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Mirror, A Hollow 1 In The Wall. Your Portrait, A Hollow In The Wall . Ana Cristina Cesar: Poetry And Photography

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569320601156746

1469-9575

Natalia Brizuela,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Note on the Translator – Sarah Ann Wells is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 1 The word in Portuguese is ‘buraco’, which implies, simultaneously, ‘hollow’, ‘hole’, ‘gap’, and ‘cavity’. – Trans. 2 Arbus, Diane. 1971. Five photographs by Diane Arbus. Artforum May, as quoted in Diane Arbus: Revelations Arbus, Diane. 2003. Diane Arbus: Revelations, New York: Random House. [Google Scholar], 278. 3 Cesar Cesar, Ana Cristina. 2006. Album de retazos, Buenos Aires: Corregidor. ed. and trans. Luciana di Leone, Florencia Garramuño and Ana Carolina Puente [Google Scholar], Album de retazos. 4 Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 11th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: 30. 5 Cesar, A teus pé, 106; César, Intimate diary Cesar, Ana Cristina. 1977. Intimate Diary, London: Boulevard. Trans. Patricia E. Paige, Celia McCullough and David Treece [Google Scholar], 32. Unless otherwise indicated, other translations are the translator's. 6 A tus pés, 91. 7 A tus pés, 106; Intimate diary, 32. The word ‘vitrina’ in the original is more specific than the ‘window’ of the English translation; it refers to the shop window in which merchandise is displayed. – Trans. 8 Here I am playing with the title of Ana Cristina's Masters thesis in Communication: Literatura não é documento. Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1980 Cesar, Ana Cristina. 1980. Literatura não é documento, Rio de Janeiro: Funarte. [Google Scholar], or ‘Literature is not a document’. 9 Sontag Sontag, Susan. 1977. On photography New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux [Google Scholar], On photography, Barthes, La chambre claire. 10 The author plays with the two meanings of the word ‘revelación’: to reveal and to develop, as in a photographic negative. – Trans. 11 Lejeune Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil. [Google Scholar], Le pacte autobiographique and de Man De Man, Paul. 1979. Autobiography as De-Facement. MLN, 94(2): 919–30. [Google Scholar], ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’. 12 De Man, 920. 13 The word ‘approach’ is in English in the original. – Trans. 14 Cesar, 279 and 289, respectively. 15 In addition to the Bataille text already cited, see also the work of Crimp, Douglas. 1998. On the museum's ruins. In The anti-aesthetic. essays on postmodern culture, edited by Hal Foster. New York: New Press: 49–64. 16 Bataille, Manet, 51. 17 Garramuño Garramuño, Florencia. 2006. En estado de emergencia. Poesía y vida en Ana Cristina Cesar. [Google Scholar], ‘En estado de emergencia. 18 Cesar Cesar, Ana Cristina. 1998. A teus pés, São Paulo: Editora Ática. [Google Scholar], A teus pés, 69; Intimate diary, 83. 19 In the original, the ‘I switch’ in italics is written in English – Trans. 20 A teus pés, 91; Intimate diary, 101. 21 Süssekind, Até segunda ordem não me risque nada. 22 A teus pés, 35; Intimate diary, 61. 23 Süssekind, 9. 24 Here the author uses the word ‘ensayo’, which also means ‘essay’ or ‘attempt’. – Trans. 25 Here the author uses the word ‘ensayo’, which also means ‘essay’ or ‘attempt’. – Trans, 12. It seems to me that the first photographic project of Cindy Sherman, contemporary to Ana Cristina's production, functions as the perfect other side to this poetic experimentation. Sherman, a young woman from New York and a graduate in Visual Arts, having recently moved to Manhattan, was trying, in the late 1970s, to create a project that would define her as an artist. She begins, in 1977 – some years after Ana Cristina has begun her poetic practice – to photograph herself in a series of black-and-white images in which she poses/acts as different (imaginary) actresses, observed in the intimacy of their houses: in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bed. In this way she constructed from herself the characters which would comprise the series, Untitled film stills, composed between 1977 and 1980. The methodology that Ana Cristina, as the present reading suggests, elaborates is precisely the methodology that Cindy Sherman would find through her film stills: autobiography and photography as disfiguration, as a way out of truth but, at the same time, or perhaps precisely because of this, as a shop window of desire. Between posing and acting – for this and other reasons they are called film stills – Sherman appears in disguise, with wigs, composing her self-non-portraits. Working with clichés of pop culture, her film stills work by way of a double recognition on the spectator's part: on one hand the sensation of recognizing where the image belongs to and, on the other, in recognizing the subject that appears. Yet if the stills are self-portraits, they are only in so far as figures-en-abime, in so far as something like a visual prosopopoeia, and given that they do not refer to any film, we could think that this double recognition is nothing more than the product of the projection of desire. Sherman's project works on a double negation: self-portraits but not of herself; film stills that belong to no film. In this sense, the photographs do not refer, essentially, to anything. Sherman's experiment resulted in a total of 69 images and in a project (Untitled film stills) that radicalized photography in the US. This, at a moment in which photography was still stuck in a certain documentarian and ethnographic gaze – which emerged, to a great extent, from the project of the Farm Security Administration. Yet Untitled film stills, in its dialogue with other works in the field of visual and conceptual art that were using photography as a methodology of other works treating subjectivity, referentiality, the relationship between art and life – we can think of the projects of Adrian Piper, such as ‘Food for Thought’ (1971) or ‘The Mythic Being’ (1975), or certain works of Gerard Richter beginning in 1972, as well as the era's experiments with performance art (and this genealogy could also include performances of Marina Abramovic such as ‘Role Exchange’ in 1975 or the masks with mirrors Lygia Clark would construct in the late 1970s) – was making clear on one hand the centrality of the photographic mechanism, to a great extent as vehicle, and on the other a questioning of the limits of the I in the articulation of contemporary art. In this sense, it is no coincidence that the film Blade Runner (1982), an emblem, or classic of that era and its problematics, would be the staging of a crisis in subjectivity, and that photography, the gaze and the autobiographic story would function as the mechanisms upon which and from which this crisis would be played out. Perhaps like Deckard, the futurist replica of that film, and like Descartes (Descartes/Deckard) Sherman and Cesar – like Piper, Richter, Rauschenberg, Oiticica, etc. – all know that there is no direct access to the world, only to its representations and that representations only circle around that which escapes from perception, understanding and imagination: desire. See Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. Cindy Sherman: Untitled. In Bachelors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 101–59; and Bruno, Giuliana. 1987. Ramble city: Postmodernism and Blade Runner. October 41: 61–74, for compelling and suggestive readings of Sherman and Blade Runner respectively. 26 Here the author uses the word ‘ensayo’, which also means ‘essay’ or ‘attempt’. – Trans, 9. 27 Cesar, Correspondências incompletas, 192. 28 Buarque de Hollanda, ed. Vinte e seis poetas hoje, 97. 29 Süssekind Süssekind, Flora. 2004. Literatura e vida literária. Polêmicas, diários & retratos, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG. 2da. edição revista [Google Scholar], Literatura e vida literária, 124. 30 Süssekind, Literatura e vida literáriaibid., 132. 31 Cesar, A teus pés, 152. 32 Within this problem surrounding the editorial use of visual material in the publication of Ana Cristina's writings, we should certainly pause over the exception, the author's own addition of Caderno de Portsmouth–Colchester from 1980, a book which was intended as an object while the poet was still living, and on whose cover Ana Cristina had decided to place a photographic portrait of herself. This photograph was then reproduced in the posthumous edition of Inéditos e dispersos, in which Ana Cristina is leaning against a white railing, hands in her pockets, looking at the camera through glasses. Next to the young woman, a suitcase. Has she just arrived, is she leaving? From where, where to? This exception – the only book that Ana Cristina intended with that photograph – is perhaps neither strange nor exceptional, if we take into account the absence of a title for the book and, where the proper name itself might appear as the title, the photographic portrait of the author as a kind of subheading. Critics began to refer to the book as Caderno de Portsmouth–Colchester simply because the name of those two cities appears underneath the photography. In any case, it would be Ana Cristina Cesar's name that could serve as a title, upon reading the name, in capital letters, at the top of the cover. It is worth pausing over this detail of the graphic organization because, although Ana Cristina's poetry is not in any way a direct descendent of the traditional avant-garde (as in the modernists or the Concrete poets) in which the visual organization formed part of a programmatic exercise around the poetry, this book, perhaps her most experimental, is to a great extend a ‘pictographic exercise’ (Süssekind). Yet also, if on one hand the photograph of the author, situated as a subheading or subtitle of the book, is surprising – if we were to consider the name as the title – on the other hand the inscription is not surprising, in the context of a poet who works constantly at decentring the poetic subject, the concrete, fixed subjectivity: as this fixity is sustained, literally, by a spatial-temporal displacement from Portsmouth to Colchester, from 30 June to 12 July 1980. 33 The author uses the adjective ‘desvairado’, which can mean ‘mad’, ‘delirious’, ‘hallucinated’, or ‘extravagant’. – Trans. 34 Süssekind Süssekind, Flora. 1995. Até segunda ordem não me risque nada. Os cadernos, rascunhos e a poesia-em-vozes de Ana Cristina Cesar, Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras. [Google Scholar], Até segunda ordem, 12–13. 35 Cesar, A teus pés 80; Intimate diary, 92. 36 Cesar Cesar, Ana Cristina. 1995. Inéditos e Dispersos. Poesia/Prosa, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense. Org. Armando Freitas Filho [Google Scholar], Inéditos e dispersos. Poesia e prosa, 35. 37 Cesar Cesar, Ana Cristina. 1995. Inéditos e Dispersos. Poesia/Prosa, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense. Org. Armando Freitas Filho [Google Scholar], Inéditos e dispersos. Poesia e prosa, 198. 38 Cesar, ‘Luvas de pelica’, A teus pés, 136; Intimate diary, 18. 39 Barthes, ‘Luvas de pelica’, A teus pés, 136; Intimate diary, 18ibid. 40 ‘Photography is privileged within modern culture because, unlike other systems of representation, the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by the world. Light bounces off an object or a body and into the camera, activating a light-sensitive emulsion and creating an image. Photographs are therefore designated as indexical signs, images produced as a consequence of being directly affected by the objects to which they refer’. Batchen Batchen, Geoffrey. 2004. Forget me not: Photography and remembrance, New York and Amsterdam: Princeton Architectural Press and Van Gogh Museum. [Google Scholar], Forget Me Not, 31. 41 Anther possible translation would be ‘We miss her’, although the original does not use the pronoun. The Portuguese word ‘saudade’ is not entirely equivalent to nostalgia; encompassing both a retrospective and prospective longing for a lost object, it is notoriously untranslatable. – Trans. 42 Inéditos e dispersos, 126. 43 Ibid, 168. 44 Cesar, Correpondências incompletas. 45 Cesar, ‘Luvas de pelica’, A teus pés, 125. 46 Ibid, 126. 47 Ibid, 127. 48 Ibid, 129. 49 The translations are from Intimate diary, 9–11. 50 The translations are from Intimate diary, 13. 51 Cesar, ‘Instruções de bordo’, A teus pés, 94. 52 Intimate diary, 61–2. 53 This phrase is in English in the original. – Trans. 54 Intimate diary, 27. 55 Intimate diary, 26–7. 56 Cesar, ‘Epílogo’, A teus pés, 148–9; Intimate diary, 28. 57 I am citing and reconfiguring in this initial sentence the beginning of Georges Didi-Huberman's work on anachronism and temporality in the image, which has been fundamental for the development of this essay: ‘Facing an image we are always facing time’ (‘Siempre, ante la imagen, estamos ante el tiempo’). See Didi-Huberman Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2006. Ante el tiempo. Historia del arte y anacronismo de las imágenes, Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo. [Google Scholar], Ante el tiempo, 11. 58 I am playing here with two verses of Ana Cristina Cesar, unedited during her life time, and which Flora Süssekind, in her study of the poet, will salvage: ‘Mirror, a hollow in the wall’ and ‘Your portrait, a hollow in the wall’ (‘Espelho, buraco na parede’ y ‘Teu retrato, buraco na parede’).