The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art

M. McNee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349481521, 9781137386144
• eBook ISBN: 9781137386151
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Literature

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on the connections between the environmental imaginary and issues of identity, place and nation. Utilizing a delimited ecocritical approach, McNee puts Brazilian culture, through the work of contemporary poets and visual artists, into a broader, transnational dialogue.

1

ECOPOETRY AND EARTH ART

THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS AND BRAZILIAN INFLECTIONS

In an untitled poem from her 2011 collection, Olho empírico (Empirical Eye), Dora Ribeiro writes: “I prefer the world / without territory / only the dispersed surface / . . . / if unwritten / place / closes its eyes / and does not allow itself to be seen” (83). Ribeiro’s withdrawal from representation as she looks upon the world, her desire to let it remain unperceived, unladen by the signifying gaze, illustrates a particular trend in contemporary Brazilian poetry: the figuration of landscape and signs of nature in states of abstraction, dislocation, and reflexive, skeptical interrogation rather than under a sign of place-making or territorial referentiality. This is a notable feature throughout Ribeiro’s earlier collection, A teoria do jardim (The Theory of the Garden, 2009), which is filled with largely generic nature imagery. Trees, flowers, fruit, stone, and earth appear not as specific objects of representation nor as refracted through the lens of place or Brazilianness, but instead as symbols and metaphors for the sensual physicality of the self in its relationship with the body and the material world: “pure material / pure stone / voluptuously sculpted, in time and its waters / pure eye of the universe / in the earthen bed / pure path of silence” (23). In “antilineana,” the opening poem of the second part of the collection, titled “systema naturae: classificação das coisas vivas” (systema naturae: classification of living things), Ribeiro lightly mocks the urge to classify in the scientifically minded view upon beings, which are thus reduced to “things of the enslavement of the gaze / contaminated by the exercise / of discovery” (57).

This tendency toward abstraction, skepticism, and an apparent disentangling of landscape and nature from identity debates or frameworks of national or regional signification also finds sustained expression in Duda Machado’s 1997 book, Margem de uma onda (The Margin of a Wave). Machado shares with Ribeiro a largely generic quality in his signs of the natural world, in poems that strive to reveal and interrogate the philosophical implications of landscape as a way of seeing and a formal tradition. In “Devoração da paisagem” (Devouring the Landscape), the innocuous contemplation of a pastoral landscape of hills, patches of forest, houses, and a stream suddenly, as critic Myriam Ávila describes it, “reverts back to a sort of violent pillaging” (n. pag.). Machado writes:

De algum lugar,

distante das retinas,

a fera irrompe

e de pronto,

a paisagem se contrai.

Já é presa,

repasto de significados

com que a fera

realimenta sua fome (53).

(From somewhere

far from the retinas,

a beast erupts

and instantly,

the landscape contracts.

It is now captured,

banquet of meanings

with which the beast

nourishes again its hunger.)

“O Reino” (The Realm), from the same collection, follows a similar transition, from an idyllically figured yet largely generic vista—“the wind appears to expand the horizon / tree-tops, shadows, / curves of branches / the sweetness of the leaves / sunlit”—to its interruption by an almost violent imposition of meaning, this time in the form of an ambiguously posed question, “who reigns here?”, invoking concepts of power, property, and dominion.¹

Among contemporary Brazilian visual artists, there are parallel trends indicating a reflexive, deconstructive approach to the figuration of nature and to landscape as an artistic tradition and mode of perception. In her 2010 series, “Estudo da paisagem” (Landscape Studies), photographer Sofia Borges, from São Paulo, presents large format, color prints of sections of the painted background landscapes that, along with taxidermied animal specimen, are part of the elaborate biome and wildlife habitat dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. The mounted animals are left beyond the framing of her photographs, which initially appear simply as catalog images of old landscape paintings. Closer examination reveals degrees of mediation and distortion in the photographic renderings that subtly jar the gaze upon landscape representation out of its habitual modes of regard and disregard. Odd framings, the heightened revelation of extraneous visual details such as scratches, reflections, and shadows, and the faded or slightly softened, vaguely impressionistic quality of the original paintings combine to give the images a temporality that spans a distant past to the present. These effects heighten our perception of the decay of the original paintings as well as their romantic strangeness, their distance from the hyperactive photo-realism we now tend to expect of natural-history modes of representation. The photographs thus erode the aura of scientific verisimilitude of the original images, imbuing them with both skepticism and nostalgia for the sense of timelessness, or a frozen-in-time quality, of the dioramas and the majestic landscapes that are their object of representation.²

Landscape as form and mode of perception and representation is also a recurrent focus in the work of Rio de Janeiro–based artist Eduardo Coimbra. Through his deconstructed and reconstructed landscapes, Coimbra explores the interstices and disjunctions between the image and the real, subject and object, nature and artifice. In his Asteróides series, Coimbra begins with multiple images of a mountain face set against a backdrop of blue sky. These are then cut and reassembled into roughly spherical, floating, asteroid-like objects. As the artist describes it, the landscape is not just matter or surface, but is, fundamentally, “an extension of visible space. I see landscape as the great concavity that comprehends us. . . . It is a huge shell that only exists up to the limit of our range of vision.” (113). His asteroids transfigure the concavity of that shell into what appears as a convex object. Other series and installations, including “Landscape Invention,” bring the landscape image into juxtaposition with a landscape constructed for the exhibit site, simultaneously transforming the landscape into image and the image into landscape. Writing about Coimbra’s installation, critic Glória Ferreira notes its destabilization of the nature/culture and subjective/objective antinomies that operate through the landscape form:

“Landscape Invention,” in particular, restates the problem of landscape by overlaying nature and culture and, by representing landscape in situ, it signals that, in the end, a landscape is only that which is seen, and from a certain perspective. . . . [T]he landscape is not just a pure object before which the subject can locate itself in a relationship of exteriority. In this transitional space between representation and natural element, the landscape is clearly an interface between subjective and objective space. (125)

Operating within the counterpoint between the natural and the fabricated, Coimbra’s work disrupts it by highlighting the always fabricating role of perception and its conversion of the “natural” object into image and representation.³

The clearly conceptualist thrust of environmental aesthetics and representation among these poets and artists challenges us to reach beyond critical approaches in Brazil that have been largely concerned with the meanings of flora, fauna, and landscape representation within the context of the ideological configurations of place, collective identity, territorial expansion, and national imaginary. They also challenge us to rethink what we consider as the relationship between environmental engagement and artistic practices and texts. Ultimately, their work substantially resonates with intensified discussions on the meanings of nature and the environment in our age of increasingly generalized, globalized environmental change and anxiety as well as debates around ecopoetry and Earth art as still emergent critical categories and as transnational literary and artistic movements. Before turning in chapters to follow to more developed readings of four ecopoets and four Earth artists active in Brazil today, this chapter introduces components for an ecocritical framework that can help to illuminate and respond to the conceptual ambitions and dimensions in their work. Drawing upon recent and ongoing attempts to theorize environmental aesthetics and representation, we will be able to more fully appreciate these artists’ and poets’ engagement with specific environments and environmental issues as well as more abstractly oriented ecological thinking and its ethical and ontological implications.

In his deconstructive approach to environmental criticism, Timothy Morton reflects on the philosophical implications of the forms of intersubjectivity and interdependence between beings and species of radically diverse orders that ecological science evermore insistently reveals to us. Morton proposes that this looming awareness, the “ecological thought” that inexorably has come to hang over or behind much of thought today, unsettles modern concepts of nature, self, and environment. As he puts it:

The concept “nature” has had its day and no longer serves us well. The main reason is that nature is a kind of backdrop—and we are living in a world where the backdrop has dissolved: it’s all in the foreground now. When we replace nature with the ecological thought, we discover a much stranger, more intimate, more jaw-dropping world. (“Timothy Morton” n. pag.)

Morton proposes a critical dismantling of an idea of nature that is still, in his assessment, overly burdened by the legacies of dualistic thinking, whether in instrumentalist, positivist manifestations or their Romantic counterpoints. He calls for heightened attention to Derridean différance as a more useful foundation for ecological thinking than the idea of nature itself in the way that it has been established as an idealized abstraction, a unified category or set of categories, always ultimately over there and apart from us. As Morton sees it, if the typically Romantic subject of environmental discourse desires the transcendence of difference between nature and the self, it also, through its desire for pure, pristine, organic nature, “reestablishes the very separation it seeks to abolish” (Ecology 125). Morton’s work seeks to unsettle some of the certainties of environmental discourse and representation by insisting upon ontological reflection and by shifting the critical gaze from the object of environmental art and writing to its various forms of subject/object formation.

Morton deploys two concept metaphors by which to explore the intersections between ecology, deconstruction, and ecocritical theory: the mesh and dark ecology. With the mesh, Morton purposefully rejects the more stock phrase, “the web of life,” renaming what has become a standard metaphor of environmental discourse in order to reactivate its potential for destabilizing ontological certainties. The mesh newly insists on the question of what is what, exposing and unsettling background and foreground, subject and object, human self and nonhuman other:

The ecological thought imagines interconnectedness, which I call the mesh. Who or what is interconnected with what or with whom? The mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself.” . . . Our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger. (The Ecological Thought 15)

Morton’s second concept, “dark ecology,” is proposed as a counterpoint to romantically pure, sublime portrayals of nature. Morton urges, via Adorno, greater attention to “what in us is most objectified, the ‘thousand, thousand slimy things’ ” (Ecology 196), thereby recognizing the “monstrosity” in the “mechanical” processes that is nature and refusing to digest the object or other into an idealized form. (Ecology 97) He writes:

Ecological art is duty-bound to hold the slimy in view. This involves invoking the underside of ecomimesis, the pulsing, shifting qualities of ambient poetics, rather than trying to make pretty or sublime pictures of nature. (Ecology 159–160).

An insistent gaze upon abject beings and qualities might compel us to recognize ourselves in and as the “natural” object or other, suspending the comforting aestheticizing distance and the human subjectification conventionally provided by the frame called nature (Ecology 197).

Morton thus privileges texts that break with traditional conventions of nature writing and ambient aesthetics. Environmental aesthetics, in his view, should highlight and destabilize what Derridá called “re-marks,” the rhetorical devices that produce a split between background and foreground, human self and nonhuman other. Morton encourages heightened attention to what we might call post-nature and post-landscape forms and metalevel readings of landscape and nature representation at large as a vital dimension to ecological awareness and our response to ecological crisis.

Morton’s interest in pushing environmental discourse and aesthetics past dualistic and idealized conceptions of nature finds echo in ongoing critical discussions of ecopoetry and Earth art. J. Scott Bryson (2005) proposes attributes of ecopoetry that distinguish it from nature poetry, including, like Morton, emphasis on “the interdependent nature of the world” (2). Bryson also interrupts the privileged connection between ecopoetry and the particularities of place, as explored through notions such as bioregionalism, reinhabitation, and, famously, Wendell Berry’s “land ethic,” arguing that

while the process of place-making is a vital activity in the work of ecopoets, . . . it is almost always balanced . . . with a healthy dose of space-consciousness, since to see oneself as metaphorical place-maker is to be tempted to also see oneself as owner, or even literal creator, of the surrounding landscape. (18)

Among the purposeful effects of ecopoetry, as Bryson understands it, can be to serve as a counterpoint to the orderly signification of place, evoking, through metalanguage and abstraction—what he refers to as space-consciousness—uncertainty, hesitation, and the limitations of our faculties of perception, comprehension, and representation.

Morton’s emphasis on the unsettling ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Land That Seemed to Us Quite Vast
• 1  Ecopoetry and Earth Art: Theoretical Orientations and Brazilian Inflections
• 2  Manoel de Barros and Astrid Cabral: Between Backyard Swamps and the Cosmos
• 3  Sérgio Medeiros and Josely Vianna Baptista: Meta-Landscape and the (Re)Turn of the Native
• 4  Frans Krajcberg and Bené Fonteles: Art, Anti-Art, and Environmentalist Engagement
• 5  Lia do Rio and Nuno Ramos: The Art of Nature Estranged
• Epilogue: Notes from the Creative Margins of Rio+20
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index