Anna Bella Geiger: crossings and overflows by Marisa Flórido César, 2020
Anna Bella Geiger once defined her artistic process “as a cross-border flux, assorted choreographies moving from one territory to another”[1]. But in this flux, countless territories emerge and clash with the various borders that control them. While Anna Bella Geiger moves to clarify how these limits are drawn, she also moves in the direction of ceaseless overflowing: her work has crossed through different types of media and knowledge, contaminating the territories of art, going beyond and installing itself within and outside its borders.
And, in fact, many of her works seek to unravel the borderline and problematic situation — the tense edge of the razor — in which we live: on one side the devices[2] (the systems of representation, the codes of control and inventory, such as cartography and ethnography, drawing, writing, image, the constructions, and the conventions of identity, such as national myths and gender issues); on the other, the incessant maladjustments and inadequacies (the impossibility of founding an originary site, of establishing stable and solidary ties between mankind and the spaces we inhabit or through which we move, of defining a fixed identity, of communicating with others beyond the border). In the thread: the imagination, the vital flow as the matter of art that overflows the limits that imprison. In the edge: the imagination, the vital flow as the matter of art that transcends the limits that imprison.
Anna Bella Geiger began her artistic career in the 1950s at a very young age, with abstract printmaking, but her constant restlessness would lead her to explore and experiment with various media, almost always simultaneously. In the “visceral phase” that would follow (1965-68), representation of the fragmented body as a microcosm would foreshadow the use of cartography in her art; in the 1970s, she would experiment with photomontage, photogravure, photocopy, and video. From that period on, her production acquires a predominantly plural character regarding media and knowledge, materials and images. With her degrees in Anglo-Germanic and Anglo-Saxon languages (both from the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia, now UFRJ), and art history courses in New York, the (written) word is vividly present in Anna Bella’s art, in recurring games between text and image. Interdisciplinarity permeates her work, nurturing it through several other fields of knowledge besides history and art theory, such as geography (cultural and social, physical and human), encouraged by geographer Pedro Geiger, the history of religions and myths, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and others.
Two moments have been crucial as turning points toward the opening to and searching for new media in her production: Circumambulatio (1972) [3] and Walter Zanini’s invitation (or incitement) in 1974 prompting Geiger and artists from Rio de Janeiro to participate, in 1975, in the Video-art show that would be presented in the United States. Through their experimental availability and using Sony Portapak equipment borrowed from Jom Tob Azulay, the pioneering group of video art in Brazil was formed, in Rio de Janeiro, by Anna Bella Geiger, Fernando Cocchiarale, Ivens Machado, Sônia Andrade, Letícia Parente, Paulo Herkenhoff, Ana Vitória Mussi and Miriam Danowski.
Video as an “in-between”
Video art emerged in Brazil in the midst of the military dictatorship[4] and the questioning of the formalist foundations of art. In Rio de Janeiro, it would face a precarious art circuit and strong resistance to its being accepted as art by the critics of the time. Without technological resources such as an editing studio, this group was still able to produce videos with high poetic and critical voltage that remain admirably up-to-date.[5]
As Fernando Cocchiarale analyzes, the Rio de Janeiro group “moved along a path alternative to the one introduced by the New Brazilian Objectivity (1967), which Hélio Oiticica (in his text “General outline of the new objectivity”) placed at the crossroads of anthropophagy (1928), with what he called the general constructive will — originating from the constructivist movement of the 1950s, the concrete (Waldemar Cordeiro) and above all the neo-concrete movement (Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape) —, and the new figurative art of the 1960s (Antônio Dias, Carlos Vergara, Rubens Gerchman and Roberto Magalhães, among others). Since the beginning of the seventies, we had been working from a different perspective. We were starting something different from the assumptions of the New Objectivity or Tropicalism, although we were not moved by dissidence in relation to this genealogy. We belonged to a different branch, critical, but permeable to international trends and new media.”[6]
In Anna Bella Geiger’s videos from the 1970s, it is the artist herself who is the central character of the actions. They are everyday rituals, devoid of any dramatic narrative, showing her walking, drawing, writing, and mapping. The emptying of the artist’s expressive gesture, the incorporation of routine and de-glamorized actions, her operational, repetitive, robotic time stand in opposition to the formalist conceptions of art. In the 1970s, women artists’ photographs and video performances expanded issues related to body, identity, and gender. In Geiger’s videos, these issues are inseparable both from the contexts in which they are set and from the tensioning of the codes of enunciation and visibility that frame them, exposing their symbolic violence and their non-conformity. They deal with issues topics such as the construction of Brazilianness, the historical control of its imaginary, its means and systems of representation, its iconography. Her work questions art and its place in society and the situation of artists (and women) in a world that is increasingly codified and nevertheless infringed and slippery.
Declaração (1974) refers to the self-portrait genre in art, exposing it in all its ambivalence in the context of the time: in the midst of the military dictatorship, what could one talk about? What could one say? What could one show? How to give that figure its voice back? On the one hand, words are forbidden in times of censorship, and on the other, no words seem to fit the images sufficiently. What is shown there as an intimate fracture is the gap between identity and representation, the image of a void. As Jean-Paul Fargier (Poeira nos olhos) says, “video is not a way of being of reality, it is a thousand ways for images to be elsewhere […].In video, reality never appears in the encounter, because it is not reality that we expect.”[7]
By exploring the passages and intersections between the arts, between images and words, between different types of knowledge, representations, and codes, Geiger installs us in that ambiguous and hesitant zone between images that Raymond Bellour called “in-between”. It is “between the images”, he states, “that the passages, the contaminations of beings and regimes increasingly take place.”[8]
Passagens, two videos made in 1974, make it explicit: one can only derive from the feeling of the world its flows, its “in-between”. Man and world establish transitory, tense, unsustainable contacts: what can rescue the lost unity? What rites of passage or sacrifices allow us access to the forbidden spaces?
In Passagens 1 we see Anna Bella Geiger going up, down and crossing three stairways in different neighborhoods of the city of Rio de Janeiro: that of a residential building in Jardim Botânico, the stairs going up or down a hill in Glória, and the stairway to the Benjamin Constant Institute for the visually impaired in Urca. Three transitional spaces, three ascending spaces of access: to a private space (the house), to a public space (the street), to an institutional space (the education institute whose paradox is to have a staircase for the visually impaired).
To explore the passage between images is to free them from the representative function understood as a mirror of the world. The passage between the images is the interstice in which their metamorphoses and reconfigurations surface, the flaws of mythical, historical, or anthropological time, the unusual temporalities. The paradox of video, says Bellour, “has been to hold analogy in a tongs: on the one hand it multiplies its power, on the other it ruins it. Video directly extends the analogy of movement to time: real, instantaneous time, which duplicates and surpasses the time of cinema and of which surveillance cameras offer the atrocious, pure image”, [9] which forces us to reflect on the analogy of the world borne by image, its power to resemble and represent, but also to deviate and indeterminate.
In Passagens, the stairs are used in rites of passage that do not arrive at any destination whatsoever; they are spaces for transit and transition, with no origin or purpose. These spaces overlap with the very space-support of representation, which is also configured as a passage. Thus, Geiger climbs up and down the stairs as if she were walking across planes — the cartographic plane, the surface of the drawing, the written page, the television screen that displays the video —, as if she were walking through “an in-between” in which the representations of space and the means by which these representations are exposed are confused. At the same time, through the pace of the steps, the going up and down the stairs sets the time of the video as a moving-image in its literalness; the walking up and down the successive horizontal lines of the steps alludes to the gesture of writing on the lines of a notebook or to the balancing act of walking on the television’s horizontal lines of retraction; the artist’s walking body posing in profile (“like a two-dimensional Egyptian figure”, says Geiger) draws the limits of the screen’s framing and marks an X at its center, referring to cartographic space (recurrent in her work) and to pictorial space (the definition of a vanishing point as a promise of the three-dimensional space of perspective).
Elementary maps
The complex spatialization Anna Bella Geiger’s works refer to (particularly due to her interest in cartography) is confronted with the violent fragmentation established by the borders: like the Treaty of Tordesillas, this “imaginary line” — as the artist would define it in one of her Fronteiriços — divided the world as if it were unshaped wax. While borders are abstract limits in the flesh of the world, they are nevertheless forged and operated by conflicts in the flesh of man. While maps systematize on a two-dimensional surface the information collected about a space, whereas they reveal visions of a time, they also comprise a temporal dimension: the dimension of disputes over territories, of the history of powers and dominions, of reservations and exclusions. Borders attempt to circumscribe into fragments, identities, languages, cultures. To protect them from outside contamination. To protect them from others, from the invader, from this foreigner to the realms that are familiar to us. Maps can codify a space and name its soil, but do not decipher it.
Between the drawings of the world and its concreteness there is, above all, a gap and an inadequacy. Horizons, borders, meridians try — in vain — to outline and designate it. Maps outline both the totality and the fragmentation and division of its soil; conventions seek to anchor escapes and departures; coordinates align the Earth and its cycles with the cosmic choreography. The designs of the horizon seek to control the shifting inconstancy of the lands, the soils. But it is in this gap, in this inadequacy, that imagination works and art invents worlds beyond its borders, that it finds its possibility where conventions, horizons, and coordinates are exhausted.
While maps are spaces, inventories are also invented spaces, where we are and where we would like to be. They are the writing and the crossroads of situations and desires: if they are archives of information, they are also the reserve of dreams. This is the fascination that maps exert on artists, especially Anna Bella Geiger. Artists are not only travelers or navigators, they are corsairs. In the artists’ cartographies, geographies are plundered to expose the arbitrariness and violence of codes and borders, but also to get lost in their reveries, to open worlds beyond.
Local de ação, a series that begins in the 1970s. Despite its obvious political connotation (the guerrilla operations during the dictatorship were called “action”), these works are cartographies, not only of a geographical situation, but of events, whether imaginary or not: the arrows point and divert toward the site of action, as signs of location and of deviation. This is when words enter her work, but it does not designate, either. It shares the ambivalence of the deviations between the abstraction of language and the concrete of perception. The arrow focuses on the target while redirecting it beyond borders, into virtual and mental territories. No border is more evident: between the conventions of the world’s space and the place that is specific to us, any place is always another place. Man, world, and the structures that mediate them carry a hopeless eccentricity.
Mapas elementares I (1976) and Mapas elementares III (1977) are videos in which the action of mapping is connected to the artist’s hands and intention, to a conceptual and procedural exercise. In Mapas elementares I, Geiger draws the contours of a world map to the sound of Chico Buarque and Francis Hime’s song “Meu caro amigo”, whose lyrics are a letter addressed to a friend in exile in Europe, talking about the banalities of everyday Brazilian life in its export clichés (soccer, samba, on sunny or rainy days) and — in a camouflaged way to evade censorship — of the somber situation (“eu quero mesmo te dizer que a coisa aqui tá preta” / “what I really want to tell you is that things look bleak”) that the country was going through during a dictatorship where violence and suppression of rights were on the rise. To the rhythm of the song, in analogy with the lyrics, Geiger covers the map of Brazil in black and, in a subtle, veiled and symbolic way, converts the abstraction of space (from the rectangle of paper to the TV screen) into a historical site of nebulous events.
In Mapas elementares III (1977), a game of analogous sounds and figures between words and images — amulet (figa), mulata (mulatto woman), muleta (crutch), Latin America (map) —, weaves unusual correspondences between the sequestered imaginaries and the clichés in the representations of a continent crossed by servitude and magical promises, of veiled violence and widespread and peddled stereotypes.
To the tune of Virgen negra (a bolero by Colombian Jorge Monsalve, whose sensual melody contrasts with the sacred content about the black-skinned Mother of Jesus), Geiger first draws a pillar and writes the word “amulet”. Originally Italian, the figa (Mano Fico) was associated with fertility and eroticism. In Portugal and Brazil, and when incorporated by religions of African origin, the symbolic gesture (sexual and “obscene gesture”), of clenching the fist and placing the thumb between the index and middle finger, would avoid the evil eye and protect from hostile beings and forces.[10] Amulets are apotropaic means (from the Greek apotrópaios — which drives away evil) that promise to magically protect us from the sinister and monstrous character of a stranger in our proximity, from the stranger’s presence which represents foreseen and feared horrors. The apotropaic protects us from this evil effect, which also means protecting us from the appearance of something that paradoxically has no shape or definition. An apotropaic object is located at the vertex of seeing what cannot be seen, drawing a border and a gap between the repression of the sinister and its sensible appearance.
The mulata, drawn afterwards based on the contours of the figa, is the stereotype of the mestizo black woman as an object of tourist attraction. She is an icon of a Brazil that conceals and preserves its colonial and slave past in its merchant-body. If the amulet protects us from the sensitive appearance of something, the mulata is the image that can be shown externally of those who have no right to image or voice, but both bear a sexual connotation. In many of her works, Anna Bella addresses the stereotypical views that are held about women, black people and indigenous people: their place in the Brazilian imaginary, between mythification and marginalization (identity and cultural stereotypes are addressed in several works, as in the series about Brasil nativo, Brasil alienígena[11]). The Brazil for export buries the extermination of several ethnicities and peoples over time, its image-body-mercury conceals its invisibility and silencing, preserving its violence.
The fluidity between semantic and visual analogies becomes increasingly complex and permeated by many layers of meaning in the game that follows between words and images. Figa and mulata become crutches and maps of this limp Latin America: poor visual prostheses that substitute that which is demeaning. This is why the game of concealment and the exposure of what should be shown and what should be erased from its history and its people traverses the video.
Therefore, even though Anna Bella Geiger seeks to map soils and territories, the artist also enjoys displacement, artistic experimentation with no stable ground, between borders. Even if failing at establishing a precise identity, the other at the border will grant her, through the gaze of others, the fluid drawings of herself. Even if the voice is missing, the fright promises a new beginning. Even if there is no defined place for action, the diaspora grants her an “in-between”, this impulse toward beyond the border – this transit that disperses also integrates the strange and the stranger.
– Marisa Flórido César
[1] Anna Bella Geiger in an interview granted to Marisa Flórido César, in October 2001, in her studio-house in Rio de Janeiro.
[2] “Device” is a term from the work of Michel Foucault, comprising a heterogeneous set of discourses and knowledge, institutions and architectures, laws and security apparatuses, etc., but the concept is above all, about the network that is established among them as strategies and games of power. It is a force field, a network of control and relations, which invests over the body and over life. Giorgio Agamben expands this concept by dividing living beings and the devices that capture them into two groups: “I will literally call a device anything that has in any way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, and secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, and discourses of living beings. Therefore, not only prisons, insane asylums, the panopticon, schools, confessions, factories, disciplines, legal measures, etc., whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident, but also writing, literature, […] computers, cell phones, and — why not — language itself, which is perhaps the oldest of devices, in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate — probably without realizing the consequences that would follow — had the unconsciousness to let himself be captured”. AGAMBEN, Giorgio. O amigo & o que é um dispositivo? Translated from the Portuguese translation in Vinicius Nicastro Honesko, São Paulo: Argos, 2014. p.40.
[3] Circumambulatio: to circle around a center, as if by emulating the movement of the cosmos, it would thus ensure its harmony. Few rites like the Circumambulatio have been so universally spread. The Hebrews practiced it around an altar, the Arabs around the Ka’ba of Mecca, the Hindus performed it by repeating the apparent movement of the Sun as seen from the boreal hemisphere. Circumambulatio was the name given to a series of actions that took place in the early seventies (1972) along the coast and in empty lots in the city of Rio de Janeiro, carried out by Anna Bella Geiger and her students in the course she taught at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. She scheduled secret meetings with her students in certain places in the city, where they would conduct urban intervention art projects, working on archetypes of mythical space such as the labyrinth and the tower. These projects drew on the theories of Mircea Eliade and Carl Gustave Jung. The actions were then photographed. Those were times of military dictatorship and strong censorship, so the actions were simultaneously camouflaged and explicit. It was a response to the museum’s coordination, which had imposed a series of restrictions. Among the wanderings along the coast, perhaps an ideal territory could be found where it was still possible to work, to gather, to speak: the sacred center that the labyrinth guards, the word that the tower (like Babel) wants to reach.
[4] A regime established on April 1, 1964 and lasting until March 15, 1985, under successive military governments. Authoritarian and nationalistic in nature, it began with a military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart, the then democratically elected president.
[5] The first experiments were made in 1974 by Anna Bella Geiger, Sônia Andrade, Ivens Machado and Fernando Cocchiarale, and a few months later in 1975, by Letícia Parente, Paulo Herkenhoff and Miriam Danowski. This group’s interest in video art was sparked by Walter Zanini’s invitation and encouragement to some artists from São Paulo and to Anna Bella Geiger (asking her to call artists from Rio) to participate in the Video-art exhibition that would take place in 1975 in the United States. The São Paulo artists could not get their hands on the necessary equipment, but the Rio artists borrowed it from Jom Tob Azulay, who had obtained a Sony Portapak. The group created approximately 40 videos, some filmed by Jom Tob Azulay himself. The Video-art exhibition was presented in four American institutions: Institute of Contemporary Art/University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; The Contemporary Arts Center/Cincinnati, Ohio; the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, Illinois; and Wadsworth Atheneum/Hartford, Connecticut. Five Brazilians participated in the show: four of them from the pioneer group from Rio de Janeiro (Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado, Sonia Andrade, Fernando Cocchiarale), and Antônio Dias, with a video made in Milan, where he lived.
[6] COCCHIARALE, Fernando. “Testimony about the origins of video art in Brazil”. In: Ivens Machado. Encontro/Desencontro. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa; Oi Futuro, 2008, p.76.
[7] FARGIER, Jean-Paul. “Poeira nos olhos”. In: PARENTE, André (org.) Imagem máquina. Rio de Janeiro: 34, 1993, p.231.
[8] BELLOUR, Raymond. “A dupla hélice”. In: PARENTE, André (org.) Imagem máquina. Op. cit., p.215-216.
[9] Idem, p.223.
[10] The belief in the protective efficacy of the gesture may be due to the belief that demons, being asexual spirit creatures, feared sexual allusions of any kind (which may also explain the presence of images of sexual organs alongside pentagrams and Christian symbols in Alpine graffiti).
[11] In Brasil nativo/Brasil alienígena, Anna Bella Geiger appropriates a series of nine postcards with scenes of indigenous life, stereotypes reinforced by both the cultural industry and the civil-military dictatorship that ruled the country at the time, both of which cover-up the extermination of these peoples that continues until today. Next to each postcard, Geiger places photographs in which the artist appears imitating, somewhat clumsily, the gestures of indigenous men and women. What does it mean to be a white artist descended from European Jews in a place called Brazil? For whom is Brazil Brazil? Which is the native Brazil, which is the alien Brazil? What does it mean to be Brazilian? What is identity?
Commissioned by
Original Tiltle : Anna Bella Geiger: passagens e transbordamentos
Marisa Flórido Cesar
(BrazilIan, b. 1962; Rio de Janeiro) is a leading scholar, professor, curator, critic and socio-cultural theorist focused on 20th/21st centuries.