A Face Drawn in Sand: The Territories of Anna Bella Geiger by Pablo Larios, 2020

Writing about one of her installations – an archaeological topography she titled Circa (2006) – Anna Bella Geiger noted a contradiction that is central to the scientific demarcation of time, place and history. Time is subjective in its perception. Nonetheless, time has indelible and objective effects – shaping lands, histories and bodies. Scientific facts propose to map objective truths but never encompass the complete territory of knowledge. Even dates and coordinates are informed by the politics of perspective.

Geiger’s eclectic conceptual work draws upon an array of media, including  metalwork, prints, video, installation, sculpture, illustration, collage, bookmaking, postcards and videos to explore the relationships between demarcating and depicting, naming and describing, speaking and enforcing. Like multi-disciplinarians of the early modern era, who could draw a line between the human form and the arrangement of the planets, for Geiger the sciences and the arts readily inform one another. Her visual art is steeped in philosophy, the invention of perspective, geopolitics, cartography and ecology, as well as in the politics of land use, specifically the appropriation of indigenous land by the Brazilian government. Space becomes political. Several of her works reference the cartographic space of the South American continent. For an art action documented in photographs, O pão nosso de cada dia (1978),‎ she gave meaning to negative space, by biting the shape of the continent out of a slice of bread.

Placing Geiger’s practice within a linear trajectory of post-war art is too limiting. Her work stems from philosophy and spans ancient as well as current history. She is inspired by the psychological inquiries of Carl Jung, the investigations of religious space cited by Mircea Eliade, and always, the history of Brazil. Her work also investigates anti-colonial and feminist thought and the impact of these on cultural hegemony.. There is an affinity between Geiger’s many cartographic images, especially those punctuated by mathematical equations, and the virtuosic ‘archaeology’ proposed by Michel Foucault. In his Les Mots et les Choses (1966), Foucault traced the history of representation and the construction of ‘mankind’ within the human sciences in Europe from the 16^th century onward. Similarly, for Geiger, there is an order of things that includes both territory and mapping and embraces the political and spatial particularities of human perspective. Her work asserts that, just as science can discover laws and facts, such truths are, at the same time, products of convention.

All artworks live in their time. Geiger’s oeuvre has been impacted by the political atmosphere of Brazil. Around 1965 there was a turning point. She abandoned abstractionism and began creating works cited by critic, Mario Pedrosa, as visceral. She deployed metal and other harsh, found or scavenged, raw materials. These she engaged to comment — sometimes obliquely, sometimes metaphorically — on the unraveling political situation in Brazil. During these times, political voices were silenced. There was a rise in pro- and anti-government violence. Repression was met with a surge in demonstrations and other forms of activism. Artists including Geiger perpetuated a boycott of the officially-sanctioned  International São Paulo Biennale for over 20 years.

In the 1970s, Geiger absorbed the critique of mass-media contemplated in Pop Art and the various forms of Conceptual Art emerging in‎ Latin America, Europe and North America. Her pivot to conceptual work paralleled her engagement with video. Initially, her experiments were dismissed by conservative Brazilian critics who were doubtful whether moving-image media should be considered fine art. Beyond Brazil, these works garnered notable international recognition in seminal exhibitions such as Video Art (1975) at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia and the participation in the first Brazilian Pavilion to include video at the 39th Venice Biennial (1980).

She has remarked that she was ‘disappointed’ by some of the art she encountered when she traveled to the US and Europe. However, there were important exceptions, such as the work of Joseph Beuys. She met the artist in 1975 and made a video with him. To this day, she remains in thrall of his work and ideas. Her work shares with his a purview broader than the art historical canon: it is not only cosmopolitan but also post-national. Also in the 1970s, Geiger sourced photographs of craters of the moon from NASA. She finessed printmaking techniques to reimagine this beyond-terrestrial object. Her work proposed an object/subject that was both universal and deterritorialized. The moon is seen by all but owned by no one. Foucault invoked a geographical metaphor that encapsulates the spirit of this series of Geiger works: ‘if these arrangements [of knowledge] were to disappear’, then ‘one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’

Pablo Larios, 2020