined any (neo)baroque artistic, architectural 19 20

21

See: Mark Siemons. “Leben im Goldrahmen” (2006). See also p. 132 with a short history of Venice fake reproductions in Viena 1895, Buffalo ny 1901, Los Angeles 1905, Barcelona 1929, Las Vegas’ Ventian Hotel 1999 Tokyo’s Disney Sea 2001, and Macao’s Venetian Macao 2007. See: José Antonio Maravall. La cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica. Barcelona: Ariel 2002 (novena ed.; primera ed. 1975), p. 512, and p. 502, about the emblematic importance of ephemeral architectural decorations.

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

251

or ornamental element as an expression of melancholy—a psychic reaction confronting decay.22 Beyond these and other definitions of neo-baroque kitsch as a basic cultural system of the globalized consumer society, where transnational collective identity is determined by banality, which can cause melancholy in the eye of the philosopher, information theory reveals other insights with a similar result. Theorist Vilém Flusser has analyzed the phenomenon of kitsch as part of a comprehensive entropic process, which includes the city, civilization, and culture. In his systemic view, human beings try to resist the dissolution of (cultural) values by building cultural storage houses, in which decontextualized objects are preserved but semantically emptied. Their loss of information converts them to trash. This accumulated cultural trash can be recycled as kitsch, and thus reintegrated into a culture of masses. This upgraded trash often appears with the prefix “neo”, which indeed reverses the cycle of cultural consumption. As a result, the recycled cultural garbage contains information that is useless, but also an attractive tool for collective mental dispersion. Kitsch, for Flusser, “is a cozy method to feel at home in the garbage”, or even a “method of pleasantly dying, facing the absurd condition of mankind” (Flusser 60–61, 53–55). This abstract scheme of interpretation describes the evolution from the baroque to the neo-baroque balustrade. Its efficiency consists in the function to elevate trash into cultural fiction23 with guaranteed social effects beyond any strict codes. Works Cited Obrist, Hans Ulrich and Rem Koolhaas. “Relearning from Las Vegas (an interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi)”. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Project on the City 2). Judy Chuihua Chung, Jeffery Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong (eds.). Köln: Taschen 2001. 590–617. Adorno, Theodor W. Ästhetische Theorie. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (eds.). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. Beeck, Sonja. “Gutes und schlechtes Theming?” Bauwelt. 16–17 (2005): 12–15 Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque. Sign of the Times. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Christians, Heiko. “Gesicht, Gestalt, Ornament. Überlegungen zum epistemologischen Ort der Physiognomik zwischen Hermeneutik und Mediengeschichte”. Deutsche 22 23

See: Rodríguez de la Flor (Footnote 23). Following an idea of Wilhelm Hausenstein in Vom Geist des Barock (1924).

252

Krieger

Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. Heft 1, Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler 2000. Debord, Guy [Ernest]. Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Bittermann/ Edition Tiamat, 1996. (First ed. La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Éditions Buchet ­Chastel 1967), p.242 (“Kommentare zur Gesellschaft des Spektakels”, published in 1988). Echeverría, Bolívar. “Zum Barock-Ansatz in Mexiko”, n.d. www.bolivare.unam.mx. Flusser, Vilém.Kitsch. Soziale und politische Aspekte einer Geschmacksfrage. Pross, ­Harry (ed.). München: List Verlag, 1985. Hausenstein, Wilhelm. Vom Geist des Barock. München: Piper, 1924. Herman, Daniel. “Jerde Transfer”, and “Separated at Birth”. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Project on the City 2). Judy Chuihua Chung, Jeffery Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong (eds.) Köln: Taschen 2001. Kaup, Monika. Neobaroque in the Americas. Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film. Charlottesville, London: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Klotz, Heinrich (ed.). Vision der Moderne. Das Prinzip Konstruktion. (catalogue Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt/M.). Munich: Prestel 1986. Kracauer, Siegfried. Strassen in Berlin und anderswo. Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1987. Krieger, Peter. “Decoración de la decadencia. La balaustrada neobarroca como síntoma crítico en la mega ciudad de México”. in Intervención. Revista Internacional de ­Conservación, Restauración y Museología. 2 (Julio-Diciembre 2010), México: Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía. INAH, 16–23. Luhmann, Niklas. Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1997. Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica. ­Barcelona: Ariel, 2002 (novena ed.; primera ed. 1975). Moles, Abraham. “Kitsch als ästhetisches Schicksal der Konsumgesellschaft”. Kitsch. Soziale und politische Aspekte einer Geschmacksfrage. Harry Pross (ed.). München: List Verlag, 1985. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Paul, Jürgen. “Nachtgedanken zur Architektur, heute”. Dauer und Wechsel. Festschrift für Harold Hammer-Schenk zum 60. Geburtstag. Xenia Riemann, Christiane Salge, Frank Schmitz, Christian Welzbacher (eds.) Berlin: Lukas, 2004. Pross, Harry (ed.) Kitsch. Soziale und politische Aspekte einer Geschmacksfrage. München: List Verlag, 1985. Richter, Klaus and Jan-Michael Rost. Komplexe Systeme. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2002. Rodríguez de la Flor, Fernando. Barroco. Representatción e ideología en el mundo hispánico. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. Siemons, Mark. “Leben im Goldrahmen”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2 August 2006.

An Alternative Learning from Las Vegas

253

Soler, Anna Viader. “Venedig—Las Vegas”. Wiederkehr der Landschaft/Return of Landscape. Donata Valentien (ed.). Berlin: Akademie der Künste/Jovis Verlag 2010. Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Erster Band: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit, Munich 1922. Venturi, Robert. Komplexität und Widerspruch in der Architektur. Braunschweig: Vieweg 1978 (First ed. New York 1966, Complexity and Contradistion in Architecture). Warnke, Martin. “Zur Situation der Couchecke”. Stichworte zur geistigen Situation der Zeit. Jürgen Habermas (Ed.). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1982.

chapter 11

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity and the Marketplace Baroque: Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana and Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana Monika Kaup* Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana (New Mexican Grandeur, 1946) was the winner of a Mexican government prize for the best book in 1946 celebrating the Mexican capital, Mexico City.1 A chronicle of the modernizing capital of Mexico at a turning-point in that nation’s post-revolutionary period, Nueva grandeza mexicana recuperates, and updates, a foundational text of the New World baroque, Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana (Mexican grandeur, 1604). Yet Nueva grandeza mexicana is anything but a nostalgic paean to the past: to the contrary, Novo’s urban chronicle is a eulogy to the new prosperity and political stability of the Mexican nation and its capital in the 1940s. This brings me to my central question: Why does Novo return to the colonial past, and to Balbuena’s 1604 portrait of the capital of colonial New Spain, to produce his chronicle of the modernizing capital of Mexico the mid-1940s— at a turning-point in Mexico’s post-revolutionary period? Both Balbuena’s and Novo’s works are paeans to the city; both are organized around—and offer an inventory of—the grandeurs, that is, the sights and spectacles of the Mexican capital. Yet, what exactly is ‘new’ about Mexico City’s grandeur according to Novo? What continuities does Novo construct between the colonial capital of New Spain and the 20th century Mexican capital, across a gulf of more than three centuries? Nueva grandeza mexicana is neo-baroque, which refers to the 20th and 21st century recuperation of the 17th century baroque. The afterlife of the baroque has made it a fascinating phenomenon: transhistorical, transcultural, and interartistic, the baroque has crossed multiple spatial and temporal borders. To

* All unacknowledged prose translations are mine As for the verse translations from Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana, some are adapted from Lafaye’s Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe and Reiss’ “American Baroque.Histories.”. 1 In the interest of saving space, all quotations from Nueva grandeza mexicana are from the English translation, New Mexican Grandeur. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_016

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

255

begin with, these include its European origins as the expression of Absolutism and the Counter-Reformation, its Atlantic crossings as the cultural instrument of Iberian colonialism, as well as the New World baroque—the rebellious adaptation of the European baroque at the hands of 17th and 18th century Latin American artists who appropriated the art of the colonizer and turn it into an expression of their own: in José Lezama Lima’s formulation, in the Americas, the baroque became the art of counterconquest (arte de contraconquista). Next, the neo-baroque constitutes a broad interartistic trend comprising certain kinds of modernist and postmodernist expression. But neo-baroque forms are extravagant and inordinate; furthermore, it adopts a relationship to the past that runs counter to the modern logic of rupture that subtends modernism and postmodernism: the neo-baroque embraces the idea of recycling (rather than breaking with) the past, as Omar Calabrese has pointed out: “‘neo’ might induce an idea of repetition, return, or recycling of a specific historical period, that described by the term ‘Baroque’” (15). Indeed, Mexican writer Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana constitutes a near-ideal type of the neo-baroque in this sense of reviving, recycling, and appropriating the historical baroque. As I have argued elsewhere, the reason for the remarkable contemporary popularity of the baroque—as evidenced by countless cycles of 20th and 21st century revivals—lies precisely in the fact that the baroque constitutes a successful blueprint for secondhand creation, for saying something new by remaking old forms. In all varieties of baroque, to create means to re-create: not to create from scratch, but to re-make by adapting, disfiguring, and re-signifying existing expression. In this sense, the New World baroque and neo-baroque continue the baroque’s transgressive origins in the anti-classical impulse to spill beyond set limits, to open enclosed forms, to make the familiar strange. The point has been made by both Latin American scholar such as Irlemar Chiampi and Bolívar Echeverría as well as European scholars such as Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Martin Jay that the baroque presents an alternative model of the modern that precedes and rivals the dominant modernity of Enlightenment rationalism. In contrast to the dominant modern, the baroque modern is hybrid and nonfuturist: instead of purifying, it seeks to hybridize; instead of dividing and rupturing, it seeks to connect. As is well known, Enlightenment rationalism and 18th century neoclassicism stigmatized the art of the preceding century under the pejorative label of “baroque,” meaning “bizarre.” But after two centuries in “purgatory,” when even major baroque artists had been struck off national canons, the baroque came back at the beginning of the 20th century; the 20th century crisis of Enlightenment modernity opens the way for the rediscovery of the alternative modernity of the baroque, which manifests itself in a series of neo-baroque compositions.

256

Kaup

Novo was a member of the Contemporáneos, one of Mexico’s two principal vanguardist groups of the 1920s and 30s, which also included Xavier Villaurrutia, Carlos Pellicer, Jaime Torres Bodet, José Gorostiza, and others. Emphatically cosmopolitan, the Contemporáneos paralleled the Spanish “Generation of 27” in sponsoring the recuperation of the baroque in Mexico.2 Like Federico García Lorca, Dámaso Alonso, and Gerardo Diego, the Mexican vanguardist poets turned to Góngora, Quevedo and other Hispanic Golden Age writers to justify their modern poetics of invention. Furthermore, unlike their peninsular counterparts, they also turned their attention to colonial Mexican baroque writers like Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora, thus beginning the recovery of what became known as the barroco de indias (Mariano Picón-Salas) or the New World baroque as an expression that was uniquely American (rather than imitative of Europe). Novo’s re-visioning of Balbuena in Nueva grandeza mexicana is part of this collective effort, although it is occurring later, in the late modernist period of the 40s rather than the 1920s and 30s. Yet, in the heady Mexican cultural climate of the 1920s, the Contemporáneos’ avantgarde prediliction for the 17th century baroque takes on additional, complex social meanings. Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists recovered pre-Columbian art and history; in the murals commissioned by Vasconcelos as Minister of Culture for the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Education; 1922–25) and the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School; 1922), which embody the official post-revolutionary Mexican master narrative of Mexican history, pre-Columbian history and rulers are exalted, whereas Spanish colonial rule and evangelization are reviled. The Contemporáneos’ revival of the baroque thus ran directly counter to the dominant anti-colonial Mexican state ideology of the 1920s. In short, the Contemporános’ efforts to “link up Mexican letters with the main currents of contemporary European and American art and literature” (Verani 124–125),3 constituted 2 For in-depth studies of the Contemporáneos, see Sheridan, Contemporáneos ayer and Oropesa, Contemporáneos. According to Oropesa, the “parallel in Mexico to the Generación de 1927 is the Contemporáneos group” (Oropesa, Contemporáneos 2). The journal Contemporáneos published a series of articles on baroque and New World baroque writers, especially Sor Juana, Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, reprinting excerpts from their works as well as printing reviews of recent scholarship, including from the u.s. The main editor and author of these scholarly contributions was Ermilo Abreu Gómez. Contemporáneos poet Xavier Villaurrutia wrote several neo-baroque poems and an important essay on Sor Juana (Novo, Contemporáneos 48–53); in a literary polemic with an established Mexican writer, Rubén M. Campos in 1929, Novo assumed the persona of Sor Juana penning her rebuttal of the Bishop of Puebla in a modern “Carta atenagórica” (Mahieux 159–161). 3 See also Oropesa, Contemporáneos, 11.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

257

a contentious position in the Mexico of the 1920s and 30s. The climate favored social commitment and nationalism, but unlike Mexican muralism, the novelists of the Mexican Revolution, and the other important vanguardist group, the Estridentistas, the Contemporáneos eschewed this rhetoric (Unruh 16). Novo, in particular, was fond neither of the Revolution nor of socialism (Oropesa, “Novo” 58). Children during the Revolution, the Contemporáneos were also the first Mexican artistic group too young to have been active militants. Nationalists of various persuasions in the 1920s and the 1930s polemicized against the Contemporáneos as “effeminate,” “reactionary,” and “decadent.” (Several, including Novo and Villaurrutia, were openly gay. Novo and the Contemporáneos, in turn, were not shy to trade insults.)4 For these reasons, Novo’s ­backward-looking projection, in his radiography of the modernizing Mexican metropolis at mid-20th century onto Balbuena’s portrait of the colonial capital at the opening of the 17th century baroque is all the more striking. Nueva grandeza mexicana takes stock of the Mexican capital at a critical juncture of Mexico’s modern history: the 1940s mark the beginning of Mexico’s Institutional Years (1940–68), which brought the end of military rule, and the beginning of political stability and economic growth after the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution that had erupted in 1910. Novo was a member of the government of Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–52), the first civilian president since the Revolution. Noting Novo’s closeness to political power, Carlos Monsivais calls Nueva grandeza mexicana an alemanista book (qtd. in Oropesa, Contemporáneos 18). Alemán promoted industrialization and capitalist development, opening Mexico to foreign (particularly U.S.) transnational corporations. He also developed tourism for foreign currency income, presiding over the beginnings of the so-called milagro mexicano, Mexico’s explosive urban and economic growth in the post-war period.5 Indeed, Alemán’s pro-capitalist administration pinpoints the contradictions of the rule of the one-party state—run by the Revolutionary Party (pri)—that emerged from the Mexican Revolution. pri presidents during the Institutional Period steered a “middle course of development between the free-market capitalism of the u.s.a. and the socialistic nationalism [that was] still enshrined in the official ideology of the party” (Williamson 401). Alemán’s administration also represents the diametrical ­opposite of the left-wing administration of Lázaro Cárdenas ­(1934–40),

4 See Oropesa, Contemporáneos 11. For further details on the polemics, see Sheridan, 126ff. and Mahieux. 5 See: Dávila, “Mexico City as Urban Palimpsest,” 107; Oropesa, “Salvador Novo” 57. For an outline of the history of the Mexican post-revolutionary state, see Williamson 378–409.

258

Kaup

who nationalized the oil industry, supported organized labour, and revived the agrarian reform that had impelled Mexico’s peasant revolution. Indeed, this larger political context is indispensable for understanding Novo’s classic. Nueva grandeza mexicana is a post-war text, celebrating Mexico’s transition to civilian rule and new capitalist prosperity after thirty years of political upheavals following the 1910 Revolution. Novo, who grew up middle-class and the son of a Spaniard in Mexico, frequently expressed his alienation from the nationalist, proletarian, and socialist rhetoric of the ­post-revolutionary years. In short, Novo turned out to be ideally suited to capture the spirit of these times. Fluent in English, familiar with u.s. literature and culture, and considered an “expert in all things foreign” (Mahieux 162), Novo became the ideal cultural intermediary for a Mexican administration newly interested in free-market capitalism and in opening Mexico to the world. Indeed, Novo became—according to Monsivaís—the predominant chronicler of Mexico’s Institutional Years (Monsivias “On the Chronicle in Mexico,” 30). Oropesa discusses Novo’s travels to the u.s. on behalf of the Alemanista administration and his role as a (selective) promoter, and gatekeeper, of North American cultural influences (“Novo” 60–64). Emblematic of Novo’s closeness to political power is the fact that the only English translation of La grandeza mexicana available (and quoted here) was printed by Petróleos Mexicanos and—­according to the title page—was “presented to the Hon. Delegates to the 7th World Petroleum Congress held in Mexico City” in 1967 (nmg n.p.). Named official Cronista de la Cuidad de México (Chronicler of the City of Mexico) in 1965 (Long 184), Salvador Novo is one of the foremost modern practitioners of the Latin American chronicle, a part-literary, part-documentary genre whose roots go back to the 16th century chronicles of conquest and colonization. For Novo, it was clearly the city—as the cradle of modern culture and civilization—that attracted him to the baroque and to Balbuena. The Revolution had been proletarian and rural, but since the 1920s Novo’s key interest had been in chronicling urban lifestyles. He was keenly interested in the changing urban lifestyles of the middle classes living in Mexico City, commenting on novelties in a “playful and provocative manner” in various small weeklies and magazines (Mahieux 171). To be sure, all these modern innovations—cinema, radio, telephone, personal hygiene, department stores like Sanborn’s, American cars in Mexico City called fordcitos (little Ford cars)—hinged on consumption, commodities and the expansion of capitalism in Mexico. Oropesa ­observes that Novo’s bourgeois upbringing and his admiration for the good things capitalism was bringing to the United States convinced him that the

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

259

a­ uthentic revolution was to be found in the expansion of the middle class; he was ready to be one of its voices in diverse media. The admiration was mutual. The new middle classes enjoyed reading Novo’s articles and diaries because its members felt he was one of them. Novo’s common sense, centrism, and humor, his ease of movement from popular to high culture, … and the straightforward quality of his writing made him obligatory ­reading for professionals, store owners, small business owners, and “decent” people in general (Oropesa, “Novo” 59). According to Mary Long, Novo significantly shaped the development of the Mexican urban chronicle, developing a “new collage-like style of flexible prose” and contributing “iconoclastic visions of social and national identities” (Long 184). Just as the “experience of Mexico City permeated his life, … the details and rhythms of city life shaped his writing” (Long 184).

Baroque Intertextuality and the Open Valve Connecting Balbuena and Novo

Having found an answer to our first question why Novo returns to the colonial past and Balbuena’s 1604 portrait of the grandeur of the capital of New Spain to chronicle urban life in the post-revolutionary Mexican capital in 1946, we are now ready to inquire further: how does Novo construct transhistorical continuities between the baroque and the neo-baroque city? What thematic and stylistic features connect Balbuena’s and Novo’s texts? What regime of meaning does the notion of Mexico City’s grandeur create? How does Novo update Balbuena’s concept? As we shall see, the intertextual umbilical cord that connects Novo’s neo-baroque re-creation to Balbuena’s work remains uncut, as it were, so that our analysis will need to switch back and forth between Grandeza mexicana and Nueva grandeza mexicana to appreciate the ­alternative ­originality—a secondary, hybrid originality—that results from Novo’s contemporary re-creation of Balbuena. Indeed, urbanism is at the heart of Balbuena’s baroque poem as much as it impels its neo-baroque revival by Novo. Nueva grandeza mexicana and Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana both eulogize the city; Novo’s enthusiastic praise of contemporary urban life matches that of his elective precursor. Clearly, it is Balbuena’s eloquent celebration of the Mexican capital that prompted Novo to frame his chronicle of Mexico City at mid-20th century as a gloss on Balbuena’s 1604 work. La grandeza mexicana is structured around the lines of an ­introductory poem in the form of an octava real, each of which become the

260

Kaup

title, and serve as the argumento, of La grandeza mexicana’s nine “chapters,” written in tercets. In this way, the prefatory poem functions as what O.F. Pardo calls a “textual cell” from which the body of the whole poem “expands and grows” (104). Balbuena’s poem reads: De la famosa México el asiento, origin y grandeza de edificios, caballos, calles, trato, cumplimiento, letras, virtudes, variedad de oficios, regalos, ocasiones de contento, primavera inmortal y sus indicios, gobierno ilustre, religión y Estado, todo en este discurso está cifrado (gm 59). La grandeza mexicana is organized into nine sections that Balbuena calls chapters (capitulos). Beginning with a panoramic overview of the site (asiento) of the Mexican capital (Chapter 1: “De la famosa México el asiento”), La grandeza mexicana moves on to an encyclopedic survey of important urban features: the city’s (pre-Columbian) origins and its history (Chapter 2: “Origin y grandeza de edificios”); urban transportation and infrastructure—horses and their splendidly adorned riders, precursors of the iconic charros, streets, customs, and commerce (Chapter 3: “Caballos, calles, trato, cumplimiento”); culture, the arts and crafts (Chapter 4: “Letras, virtudes, variedad de oficios”); leisure and recreational activities, including food (Chapter 5: “Regalos, ocasiones de contento”). As James Lafaye has noted, Balbuena’s poem reaches its pinnacle with a description of Mexico City’s pastoral beauty in spring in Chapter 6 (“Primavera inmortal y sus indicios”). Here Balbuena offers an utopian portrait of colonial Mexico City as a paradise on earth (“paraíso mexicano”; gm 94) (Lafaye 52). The following two chapters are devoted to government (Chapter 7: “Gobierno ilustre”) and religion and the state (Chapter 8: “Religión y Estado”), core elements of the official colonial city. In her recent extensive discussion of La grandeza mexicana, Stephanie Merrim calls attention to the preponderance of the institutional lettered city, which results from splitting line seven in half and having it generate two separate chapters (97). Balbuena closes with an epilogue announcing a retrospective summary (although in fact new topics are addressed as well) (Chapter 9: “Todo en este discurso está cifrado”). In Nueva grandeza mexicana, Novo borrows each of the lines of Balbuena’s poem (excepting the first) as the cue and title for a chapter of his modern ­urban chronicle, thereby providing a point-by-point update on Balbuena’s ­subjects.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

261

In this way, both La grandeza mexicana and Nueva grandeza mexicana are organized around the sights and the spectacle of the city. But instead of following the linear order of Balbuena’s lines, Novo changes the order and eliminates the introductory chapter on Mexico City’s asiento, thereby signaling his deformation of Balbuena’s 17th century original. Nevertheless, Nueva grandeza mexicana follows La grandeza mexicana in offering what Merrim identifies as an inventory of Mexico City’s urban attractions. Novo’s 1946 chronicle begins with a chapter on modern urban transportation and infrastructure, updating the reader on the urban conveyances that have replaced Balbuena’s horses—trolleys, buses, cars, even airplanes (Chapter 1: “Horses, Streets, Dealings, Complimenting”). Chapter 2 (“Gifts, Occasions for Contentment”) updates the reader on what new urban “occasions for contentment” have become available by 1946 by surveying Mexico City’s modern entertainment and leisure sector—restaurants, bars, cinema and theater. Chapter 3 (“Letters, Virtues, Many Professions”) moves on to high culture—discussing the growth of the national university (unam) since colonial times, bookstores, public libraries and the National library, museums, art galleries. Chapter 4 (“Origin and Grandeur of Buildings”) narrates a walking tour of Mexico City’s historic center and important public buildings, beginning in the Zócalo, and proceeding to the developments of middle-class subdivisions and suburbs where the modern Mexican capital has spilled beyond its colonial limits.6 Chapter 5 (“Illustrious Government, Religion, State”) continues the walking tour of the historic center, reviewing government ministries, the legislature, the Supreme Court, and the new Federal District (D.F.) founded in 1929. Chapter 6 (“Immortal Spring and Its Harbingers”) substantially shifts the emphasis away from Balbuena’s pastoral utopia. Although beginning with pastoral settings—descriptions of Alameda and Chapultepec Parks—the main subject is a “bird’s-eye visit” (nmg 106) to the thirteen municipalities of the Federal District from Chapultepec Park. In effect, Novo here supplies a contemporary analogue to the panoramic survey of the city’s expanse that Balbuena offers in his first chapter (on asiento). Chapter 7 (“Everything in this Discourse is Ciphered”) concludes the urban tour by pointing out the importance of class hierarchies and the difference class makes to lifestyles in the Mexican capital. This chapter also presents Novo’s advocacy of the modern city as a living, changing, impure, hybrid entity. 6 On Mexico City’s urban development, see Carol McMichael Reese. For a cultural account, see Monsivaís, “Enlightened Neighborhood.” For a more detailed account of Mexico City’s modernization depicted in Nueva grandeza mexicana, see Johns, The City of Mexico in the Age of Díaz and the relevant chapters in Kandell, La Capital.

262

Kaup

Novo concludes his narrative by offering a panoramic view of modern Mexico City as a historical palimpsest. A catalog of places and people from all social strata adds up to this sweeping vision of unceasing activity that, Novo proposes, constitutes the “Grandeur of Mexico,” which Balbuena was the first to celebrate and which still survives today: From Chapultepec Heights, the city seemed to float in a halo that threw the skyline into relief. It spilled over into the valley, stretched between the centuries, alive and eternal. Like a huge, jealous mother, it watched for its tired children to come home. Under its roofs, the cry of the newborn baby, in the young lover’s kiss, in the man’s dreams, in the mother’s womb, in the tradesman’s ambitions, the gratitude of the exile, in luxury and squalor, and the pretentiousness of the banker and the worker’s muscles, in the stones shaped by the Aztec and the churches built by the conquistadores, in the naïve palace built in the times of Díaz, in the schools, the hospital, the parks laid out by the Revolution, the Grandeur of Mexico now slept, drew into the future, stored up its strength—­ survived (nmg 131). By providing a new “gloss” on Balbuena’s octava real (Celorio 117), Novo invites a direct comparison and contrast between the 20th century urban scene and that of Balbuena’s colonial city of nearly 350 years past. In an essay discussing  the transhistorical intertextuality of the baroque and the neo-baroque, Roland Greene argues that the neo-baroque makes the “past become present in a critical, anti-antiquarian spirit” (152). It functions like an “open valve” linking past and present: “The open valve that connects the baroque and the neo-baroque allows us—encourages us—to enter a poem of the seventeenth century and step through into the other era” (Greene 155). By recycling Balbuena’s octava real and re-creating it as the textual cell of his neo-baroque urban chronicle, Novo has constructed a model incarnation of such a switchboard between the contemporary present and the early modern past. Novo’s neo-baroque gloss on Balbuena’s octava real has literally turned this poem into an open doorway that now connects two centuries, two portraits of the Mexican capital and two celebrations of its grandeur, as well as two texts, a colonial poem written in tercets, and a neo-baroque urban chronicle written in a hybrid modern part-journalistic, part-literary prose. Reminiscent of Borges’ conceit of a latter-day Quixote in “Menard,” Novo’s text is about what a writer following Balbuena would produce if he was composing in the mid-twentieth century. Notably, Novo copies only Balbuena’s introductory poem. To this he adds his new, ­up-to-date exposition on each of its lines except for the first,

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

263

taking stock of historical change and continuities since the publication of Balbuena’s original text.

Entering a Poem in the 17th Century: Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana . . .

La grandeza mexicana is an epideictic poem, specifically a panegyric. Bernardo de Balbuena (1562–1627), born in Spain but “spiritually a creole beyond the shadow of a doubt” (Lafaye 51), has long been viewed as one of the founding writers of the New World baroque. The principal statement of this claim was made by Pedro Henríquez Ureña in “The Baroque in America” (1940). Quoting Spanish critic Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856–1912), Henríquez Ureña calls Balbuena “‘the first truly American poet, the first in whom one notes the exuberant, unfettered, genial fecundity of America’s prodigious nature’” (Ureña 200). Availing himself of analogies between architectural grandeur and literature, Henríquez Ureña affirms that La grandeza mexicana “is the equivalent of the Sagrario Metropolitano” (201). The Sagrario is the parish church of the Cathedral of Mexico City, which is one of the prime instances of the Ultrabaroque in Mexico. In a distinct reasoning, Ángel Rama placed Balbuena’s long poem in the mannerist tradition, traced the birth of Latin American poetry from its mannerist style. According to Rama, the characteristics of mannerism—the work’s epigonic position in relation to the European literary canon, the preference for artifice and anti-realism rather than naturalism, and a transgressive formalism, such as the use of hyperbole and ingenious conceits—serve as tools for Balbuena to signpost his poem’s critical difference from European models. Paralleling Severo Sarduy’s definition of baroque style as anti-realism (“the apotheosis of artifice, the irony and mockery of nature”) (272), Rama argues that Balbuena harnesses the mannerist transgressive impulse to bend classical norms towards creating something new—thereby remaking canonical European forms: mannerist style in La grandeza mexicana effects “una distorsión que aplica el régimen de los núcleos proliferantes laterales. Estos subvierten la entera estructura del modelo, confunden sus proporciones, escamotean sus centros de significación, desuelven sus ritmos y jerarquías, permitiendo así la indirecta emergencia de una inconfesa obra original y la comunicación de un mensaje nuevo” (“a distortion that applies the regime of laterally proliferating nuclei. The latter subvert the entire structure of the model, mixing up its proportions, spiriting away it centers of signification, and dissolving its rhythms and hierarchies, thus permitting an undeclared ­original work indirectly to emerge and to communicate a new message”) (Rama 14).

264

Kaup

Although Rama was working out his ideas independently, the proximity to Sarduy’s conceptualization of baroque transgressive artificialization and ­de-centering in the foundational essay “The Baroque and the Neo baroque” is noteworthy. Indeed, Rama concludes by identifying Balbuena as the architect of the anti-colonial New World baroque, “quien funda lo que … el cubano José Lezama Lima definió como ‘el arte de contraconquista’” (“who founds what … the Cuban José Lezama Lima defines as ‘the art of counterconquest’”) (Rama 21). While Henríquez Ureña’s reference to the Churrigueresque ultrabaroque and Rama’s discussion of mannerism place La grandeza mexicana in different contexts historically, the differences between mannerism and the ­baroque fade in light of their convergence in parallel claims about the mongrel originality of Balbuena’s poem and its status as a founding text of the rebellious New World baroque in literature. La grandeza mexicana is framed as a letter addressed to Doña Isabel de ­Tobar y Guzmán, a friend from Jalisco, an epistolary response to her request for a ­detailed description of Mexico City.7 Novo, for his part, borrows Balbuena’s device of acting as a tour guide of the capital for a friend from the provinces. But in the place of Balbuena’s epistolary urban guidebook, Novo’s text has an existential dimension: Nueva grandeza mexicana is the memoir of a week-long tour of the capital, on foot and by bus, on which Novo takes his friend. Each chapter records the activities of one day. In contrast, Balbuena’s ­chapters ­unfold as successive parts of an encyclopedic inventory of the capital’s sights, institutions, professions, recreations, and riches. According to Merrim, Balbuena’s poem represents Mexico City as a cabinet of curiosities, a stockpile of ­exotic and precious objects collected for the education and entertainment of his n ­ oble addressees. Indeed, the catalog style in Balbuena is legendary; in nearly every chapter, the narrative lapses into a quantifying list of objects, urban sights, and activities. Merrim’s notion of La grandeza mexicana as a “collection poem” (Merrim 102), a textual museum of the city, captures important dimensions of Balbuena’s poem. A related trait—in analogy to cabinets of ­curiosity, museums of “everything” that were predecessors of the modern ­museum—is the universality of its inventory of urban life, a repository of works of art, culture, works of handicraft and technology, as well as natural wonders in the famous chapter on Mexico City’s Eternal Spring (“Primavera inmortal”).

7 Complicating the narrative situation further, Balbuena embedded the poem itself in a collection of texts that is prefaced by a dedication to the recently arrived Archbishop of Mexico. Don Fray García de Mendoza y Zúniga.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

265

Another aspect is Balbuena’s emphasis on wealth and luxury. Portions of the poem read like a textual version of a treasure chamber. In one frequently quoted passage from Chapter 3, Balbuena’s sketch of streets and customs slides into a celebration of commerce and the wealth it generates: Es la cuidad más rica y opulenta, de más concentración y más tesoro, que el norte enfría, ni que el sol calienta. La plata de Pirú, de Chile el oro viene a parar aquí y de Terrenate clavo fino y canela de Tidoro. De Cambray telas, de Quinsay rescate, de Sicilia coral, de Siria nardo, de Arabia encienso, y de Ormuz granate; […] de España lo mejor, de Filipinas la nata, de Macón lo más precioso, de ambas Javas riquezas peregrinas; (gm 77) (It is the richest and most opulent city with more trading and more treasures that the north chills or the sun warms anywhere. Silver from Peru, and from Chile gold comes to end up here, and from Terrenate fine cloves, and cinnamon from Tidore. From Cambray fabrics, ransom from Kinsai from Sicily corals, from Syria nard, from Arabia incense, and from Ormuz granate; […] from Spain the best, from the Philippines the cream, from Macon the most precious things, rare riches from both Javas.) These lines are loaded with meaning. As Timothy Reiss observes, “What is ­actually remarkable in this passage is that it contains hardly any indigenous elements” (404). The wealth of the colonial capital is generated entirely by

266

Kaup

­foreign commodities—silver from Peru, gold from Chile, coral from Sicily, fabrics from Cambrai, ivory from Goa, diamonds from India. These are, as Reiss aptly puts it, the products of a “global city,” whose lineaments “overlie” and obscure the “local geography” (405). Indeed, at the beginning of the seventeenth century Mexico City emerged as a trading center of the Spanish empire, “due, in great measure, to the nao de Filipinas, the Manila galleon, carrying to Mexico merchandise from the Far East, to be shipped to Europe by the fleet of Veracruz, which on its return voyage brought European products to the New World and the Orient” (González Echevarría 144). Balbuena revels in the cosmopolitan character of the colonial capital, comparing it to Venice (a parallel also resting on the fact of its being built on a lake) and boasting that it has surpassed Venice as a trading center (gm 64; 80; 122).8 Conversely, Balbuena deprives the countryside of its pastoral and ideal quality, conferring those same utopian qualities of the pastoral on the city—the countryside’s opposite: visitors of Mexico City need not leave the city to enjoy the natural delights of Mexico’s Eternal Spring (“Primavera inmortal”), which Balbuena details in Chapter 6: Aquí suena un faisán, allí enredado El ruiseñor en un copado aliso El aire deja en suavidad bañado (gm 95) (Here one hears a pheasant, there ensnared within the foliage of an alder tree a nightingale Bathes the air with his sweet song.) In the magnificent closing catalogue of this chapter, which lists the flora and fauna to be found in the city’s gardens, a striking trait is the “absence of native plants” (Reiss 405). … palmas, yedra, olmos, nogales, almendros, pinos, álamos, laureles (gm 99) (… palms, ivy, elms, walnuts almonds, pines, poplars, laurels) Like the foreign commodities arriving in Mexico City from around the world on Spain’s royal trade fleet, the natural products of this green city, where 8 See also Reiss 401–402; 404.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

267

springtime lasts forever (“Todo el año es aquí mayos y abriles” “Here it is April and May all year”) (gm 94), are mostly imports.9 James Lafaye reads Balbuena’s poem as the “most finished expression” of what he calls “the creole utopia of the Indian Spring” (54). According to Lafaye, La grandeza mexicana is the expression of a new utopia of a “luxury society” that replaces the militant aesceticism of sixteenth century New Spain. Lafaye traces this shift to the arrival of the first Jesuits in Mexico in 1572, who were more worldly than their predecessors, the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans. Balbuena’s pastoral in Chapter 6 of La grandeza mexicana “explicitly laid the foundations of a new Mexican utopia, called to replace the evangelical utopia of the Iglesia Indiana, which had collapsed. The Spanish friars of the preceding century had projected their eschatological hopes upon their Indian flock; the Mexican creoles would now exhume the Edenic myth in order to apply it to their American patria” (54). It is partly for this reason that “the Indian, the central figure in the writings of the first missionaries, is absent from the poem. In Mexico City, in 1602, the Indian was neither a warrior to be feared nor a soul to be saved; he was simply ignored” (Lafaye 54). The eponymous grandeur of Balbuena’s Mexico City, then, is this new luxury society that has arisen—as Balbuena’s argument goes—thanks to the new global commerce sponsored by Spanish colonialism. This is an important point, because the celebration of wealth as arising from capitalism and globalization is also key to Novo’s recovery of Balbuena. The Mexico City whose praises Balbuena sings is the colonial capital newly connected to places around the globe by Spain’s mercantilist trade. Its riches arise from trans-continental trade, not from indigenous or local roots. Here is also an explanation for La grandeza mexicana’s conspicuous presentism: Chapter 2 (“Origen y grandeza de edificios”) mentions Mexico City’s pre-Columbian history, only to quickly abandon the subject. Tenochtitlán and its urban life are seen as utterly unremarkable: “Esto es muy lejos, yo no basto a tanto” (“This is very remote, I don’t remember this far back”) (gm 69–70). Compared to the delight Balbuena takes in minutely detailing the riches of the viceregal capital, his silence here is ­poignant. And of course, in 1604, the conquest of Tenochtitlán in 1527 is barely a century past. Clearly, Balbuena’s urban guide book in verse “is a postconquest and postethnographic anatomy of a New World no longer considered to reverberate with hostile otherness” (Merrim 122).

9 It is true, however, that Balbuena also makes reference to the famous chinampas, the hanging gardens (“huertos pensiles”) of Xochimilco, which (though Balbuena neglects to mention this) are of pre-Columbian origin (gm 94).

268

Kaup

The notorious key word of Balbuena’s poem, as has long been pointed out, is interés (which Balbuena uses as a catchall term denoting profit, interest or self-interest, but also materialism and commerce more generally). The introductory Chapter 1 culminates in a glorification of interest as the sun that gives life to the world: Por todas partes la cudicia a rodo, que ya cuanto se trata y se practica es interés de un modo o de otro. Éste es el sol que al mundo vivifica; quien lo conserva, rige y acrecienta, lo ampara, lo defiende y fortifica. (gm 65) (Covetousness circulates everywhere, as it is already practiced and is interest in a way or another. This is the sun that gives life to the world; whoever preserves, governs and increases it, it protects, defends and strengthens.) In Mexico City, as everywhere, commerce makes the world go round. As Paz explains, in La grandeza mexicana “self-interest is the source of culture, the creator of social hierarchies and of the inevitable inequality among men. A return to nature would be a return to barbarism” (48). The closing cuarteto of Chapter 3, which treats commerce focally, glorifies Mexico City’s prosperity as an earthly heaven, thereby also glossing over the conflict between religion and materialism: “hecha está un cielo de mortales bienes/cuidad ilustre, rica y populosa” (“it is a paradise of worldly goods/this illustrious, rich and populous city”) (gm 79).10 The grandeur of Balbuena’s Mexico City is, without a doubt, founded on capitalism: Balbuena unabashedly celebrates the economic prosperity that Spanish colonialism and its global trade network have generated by developing the former Aztec city: “Quien con dineros/halló a su gusto estorbo ni intervalo?” (“Who having money/ever found his pleasure interfered

10

On Balbuena’s undoing of “the antagonism between the pure City of God and the earthly City of Mammon” (Merrim 113) see also Pardo 108.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

269

with or interrupted?”) (gm 83). Mexico City is advertised as a great place to be rich in (gm 83). Significantly, the thematic focus on prosperity generated in the marketplace also underpins La grandeza mexicana’s mannerist aesthetics. As Pardo argues, Balbuena’s mannerist program is part and parcel of his pro-capitalism, for just as trade and art add value to nature’s raw materials, “in similar fashion, the poet contributes to transforming that artistic creation of a city into an even more precious good” (112). Balbuena’s mannerist celebration of artifice over nature thus make his colonial poem a New World baroque text that— schizophrenically, it seems—at once celebrates American originality and difference from Europe and the legacy of the Spanish conquest as the basis of the colonial civilization and wealth that makes up Mexico City’s grandeur. For Balbuena, the Spanish conquest laid the foundation of Mexico City’s grandeur because it hooked up an isolated locality to Spain’s global imperial network, within which, Balbuena argues, Mexico City then went on to assume a distinguished and singular status. Such glorification of empire is reflected in two chapters (Ch. 7 “Gobierno ilustre” and Ch. 8 “Religión y estado”) of La grandeza mexicana set aside to eulogize the official city of the Spanish state and religious institutions that uphold this post-conquest political order. Nevertheless, Balbuena’s point is not about war and conquest—rather, it is civil life, urban culture, and wealth and consumption after the cessation of warfare that are celebrated. Given this affinity between Balbuena’s and Novo’s projects of writing postwar literary portraits of the Mexican capital, it comes as no surprise that Novo’s idea of updating Balbuena’s text was an inspired act: “La idea de trasladar al México contemporáneo la temática planteada por Balbuena 330 años atrás es afortundada, digo, porque nos permite ver, ‘De la famosa México el asiento,’ tanto los cambios que ha sufrido como la continuidad de sus tradiciones; su modernidad y su historia, su transformación y su permanencia.” (“The idea of translating to contemporary Mexico the issues set out by Balbuena 330 years earlier is fortunate, I argue, because it allows us to see ‘Of the famous city of Mexico the seat’ both the changes endured and the continuity of its traditions; its modernity and its history, its transformation and its permanence”) (Celorio 118). If Balbuena records the founding of Mexico City’s grandeur on the colonial capital’s cosmopolitanism, trade and economic prosperity, what of Novo’s 1946 reassassment? Precisely what role does the concept of baroque play in Novo’s 20th century revival of Mexico City’s grandeur? Finally, how, in 1946, does Novo redefine the relation between past and present, history and modernity? Briefly put, the affinity between Novo’s and Balbuena’s pro-capitalism is striking: in

270

Kaup

their very different historical contexts, both La grandeza mexicana and Nueva grandeza mexicana are post-war texts celebrating the new prosperity built on peace and political stability.11 Furthermore, Balbuena’s poem also prefigures Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana as a post-war text that weds its celebration of Mexico City as “a demilitarized city given over to pleasure, art, and culture” (Merrim 99) to the eulogy of baroque artifice.

…And Stepping through into the Other Era: Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana

Re-crossing the intertextual junction connecting Balbuena’s baroque work to its neo-baroque re-creation, I now return to Novo to substantiate this claim. Novo begins his modern chronicle by updating the reader on Mexico City’s urban transportation in Chapter 1 (“Horses, Streets, Dealings, Complimenting …”). Balbuena’s special object of pride, Mexico City’s “gran caballería” (gm 74), its horses and horsemen, richly adorned with the silver from Mexico’s mines, to whom he dedicates more than a hundred lines—“the image of the charro dates from this period” (Lafaye 52)—have been replaced by trams, cars, and buses. Novo takes his visitor-friend from the north on a bus ride in Mexico City; this is the only chapter where the duo is not exploring the city on foot. Employing analepsis, Novo foregrounds the changes that modernization has brought by summoning the memory of Mexico City before the Revolution, under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). “In the times of Díaz the city was inert” (nmg 22). The poor travelled in mule-drawn trams, the rich in buggies and phaetons. It wasn’t until the Mexican Revolution that automobiles appeared in city streets: “Looking back, it is only natural that the Revolution, which shook up our Victorian inertia even before the world wars and the Russian Revolution, should coincide in the city of Mexico with the speeding up of the transport system which it was the privilege of the generals to begin, since it was they who first rode through our streets in huge cars of makes now extinct or transformed, such as the Hudson Super Six” (nmg 23). Mexico’s peasant revolution that ended up enthroning northern caudillos at the head of the Mexican state coincided with the modernization of urban transportation: in Novo’s image of revolutionary generals parading through Mexico City’s streets in new American cars, revolutionary social mobility becomes incarnate in accelerated spatial mobility thanks to modern technologies, by which “man gains time, 11

See also Oropesa’s comment on this parallel (Contemporáneos 16).

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

271

by abolishing space” (nmg 23). The simultaneity of social revolution and the speeding up of urban transportation in Mexico City is most poignant in Novo’s observation that 1917 saw both the passing of Mexico’s radical anti-clerical and pro-labor 1917 Constitution, as well as the release of the Ford car, product of the “ingenuity of the Americans” (nmg 24). In these passages on the Mexican Revolution, Novo’s bias towards urban development and lifestyles is evident, which is his main focus, rather than the Revolution proper and the new socialist and nationalist movements it inaugurated. Novo dwells on the radical impact of technological change in generating new identities and lifestyles: the buses of the post-revolutionary capital “created the new profession of ticket collector,” “a new caste of drivers and conductors” (nmg 25), as well as a new words and phrases characteristic of the world of modern mass transportation. Novo wittily suggests that the practice of mordida (as well as the term) originates with the “first traffic cops created by the authorities” (nmg 25). Ironically, while the generals “became extinct,” “dying gloriously in battle,” their “young skillful chauffeurs …, the first sons of the Revolution” survived to win the day. Having “acquired a technique and a few savings,” the generals’ former chauffeurs “bought cars of their own” and managed to outdo more obsolete vehicles as public conveyances, “since they were able to provide the newly fashionable speed to a greater number of citizens at a moderate price” (nmg 24). In this way, American Fords became Mexico City’s fordcitos, an army of privately owned vehicles of mass transportation that plied the roads of Mexico City: the fordcito was the “young grandfather of the bus” (nmg 24). Novo adds that unlike in other cities, in Mexico City mass transportation by bus is not run by the state or by large companies; instead, it is “the fruit of thirty years of private initiative on the part of nameless but enterprising drivers” (nmg 28). Sharing with Balbuena a fascination with urban transportation and its vehicles, it comes as no surprise that Novo first mentions Balbuena, and the baroque, in relation to Mexico City’s car and bus culture: Now, three and a quarter centuries later, there are still plenty of vehicles, proportionately more, in fact, than before, and with a tendency to bedeck their mechanical outlines with little mirrors, amulets, symphonic horns, smooth upholstery and other decorative excesses, the essential and everlasting baroque of Mexican taste expressed in ostentation and the extrovert enjoyment of wealth…. Bernardo de Balbuena gave as the theme of Chapter 3 of his La grandeza mexicana praise of “horses, streets, manners accomplishments,” and observed:

272

Kaup

The horses sprightly, spirited, fierce; Proud horses, sumptuous streets; A thousand horsemen light of hand and foot; Rich trapping of costly liveries Of pearl, gold and precious stones; In its plazas these are ordinary things. No less sprightly, spirited and fierce or ornamented are today’s cars driven by chauffeurs though these are hardly “light of hand and foot.” All this seems to demonstrate that we Mexicans would rather be driven than walk (nmg 27). The italicized lines are direct quotations from Balbuena. In moving from baroque “decorative excess” on 20th century Mexico City busses to richly adorned 17th century colonial horsemen, Novo constructs a transhistorical passageway that allows us, in Greene’s words, to enter a 20th century neo-baroque text and “step through” into Balbuena’s New World baroque poem. This passage constitutes an ideal type of Greene’s “open valve” intertextuality characteristic of neo-baroque texts. But what exactly are the parallels between 17th century and 20th century Mexico City showcased here? First, there is “the extrovert enjoyment of wealth,” which signals Novo’s and Balbuena’s shared pro-capitalism. Next, the observation that residents of Mexico City, past and present, prefer to be driven rather than walk similarly suggests a preference for the comforts, even luxuries, of urban civilization. Last not least, Novo’s association of the ostentatious expenditure of wealth with an “everlasting baroque of Mexican taste” speaks for itself: Balbuena’s New World baroque and Novo’s 1946 neobaroque revival are firmly tied to prosperity and consumerism: together, La grandeza mexicana and Nueva grandeza mexicana engender what might be termed a Mexican ‘marketplace baroque.’ How to assess the uncomfortable closeness of both Balbuena and Novo to state power? Balbuena’s unsubtle eulogy of colonial state institutions in Chs. vii and viii seems to make it an imperial text, although Merrim makes the case (as New World baroque critics cited above do from different angles) that Balbuena’s emphasis on interés ultimately makes his poem a Mexican creole rather than a Spanish imperial project.12 But what about Novo, the chronicler of Mexico’s Institutional Years? Does Novo produce a text that comes close to a 20th century equivalent of the State baroque, a medium of the official ­self-representation of the alemanista state? In this regard, there are significant 12

Merrim proposes to “reframe[] Balbuena’s poem, wresting it from the imperial project and situating it in the orbit of the creole program” (Merrim 128). See also Sabat-Rivers.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

273

differences between Novo and Balbuena. Novo’s chapter that takes its title from line 7 of Balbuena’s octava real (Chapter 5; “Illustrious Government, Religion, State”) begins by marking the difference between Balbuena’s colonial and the post-revolutionary Mexican state: “‘Church and State,’ I told my friend as a prologue or a warning before dedicating the day to visiting the more notable seats of both of these, ‘have, as you will remember, not been speaking to each other for some time in Mexico”’ (nmg 91). And in contrast to Balbuena, whose chapter on religion offers a long catalogue of convents and religious societies, Novo barely devotes one page to religion, covering not institutions but popular religious practices during Holy Week and the Day of the Dead. Moreover, the review of ministries and government bodies occurs by way of a walking tour of the centre that also attends to the visible effects of administration on residents’ lives, such as access to markets and water. As noted above, New Mexican Grandeur has an existential orientation absent in La grandeza mexicana. Balbuena offers an abstract survey of the colonial capital’s urban inventory, narrated by an omniscient observer from a detached and disembodied point of view, as if floating above the city. In contrast, Novo’s narrator takes the form of an embodied observer walking Mexico City’s streets, immersed in the urban life down below, one resident among many. To invoke Michel de Certeau, Balbuena assumes the voice of the city planner, architect or cartographer, an official looking down on the city from on high. In contrast, Novo’s urban chronicler assumes the persona of a streetwalker, immersed in the chaos of the streets.13 As de Certeau argues in an essay on “Walking in the City,” the urban planner’s centralized, panoramic vision is the diametric opposite of that of everyday urban users and “ordinary practitioners,” whose “practices are foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions” (93). Whereas Balbuena’s perspective on the colonial city is conceptual, theoretical and distant like that of an urban designer; Novo adopts the physical, immediate and experiential perspective of the streetwalker and urban dweller who comes to know the Mexican capital by traversing the city on the ground. The embodied character of Novo’s guided tour of the colonial capital is manifest in the memoir of a week’s activities, of lunches, dinners, suppers, and night club visits in particular establishments, of visits to specific theaters, bookstores, museums, and countless famous buildings, parks and monuments. It also yields special treats such as a chance encounter with Diego Rivera at work painting the murals in the National Palace while touring the historic center around the Zócalo (nmg 79). 13

On this topic, see especially Mahieux, but also Dávila and and Long.

274

Kaup

However, Novo’s choice of a homodiegetic narrator who acts as a character in his own urban narrative also generates formal problems that need to be overcome. A first-person, immediate and subjective point of view involves restricting knowledge to the present time and place (here/now). The genre of urban history or survey, however, requires absolute, panoramic knowledge ideally provided by a heterodiegetic narrator—Balbuena’s choice. (Due to its epistolary speaking situation, La grandeza mexicana is interspersed with direct address to a personal addressee, “Senora,” Balbuena’s friend Doña Isabel de Tovar y Guzmán. But she exists in a realm above and superior to the narration, as does Balbuena’s hetero- and extradiegetic narrator.) Novo solves the problem of the limitation of knowledge by resorting to the conditional mode, frequently interrupting his account of sites visited with digressive hypothetical reflections about other places he and his friend could have seen as well, or instead. In this way, Novo’s account of taking his friend to lunch at the Ambassadeurs restaurant in the center of the city expands into an extended survey of other restaurants in nearby neighborhoods, commenting on their brand of cuisine and comparative quality. Novo speculates: If I had been a member, I should have taken my friend to the Bankers’ Club, and we would have shared with these gentry the neurotic privilege of feeling ourselves, on the terrace overlooking the Alameda, the lords of Mexico and the authors of its development, after downing some ­highballs in front of Angel Zarraga’s murals, I might even have been ­indiscrete enough to tell my friend that below us, in the Alley of the Countess, ­beside which the building topped by the Bankers’ Club rises proudly, there was about a hundred years ago a dirty tortilla shop, with an open drain running by it, pullulating with dogs. Here, rescued by a charitable old woman, grew Payno’s romantic hero. And I could have told him that the Sanborn’s in front, where we might have eaten, or bought toothpaste, or a suit, or silver, or toys, or paintings, or candy, or laxatives, or admired a fresco by Orozco, is The Palace of Tiles. Its complete history was written by the Marquis de San Francisco. Before becoming what it is, it housed the Jockey Club, rendezvous of the “scientific tight folk” (“­scientific” because they represented the educated support for the Díaz regime) … (nmg 31). Here, an interpolated “what if” speculation about unrealized possibilities furnishes the occasion for a panoramic survey within Novo’s first-person memoir. It does so by breaking the limits of the itinerant narrator’s restricted ­knowledge and swooping upwards, as it were, to the panoramic heights of an omniscient urban historian.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

275

But this passage is also resonant with other meanings. First, the contrast between the non-choice of the private upper class Bankers’ Club and the choice of upper middle class Ambassadeurs signals Novo’s bourgeois affiliation. Here, Novo distances himself from the inner circle of Mexico’s financial elite, ­posing as an ordinary consumer and beneficiary of Mexico City’s capitalist development coordinated by the latter. Novo employs the metaphorics of heights (the club terrace “overlooking the Alameda”) and depths (“open drain”) to signal class hierarchies (“the lords of Mexico” vs. “pullulating with dogs”) and privileged insight and power (“the authors of its development”). As Oropesa ­comments, “the simple truth is that the banqueros float on the shit of the city” (Contemporáneos 23). Employing the baroque dialectics of illusion and disillusionment, Novo exposes the external appearance of power and privilege as just that, a surface that is deceptive. To make a baroque point about the ­deceptiveness of appearances, Novo ascends to the elevated perch of the city historian’s omniscient and archival knowledge, offering retrospective insight into the past. Such frequent trans-historical comparisons between present and past incarnations of Mexico City mark a major difference that sets Novo’s neo-baroque chronicle apart from Balbuena’s baroque poem. In keeping with La grandeza mexicana’s conspicuous presentism and its dismissal of the pre-Columbian past, in the concluding Chapter 9 (“Todo en este discurso está cifrado”), Balbuena delivers a “devastating” (Oropesa Contemporáneos 23) condemnation of the Aztec city’s inferiority: Y admírese el teatro de la fortuna, pues no ha cien años que miraba en esto chozas humildes, lamas y laguna; y sin quedar, terrón antiguo enhiesto, de su primer cimiento renovada esta grandeza y maravilla ha puesto (gm 121). (And let us admire the theater of fortune, for less than one hundred years ago all one could see was humble huts, scum and lagoon; and not even one old clod is left standing, from its first foundations renovated, this grandeur and marvel has been erected.)

276

Kaup

For Balbuena, the grandeur of Mexico City derives from the destruction of Tenochtitlán, and the city’s reconstruction from the bottom up. For Balbuena, the Aztec past is best forgotten, just as its buildings have been torn down. Balbuena fully embraces the myth of modernization as rupture and (urban) renewal; Mexico City’s grandeur is due exclusively to its post-conquest “rebirth” as the Spanish colonial capital (Oropesa Contemporáneos 15). Eschewing the presentist absolutism of Balbuena’s urbanism, Novo adopts a hybrid position that negotiates the eulogy of capitalist modernization with selective nostalgia and memory of the past. Thus, whereas Balbuena in part relies on the logic of purification and rupture of the dominant modern, it is only Novo’s neo-baroque chronicle that fully embraces the hybrid and non-futurist alternative modernity of the baroque. Departing from Balbuena (but in accordance with Mexico’s post-revolutionary indigenism), this includes frequent references to the pre-Columbian city: the tianguis (open-air Indian markets) in the city streets; the ruins of the templo mayor, etc. Structurally, this is of course due to Novo’s neo-baroque program, which sets out to revisit a work of the New World baroque. As a re-creation—unlike La grandeza mexicana—Nueva grandeza mexicana hinges on recycling and updating an older text; balancing present and past, modernity and history constitute its central procedure. But, of course, such formal structures are nothing but the expression of the author’s underlying concepts of modernity. I suggest that Novo makes the case for an impure modernity akin to (if not completely overlapping with) García Canclini’s assessment of Mexico’s alternative modernity in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Exiting Modernity. According to García Canclini, in Latin America, “where traditions have not yet disappeared and modernity has not completely arrived,” modern culture is marked by a “multitemporal heterogeneity, …a consequence of a history in which modernization rarely operated through the substitution of the traditional and the ancient.”14 He proposes a spatialized, synchronic model of “entering” and “exiting” modernity by way of passages and itineraries, as in a city, “which one enters via the path of the cultured, of the popular, or of the massified…. The migrants cross the city in many directions and, precisely at the intersections, install their baroque stands of regional candies and contraband radios, medicinal herbs and videocassettes” (García Canclini 3). Nueva grandeza mexicana’s week-long tour of Mexico City charts precisely such a nonlinear journey across the urban landscape, which exposes the permanence of the past beneath, or next to, the monuments of modernity. The high rise built over an old tortilla shop, the fordcitos that replace mule-drawn 14

García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 1, 47.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

277

trams that replaced the colonial horses and horsemen, all equally bedecked with the decorative excess due to “the everlasting baroque of Mexican taste” (nmg 27), are all part of Novo’s x-ray of what Canclini calls Mexico City’s “multitemporal heterogeneity.” But Novo’s pastism is most vocal in his critique of urban development in the late 19th century, under Porfirio Díaz. Reviewing the new buildings in the center constructed at that time, Novo remarks: the Italianate Palace of the Ministry of Communications did not strike my friend as beautiful, or the neighboring Post Office either. They are both barbarous products of the age of Díaz, blind to the true Mexican tradition in architecture, which was a rebirth in direct line from the Spanish, and so a rich mixture…. For its organic development, therefore, it had no need for retarding injections of European styles, artificial, quickly outmoded and rootless, which were spread in the XIXth Century and culminated, horror of horrors—in the Eiffel Tower. These styles are to blame for the building in Mexico of houses with mansard roofs and slopes of corrugated iron that wait in vain for the decoration of snow for which these were originally designed (nmg 82). Novo’s definition of authentic Mexican architecture as a revival of the Spanish colonial tradition, and his corresponding rejection of 19th century modernization as an alien imposition of European styles, offer an answer to the questions posed at the outset about the reasons why Novo, chronicler of Mexico’s prosperous Institutional Years, should return to Balbuena’s colonial text. To furnish another example of Novo’s dismissal of “futurist” Europe-oriented modernization in post-Independence Mexico: Mexico City’s suburban expansion took place during the Porfiriato, when the wealthy moved away from the vicinity of the Zócalo to suburbs south and west of the center, where they sought to imitate European (and especially French) culture. The devotion to modern European lifestyles manifested itself in the naming of these districts and their streets: “The spirit of the Díaz regime, positivist in a hybrid sort of way, bigoted, ‘scientific,’ Europe-oriented, ancestor worshipping and romantic, revealed its state of mind when it baptised the new districts. Faith in medicine prompted ‘Doctors’;…. Those who had been to Europe underlined the fact by living in the elegant Juárez district in Hamburgs, Viennas, Liverpools, Londons, and Napleses. It was only a late tide of compensating geographic nationalism that gave us in the Roma district (but kindly not ‘Rome’) the names of Mexican cities, Puebla, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Tabasco” (nmg 85–86). On the one hand, Novo’s critique of Mexico’s Europeanizing modernization under the Porfiriato is a staple of post-revolutionary Mexican nationalism. But

278

Kaup

it also belongs to a more specific neo-baroque discourse defining Latin America’s alternative modernity that takes shape with the revival of the baroque across Latin America in the 20th century. Here, the 17th- and 18th century baroque is coming to be seen as the blueprint defining Latin America’s modernity, which 20th (and 21st) century Latin American intellectuals recuperate while rejecting the legacy of the Enlightenment and its 19th century developments. As Irlemar Chiampi explains: “The Baroque, crossroads of signs and temporalities, aesthetic logic of mourning and melancholy, luxuriousness and pleasure, erotic convulsion and allegorical pathos, reappears to bear witness to the crisis or end of modernity and to the very condition of a continent that could not be assimilated by the project of the Enlightenment…. The neo-baroque is thus constituted as an archaeology of the modern, one that allows us to interpret Latin American experience as a dissonant modernity.” (508) Novo provides just such an ‘archaeology’ of Mexico City’s “dissonant modernity” in his 1946 chronicle, by drawing trans-historical continuities between the post-revolutionary capital and its colonial predecessor, while dismissing 19th century modernization as an alien imposition. Like other neo-baroque works, Novo’s La grandeza mexicana employs an eccentric, non-linear temporality, in which history resembles a spiral, meandering through a series of digressive turns and folds, rather than the conventional arrow-like model of progress. The latter would have represented 19th century modernization under Díaz as a step forward on the way to the present. In his pioneering art historical study of the New World baroque, Redescubrimiento de América en el arte, Ángel Guido theorizes the non-teleological neo-baroque genealogy of modernity by modeling Latin American history since 1492 by way of two successive cycles of European ‘conquest’ and Latin American anti-colonial ‘reconquest.’ According to Guido, the second cycle of conquest occurs in the 19th century—ironically, the century of Latin American Independence—when new Latin American states are once again subjected to European hegemony through the positivist ideologies adopted by the new criollo political elites in their efforts to modernize their young nations. If Novo rejects the Porfiriato’s imitation of European modernity as neo-­ colonialism, neither does he advocate a nostalgic return to any past. “From its days as Tenochtitlán, differing in this from Mitla, Chichen, or Teotihuacan which are preserved in the deep freeze of centuries, it has been the destiny of Mexico to survive at the cost of change” (nmg 121). A city is a living organism, not a museum of the frozen past. After all, such defense of modernization and change is not surprising on the part of an eminent member of an avantgarde group that named itself the Contemporáneos. But Novo’s endorsement is only, and specifically, for a hybrid, impure, baroque modernity. As Novo offers

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

279

his concluding thoughts on history and modernity, permanence and change in Mexico City in Chapter 7, he once again makes reference to the baroque to make this point: “The proletarians, who are after all, fortunately, Mexican, have not been long in turning the plain Corbusierism of their dwellings into baroque with flowerpots, bird cages, and chintz curtains” (Novo 123). As the Mexican-Chicano artist Rubén Ortiz Torres phrases it in another context, the baroque art of excess is “Montezuma’s revenge against Mondrian” (30). This is why, in Nueva grandeza mexicana’s concluding paragraph quoted earlier, Novo ends his chronicle with a panoramic—albeit fantastic (“the city seemed to float”)—image of Mexico City as historical palimpsest, in which the cities of the Aztecs, of the conquistadors, of Diaz, and of the post-revolutionary present—impossibly, but necessarily, featured together within the same picture plane—make up the “Grandeur of Mexico” (nmg 131). Works Cited Balbuena, Bernardo de. La grandeza mexicana y Compendio apologético en alabanza de la poesía. Luis Adolfo Domínguez (Ed.). Mexico City: Porrúa, 1985. Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. Burlington: Ashgate, 2004. Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Trans. Charles Lambert. Prince­ton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Campos, Haroldo de. “Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture.” Novas: Selected Writings. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros (Eds.). Trans. Odile Cisneros. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 157–177. Celorio, Gonzálo. “De Bernardo de Balbuena a Salvador Novo.” Cánones subversivos: Ensayos de literatura hispanoamericana. Mexico City: Tusquets, 2009. Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Trans. Stephen Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Chiampi, Irlemar. “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity.” Trans. William Childers. Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds. 2010. 508–528. Corona, Ignacio and Beth E. Jörgensen (Eds.). The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Dávila, Roxanne. “Mexico City as Urban Palimpsest in Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 33.1 (2000): 107–123. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. New York: The New Press, 2003. 351–369.

280

Kaup

García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Gelpi, Juan G. “Walking in the Modern City: Subjectivity and Cultural Contacts in the Urban crónicas of Salvado Novo and Carlos Monsivaís.” Corona and Jorgensen, The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle. 2002. 201–220. González Echevarría, Roberto. Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Greene, Roland. “Baroque and Neo-baroque: Making Thistory.” PMLA 124. 1 (2009): 150–155. Guido, Ángel. Redescubrimiento de América en el arte. Rosario: Republica Argentina, 1940. (Reissued: Rosario: Imprenta de la Universidad del Litoral, 1941; Buenos Aires: Editorial El Ateneo, 1944.) Hauser, Arnold. “The Social History of Art” (Vol. 2), Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. New York: Vintage, 1985. Henríquez-Ureña, Pedro. “The Baroque in America.” 1940. Trans. Rose Dutra. Zamora and Kaup, 200–208. Johns, Michael. The City of Mexico in the Age of Díaz. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Kandell, Jonathan. La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Kaup, Monika. Neo baroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, ­Visual Art, and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Lafaye, James. Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National C ­ onsciousness, 1531–1813. Trans. Benjamin Keen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Lezama Lima, José. La expresión americana. 1957. Ed. Irlemar Chiampi. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993. Long, Mary K. “Writing the City: The Chronicles of Salvador Novo.” Corona and Jörgensen, The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle. 2002. 181–200. Mahieux, Viviane. “The Chronicler as Streetwalker: Salvador Novo and the Performance of Genre.” Hispanic Review 76. 2 (2008): 155–177. McMichael Reese, Carol. “The Urban Development of Mexico City, 1850–1930.” ­Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850–1950. Arturo Almandoz (Ed.). London: Routledge, 2002. 139–169. Merrim, Stephanie. The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Monsivaís, Carlos. “Enlightened Neighborhood: Mexico City as Cultural Center.” ­Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir (Eds.). Vol. II: Institutional Modes and Cultural Modalities. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2004. 335–350.

Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity

281

———. “On the Chronicle in Mexico.” Corona and Jörgensen, The Contemporary M ­ exican Chronicle. 2002. 25–35. Moser, Walter. “The Concept of Baroque.” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 33. 1 (2008): 11–37. Novo, Salvador. New Mexican Grandeur. Mexico City: Petróleos Mexicanos, 1967. ———. Nueva grandeza mexicana: Ensayo sobre la Ciudad de México y sus alrededores en 1946. Mexico City: Editorial Hermes, 1946. Oropesa, Salvador A. The Contemporáneos Group: Rewriting Mexico in the Thirties and Forties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. ———. “Salvador Novo: The American Friend, the American Critic.” Mexico Reading the United States. Linda Egan and Mary K. Long (Eds.). Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Panofsky, Erwin. “What Is Baroque?” 1934. Three Essays on Style. Irving Lavin (Ed.). Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995. 19–88. Pardo, Osvaldo F. “Giovanni Botero and Bernardo de Balbuena: Art and Economy in La grandeza mexicana.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10. 1 (2001): 103–117. Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Faith. 1982. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Picón-Salas, Mariano. “The Baroque of the Indies.” A Cultural History of Spanish ­America: From Conquest to Independence. 1944. Trans. Irving A. Leonard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. 85–105. Rama, Ángel. “Fundación del manierismo hispanoamericano por Bernardo de Balbuena.” University of Dayton Review 16. 2 (1983): 13–21. Reiss, Timothy. “American Baroque Histories and Geographies from Sigüenza y Góngora and Balbuena to Balboa, Carpentier, and Lezama.” Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds. 2010. 394–414. Sarduy, Severo. “The Baroque and the Neo baroque.” 1972. Trans. Christopher Leland Winks. Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds. 270–291. Sheridan, Guillermo. Los contemporáneos ayer. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985. Torres, Rubén Ortiz. “Cathedrals on Wheels.” Art Issues 54 (September/October 1998): 26–31. Unruh, Vicky. Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Verani, Hugo. “The Vanguardia and Its Implications.” The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century. Ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 1996. 114–137.

282

Kaup

Williamson, Edwin. The Penguin History of Latin America. London: Penguin, 1992. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. 1915. Trans. M.D. Hottinger. New York: Dover, 1950. Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Monika Kaup, eds. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

chapter 12

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces: From Movie Palace to Las Vegas Casinos Angela Ndalianis In his Life of Forms in Art (1934) Henri Focillon understands form in art as an entity that was not necessarily limited to the constraints of time or specific historical periods. Quoting a political tract from Balzac he stated that “everything is form and life itself is form” (33). For Focillon, formal patterns in art are in perpetual states of motion, being specific to time but also spanning across it. (32) He states: “Form may, it is true, become formula and canon; in other words, it may be abruptly frozen into a normative type. But form is primarily a mobile life in a changing world. Its metamorphoses endlessly begin anew…” (44). While the historical baroque has traditionally been contained within the rough temporal confines of the C17th, taking my lead from Focillon, what I’ll be arguing in this essay is that baroque form has dynamically and consistently made its presence felt across the centuries, sometimes with greater intensity than others, and it’s these eruptions of intensity that fascinate me. This essay is concerned with analysing the metamorphic states that the baroque underwent in the u.s. and, in particular in Hollywood and Los Angeles, in the 1920s–30s in the form of the movie palaces, and new Urban Entertainment Destinations of the 1990s–2000s, particularly those of the Las Vegas Strip. While the baroque is associated with a myriad of traits and strategies, here, I focus specifically on a theme often associated with the historical baroque—namely, the concept of teatrum mundi, or theatre of the world. Bernini, for example, was concerned with exploring the theme of abolishing “the distinction between life and theatre” (Molinari, 149). In addition to staged, multi-media spectacles like the Ecstasy of St Teresa (Cornaro Chapel, 1647–52), his production of Mars and Mercury (performed to inaugurate the Teatro Farnese in Parma in 1628), spilled off the stage and into the space of the audience. The whole performance concluded with the pit being completely flooded, while the combat between soldiers ruptured the stage boundaries to enter the space of the auditorium, immersing the audience in the performance. The baroque delight in spectacle as theatre invited the entry of theatre into the social realm. Most famously, public spaces like those of the Piazza del Popolo and the Porta Flaminia (now called the Porta del Popolo [see figure 12.1])— which was designed by Bernini and commissioned by Pope Alexander vii for © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_017

284

Figure 12.1

Ndalianis

The Porta Flaminia (now Porta del Popolo) designed by Bernini for the entrance of Queen Christina of Sweden in Rome in 1655 after her conversion to Catholicism Image from the Port Mobility Civitavecchia site—http:// civitavecchia.portmobility.it/en/piazza-del-popolo

Queen Christina of Sweden’s entry into Rome—and its twin churches, Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1681) and Santa Maria in Montesanto (1679), not only define the points at which the three streets—via del Corso, via del Babuino and via di Ripetta—branch off into the depth, but the porta, churches, streets and piazza combine to transform the entrance of Rome into an enormous stage set [figure 12.2] that recalls the architect Andrea Palladio’s trompe l’oeil Teatro Olimpico (Vicenza, 1580–85). Here, the piazza and the Palladian set-inspired churches and streets invite the breakdown between reality and fiction. Stage and auditorium now become one, fluidly spilling into each other, and performance and reality mingle and generate event places marked by spectacle and performance. The grand baroque palaces, churches, and piazzas stood as monuments to the grandeur of their aristocratic patrons and the Church that sustained them. The majestic movie palaces, on the other hand, stood as monuments to the young Hollywood studios, their stars, their producers and their audiences. They were renown for their exuberant, themed interiors; emphasising illusionistic designs, these spaces remediated palaces, temples and ancient cities as backdrops to the performances both of the movies and the moviegoers

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

285

Figure 12.2  Entrance past the Porta del Popolo into the theatrical space of Piazza del Popolo Image from Concorso fotografico Cieli d’Italia—http:// www.touringclub.it/concorso-fotografico-cieli-ditalia/ roma-piazza-del-popolo

who visited these repurposed cathedrals of the masses in the millions. More recently, Urban Entertainment Destinations, which are multi-use complexes that can include cinemas, restaurants, casinos, and other retail-leisure services, have upped-the-ante on fantastic theming, performativity and theatricality. Reaching their pinnacle in design on the Strip in Las Vegas, Urban Entertainment Destinations are influenced heavily by contemporary theme parks such as Disneyland and Universal Studios, offering their audiences microcosmic universes to perform within. Above all, they play on the baroque concept of “great theatre of the world”, where the world and theatre, reality and performance blur. In his book The Theater of Truth, William Egginton discusses the major strategy of the baroque as one that “assumes the existence of a veil of appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a space opening just beyond those appearances where truth resides” (3). Egginton correctly stresses the ideological impetus that drives such illusions, which operate as strategies of propaganda aimed at seducing the masses through wondrous spectacle (3). In the case of the historical baroque, the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy relied on immersive and highly theatricalised spectacle to present narratives that were about religion and class power. As I will argue in this essay, the two examples of the Hollywood movie palaces and the grand casino/entertainment complexes that occupy the Las Vegas strip represent the power of a new elite: the Hollywood studio system and its thriving film industry in the case of

286

Ndalianis

the former, and its inevitable expansion into a multi-corporate entertainment industry comprising powerful media conglomerates in the case of the latter. In the late C20th and C21st, it is entertainment environments that stand as monuments to media conglomerates and to the masses who inhabit these worlds. Film and entertainment companies have appropriated the tropes and modes of engagement of the historical baroque and refashioned them into hi-tech, spectacular neo-baroque spaces.

His Excellency—The American Citizen

In the United States, it was the young film industry that began a love affair with baroque flair and monumentality and introduced it into the public sphere. Aside from the mise en scene of grand Hollywood epics like Intolerance (Griffith 1926); Queen Kelly (von Stroheim 1928) and Cecil B. De Mille’s Ben Hur and Ten Commandments—which reiterated the spectacular grandeur of baroque style (Calloway 52–9), the sets and production began to spill into the space of the city. The “visual richness of film culture” and the success of the star system by the 1920s shifted the cinema’s evocation of fantasy and glamour off the screen and into the private lives of its stars and the public sphere they inhabited (Calloway 56). Film culture nurtured an environment that allowed baroque form to infiltrate the space of the city. A baroque opulence the likes of which had never been seen since the 17th and 18th centuries soon exploded and, what came to be known as the ‘Hollywood Style’ emerged. In the new Hollywood of the 1910s–20s the mansions of movie moguls like Cecil B. DeMille and Louis B. Mayer and film stars Rudolph Valentino’s ‘Falcon’s Lair’ and Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Mary Pickford’s ‘Pickfair’, spoke of a new splendour that deliberately recalled and refashioned the tastes of European nobility. Many of the structures explicitly imitated the C17th and C18th palazzi of European aristocrats and monarchs as well as the Spanish baroque and the fashionable Spanish colonial revival. But it was the emergence of the new picture palaces that brought a truly baroque aesthetic and theatricality to city life in Los Angeles. The new monarchs were now the movie stars and film moguls, and they asserted their power and ethereal-like aura through a baroque visual splendour evident not only in their palatial abodes but in the public spaces of worship that were created for their audiences. There was a neo-baroque show in town and, to quote the architect S. Charles Lee—who designed over 400 picture palaces—“The show starts on the sidewalk” (Silverman 10). To go to the movies meant to invest in an entire immersive performance. Here was the new religion: spaces that evoked alternate and fantastic

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

287

realities that were offered both by film technology and by its new palaces for the people. These were places of rapture and intensity where audiences could leave the ordinary world behind them, and instead adopt a role worthy of the otherworldly spaces that surrounded them. The previous baroque theatres, piazzas, churches and palaces that were designed as exuberant performance spaces that existed for the whim of aristocrats, royalty, clerics and the private elite, and which relied on visual effects to delight audiences were, in the early 20th century remediated into movie palaces for the masses. The themes of religion and empowerment that were so familiar to the historical baroque made a return. Capped by huge electric signs and marquees that radiated their studio titles like giant beacons, they became symbols of a new cosmopolitan and consumer confidence and sophistication. Key architects who specialized in and were commissioned to design the new palaces for the large chains (Paramount, Loews, Fox) included John Eberson, Rapp & Rapp, Thomas Lamb, and Charles Lee. The architect John Eberson created over one hundred ‘atmospheric theatres’ across the u.s., including The Palace in Marion, Ohio (1928) and The Paradise Theatre in the Bronx (1929), which included busts of Lorenzo de Medici,

Figure 12.3  Lowe’s Paradise Theatre, Bronx, New York (1929) Architect John Eberson.

288

Ndalianis

William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin (figure 12.3). In the mid-20s he developed the ‘stars and clouds’ formula, which created the impression that the ceiling above the seating space of the auditorium had dissolved and opened up to a ‘sky’ that was lit by pin point star lights (Naylor 23), an effect that would later do any designer of the contemporary Las Vegas casinos proud. Marcus Lowe, owner of Lowes Theatres and mgm, hired Eberson to design the Paradise Theatre, which “transported visitors to an outdoor baroque Italian garden of marble pillars, cypress trees, plaster replications of Michelangelo sculptures, vines, stuffed birds, and even a goldfish pond. With a painted ceiling of stars bearing the constellation of Marcus Loew’s birth sign and a smoke machine producing simulated clouds” (Volmer n.p.). Appropriating the aristocratic splendour and allegorical strategies of the baroque, it was no longer Louis xiv who was glorified by spectacle, but Marcus Lowe, business magnate and pioneer of the Hollywood film industry. Eberson announced that his theatres were “magnificent amphitheatre[s] under a glorious moonlit sky… an Italian garden, a Persian court, a Spanish patio, or a mystic Egyptian temple yard” (Hall 96). From the moment they sighted the theatre exterior, and even more so once they entered, moviegoers were invited to be part of a performance space that transported them to another time and another place. This message would further be emphasised once the film projector began to project its seductive rays and evocative stories onto the screen. Influenced by the trompe l’oeil effects popularised during the historical baroque by artists like Baciccio and Giambattista Tiepolo, Eberson’s atmospheric theatres added to the illusion of entering an alterative reality. But unlike the frescoes of Tiepolo and Baciccio, these were the created not through paint, stucco and a reliance on perspective; instead, a brenograph magic lantern machine was used “to project clouds and constellations” onto painted blue ceiling “creating special effects like Aurora Borealis, Babbling Brooks, Blizzards, Descending Clouds, Flying Angels, Birds, Butterflies, Fire and Smoke, Lightning, Storm Clouds, Fleecy Clouds, Ocean Waves, Rain, Sand Storms, Snow, Falling Roses, Rainbows, and Volcanoes in Eruption” (‘Auditorium’ n.p.). These interiors relied on a key baroque strategy, which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, involves an ambiguous relationship on the part of the spectator when confronted with such technological wonder (Ndalianis 2008). The viewer is at once drawn into an irrational state that evokes wonder and an almost mystical reality, while simultaneously being rationally aware of the skill and mastery that conjured these fantasy worlds. These are neo-baroque places that herald their ­virtuosity; they celebrate the fact that they are human constructs that summon performative spaces in which the audience can actively participate.

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

289

One performative role dominated during the hey day of the movie palace: not only did the visual imagery connote aristocratic abodes and religious temples, but also the moviegoer was invited to adopt the role of king, queen, or high priestess. The new royalty were the masses. Many movie palace architects proclaimed that they’d created democratic spaces of leisure, and John Eberson stated: “Here we find ourselves today creating and building super-cinemas of enormous capacities excelling in splendor, in luxury, and in furnishings of the most palatial homes of princes and crowned kings for and on behalf of His Excellency—the American Citizen” (in Jones 20). The 4,651 seater Fox Theater in San Francisco (figure  12.4), designed by Thomas W. Lamb for William Fox, founder of the Fox Film Corporation in 1915, was called the ‘greatest theatre in the world’. Built in 1929 it was one of a chain of Fox theatres, the others opening in Brooklyn, Detroit, St.Louis and Atlanta. As the authors on the University of Virginia’s American Picture Palaces website explain, the Fox …housed a lobby that was a temple to European high culture and aristocracy… William Fox’s wife Eve Leo toured Europe and shipped home various objets d’art, furniture, and architectural embellishments to be displayed in the theater lobby. Built and decorated by European craftsmen, the lobby featured throne chairs, statuary, and a pair of vases once owned by the royal family of Russia. Thomas Lamb designed the lobby’s picture gallery to be an exact duplicate of a chapel in Versailles. Many theater exteriors and interiors were designed as replicas of Old World churches, monuments, and palaces…The frieze in the theater lobby is a copy, at 1/3 scale, of the frieze decorating the choir gallery in the cathedral in Florence. Theater designers mixed European styles to create an overall lavish display of wealth. ‘Exteriors and Lobbies’ n.p.

Responding to the opening of the Fox theatre in San Francisco (which was destroyed in 1963), an advertisement proclaimed: What have you heard about the new Fox theatre?… whatever you’ve heard—there is a thousand times more to find within its doors. As you pass through the great entrance into the vast foyer of magnificence, you feel like exclaiming: ‘Is this a theater or the palace of a king?’ All worry vanishes and life becomes a dream of dazzling beauty, glorious colors, intoxicating music and motion pictures that make the minutes fly like seconds. Wander through these spacious halls and beautiful lounges. Listen

290

Ndalianis

to the music in the grand hall, where your feet rest in luxury upon rugs as lovely as rare museum fabrics. King Louis xvi enjoyed no finer, and it is yours, for today, for tomorrow, next week. Come, be king for a day! Kaufmann 97

Figure 12.4  The 4,651 seater Fox Theater in San Francisco (1929) designed by Thomas W. Lamb for William Fox, founder of the Fox Film Corporation.

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

291

The movie palaces built on the logic of the film set: hundreds of creative people—from architects to interior designers, projectionists to technicians—created fantastic spaces both onscreen and within the physical space the moviegoer had entered. They were invited to adopt the role of an actor who had escaped their everyday life and were inserted into a wondrous new narrative space.

The Cathedrals of Motion Pictures

It was the entrepreneur Samuel L. Rothapfel, better known as ‘Roxy’, who would have a dramatic impact on the artifice and theming of theatre design. At the time of its opening in 1927, the Roxy in New York (a 6,000 seater designed by Walter Ahlschlager at a cost of $12 million) was hailed in an advertisement in the Weekly Review as the “Cathedral of the Motion Picture”. The sacred and wondrous imagery and terminology of the baroque had returned. Whether palaces or cathedrals, these were the new temples of entertainment, a modus operandi that, as will be discussed below, returned later in the century in the casino complexes of Las Vegas. The theatre relied on a “fusion of religious and commercial purpose” and in doing so formed “a new American identity based on consumerism” (‘Auditorium’ n.p.). Pulpits flanked either side of the stage, and On opening night, ushers directed patrons to their seats in near-darkness; the opening ceremony began with the appearance of a spotlit, robed monk reading from a scroll, ‘Ye portals bright, high and majestic, open to our gaze the path to Wonderland, and show us the realm where fantasy reigns, where romance, where adventure flourish. Let ev’ry day’s toil be forgotten under they sheltering roof—O Glorious, mighty hall—thy magic and thy charm unite us all to worship at beauty’s throne’. When the monk intoned ‘Let there be light’, a switch was thrown to reveal the auditorium decoration and the orchestra rising out of the pit. The monk’s prayer—addressed to the building and its custodians, not to God—became a standard feature at every theater Roxy opened. ‘Auditorium’ n.p.; also see Hall 8

Blurring its iconographic purpose, these theatres were both cathedrals and palaces, and moviegoers were addressed as royalty both in advertisements and once they’d entered the glorious interiors. As Miles Orvell argues in relation to Californians of the same period, the movie palaces played on the desire to

292

Ndalianis

experience ‘generic aristocracy’ (48). Central to the articulation of the experience is an interplay between illusion and reality, one that is, above all reliant on theatricality. In her book Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque, Mary Ann Frese Witt discusses “the baroque topos of the theatrum mundi or ‘all the world’s a stage’ and the convention of the play within the play”. (8) Her interest lies in the origins of metatheatre in the writings of Shakespeare and Calderón and, in turn, in locating its continued presence and revision in contemporary, neo-baroque metatheatricality: baroque and neo-baroque metatheatre draws attention to the illusory theatricality of the performance. On entering these majestic theatres, moviegoers consciously adopted the role that the theatrical interiors asked them to perform. Going to the movies meant performing royalty or the aristocracy of a time gone by, while simultaneously recognising that it was a revamped version that now transformed and raised the masses into this role. Louis Marin, in his analysis of the baroque, architecture and Louis xiv, argues that, in the construction of Versailles and its gardens, his function as King found its fulfillment, its monarchal dignity, its privileged manifestation… the King is an architect, the architectural Subject of Versailles through which the Kingdom receives its most perfect consecration… In this sense, the castle and gardens of Versailles, “architect” the Prince to make him not only the absolute of political power, but the center of the cosmos in its entirety. To this double extent, Versailles is the result of a production, of a construction at once real, imaginary, and symbolic. Real, in that the palace exists: one can still visit it today. Imaginary, in that it reveals “baroque” desire, the fantastic, the phantasmatic desire to show (oneself) as absolute power. Symbolic—since in some manner it is the sovereign Norm, the “classic” Law of universal subjection to signs constituting a transcendent cultural and political universe devoid of civil and natural exteriority. (168) Film studio bosses created a strategy of marketing and consumerism that transformed the role of Prince or King. The movie palace now became “the most perfect consecration” of the kingdom that was the studio—mgm, C20th Fox, Warner Bros etc.—and it did so by addressing the moviegoer as royalty, asking that they embrace this role that placed them at the centre of the world created in the theatre. Furthermore, Marin’s explanation regarding the real, imaginary, and symbolic also holds up when considering these new palaces of the people. They were real in that film studios commissioned them, architects created them, and they existed in actual cities. They were imaginary in that

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

293

they revealed a baroque, “phantasmatic desire to show (oneself) as absolute power”, one facilitated by the studio owners. Finally, they were symbolic in that they succumbed to the law of the Hollywood studio, which produced alternate realities in their film products, then created wondrous palaces to screen them in, thus evoking transcendent cultural experiences. Baroque spectacle speaks directly to the viewer through what Deleuze calls the “seduction of the senses”, and this was especially a driving force during this era of the picture palace. The illusions produced in these spaces would try to engage as many of the senses as possible in their attempts to captivate their audiences. For example, Roxy’s Rivoli of 1918 in New York, which opened with the premiere of Douglas Fairbanks’ A Modern Musketeer, was noted as revolutionizing the motion picture industry. In addition to the 50 piece orchestra that played live music before and during the film, it included colour symphonies that lit every area of the interior—from floor to dome—and lamps that were masked and could fill the auditorium with an array of colours. But in addition to assaulting and overwhelming the audience with stimulants of sight and sound (and taste in food and drinks that were also available), Roxy also introduced smell. Roxy invented a new compressor machine that operated in connection with an intricate system of atomizers. The Motion Picture News of 1918 stated that any …delicate odor can be wafted to any part of the house, such as incense for oriental scenes, clover and new mown hay when the setting reveals a country landscape at dusk, or any of the myriads of other combinations that may be suggested by the pictures being shown. Tentative experiments with perfume at the Rialto led to the installation of the fine new plant which promises a permanent innovation in pictures. Anonymous, 65

An advertisement for the Rivoli in the same issue reads “The Grandest, the Most Magnificent Temple Ever Erected to the Cinema GOD”. The Los Angeles Theatre was S. Charles Lee’s deliberate return to the baroque, and the interior of the movie palace recreated a Versailles in miniature. It opened on January 30, 1931 when it premiered Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. It had 2,200 seats and belongs to his ‘motion picture baroque period’. The theatre included: electric indicators that could monitor available seats; floor lights to guide patrons; sound proofed crying rooms for babies that shielded patrons from the noise; and ladies rooms with 16 private compartments and a periscope-like prism that showed the film on a second screen in the bathroom. While the experiential properties of these spaces evoked wonder, pleasure

294

Ndalianis

and an assault on the senses that conjured a quasi-spiritual experience akin to standing in front of the baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica, on the level of effect, the audience marvelled at the level of skill required to produce these architectural visions. In fact, picture palaces—while deliberately revisiting past architectural styles were examples of the latest in cutting edge technology and engineering. Relying on another baroque trait, these enormous structures were incredible virtuoso feats of modern engineering and high-end technology. In addition to their massive steel structures, the picture palaces were contemporary showcases for the possibilities of electricity. Thousands of lights lit the building exteriors making the buildings look like magical, otherworldly places that would transport visitors beyond the everyday. On the interior, thousands of lights provided sophisticated effects and mood lighting (one of the Warner Brothers cinemas, for example, had over 25,000 light contacts) and electricity also powered the new electric lifts and the massive refrigeration plants that provided the new innovations of air conditioning into the cinemas (see Silverman 12–3). The Great Depression that followed no longer made these largescale entertainment palaces and cathedrals feasible; thousands closed and were demolished in the 1960s and 70s to make way for parking lots and malls. But while they lasted, these cathedrals of the people created and maintained their deceptive fantasies that weaved the audience—even if briefly—into their magical worlds.

Jon Jerde, Entertainment Design and Event-Places: Designing Like a Filmmaker

The neo-baroque theatricalisation of space in our contemporary era is evident in so many examples of entertainment culture—special effects films, videogames, theme parks and the attractions they contain. But from the perspective of urban and architectural development this was to emerge in the mid1990s. One of the key figures was the Los Angeles-based architect Jon Jerde. Approaching urban design as a director who orchestrated what he calls urban scripted spaces, he was one of the key figures who spearheaded what’s come to be known as ‘entertainment design’, or ‘urban entertainment destinations’. The creative and technical prowess of entertainment has escaped the cinema and extended far beyond the ‘sidewalk’ of the picture palace and now occupies a wider section of the urban sphere. Such ‘experience’ architecture blends environmental design, media technology and narrative to create what Jerde

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

295

calls “event-places”. These projects continue a Hollywood special effects tradition of making places that are designed to theatricalise experience and remove us from everyday life by appealing to visceral interests. Jerde is especially concerned with the way humankind has been disengaged from a greater sense of community by the effects of modern urban planning and design. He saw cities as ruptured, urban wastelands surrounded by rings of suburban sprawl, which led to the loss of the communal experience. But, he argued, the communal experience is a designable event. (Jerde 1998, 7) Whereas Rome or Tokyo took hundreds, even thousands of years to ‘become’, Jerde believes that you can accelerate the process and create a film-set in which you can generate a community or, “instant worlds”. For Jerde (like Walt Disney before him) when you design architecture you design an urban script that is a conscious creation of communal urbanism. Jerde and the Jerde Partnership Group design urban architecture as if they are filmmakers. Reflecting many parallels with the bel composto or unity of arts typical of the baroque culture and arts of the C17th (see Ndalianis (2004) and Careri), Jerde functions as director and the production relies on the “co-creativity” of teams of professionals who, like the production of a blockbuster film and the earlier movie palaces, can include multiple companies (engineers, designers, landscapers, retail companies, special effects crews, etc.). Functioning like a film set, the architecture creates a theatrical film space that understands community members as performers. Add to this the fact that the entire urban space is littered with multiple screens—huge, medium and tiny—line the streets: outside as billboards, inside shops, in cinemas, and on consumers themselves who come armed with mobile phones or handhelds. Now, the social experience itself has become a performance. Jerde states: “we realized that the shopping centre was the last place left where American communal life existed” (1997, 9) and it was the mall that he revamped into a neo-baroque space. Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego (1985) revolutionized the mall typology as the first urban retail and entertainment environment of its kinds creating an urban space that resulted in the rejuvenation of an aging and unpopular city centre (Jerde 1998, 9). Horton Plaza is an urban place covering 4.5 million square meters. The six-block district houses specialty shops and restaurants, a multiscreen cinema, hotel, office space and an outdoor performing arts theater. Explicitly theatrical, it took retail drama to a new level of fantasy and exuberance. Jerde called Horton Plaza an urban theme park and, as in a theme park, Jerde condensed and juxtaposed images of urbanity from across time and space. Horton Plaza reveals Jerde’s love of alluding to past architectural forms, in particular, the Italian hill town and

296

Ndalianis

Venetian, Tuscan and Oriental architectural motifs and designs. Through a virtuoso display of intertextual revision, which emphasizes the performance of the architect-artist, Jerde literally created a theatre of the world by bringing bits of the world (Tuscany, Venice, etc.) into the urban entertainment destination’s microcosmic space. These spaces that evoke and bring together fragments from across the world become a source of sensory immersion: sights and sounds of architecture, media displays or a film/band; smells and tastes from food halls; and the touch and textural sensations conjured by food, mall sculptures, merchandise. Like the wunderkammer, which contained the wonders of the world in microcosmic form, the urban entertainment destination presents a similar theatre that is a virtuoso performance par excellence.

Scripted Spaces and Las Vegas

While initially predominating in California in the 1990s, the descendants of Urban Entertainment Destinations have spread worldwide. Many of the major corporate architectural firms in the u.s. and internationally have moved into entertainment-based design in the 1990s and have in-house design teams that include movie companies and small design practices. The concept of designing a theatre of the world now has a complex economic infrastructure to maintain it. Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles (figure 8) was opened 1993–1994 and similarly presents Jerde’s tendency to generate a collage of images and iconic signs from cities of the world—in this case, the City of Los Angeles. In the process, these public spaces become staged performances of the city in micro form. Universal CityWalk emphasises one of the key principles of the entertainment destinations, and this is concerned with the strategic creation of an environment that evokes a multiplicity of experiences. Contained within the Universal City complex are the studio complex, Universal’s headquarter buildings, the Universal tour and theme park, a shopping district, hotels, restaurants and other food stops, entertainments that include the mega cinemaplex, and nightclubs—and each of these experiences, in turn, has its own unique sensory attack to deliver to its audience. Jerde has constructed a spectacular micropolis within the larger metropolis of Los Angeles whose themes are entertainment, performance and spectacle. Universal City is, in a sense, the play about Los Angeles, within the play about the larger city of Los Angeles. Here the architecture has become like a film production creating a space where the community members are the actors writing, what he calls, scripted spaces that have their pre-generated mise en scène.

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

297

As Norman Klein explains, at the centre of what he calls the “electronic Baroque is illusion as a ‘scripted space’, where the walk is designed carefully, not unlike the levels on a computer game”. Discussing examples from baroque Rome, he states: Bernini helps us understand the purpose of these phantasmagoria. ‘To make of Time a thing stupendous’, he wrote. This could be understood not only as frozen allegory, a movement implied in an animated gesture, but also the pedestrian’s time: a walk past the fountain, the altar, under the dome, into the piazza. During this passage, a story unfolds, based on forced perspective, trompe l´oeil, what scholars call points of projection. In some cases, like the interiors designed by Andrea Pozzo in the early eighteenth century, marble disks were assigned, as vantage points, where the images would wane, reconnect, become more robust. Clearly, this is a kind of walk-through narrative. The paths are theatricalized to encourage “story”, but also to glorify the client—the Counter-Reformation or the monarch. The route seems less restricted, but still reminds pedestrians who is in charge, that the duke sanctioned all these choices. Klein n.p.

For Klein, Jerde’s spaces “are Baroque illusion that privileges the visitor’s walk, but also provides well for the corporate client. Instead of seventeenth-century mercantilism, we have franchise mercantilism, dominated by shopping mall developers who are increasingly allowed to plan sections of cities”. (n.p.) The picture palaces’ walls have collapsed, and the fantasies and magic they had to offer have become more integrated into the urban sphere. And like the picture palaces before them, the spectacles of these entertainment destinations are technologically driven by the same technology required to create entertainment media like films, computer games, film sets and theme park attractions. Relying on the latest in cutting edge technology they seduce the actors/consumers who inhabit their spaces. This is clear to an extreme degree in Jerde’s redevelopment of the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas, Nevada (1995), which epitomizes the links with Hollywood style spectacle and the multimedia experience. Encompassing four blocks of old Vegas city space, this mall is 600 meters in length, 30 meters wide and 30 meters high. The street blocks are unified by an enormous canopy—a sky parade of 2.1 million lights that are set into the Surface of the entire frame. Relying on 32 computers generate, the vaulted ceiling produces a film animated show that performs for viewers below several times a night. The 440,000-watt sound system and 160 speakers adds to the impact of the spectacle above, adding further drama

298

Ndalianis

that astounds the crowd, making them gape in wonder. It seems only appropriate that the Freemont Experience vault has been nick-named ‘celestial vault’ (Jerde 1998, 55), thus recalling the themes of transcendence found in the earlier movie palaces, and C17th palaces and churches before that. The Freemont Street experience brought to downtown Las Vegas an urban theatre and a new sensory experience that enacted, to cite Deleuze, a baroque seduction of the senses. Echoing the visceral and virtuosic environments and experiences of the movie theatres, Jerde claims that “As the world becomes more virtual, we reinforce the visceral. We use the language of the globe to reinforce primary relationships between humans” and “rich, experiential places that inspire and engage the human spirit”. Furthermore, he explains, “architects have, for the most part, been entranced by the static object to the detriment of the movable experience. What we do is design time” (Jerde 1997, 9). In the ‘celestial vault’ we feel this as we move, and as it moves; constructing our own stories of experience in the process, and editing our own views. Here, as in so many of these spaces, we replace both camera and actor as we navigate these technologically staged spaces and, all the while, the cameras of surveillance stage yet another performance as they survey us in this layered spectacle that becomes a play within a play. Jerde International was also commissioned by Steve Wynn to design the Bellagio as the “world’s finest hotel” and resort casino. The $1.9 billion Bellagio (which surrounds an eleven-acre, manmade lake on the former site of the legendary Dunes Hotel on the Strip in Las Vegas) opened in October 1998 (and is now owned by mgm). In the backdrop, the Bellagio Hotel/Casino stands majestically like a grand, high-rise palazzo, deliberately recalling the villas Carlotta, Melzi and Serbolloni—all of which find their home in the ‘real’ Bellagio in Northern Italy. Inside the Bellagio—the hotel/casino—a seasonal arrangement of flora of all varieties bombard the viewers’ senses with evocative scents and visuals that attempt to capture those found in aristocratic gardens throughout the Como district. However, it’s at the street level that the most sensational display occurs. Every half hour, the calm waters of the enormous artificial lake come to life, presenting the spectator with an audio-visual feast that could only take place on this scale in Las Vegas, or, more specifically, the Vegas Strip (figure 12.5). Here, a network of underwater pipes comprising over 1,200 nozzles and over 4,500 lights are responsible for the performance that is the Fountains of Bellagio—which again has its precedents in the aristocratic villa garden tradition of trick fountains which were popular in the C17th and C18th. Created by wet design, the fountains dance to meticulously ­choreographed routines that match the rhythms of tunes like Luck Be A Lady (Frank Sinatra),

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

Figure 12.5

299

The fountains of Bellagio designed by wet at the Bellagio, Las Vegas Architects: Jon Jerde, DeRuyter Butler and Atlandia Design. Opened October 15, 1998. Owner: Bellagio llc (subsidiary of mgm Resorts International). Photograph: Angela Ndalianis.

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Rachmaninov), Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly), and two songs that never fail to make me blubber like a baby, Con Te Partirò (Andrea Bocelli) and Ecstasy of Gold, the theme song to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Ennio Morricone). During these performances, hundreds flock around the lake, revelling at the spectacle of still water as it begins to magically take on a life of its own, spurting and swaying left and right, back and forth, up and down in perfect unison with the rhythms of music that erupts from the speakers that surround the lake. Truly understanding the significance of the word ‘climax’, during the songs’ finale, the mesmerizing power of this dancing fountain reaches new heights as hundreds of columns of water erupt hundreds of feet into the sky, synchronizing their movements to the melodies that seduce them with their rhythms. Like Caesars Palace before it, at the Bellagio, old and new, past and present collide. Functioning like an architectural palimpsest, the result is the creation of a microcosmic space that plucks pre-existing cities from diverse spatio-temporal zones, while simultaneously transforming their affective ­power—and that can only be the creations of our time.

300

Ndalianis

Steve Wynn and the Return of the Aristocratic Masses

In Learning from Las Vegas (published in 1972) Venturi et al welcomed the creation of this modern city that had abandoned connections with old-style European architectural and urban design; yet, since Las Vegas has succumbed to the era of conglomeration and entertainment culture (which includes mgm-­ Mirage owning a high percentage of the properties on the Strip) the ‘old-school’ architecture of an old world order has returned with a renewed vengeance, but with a different purpose. Las Vegas represents—in intensified form—the ways in which our urban environments and leisure experiences are transforming. On the Las Vegas Strip the city itself is the spectacle that is collected. While revealing our era’s distinct fascination with techno-spectacle and sensory encounters, it also interweaves experiences associated with ‘high culture’ with those of popular/entertainment culture. At the Bellagio, 18th century aristocratic villa designs comfortably share their space with hi-tech, obsessively surveyed gambling halls; at Caesars Palace, full-scale reproductions of Michelangelo’s David and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines are presented with no more or less pomp and display than the animatronic characters who perform the climactic events that lead to the fall of the ancient city of Atlantis (and which may then again be experienced as a simulation ride); and Steve Wynn’s collection of Impressionist and post-­ Impressionist paintings are displayed to the viewer in a similar way to the haute couture fashion and accessories that line the shopping arcades of the Wynn hotel and casino. Since the mob vacated Vegas in the 1970s-80s, corporations like mgm Mirage, Mandalay Resort Group, Wynn Resorts, and Harrahs have articulated new relationships between consumerism and the experiential. The old ‘all you can eat’, cheap-as-chips mentality has been replaced by an emphasis on exclusivity that owes a great deal to elite tastes and past traditions of collecting culture. Evident, for example, in: the imposing and grandiose retail entrances for Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel and Giorgio Armani at the Bellagio; the classicalinspired entrance to Gucci at Caesar’s Palace; or the grandiose Trevi Fountaininspired entrance to the Forum designer shops at Caesars Palace (figure 12.6). In an experience-based economy, goods and services are no longer enough: the new demand is for experiences. Spectacular architecture often blends with high-end retail design and entertainment media to create compelling “eventplaces” that appeal to visceral interests. As Klein argues, the Jerde city is more like the story boards for a movie. Inside this diachronic path, illusions (or simulacra) do not dissolve the story; they serve

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

Figure 12.6

301

Caesars Palace version of the Trevi Fountains outside the entrance to The Forum Shops (1992). Originally built in 1966 with renovations and extensions in 1974, 1979, 1992, 2001, 2005, 2011, 2015. Owned by Caesars Entertainment Corporation Photograph: Angela Ndalianis.

302

Ndalianis

as plot points in the movie script. What is the role of the viewer in this sculpted movie? For example, forty years ago, movie glamour implied a visit to a premiere, to be among the cognoscenti who first saw the finished product. Now, increasingly, the movie set itself has replaced the premiere. One is encouraged to shop inside a movie set. The consumer journey literally resembles a film shoot. More specifically, it resembles a special-effects movie: scripted spaces with illusionistic effects in which the audience is a central character. This is not a new strategy at all, more like the recovery of older scripted spaces. The consumer, like the baroque parishioner three hundred years ago, is the central character in a miniaturized epic of sorts… Here we see the tourist culture merging with a consumer-driven personalized daydream. (n.p.) The city of Las Vegas visualizes global, conglomerate driven, urban culture at its most intense point of obsession with the Experience Economy. In their seminal book The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argue that post-1980s global culture is driven by this new economy, and in “the Experience Economy every business is a stage, and therefore work is theatre”. (x) Tied into this theatre and is a deliberate, pre-fabricated performance created for the public, one that recalls the roles of “generic aristocracy” that dominated the movie palace era. Brian Lonsway explains that the architecture of the Experience Economy that typifies these urban destination places is an architecture of persuasion. “Yet unlike former persuasive architectures (from imperial monuments to sacred gathering places), the goal of this new architecture is to compel consumption of a material artifact—not honor of a royal or holy power” (1). But I’d argue that, instead, the concept of royalty and holiness has shifted, not disappeared. The experience economy according to Las Vegas is tied into traditions of collecting culture that dominated prior to the C19th. Ultimately, it was the wunderkammer that encapsulated the tastes and interests of its collector. Remnants of the private collection of the aristocrat and learned scholar are still present in these palatial wunderkammers, but, paralleling the strategies of early Hollywood, the roles of Francesco Medici, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and John Soane are now being performed both by the new conglomerate moguls and the masses they seduces into their architectural wonderlands. Steve Wynn is especially a case in point. Almost single-handed he has initiated the remodelling of Las Vegas since the 1980s. The Mirage, Treasure Island, the Bellagio, the Wynn and the revamping of old Vegas’ Freemont Street into the Freemont Experience (in which he played a key role) transformed Las Vegas into what it is today. The new Vegas moved away from the hotel/casino that was second to its spectacular sign on the Strip (the model Venturi

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

303

celebrated) into a model that understands the entire space of the casino as part of the experiential spectacle. While famously collecting great masterpieces worth millions—including Picasso’s La Rêve (a painting he just as famously stuck his elbow through accidentally)—and building each of his casinos obsessively and meticulously according to his personal tastes and desires (which are very much in the style of European palaces of the past), Wynn got where he is because he’s also a savvy businessman. Heading Wynn Resorts Ltd., he has a canny understanding of the service economy. Wynn understands only too well that he’s been able to cater to his tastes because of his ability to speak to the consumer, entertainment and leisure desires of the people who got him to the place he is today: performing like a modern day Medici. In the late C20th-early C21st, however, the role of private collector has expanded to also encompass the public collector. Visitors to Las Vegas can now all be modern day Medici. In embracing such a move, however, the logic that associates Wynn’s accumulated masterpieces, elite retail stores and palatial ‘abodes’ with individual and—by extension—corporate power is slippery and also shifts to accommodate the people Wynn and Wynn Resorts Ltd. service. The private collection has merged with the public sphere in radically remediated ways that are more in tune with contemporary consumer and leisure culture. And we, in a very real sense, create our own collection—one based on the consumer resources and entertainment experiences laid out before us. Again, this is integral to the spatial and architectural configurations that are typical of the Experience Economy. The spatio-temporal production of sites of experience correlates to brand (corporate) affiliation and repeat consumerism, but, what I find most fascinating about these spaces is the lessons they’ve learned from media fictions and spectacles. Las Vegas is a media city, a cinematic city—a spectopolis—and in this space “experiences are staged, performed, and executed according to script[s]” (Lonsway 11) that invite multisensory and cognitive engagement from the actors (the Vegas visitors). And this emphasis on performativity is integral both the baroque aesthetic and to the Experience Economy. The people as consumers are invited to perform the role of the new Royalty, but corporate moguls like Wynn who make the illusion possible always mediate this performance. In a sense, history has travelled a full loop back in time. As mentioned above, in 1655 Queen Christina of Sweden (who’d recently converted to Roman Catholicism) visited Rome. To celebrate her arrival and conversion, the Porta del Popolo was constructed (by Bernini) as her official entranceway into the city (figures 1 & 2). Deliberately modeled on the theatrical backdrops made famous by Palladio, on entering the Piazza del Popolo via the Porta, Queen Christina was transformed into a performer in a theatrical

304

Ndalianis

production. The city itself became the context of that performance. Urban life in Rome was theatre. Like the technological spectacles that can be experienced in Vegas, many of the grand entrances, corridors and sculptural arrangements that greet the visitor in Las Vegas deliberately mimic these royal arrivals, in the process acknowledging themselves as part of grand theatrical performances that service the demands of individual consumers. One of the most recent and dramatic of these is the entrance to the new Forum shops at Caesars Palace that reappropriate the Raphael’s Villa Farnesina. These are entranceways for the people. Urban life in Las Vegas has become theatre. With the rise of mass culture the modern museum and gallery a­ ppropriated aristocratic tropes, symbols and architectural styles to create reformulated p­alaces-as-museums for the people—often transforming royal residences like the Louvre into public spaces that collected art works that had previously been the domain of the upper classes. Las Vegas, on the other hand, collects iconic cities that return to a time past: corporations facilitate the construction of new palaces that address ‘the people’ not as part of a faceless mass, but as one of many unique individuals who fashion their own tastes and experiences according to the vast array of choices that Vegas lays out for them. This is the performance role granted to the masses. The cinema and entertainment experiences have frequently returned to a baroque-aligned visuality intent on producing wondrous spectacles through technological means. The 1950s, for example, attempted to renew this obsession with collapsing the frame through more intense and invasive spectacles that were generated through the invention of new widescreen, 3D, surround sound and other invasive film technologies and entertainment spaces, but the socio economic conditions of the period would not allow this to flourish (see Belton). However, more intensive eruptions of the baroque—such as the highly theatricalized architectural spaces of the movie palace era and contemporary Las Vegas, which are intent on conjuring astounding spectacles—are monuments to the continued presence and rearticulation of the baroque as neo-baroque. Since the beginning of the last century and well into the 21st century, Hollywood film studios and entertainment conglomerates have expanded our experience of the baroque in far-reaching ways that, I would argue, have marked our times as neo-baroque. Works Cited “Auditorium”. Some Enchanted Evenings: American Picture Palaces. American Studies, University of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/palace/auditorium.html.

Baroque Theatricality and Scripted Spaces

305

“Exteriors and Lobbies.” Some Enchanted Evenings: American Picture Palaces, American Studies, University of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/palace/auditorium .html. Anonymous. “Rivoli Opening Sets New Mark.” Motion Picture News, vol. xvii, no. 1, Jan. 5 1918, 65. Belton, John. Widescreen Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Calloway, Stephen. Baroque Baroque, the Culture of Excess. London: Phaidon, 1994. Careri, Giovanni. Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion. Introduction by Herbert Damish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993. Originally published 1988. Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: the ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. London: Zone Books, 1992. Originally published in 1934. Hall, Ben H. The Best Remaining Seats: the Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1961. Jerde, Jon Adams. “Capturing the Zeitgeist”, in Wayne Hunt, Urban Entertainment Graphics: Theme Parks and Entertainment Environments. New York: Madison Square Press, 1997: 9–13. ———. Jerde Partnership International: Visceral Reality. Rome: l’Arca Edizioni, 1998. Jones, Janna. Southern Movie Palace: Rise, Fall and Resurrection. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Kaufmann, Preston K. Fox, the Last Word… Story of the Worlds’ Finest Theater. Pasadena: Showcase Publications, 1979. Marin, Louis (and Anna Lehman). Classical, Baroque: Versailles, or the Architecture of the Prince. Yale French Studies. No. 80, 1991: 167–182. Molinari, Cesare. Le Nozze degli Dei: un Saggio sul Grande Spettaccolo Italiano nel Seicento. Rome: Mario Bulzoni, 1968. Naylor, David. American Picture Palaces: the Architecture of Fantasy. Prentice Hall Press: New York, 1981. Naylor, David. Great American Movie Theaters. Washington: The Preservation Press, 1987. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque and Contemporary Entertainment. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004. Ndalianis, Angela. “Architektur und Rhetorische Inszenierung”, in Design als Rhetorik, eds Gesche Joost and Arne Scheuermann. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2008, pp. 191–203. Pine, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre And Every Business A Stage, Goods & Services Are No Longer Enough. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

306

Ndalianis

Silverman, Stephen M. The Last Remaining Seats: Movie Palaces of Tinseltown. Pasadena: Navigator Press, 1997. Valentine, Maggie. The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: an Architectural History of the Movie Theatre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Vollmer, Deenah. Loew’s Paradise Theater. Place Matters: a Joint Project of City Lore and the Municipal Art Society. http://www.placematters.net/node/1310. Witt, Mary Ann Frese. Metatheater and Modernity Baroque and Neobaroque. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013.

chapter 13

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque: Reinterpreting Baroque Reality and Beauty in Contemporary Architectural Design Marjan Colletti In the last few decades, a quantum leap in computing power and availability, flexibility and adaptability of computer-aided design (cad) software packages has made computers indispensable to architecture. Digital and calculative processes are to architecture students and practitioners more than common fashion or cool gadgetry. 2D (two-dimensional) drafting tools, 3D (three-­ dimensional) modelling techniques and rp (rapid-prototyping) technologies, 4D (four-dimensional) animation and simulation protocols, as well as synchronized robotic systems lie at the core of the theorization (of aesthetics, for example) and the manifestation (of practice, for instance) of contemporary architecture. In my own practice as designer, educator and researcher, I have embraced the digital paradigm shifts, too. In my design-research, and through researchled education, I attempt to contextualize the recent development of computational tools, digital fabrication technologies and simulation methods in architecture not in terms of subject matter or technique, but as cultural catalyst in altering the understanding of reality—of aesthetics and design in present-day society; a society that by now can be described as ‘post-digital’. After the first infatuation with virtual reality, cyberspace and disembodied architectures, there has been much more emphasis on the hybridization between digital, analogue, biological and artificial media, spaces and technologies. The research presented here reflects on a key book about the baroque published 100 years ago: Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915), in which he studies and characterizes the differences between the baroque and the Renaissance. One century later, it seems that a revived understanding of a neo-baroque idea of reality and aesthetics has been endorsed (e.g. Kaup, Ndalianis, Egginton, Lambert, Calabrese and others). This collection of essays, for example, provides evidence for the impact of a neo-baroque mentality and style across various disciplines. I would confidently state that post-digital architecture is also neo-baroque in essence. It puts principles against the tenets of Modernism similar to those baroque values that Wölfflin presented against

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324350_018

308

Colletti

the Renaissance. For example, post-digital design presents formal (in Wölfflin’s terms: ‘decorative’) and performative (‘imitative’) mannerisms (Wölfflin 227), that were unknown, alien, simply awkward or even horrific to Modernist and Postmodernist aesthetics: such as, figurative ornamentation, decoration by machinic fabrication and material intelligence by computation. In order to elaborate on post-digital neo-baroqueness in more depth, I appropriate Wölfflin’s five antithetical ‘pairs of concepts’ (Wölfflin 14) introduced to position and classify the traits of baroque art and architecture as opposed to Renaissance classicism. All five concepts seem to intriguingly and accurately describe and comment on apparently similar present-day architectural changes and challenges in the 21st century: linear vs painterly, plane vs recession, closed (tectonic) vs. open (a-tectonic) form, multiplicity vs unity, and clearness (absolute clearness) vs. unclearness (relative clearness). Furthermore, I will link Wölfflin’s pairs of concepts with more contemporary terms such as straight vs convoluted, 2D/3D vs 3D/4D, solids vs fields, collage vs gradients and order vs adaptability.

Linear vs. Painterly or Straight vs. Convoluted

For Wölfflin, the classically aligned Renaissance representation used lines, contours, edges and boundaries to depict the world, whilst baroque art represented its subject matter by appearance, focussing on vacillating surfaces, folds, volumes, masses, colour and light. The shift from analogue to digital drafting has enabled designers, architects and artist to predict materials, shapes and spaces with a much higher degree of feedback. cad software packages can handle complex geometric, physical and atmospheric instances extremely well: whether it is about modelling a convoluted 3D form with very detailed surface ornamentation or about simulating photorealistic lights and textures. Designers are no longer restricted to depict the outline, the silhouette of an object or building, but can control ‘painterly’ parameters such as textures, ­colours, reflectivity, transparency and so on. This 3D drawing of a convoluted wall—Digital Delicatessen ii, Foldsteria (figure 13.1)—explores an archetypical digital item: a smooth and continuous geometry (Deleuze and Guattari). In this post-digital rendition, the complex geometry of the topology matters more than the outline of the wall, which could be a simple rectangle. The object has been designed as a continuum, but with three degrees of folding in mind to break the readability of the geometry towards a neo-baroque vacillating surface: macro folds depict the geometry, regular folds construct shelves of various sizes and micro folds describe the surface’s texture.

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque

Figure 13.1

309

Digital Delicatessen ii, Foldsteria (2012). Design: Marjan Colletti. Digital media

A major contribution of the baroque to architecture was the introduction of dynamism to the geometric and tectonic vocabulary of the discipline; for example the curve, the ellipse, the sinuous line. Such improved understanding of complex geometries becomes evident in typically baroque anamorphic projections and folded topologies. Similarly, digital design embraces the potentialities of cad software packages to construct and animate flowing nurbs (non-uniform rational B-Splines), meshes and polygon geometries. The exhibition wall and a table Molly Wally (figure 13.2) echo this aim to produce such dynamic forms by fabricating a series of thick, volumetric folded membranes are out of several layers of foam attached to a Medium-density fibreboard (mdf) structure. In addition, the client requested that the design recalled ice and snow formations. We responded to such ‘painterly’ wish by trying to achieve snow-like smoothness and softness out of the white foam, as well as recreating within the folds the light blue coloration typical of glacial crevices.

310

Colletti

Figure 13.2  Molly Wally (2010). Design: marcosandmarjan. Collaborators: Hubert Ducroux, Sébastien Tabourin, Camille Tenart, Tze-Chun Wei. Flipped-milled foam with notched mdf structure, approx. 4200/3000/1800 mm, exhibited at the 350th Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition, Royal Festival Hall, and the Slade Galleries, ucl London uk. Client: the ice group, London Centre for Nanotechnology & Department of Chemistry, University College London ucl. Fabrication: Grymsdyke Farm. Sponsoring: Grymsdyke Farm Photography: Marjan Colletti.



Plane vs Recession or 2D/3D vs 3D/4D

Wölfflin argues that in contrast to the classical construction of perspective by static, stratified, parallel planes (to each other and to the picture frame), the baroque acquires dynamism and depth. It achieves this by exaggerating diagonal, ‘forward and backward relations’ (Wölfflin 73), colour and chiaroscuro zones. I would argue that 2D, 3D and 4D cad techniques similarly evade the flatness and planarity of traditional architectural drawings: the drafting board has been replaced by the computer, which offers a much more immersive virtual space. Orthographic drawings (plans, sections, elevations) have been superseded by 3D models and 4D graphical algorithm editing, scripting, coding, Building Information Modelling (bim) techniques and physics simulations: in addition to space, programmes can now integrate time-based parameters to animated

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque

311

Figure 13.3  Digital Delicatessen ii, S-Cannelures (2012). Design: Marjan Colletti. Digital media.

models, adding more depth to the settings by including material and atmos­ pheric parameters. Compared to a sheet of paper, the computer-­generated space is dynamic. It allows the user to navigate it by constantly changing viewport, panning, rotating, zooming in and out—comprehending in much more depth all the interior and exterior facets of the design. The 3D drawing Digital Delicatessen ii, S-Cannelures (figure 13.3) plays with exaggerating the helical Solomonic (or Barley-sugar) column, twisting and accelerating its s-curved cannelures (the grooves running lengthwise on columns). Focussing on a dynamic interior space, the eye is drawn up (or into) a receding and immersive space. Its geometric complexity would be impossible to be orthographically represented two-dimensionally; it requires a cad programme to be visualized. In Greek mythology the Chimera was a monstrous fire-breathing creature. She had the body of a lioness, a tail ending in a snake’s head, and a goat’s head arising on her back at the centre of her spine. In genetics, biology and botany a Chimera represents an animal or plant with genetically distinct cells from two different zygotes or genetically different types of tissue; the resulting organism is a mixture of tissues, and of different sets of chromosomes. From its ­distinct

312

Colletti

Figure 13.4  aRC(2)himera (2012). Design: Marjan Colletti, Guan Lee, Tea Lim, and Pavlos Fereos, with students of Bartlett MArch gad RC2, ucl. Milled foam and notched lasercut Perspex structure, approx. 5000/2700/1700 mm, produced for and exhibited at By All Means—Analogue/Digital Experimental Settings at the Haus der Architektur, Graz Austria. Manufacturing: Grymsdyke Farm. Sponsoring: Mrs. M. Lim, Grymsdyke Farm. Fabrication: Grymsdyke Farm Photography: © thomasraggam.com.

sets of digital chromosomes and analogue chromosomes evolved aRC(2) himera (figure 13.4): a ‘monstrous’ mix-up of various design approaches that went from developing skin morphologies, structure anatomies, ornamental textures, coral growth scripts, steampunk aesthetics and flocking simulations. Potentially outrageous and horrific to a modernistic eye—as it is neither linear nor pure, nor truthful or correct (process-wise), such a monstrous Frankensteinian approach, the relative grotesqueness of the piece and the excessive complexity of assembly (if completed, it stopped at 80%, it would have been made of 7200 knots, 600 triangles, 90 m2 skin, 20 pieces of Perspex, 7200 mini laser bits, 1200 joints, 350 rubber bands and 14400 metal pins) are quintessentially neo-baroque.

Closed (Tectonic) vs Open (A-tectonic) Form or Solids vs Fields

In Wölfflin’s understanding the baroque open form is a ‘limitless form’. Rather than posing in a ‘self-contained’ composition, this form is intentionally, or

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque

313

Figure 13.5  Digital Delicatessen i, Metallika iv (2010). Design: Marjan Colletti. Digital media.

casually, framed and cut out of the larger, visible world. (Wölfflin 124, 127) If we ­extrapolated this scenario to the figure of the contemporary digital architect, we would encounter a character that truly believes in the advantages, and necessities, of inter-disciplinary work: whether it relates to infiltrating and borrowing from philosophy or mathematics, chemistry and biology, architecture in the 21st century spills over and beyond its frame. Consequently, architecture has widened its vocabulary beyond tectonic Platonic Solids and architectural orders. Digital Delicatessen i, Metallika iv (figure 13.5) ‘simulates’ such dynamic 4D field. It is generated by a bespoke 3,5D modelling techniques that approaches and simulates, albeit not resulting from, 4D dynamic systems. In its open form, it flirts with digital and post-digital geometrical formations, such as fields, blobs and metaballs, vector fields, parametric topologies, nurbs surfaces, tessellated meshes, fractal geometries, recursive scripts, particle flows, agentbased systems, fluid dynamics and growth simulations and highly articulated textures that are more open and formally a-tectonic. Algae-Cellunoi (figure  13.6) is an ornamental wall structure designed for external use. It is composed of a field of numerous cellular foam components with multiple patterns, gaps and crevices. The overall layout results from a

314

Colletti

Figure 13.6  Algae-Cellunoi (2013). Design: marcosandmarjan and Guan Lee, with Richard Beckett. Collaboration: Olivia Pearson, Emu Masuyama, Jessie Lee, Keith McDonald, Jonas Brazys, Cullum Perry. Milled foam and soft 3D Rapidprototyped algae vessels wall installation, 4000/2000/165 mm, produced for and exhibited at 9th archilab—Naturalizing Architecture, frac Centre, Orleans France. Algae technology: Marin Sawa with Nixon Group and Hellgardt Group (Imperial College); Richard Beckett (ucl). Sponsoring: Bartlett School of Architecture ucl; Grymsdyke Farm; Innsbruck University. Fabrication: Grymsdyke Farm; dmc London Photography: Marjan Colletti. Collection: frac collection.

computational Voronoi pattern that determined the size and complexity of each cell. (In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram partitions a plane into sections; in computer imaging it refers to the creation of organic models that are partitioned). A ­sequence of lofted surfaces follows a gradient of punctuated lines and indentations. They vary according to the geometric inclination of each surface (similar to growth layouts in sea barnacles and shells) and the digitally controlled and manipulated machining milling path of each cellular component. The prototype represents a framed piece of larger, visible façade system that would interface architecture with nature. A variety of Objet 3D rp printed flasks host liquid algae, but if installed outdoors, each cellular component would be seeded with terrestrial algae (Neochloris texensis, a soil based algae

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque

315

Figure 13.7  Digital Delicatessen, Metallika iii—DigiRokoko (2011). Design: Marjan Colletti. Digital media.

of the Neochloris genus and Trentepohlia) that grow in the ridges between the components.

Multiplicity vs Unity or Collage vs Gradients

Modern and postmodern architecture (Deconstructivism included) achieved spatial complexity by means of collaging multiplicitous independent parts. On the contrary, 1990s and 21st century digital geometries liquefy. The transitions between tectonic entities melt down into continuous, smooth, complex topologies and geometries. Columns become (in very Deleuzian terms) walls

316

Colletti

Figure 13.8  The Plantolith (2013). Design: Marjan Colletti. 3D silica sand print 1700/1000/200 mm, approx. 250 kg, produced for and exhibited at the 3D Printshow 2013 at The Business Design Centre, London uk. Sponsoring: ExOne Digital Part Materialization. Fabrication: ExOne Digital Part Materialization Photography: Marjan Colletti.

that turn into ceilings that merge with roofs that branch out into pathways that fuse with the topography. Increased elegance, smoothness and liquidity, but also grotesqueness, roughness and permeability is achieved by gradients and patternization, which help define continuous transformation from one condition to another, for example by coloration, texturization or fenestration (rather than from the 2D design of the façade). Here, as in the baroque, ‘the part, as an independent value, is swallowed up in the whole’. (Wölfflin 125) On another level, it is argued that digital design is targeting and rediscovering a globalist approach in aesthetic as well as commercial terms: a global, international style very much like the baroque—the first style to have worldwide impact. (Schumacher)

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque

317

The rendering in Digital Delicatessen, Metallika iii—DigiRokoko (Figure 13.7) explores how pluri-symmetric aggregation and agglomeration can result in semi-ordered formations. The 3D drawing depicts a 2,5D metallic gate, where the ornamental form becomes the object. Such liberation of ornamental features from their host surface (i.e. stucco from a wall) suggests late baroque or almost rococo features. The metal implies the fascination of architecture with steel, and of the decorative arts with gilding. In geometric terms, plants and monoliths stand at the opposite sides of the spectrum. The first are growing, complex, multi-layered and convoluted systems, whilst the latter are static, homogeneous, heavy objects. Digital modelling techniques and 3D printing technologies allow the hybridization of the two. The Plantolith (figure 13.8) represents such a possible geometric hybrid. The complex, multi-layered geometry imitates, simulates and mimics natural processes, not collaging but blurring the boundaries between tectonic elements and natural forms. At the same time, due to fabrication constraints, all multiplicitous elements must be fused together to achieve a printable file to be processed by a large-scale 3D rp machine, which chemically binds ­material, gradually and layer by layer, into the final uni-material monolith out of silica sand.

Clearness (Absolute Clearness) vs Unclearness (Relative Clearness) or Order vs Adaptability

The baroque ‘avoids the acme of clarity’, writes Wölfflin, underlining that ‘beauty no longer resides in the fully apprehensible clarity at all’. (Wölfflin 198) Forms ‘look like something changing, becoming’. (Wölfflin 222) D ­ eleuzian philosophy and its frequently baroque informed logic has been of paramount influence on digital theory and conceptual processes such as ‘becoming’, ‘smooth spaces’, and ‘rhizome’; it is the infatuation with open forms but also unclear, indeterminate, approximated, uncertain, vague or ‘anexact’ (Lynn 141) yet rigorous forms, systems and models that characterize digital and computational architecture. But these concepts do not proclaim the death of form; rather, they propose a new, more flexible, adaptable and performative version of it. In the words of Umberto Eco, form becomes ‘a field of p­ ossibilities’. (Eco 102–103) Digital Delicatessen ii, 3D Arabesque (figure  13.9) depicts a fuzzy space: only partly defined enclosure, open boundaries, approximative structural ­volumetric elements that may or may not be accessed, vague definition of a x/y/z coordinate system to identify verticality and horizontality, i­ ndeterminate materiality, and ambiguous geometries. It is baroque in its ‘unclarity’ and

318

Colletti

Figure 13.9  Digital Delicatessen ii, 3D Arabesque (2013). Design: Marjan Colletti. Digital media.

e­ xpanding openness, and also attempts to give shape to Deleuze’s concept of becoming. Xenobaroque: Stereoscopic? (figure  13.10) endeavours to push 3D rp to its limits. In fact, no other technique or technology could materialize (make become) such a convoluted shape. The alien form, at first value totally random and unclear, has been created by lofting a single surface through a series of shape-­defining circles positioned in space. The geometry is repeated twice for structural reasons—to have the 3D arabesques intersect and lean upon each other—but also in order to play with the (here faked) doubling-up effect known from 3D movies, hence the title Stereoscopic? Furthermore, this strategy vaguely borrows and re-interprets some of the classical ornaments and embellishments in music, such as the ‘Appoggiatura’ [from Ital. appog­giare, to lean upon], the ‘Acciaccatura’ [from Ital. acciaccare, to crush], the ‘Glissando’, the ‘Schleifer’, trill, the mordent, the turn, which were extensively used in the baroque period. neo-baroque post-digital possibilities are plentiful: foremost such paradigm shifts in architecture are not only reactive to changes in society but are

Artist’s Essay: Post-digital Neo-Baroque

319

Figure 13.10  Xenobaroque: Stereoscopic? (2013). Design: Marjan Colletti. 3D Selective Laser Sintered print 300/300/300 mm, exhibited at the 3D Printshow 2013 at The Business Design Centre, London uk. Sponsoring: Fabrication: dmc London Photography: Marjan Colletti.

­ roactive towards the production of cultural transformations such as the way p we design, produce and place buildings into the environment. My own theoretical and design work featured here is an endeavour to promote architecture not as technical studies, but as one of the most contemporary, dynamic and synthetic models of intelligence; neo-baroque in essence but stylistically and formally unique and independent. Hence, I am not arguing for an eclectic pastiche and recycling of baroque elements, but for a radically new phase of post-digital architectural production that can capitalize on 30 or more years of research on digital mannerism and formalism. neo-baroque post-digitality may possibly be a whim, a capriccio, but to my eyes it is truly a spectacle, a meraviglia.

320

Colletti

Works Cited Calabrese, Omar. L’età neobarocca, Bari: Laterza, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, [1987] 2004. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Introduction by David Robey. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989. Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: the ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Kaup, Monika. Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film. Charlottsville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Lambert, Gregg. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005. Lynn, Greg. Folds, Bodies & Blobs—Collected Essays. Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 1998. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque and Contemporary Entertainment. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004. Schumacher, Patrik. The Autopoiesis of Architecture. A New Agenda for Architecture. Volumes 1 and 2. John Wiley & Sons, New York 2012. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Trans. M.D Hottinger. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Reprint of the English translation of the 7th German ed. 1929.

Index 17th century 2, 3, 10, 15, 16, 31, 34, 37, 39, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 59, 60, 65, 72, 82, 86, 137, 161, 162, 182n6, 187, 200, 228, 249n18, 254, 255, 256, 257, 261, 263, 272, 278, 283, 286, 295, 298 See also Baroque 2D (two-dimensionality) 60, 79, 80, 123, 307, 308, 310, 315 3D (three-dimensionality) 60, 71, 79, 80, 84, 123, 126, 229, 304, 307, 308, 310, 311, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319 4D (four-dimensionality) 319, 320, 322, 325 Abattoir Fermé 28, 48, 49, 64, 65–71, 72 Abre los Ojos (Amenábar 1997) 180 ‘absolute staging’ 33, 34, 36, 42 Adorno, Theodor W. 32, 33, 36, 42 Aleijadinho 119, 120, 164, 169, 172, 174 Alemán Valdés, Miguel 257, 258, 273 Algae-Cellunoi (2013) (wall art) 313–314 Alien (Scott, 1979) 49 Almodóvar, Pedro 4 Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979) 61 Arapere, Reweti 132 Asturias, Miguel Ángel 141, 142, 144 Baciccio 288 Bagnall, Catherine 133 Balbuena, Bernado de 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259–270, 271–277 La grandeza Mexicana (1604) Baroque 17th century 10, 15, 48, 49, 161, 187, 249n18,254, 255, 256, 257, 261, 263, 272, 278, 286, 295 as adjective 154 aesthetics 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 32, 33, 51, 63, 76, 89, 90, 92, 100, 111, 120, 139, 142, 161, 179, 186, 189, 204, 278, 286, 303, 315 and the Age of Reason 144 ancient art 107 as allegory 100, 106, 139, 175, 207, 278, 288

architecture 33, 103, 105, 108, 119, 138, 173, 243, 284, 287, 292, 308, 309 art and the visible 52, 54, 55, 59, 60, 62, 70, 87, 102, 123, 133, 171, 176, 207, 255, 304, 308 art critics, eighteenth century 123 as artistic category 100 balustrade 9, 12, 231, 238, 248 Brazilian 102, 102n2, 138, 164, 168, 169 and Chaos theory 14, 123 churrigueresco 102, 143, 248, 264 concept 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 27, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 60, 61, 62, 64, 69, 92, 100, 101, 121, 139, 142, 143, 161, 264, 269, 285, 316 culture and cultural practice 52–53, 295 as cultural transfer 6–8, 166 colonial churches 132, 155, 247 contemporary 123, 179, 183, 231 counter conquest 17, 20, 164, 255 decorative 31, 32, 155, 173, 248, 272 definition 50–53, 108, 144, 263 dialectic 12, 18, 103, 250, 275 display and staging 33, 138, 160, 162, 163, 168, 177 early modern 53, 65, 72 effet du réel 56, 59 electronic 186, 228, 297 and Enlightenment 150, 255 ethos 13, 27, 34, 36, 37, 38, 42–43, 103, 143 European 19, 34, 42, 81, 167, 231, 255 excess, exuberance, extravagance 11, 77, 108, 51, 77, 108, 142, 228, 272, 277, 279, 287 exhibitions 2, 208 fabrication of film 81, 82, 87 folds, enfolding 28, 77, 85–87, 89–91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98 form and formlessness 91, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 112, 118, 161, 168, 283, 286, 289, 312 French, in France 28, 56, 57, 64, 238 German, in Germany 123, 188 Hispanic 1, 13, 14, 246

322 Baroque (cont.) historical 5–6, 11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 28, 31, 50, 52, 53–59, 61, 64, 69, 70, 84, 86, 90, 107, 108, 132, 137, 138, 160, 161, 174, 166, 176, 179, 180, 182, 186, 187, 189, 191, 192, 200, 202, 204, 255, 283, 285, 286, 287 and horror film 57 hyperreal 59 iconography, characteristics 83, 90, 111, 138, 186 identity 38, 46 illusion 275, 297 immersion 49, 50, 56, 59, 62, 70, 71 installations 61 inter- and metamediality 49, 51, 52, 59–61, 97 intertextuality 101, 118, 259, 262, 296, 270 Latin American 7, 13, 20, 28, 38, 42, 49, 101, 142, 143, 168, 208, 209, 238, 248, 278 life and death 85 liminality 49, 50 literature 3, 164, 264 and Mannerism 50, 53, 54, 263, 264 and the ‘marvelous real’ 138, 141, 142, 143, 145, 148, 152, 153, 157 mass media 192 metatheatricality 28, 48, 50, 53, 292 metaphysical 95, 142 Mexican, in Mexico 102, 256, 272, 277 mimesis 70 and modernity 17, 18, 36, 102, 120, 189, 228, 276, 279 monads 94 multilinear logic 117 multiplicity 19, 134 New World 254, 255, 256, 263, 264, 269, 272, 276, 278 and neo-baroque 1, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15–16, 19, 20, 21, 27, 28, 48, 70, 100, 138, 142, 144, 146, 166, 176, 180, 182, 259, 262, 270, 304 open form 316 opposition with classicism 100, 101, 111, 130 ornamentalism 31, 32, 33, 230, 231 pagan antiquity 111 paradigm shift 137 paradoxic nature 53–59 and Pathos formula 111 as phenomenon 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 28, 50, 51, 77, 238, 246, 254

Index plurality 1, 14 poetry 259, 262, 263, 272, 275 Portuguese 171 Postdramatic theatre 62, 63, 64, 65 pre-classical 51 and the Renaissance 107, 133, 238, 307 representation of baptism 207 Roman 107, 170 scenography 228 sculpture 120, 143 self-reflexivity 51, 53, 56, 64, 71, 138, 146 and the senses 56, 76, 81, 298 seriality 49, 51 social and political resistance 116 Spanish, in Spain 188n16, 238, 249, 250, 286 spatial limits 227, 254 spectacle and the spectacular 68, 72, 283, 286, 293 and the spectator 61, 62, 63 strategies 189–191, 201, 288 style 100, 107, 109, 110, 121, 123, 263, 286 and surrealism 138, 141 and technology 63 texture and tactility 76, 80, 87, 89, 90, 96, 97 textiles and fabric 84, 85, 87, 96, 97 theatre 49, 62, 72 theatricality 32, 33, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 138, 160, 190, 283, 286 transcultural 117, 161, 254 transhistorical 27, 28, 48, 85, 161, 249n18, 254, 262, 272 urban cultures 231 viceregal period 228 virtuoso 294, 296 ‘Viscontian’ 28, 104, 106, 112 visual-tactility 28, 81, 83 West Africa 144 See also 17th century; mannerism; Neo-Baroque; metatheatre; transcultural; transhistorical Baudrillard, Jean 185n, 190 Bellagio Hotel 240, 241, 298, 299, 300, 302 Benjamin, Walter 3, 10, 11, 18, 20, 106, 121, 139, 201n24, 202, 203n27, 207 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 32, 51, 59, 81, 82, 83, 86, 90, 98, 228, 283, 284 fig. 12.1, 297, 303 Bustamante, Francisco de 44

323

Index Building Information Modelling (bim) 310 Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) 186 Bruno, Giuliana 87 Caesars Palace 162, 299, 300, fig.12.6, 304 Calabrese, Omar 15, 16, 19, 49, 101, 255, 307 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 10n7, 33, 139, 187, 188, 292 capitalism 20, 120, 200, 205, 215, 257, 258, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272 Catholicism 37, 38, 42, 137, 153, 167, 238, 303 Caravaggio 2, 4, 51, 54fig2.1, 83, 86, 92, 167 Carpentier, Alejo 3, 4, 7, 11, 137–138, 140–153 Concierto barroco (1974) 7 Césaire, Aimé 143, 147 Certeau, Michel de 273 Cervantes, Miguel de 31, 137, 139 Chaplin, Charlie 104, 293 Cinema Novo 28, 103, 104, 106, 112 Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) 118 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977) 49 Colletti, Marjan 21, 228 Digital Delicatessen I, Metallika iii (2010) (digital media) 315, 316fig13.7 Digital Delicatessen I, Metallika iv (2010) (digital media) 313 Digital Delicatessen ii, Foldsteria (2012) (3D drawing) 308, 309fig13.1 Digital Delicatessen ii, S-Cannelures (2012) (digital media) 311 aRC(2)himera (2012) (sculpture) 312 Digital Delicatessen ii, 3D Arabesque (2013) (digital art) 317–318 The Plantolith (2013) (3D sand print) 315, 317fig13.8 Xenobaroque: Stereoscopic? (2013) 318–319 Colonialism and colonial era and architecture 169, 174, 241, 247 cultural 238 Brazilian 138, 160, 167, 172, 177 and the Church 116 colonial cities 34, 43 concept 27, 102, 103, 114, 115 de- 209 French 238 Iberian 255 in Latin America 113, 242

in Mexico 123, 238 neo- 160, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 231, 236, 240, 241, 245, 278 Portuguese 177 post- 12, 27, 137 Spanish 120, 228, 238, 240, 241, 267, 269 See also Baroque computer-aided design (cad) 307, 308, 309, 310, 311 Contemporáneos 256, 257, 279 Counter Reformation 42, 137, 228, 255, 297 Cronenberg, David 180, 181n4, 192, 193, 198–201 Dark City (Proyas, 1998) 180 Debord, Guy 20, 227, 246, 247, 250 De Campos, Haroldo 3, 176 De la Flor, Fernando R. 3, 10, 250 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 12–13, 28–29, 59, 76–86, 89–92, 94–96, 98, 123, 134, 293, 298, 305, 308, 318, 320 De Matos, Gregório 4, 176n11 De Mille, Cecil B. 286 Denis, Claire 28, 76–98 Trouble Every Day (2001) 28, 76–98 De Zumárraga, Juan 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45 Diamonds are Forever (Hamilton, 1971) 240 Diego, Juan 39, 40, 45 Disneyland 284 Disney, Walt 295 D’Ors, Eugenio 11, 142, 209 Dürer, Albrecht 216, 217n, 219, 220 Eberson, John 287, 288, 298 Echeverría, Bolíar 11n8, 12, 13, 17, 27, 28, 102, 103, 116, 120, 231, 248 Eco, Umberto 317 Egginton, William 3, 10, 11, 18, 51, 62, 63, 65, 189, 190, 91, 201, 285 Enlightenment 17, 30, 144, 150, 255, 278 entertainment 16, 49, 161, 162, 175, 176, 179, 183, 186, 189, 199, 204, 205, 228, 244, 261, 286, 291, 294, 297, 300, 303, 304 See also Hollywood; Neo Baroque; mass media and mass culture; Urban Entertainment Destinations eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999) 192, 198–204 Experience Economy 302, 303

324 Fairbanks, Douglas 286, 293 Focillon, Henri 161, 283 Fox Film Corporation 289 Fox Theatre 287, 289, Fox, William 288, 289, 290fig12.4 Freemont Experience 298, 302 Fuentes, Carlos 4, 117n 10 Fuentes, Julio 119, 121 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 5, 6, 8 Gallonio, Antonio 57, 58 Godard, Agnès 76, 82 Godard, Jean Luc 104, 194 Góngora, Sigüenza y 256 Gracián 4, 33 Greenaway, Peter 4 Griffith, D.W. 286 Intolerance (1926) 286 Grimmelshausen 184n10, 188 guadalupanism 27, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44 The Hangover (Philips, 2009) 240 Hispanic Baroque Project 1, 5, 22 Hogarth, William 216n5, 217, 219, 220, 221 Hollywood 101, 104, 194, 202, 203, 283, 286, 302, 304 and Baroque 283 movie palaces 284, 285 style and aesthetic 194, 286, 297 studio system 285, 288, 293 visual effects 295, 297 Jerde, Jon 228, 243, 294–296, 297, 298, 299, 300 Kuhn, Thomas S. 137, 183 Küpper, Joachim 3, 10n7 La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960) 119 Lamb, Thomas W 287, 289, 290fig12.4 Las Vegas 162, 175n, 227, 228, 230, 238, 240, 241fig10.9, 242, 243, 244, 245, 248, 250n20, 283, 285, 288, 296, 297, 298, 299fig12.5, 300, 302, 303, 304 Lee, Jae Hoon 131 Root (2011) (digital photography) 131fig5.4A-B Lee, S. Charles 286, 287, 293 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 12, 76, 77, 85, 86, 94, 96

Index Lepage, Robert 4 Lezama Lima, José 3, 7n4, 11n8, 17, 20, 30, 154, 255, 264 Lonsway, Brian 302, 303 Los Angeles 227, 227, 283, 286, 293, 294, 296 Louis xiv 288, 292 Louis xvi 242, 290 Loew Marcus 287, 288 Luhmann, Niklas 180, 181, 182, 183, 189, 201, 246 Lynch, David 69 Inland Empire (2006) 69 Maffesoli, Michel 1–2 Magro, Bruno Simôes 163, 171 Mahon, Patrick 139 Water & Tower Allegory (2012–2013) (installation series) 139, 210–216 Shipwreck Study (2013) (installation) 217–218 Voyager (2014) (installation series) 218–219 Study: The Times (2014) (digital photograph) 220, 221 Submersible (Hogarth) (2014) (installation) 220–221 mannerism 50, 53, 100n1, 263, 264, 308, 319 Maravall, José A. 3, 7, 8, 20, 182n6, 183, 189, 250 Marks, Laura 49, 77, 80, 81, 82 Marx, Karl 8, 37, 184 mass media and mass culture 16, 161, 176, 179, 180–182, 183, 189, 204 See also Baroque; entertainment culture; Hollywood Mayer, Louis B. 286 Meirelle, Victor 116, 167 Primeira Missa no Brasil (1861) 116 Metatheatricality 11, 28, 48, 49, 50, 53, 59, 62, 63, 70, 71, 292 Mexico City 4, 9, 131, 133fig5.6, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233fig10.2, 234fig10.3, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239fig10.8, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 254, 258, 259–264, 265–270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279 Mexican Revolution 257

Index MGM Resorts 298, 299, 300, 302 studios 288, 292 Michelangelo 167, 168fig7.5, 242, 300 milagro mexicano 257 Modernism 11, 49, 133, 175, 210, 242, 249n18, 307 Modernity 8, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 27, 36, 37, 102, 105, 111, 114, 120, 169, 189, 207, 210, 228, 254, 255, 269, 270, 276–279 Molly Wally (2010) (exhibition) 309, 310fig13.2 Monsivais, Carlos 257, 258, 261n Moser, Walter 63, 64, 108, 138, 139, 161, 176, 210, 227, 249 Ndalianis, Angela 7–8, 16, 23, 49, 59, 74, 99, 137, 160n1, 161–162, 175n10, 178, 205, 228, 230n1, 230n2, 249n17, 252, 283–306, 320 Neo-Baroque aesthetic, esthetic 144, 145, 155, 180, 184, 200, 248 allegory 216 architecture 119, 160, 173, 230, 241, 243, 248, 250, 278, 307, 319 artifice 242, 247 artists 123 balustrade 4, 9, 227, 230–251, and baroque 12, 13, 15, 27, 28, 70, 100, 138, 142, 144, 146, 166, 176, 180, 182, 259, 262, 270, 204 Brazilian churches 160 Caribbean 158 churches 175 cinema 78, 97, 180, 184, 204, 304 cities 227, 231, 232, 245, 247, 248, 259 concept 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 49, 50, 64, 139, 145, 167, 172, 174, 210, 229 contemporary art 208 Cuban 154 cultural practice 50, 64 decoration and the decorative 160, 171, 230, 242, 245 and entertainment culture 8, 16, 49, 161, 294 European 170, 171, 172 excess, exuberance, extravagance 77, 141 experience 50, 69 expression of resistance 209 folds, enfolding 77, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96

325 and the fragment 139, 207, 240 Hispanic 230 and Hollywood 283, 285, 286, 288, 293, 297, 304 imagery 143 interartistic 254, 255 and Islamic art 49 kitsch 243, 249, 250, 251 and Latin America 49, 117, 143, 278 literature 254 metatheatricality 292 and modernity 17, 169 and modernism 138, 166, 168, 170, 175, 176, 210, 255 multiplicity 296, 308, 315 and neo-colonial 160, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 240 and new technologies 21–22 oculus 235, 256, 258, 242 ornamentalism 227, 240, 242, 248 pastiche 250, 319 poetry 154, 262 pluralism 134 polycentricism 49, 51, 230 and postmodernism 1, 16, 18, 19, 61, 134, 210, 249n18, 255 post-digital 228, 307–308, 318 and postdramatic theatre 63, 71, 72 religious narratives and experience 137, 175, 176 repetition 235, 255 research group 1, 15 resurgences baroques 63, 64 ‘return of the baroque’ 1, 3, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17–18, 19, 20, 21, 139, 176, 179, 180, 210, 255, 287, 291, 293 sensorium 162 self-referential 145 semiotic 50 seriality 230, 249–251 spectacle 162, 174, 227, 293 spectator and spectatorship 93, 187 staging the baroque 162–163, 168, 177 stylistic phenomena 228 as sub-genre 179–180, 183, 84, 192, 204 systems 137 theatre, postmodern 49, 62, 68 theatricality 61–65, 71, 228, 294

326 Neo-Baroque (cont.) transcultural 138, 160, 161, 166, 230, 240, 254 transmediality 161 ultrabaroque 145, 263, 264 urban culture 227 video-games 200, 294 virtual reality 21, 250 visual art 49, 168 vitalism and virtuoso 19, 288 Wunderkammer 161 See also Baroque; metatheatre; neocolonial; postmodernism; senses and the sensorial; transcultural; transhistorical; ultrabaroque; virtual reality; Wunderkammer Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 20, 101, 184 Nolan, Christopher 180 Inception (2010) 180 Nossa Senhora do Brasil 160 Novo, Salvador 254, 255 Nueva grandeza Mexicana (1946) 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259 Ocean’s Eleven (Soderbergh, 2000) 240 O’Gorman, Edmundo 13, 27, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46 Ortega, Francisco 5 Ortega y Gasset, José 142 Pagan resistance and antiquity 32, 44, 111 Palladio, Andrea 284, 303 Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) 131 Phenomenography 1–2 Phenomenology 181, 187, 200, 238 Piazza del Popolo 283, 285, 303 Picasso 303 Pleasantville (Ross 1998) 180, 187 Pope Alexander vii 283 Pope John Paul ii 37 Porta del Popolo 283, 284, 285, 303 Postmodernism in architecture 315 as cultural practice 69, 241, 242, 248, 249 as ideology 230, 233, 236, 241 and metatheatre 11, 49 and modernism 11, 17

Index and neo-baroque 1, 16, 17, 19, 61, 110, 134, 228, 240, 249, 255 and postmodernity 19 in a triad with Baroque and Modernity 1, 16–19 post-digital 307 Queen Kelly (von Stroheim 1928) 286 Rama, Ángel 263, 264 rapid-prototyping 241, 319, 326 Reddaway, Richard 12, 14, 125, 128 No-one believe they are evil (2002) (wax installation) 123, 125fig5.2A untitled (pornography) (2004) (installation) 128fig5.3A Renaissance 51, 72, 101, 107, 109, 110n7, 111, 133, 155, 162, 307, 308 Rivoli Theatre 293 Rocha, Glauber 28, 100–101, 103 Terra am Transe (1967) 28, 100, 103, 106, 113–117, 118, 120, 121 Rothapfel, Samual L. 291 Rotrou, Jean de 188 Roumain, Jacque 141 Rousset, Jean 3 Sacred Made Real, The (Bray, 2009) (exhibition) 51, 59 Sahagún, Bernadino de 39, 44 Sarduy, Severo 3, 13, 15, 49, 154, 156, 263, 264 Sagrario Metropolitano 263 Scarpetta, Guy 3, 17, 19 senses and the sensorial 32, 49, 52, 68, 71, 76, 78, 80, 81, 93, 143 162, 186, 187, 296, 298, 300, 303 Shakespeare, William 31, 228, 292 simulacrum 161, 185, 191, 300 Sistine Chapel 167, 168fig7.5 spectopolis 228, 303 St. Peter’s Basilica 294 Strange Days (Bigelow 1995) 180 surrealism 141, 143, 145 Tiepolo, Giambattista 288 Total Recall (Verhoeven 1990) 180, 183n transcultural 1, 6, 7–8, 138, 160, 227, 254 See also Neo-Baroque; transhistorical

327

Index transhistorical 1, 6, 7–8, 27, 28, 48, 64, 227, 228, 247, 249, 254, 259, 262, 272 See also Baroque; Neo Baroque; transcultural The Truman Show (Weir, 1998) 180, 187 ultrabaroque 145, 263 Ultrabaroque (2000–2003) (exhibition) 208, 209, 210 Unamuno, Miguel de 30, 31, 36 Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho (1605) 30 Universal Studios 284 Urban Entertainment Destinations 283, 285, 294, 296, 297 See also urbanism urbanism 35, 36, 42, 43, 87, 227, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236, 240, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 254, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 294, 295, 297, 300, 302, 304 See also Urban Entertainment Destinations Urías, Alfonso Quijada 137, 138, 140, 144, 145, 146, 154, 159 Valeriano, Antonia 39, 40, 45, 46 video and computer games 198, 200, 202, 204, 228, 294, 297 Vieira, Antônio Paim 162, 166, 168, 173 Villaurrutia, Xavier 256, 257

Venetian Hotel and Casino 162, 240, 244, 296 Venturi, Robert 228, 242, 243, 300, 302 Versailles 227, 289, 292, 293 virtual reality 21, 42, 161, 185, 198, 199, 200, 202, 250, 307 Visconti, Luchino 28, 100, 104, 105–106, 108, 109, 112 Senso (1954) 104–105, 108, 112, 120 von Stroheim, Erich 286 voodoo religion 138, 140, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158 Wachowskis, The 49, 180, 192, 194, 197 The Matrix (1999) 49, 138, 180, 186, 187n14, 192, 194–197, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206 Warburg, Aby 27, 101, 103, 106, 110n7, 111 Weber, Max 17, 18, 30 Wieskirche 123, 124, 130 Williams, Raymond 8 Wölfflin, Heinrich 27, 28, 100–103, 107-109, 110, 111, 112, 117, 229, 307, 308, 310, 312, 313, 315, 316 Wunderkammer 161, 162, 174, 296, 302 Wynn, Steve 298, 300, 302, 303 Xavier, Ismail 100, 103, 106, 118, 119, 121 Zurbarán, Francisco de 60, 167