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[@] Maria Esther Maciel Home Page |
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UTOPIAN
REMAINS (The matter of the Landless Peasants Maria
Esther Maciel
- 1 -
If Van Gogh’s painting, converted into a canonical model of modern tradition,
has been institutionalized today as cultural merchandise (which is ironic, if
we consider the marginality and the precarious conditions of existence of
this magnificent painter up to the end of his life), the conception of art
implied in it ended up by diverging radically from the dominant lines of
force in the arts in the second half of the 20th century. All this
results from the great change of parameters, demands, and expectations
brought about not only by the triumph of so-called market capitalism, which
began to control practically every sector of contemporary life, but also by
the crisis of the utopias and of the set of values that sustained modernity.
With the purpose of critically investigating this new world order, Jameson in
the same text shows another pair of shoes, this time completely lacking in
any utopian or humanistic content and presented as a type of icon of
contemporary consumer society: the "Diamond dust shoes" of
Andy Warhol. Devitalized pastiche, "hanging on the canvas as if
they were turnips," these shoes, according to Jameson, would be
constituted as fetishes, reduced to the condition of simulacra of themselves,
and so be in accordance with the commercialized and artificial life that defines
the cultural scenario of our time, and therefore in radical contrast to the
boots of Van Gogh. In Jameson’s words:
"Andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and
the great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Camppbell’s soup
can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to
late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they
are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to
begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political
or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital." (2)
The first questions that arise from this would be these: has criticism
really been abolished from the contemporary arts, as Jameson and many other
theorists of postmodernism seem to believe? Would it not be a fallacy
to say that contemporary aesthetic production should be placed exclusively
under the sign of those artists who somehow reinforce the ideology of
consumption and dedicate themselves merelyto pastiche and the recycling of
the past?
I think that to completely deny the presence of libertarian and innovative
features in contemporary culture, as if the utopian vocation and the critical
view were out of date and exclusive to the so-called "tradition of
rupture," is to underestimate the whole critical-creative potential that
has been the distinguishing feature of artists of every century and that
still makes itself visible in the crannies and cracks of the dominant
cultural system. If the modern era has converted these elements into
cultivated values, this does not mean that they have stopped existing
nowadays.
It is therefore in believing that criticism has not been completely banned
from the artistic spheres of the present that I would reply to Jameson that
there are, indeed, possibilities for a political art in the world space of
multinational capitalism, for an art that goes beyond the well-behaved limits
of the "politically correct" and that engages in destabilizating
the current commonplaces through language. I think that an artist can
perfectly well take advantage of the raw material that contemporary
technologies, mass culture, finaly, the market itself offer, and, at the same
time, through aesthetic strategies, undermine the ideology that sustains this
same material, just as the artist can also exercise this ability in a theme
that is explicitly political or social. The efficacy in either case
will depend on how the artist, in aesthetic terms, portrays the ambiguities
and contradictions of the social, cultural, and political context in which he
is inserted. In the attempt to investigate the
effective possibilities of a political art today (political here in the more
specific sense of criticizing the contextual structures of power), I will now
shift to the cultural context of Brazil at the end of the 20th century.
My purpose is, at first, to evaluate a photograph by Sebastião Salgado, which
displays certain elements that I would place in dialogue with Van Gogh’s
painting of the shoes, and then, with a poem by Haroldo de Campos, which in
its turn shows thematic affinities with the photograph, since both Brazilian
artists deal with the social problems of the Brazilian rural workers, more
specifically, of the so-called Movimento dos Sem-Terra, MST, "Movement
of the Landless." I should explain that this movement arose at the
end of the 1970s, as the result of the struggle for land that the rural
workers were undertaking, in a scattered way, in the southern region of the
country, and ended up by becoming the largest and most important social
movement of the country by the end of the century. - 2 -
Sebastião Salgado’s photo is a part of the photographic series in the book
Terra (Land), published in 1997, together with a CD by the Brazilian
singer-composer Chico Buarque and with a preface by the Portuguese novelist
José Saramago. It shows three feet clad in cheap thong sandals,
belonging to rural workers. At a first glance, the scene seems to
obviously contain a foot of one man and two of another, but soon this
obviousness is overthrown by the lack of symmetry in the toes on the feet
that would comprise the supposed pair. If at first we are tempted
to ask "where then would be the foot matching the one in the
middle?", a more attentive viewing soon leads us to discover that the
foot on the right is really the one matching the foot in the middle, since
the confusion is due to the simple fact that the man’s legs are crossed,
although this is not explicit. Through this visual play constructed by
the photographer’s look at the moment of capturing and recording the live
scene, another reality is established: that of misery, exploitation, physical
penury. It is not necessary to go to the notes at the end of the book
to deduce from these feet their context: it is shown in the dried
scabs covering the skin and the cracked toenails. And it is explained
by the photo on the facing page, where there is the desolate image of a
parched land, devastated by drought. We can read the following
explanation under the photo: In the
building of a reservoir for retaining rainwater during the great drought of
1982-83, in the backlands of Ceará, the workers were the poor population who
received as payment the food necessary for subsistence. (4)
Contrary to Jameson’s diagnosis, according to which contemporary photography
has renounced referentiality in order to develop "an autonomous vision
that has no external equivalent," Salgado’s photo brings its referent
with it, even if aesthetically transformed. On one hand, it is part of
a work that the author himself defines as a "photographic essay,"
since it is a mixture of reporting (hence its realistic character) and
critical analysis. On the other hand, it is also an aesthetic artefact,
which diverts it from its conventional function of registering an event, in
order to recreate it as an image. From this combination its critical
force and its refusal of immediacy, didacticism, and the pamphlet are
derived.
If compared to the threadbare boots of Van Gogh’s peasant, the sandals of the
workers bear the image that Jameson called the "object world of
agricultural misery, of stard rural poverty, (...) a world reduced to its
most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state", on the other
hand they do not contain the same gesture of recompense and transcendence
that are inherent in the Dutch artist’s painting. Both criticize a
specific reality, reinvent that reality, but in the case of the Brazilian
photographer, this is achieved through constructive mechanisms originating
form mass culture itself. Through sophisticated photographic
techniques, graphic and visual effects, he shows the Brazil that exists in
the crannies of transparent Brazil and exhibits the face of the country that
neoliberal policies try to conceal or deny: the face of misery, ruin,
injustice, human disrespect. As an internationally recognized
contemporary artist, Salgado paradoxically takes advantage of resources that
the market itself offers, showing to the world the images of the lamentable
social situation in Brazil. And in this way, he contributes to the
reinforcing of the movement of the Landless (it should be remembered that
Salgado donated the money from the sale of the books to the MST). He
would, therefore, be among the group of contemporary artists like the writer
José Saramago, the composer Chico Buarque, the filmmaker Walter Salles Jr.
((director of the famous Central do Brasil) and the painter Siron Franco, who
take advantage of the benefits of the market and the media to criticize the
structures of political power.
Returning to Salgado’s photo, I think that the critical efficacy of a work
like this lies not only in its message, in its content, but also and mainly
in the manner in which it is constructed and in the potential it has to
provoke internal acts in the viewer. As can be observed, Salgado does not use
experimental, avant-garde devices, but manages to provoke these acts through
small aesthetic effects, like the crossing of the legs, which are not
superficially explicit. By choosing (photographing), as Roland Barthes
would say, in the midst of the immense disorder of the world, "this
object, this moment, instead of another" (which already implies a
political and cultural viewing), the photographer selects merely a detail,
the image of the feet, which work as a metonymy of the Landless themselves
and a metaphor for the parched land of the country’s backlands
(sertões). He adds to this a destabilizing element: the nearly
invisible play of legs that confuses the logic of the viewer. This
element could be taken to be a variation which Barthes called a
punctum: the element of deviation, the small sting that will scan and
harass the stadium, or the merely cultural field. Even in the most violent scenes photographed by Sebastião Salgado,
such as those that refer to the massacre of the Landless in Pará, in April,
1996, when an operation by the state Military Police resulted in the
murder of nineteen of them, this element appears as the trigger of
unforeseeable feelings. This the case of the small, casual reflection
of light (as if it were a white spot) that is seen on the left side of the
chest of one of the women surrounding a mother whose son was killed during
the confrontation with the police and who is being consoled by one of the
young men, among whom is one wearing a shirt stamped with the name
Benetton. This white spot (intentional or not) might have a
metaphorical function within this context, depending on the viewer’s
perspective. In my case, it is the spot which truly disturbs me in this
scene, as it connotes a heart devastated, broken by the violence of the
event.
Using a fractured language, filled with plays on sound and syllabic breaks,
while maintaining an apparently narrative diction, the poet deals with the
social problem of land in Brazil, the violence of the massacre and his own
ethical indignation in the face of this violence. He therefore composes
a "committed poem," but not one within that realist line of
political commitment that distinguished Brazilian art in the 1970s and
1980s. In the case of the poem in question, what is said is displayed
in the very materiality of language, in the play of sounds, repetitions and
paronomasias, in the nomadic displacement of meanings, achieved thanks to the
non-fixed quality of the words. That is, the referential is not
superimposed on the poetic, and the content, instead of sacrificing the form,
is revealed through oblique paths in a state of transfiguration.
The word terra (land) is a pointed and repeated reference in the poem, not
only because of its successive semantic displacements within other words —
enTERRAdos (buried), desTERRAdos (banished), TERRorizados (terrorized),
TERRAtenentes (landholders) —, but also because of its transformation into
other words derived from the same semantic or sonorous field, such as
lavradores (farm-hands), sem-lavra (untilled), lavrados (tilled), larvas
(larva), agrária (agrarian), agra (field), gregária (gregarious),
agrossicários (field-assassins), etc.). The harshness of the language
is explicit and invested at various times with a corrosive aggressiveness, as
in the second-to-last stanza:
enver- [a-
If, as Roland Barthes says, "tactically or psychoanalytically, all
violence implies a language of violence," one can say that Haroldo de
Campos critically refutes this language of violence, implicit in the act of
the police against the Landless, and in the official impunity, with the
violence of language, a violence which, in this case, is seen in the very
texture of the poem, in its aggressive and indignant sonority. Through
these resources, the text distances itself from political didacticism, at the
same time that it makes an incisive critique of the perverse process of
social exclusion promoted by the powerful against the farm-workers.
Campos simultaneously enters into a dialogue with Brazilian modern poet João
Cabral de Melo Neto, when he characterizes the burial of the bodies as a
final "settlement" on the piece of land that falls to them from the
"latifúndio" (landed-estate) as in Cabral’s poem Morte e vida
severina; with Walter Benjamin, when he evokes the "Angel of History,"
and with another Brazilian modern poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, when he
characterizes this angel as "crooked" or "left."
One can also say that Campos tries to perform in this poem what he once
called a "poetic of the present." According to him, after the
"hope-principle, directed toward the future" (proper to modernity),
"the reality-principle, a fundamental anchored in the present,"
emerges in the contemporary scene. Therefore, the
"Angel" of his poem, instead of prefiguring a utopian horizon in
the line of that which fed the imagination of modern poets and artists,
impresses on the poem merely a utopian residue: "the critical and
dialogic dimension inherent in utopia," even if a future
"payback" is announced at the end of the poem. (It should be said
at this point that Campos has been one of the most incisive critics of the
neoliberal economic model, which can be verified in other recently published
poems).
This "utopian residue," wrought and reinvented in the aesthetic
work, is what gives to Haroldo de Campos’ poem, as well as Sebastião
Salgado’s photographs, their critical power. It is also what makes it
possible for us to take these works as a kind of metaphorical topos for the
wanderings of the Landless. We might say, following what Raduan Nassar
said about Chico Buarque’s song "Assentamento" (Settlement), that
these artists "settle" the Landless in the here-and-now of the
text/image, establish them in the movable space of the possible languages of
our time. There is no doubt that they try to affirm obliquely the
ever more spatialized temporality of the present, since, today, the utopian
residue is seen less as a project than as a desire. (Translation
from Portuguese: Thomas Burns) |
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