Latin American Neo-Baroque

Senses of Distortion

Pablo Baler

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349949168
• eBook ISBN: 9781137591838
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Literature

Pablo Baler studies the ruptures and continuities linking the de-centered dynamics of the 17^thcentury to the logic of instability that permeates 20^th century visual and literary production in Latin America. Bringing philosophy, literary interpretation, art criticism, and a poetic approach to the history of ideas, Baler offers a new perspective from which to understand the uncanny phenomenon of baroque distortion. This interdisciplinary inquiry not only leads to a more specific formulation regarding the singularity of the reappropriations of the baroque in Spanish America, but also allows for a more comprehensive assessment of its historical reach in the broader context of the representational crisis of modernity.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Pablo BalerLatin American Neo-Baroque10.1057/978-1-137-59183-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Senses of Distortion

Pablo Baler¹

(1)

California State University, Los Angeles, California, USA

Abstract

The introduction is devoted to a critical historiography of the conflict between Albertian perspective and the typically baroque genre of anamorphosis as a telling contrast between two opposing views of representation manifested in the concepts of “sharpness” and “distortion”. Thus, three instances of distortion to be explored in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 (metaphor, hyperbaton, and anaphora) are framed not just rhetorically but also in connection to the history of ideas and sensibilities. In the final analysis, the concept of distortion points to an epistemological problem that includes all others: perspectivism, skepticism, the limits of identity, the trustworthiness of the senses, and the efficacy of language. And it is this epistemological vein that the following chapters will attempt to articulate.

Keywords

Albertian perspectiveRenaissanceBaroqueMannerismAnamorphosisDistortion

End Abstract

A Sign of Imbalance

The subtitle of this book might lead one to believe that distortion constitutes an aesthetic category whose meanings can be rigorously defined. However, a particularly perplexing aspect of this concept is the fact that it only acquires meaning in relation to another equally fantastic parameter: clarity; for distortion, as a stylistic device, raises the issue of the limits of expressive opaqueness while at the same time questioning the artificiality of any attempt at transparency.

As examples of distortion, one could cite the contorted bodies of Gianlorenzo Bernini as opposed to the static figures of the High Renaissance; Góngora’s hyperbaton as against the restrained fluency of a Garcilaso; anamorphosis as defying the rational space of Albertian perspective; or the dissolving, atomized landscapes of the historical avant-gardes in contrast with mimetic realism of positivist hue.

Although they manifest themselves in an incredible variety of forms and have embodied, historically, different worldviews, the works that partake of this distorting impulse tend to evoke an imaginative universe that is connected to the metonymic series of imbalances, disfigurements, monstrosities, chaos, and uncertainties.

If distortion implies a twisting/deviation of the chain connecting a signifying center with its representation, clarity would assume a constantly maintained identity between those two poles. In the field of artistic expression, in any case, the borders dividing these categories are not always, and in every way, precise, since the very notions of “signification” and “representation” are suspended—sometimes flagrantly—as in the special cases of minimalism or hyperrealism. Hence, the first question one must ask is, if there is indeed a phenomenon that can be described as distortion (which will approximately coincide here with the categories of baroque and neo-baroque), where does it begin, and where does it end? It is a two-part query that is meant to probe not only the synchronic limits of distortion in a particular artistic expression but also its historical margins and overlays. In both cases, to the extent that one can conceive of every symbolic production as speculation about the “world,” I consider this aesthetic exploration of distortion in terms of the dialectics that take place between formal choices and “epistemological fantasies.” ¹

In that context, this book attempts to give meanings to a group of artistic expressions that can be encompassed by the expressive phenomenon of distortion. By linking the imaginary of twentieth-century artistic production with the production of the historical baroque, I intend to illuminate three instances of reappropriation of the baroque in Latin America: the avant-garde, the New Narrative, and postmodernism. Thus, the disintegration of the world and the subject in the poetry of Vicente Huidobro, the ungraspable plasticity of the universes projected in the work of J. L. Borges, and the games of perpetual metamorphosis that language and bodies undergo in Severo Sarduy will be dealt with here from the wider historical perspective of the problematics of modernity. ² In sum, the central line of this investigation consists of probing the genealogy that connects the Golden Age baroque’s dynamics of torsion and decentering with twentieth-century Latin America’s aesthetics of instability and angst. In spite of these commonalities, however, I shall not overlook the singularity of their insights and sensibilities.

Curious Perspectives

Before embarking on the study of those works, however, one must first explore the problem of both the historical and formal limits of distortion. For that purpose, the history of perspective serves as a revealing theoretical framework, since the device of Renaissance perspective and the experiments with anamorphosis can be thought of as the emblematic resources, respectively, of clarity and distortion. Both artificial in a different way though to an equivalent degree, these categories of representation are opposite inasmuch as the illusory geometry of linear perspective tends to cover up (or rather, ignore) its own artifice, while anamorphosis tends to unmask and foreground that deconstruction.

Ever since Euclid’s treatises on optics, perspective as a science has been concerned with fixing the exact dimension and position of an object in space in relation to a point of view. But the connection between those geometrical laws and the art of illusion that recreates those laws in visual representation is recent, having appeared in the first half of the fifteenth century in the experiments of Filippo Brunelleschi, later formulated by Leon Battista Alberti (Della pintura, 1435) and developed by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, or Vignola. ³ According to Jurgis Baltrusaitis, “perspective was restored both as a rationalisation of vision and as an objective reality, while at the same time preserving the element of make believe” (1977: 4) (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Alberti, Construction for representations in perspective, 1435. Originally published in Gilman, The Curious Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978

Although this grammar of verisimilitude (costruzione legittima) offers a technique for convincingly representing the visible, it only corresponds partially to the reality of perception. Its artificiality is not limited to the self-evident fact that it translates a three-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional space. Its true artifice lies in having made of the monocular, static point of view the touchstone for the representation of reality. This is how Karsten Harries describes it in Infinity and Perspective:

The violence [Alberti’s] construction does to the way we actually see is evident: normally we see with two, constantly shifting eyes. (…) For the sake of achieving his mastery of appearance the painter reduces experience to momentary, monocular vision and places us on a flat earth. (…) But we should not lose sight of the doubly problematic status of an art willing to sacrifice reality to its rationalized representation, a sacrifice that anticipates the replacement, demanded by the science to come of the life-world with its rationalized representation. (Harries 77–79, emphasis mine)

The correspondence between perspective and world that Harries emphasizes occurs at the level of the connection between representation and epistemology. For in spite of the illusionism involved in Albertian perspective’s realistic representation, it is a manifestation of a general atmosphere (that of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth) marked by man’s confidence in his epistemological capacity; hence it shares with the project of modern science inaugurated by Descartes the propensity to pare reality down to the bare bones of its rational underpinning.

On another note, the experiments in “curious perspectives” that we know as anamorphosis have revealed that they are more akin to the practice of methodical doubt than to the rationalized representation of reality. Although one can already find experiments in anamorphosis in Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches (two drawings in the Codex Atlanticus, 1483–1518), the theorization and projection of this device are more recent, appearing in the seventeenth century, specifically in the work of Salomon de Caus and J. F. Niceron. So if indeed its genesis and dissemination date from the sixteenth century, a renewed interest in anamorphosis spreads in the seventeenth century, when these experiments begin to acquire value in themselves.

The mechanics of anamorphosis does not contradict the principles of linear perspective. It does, however, exacerbate its spatial correspondences to the point that it produces a paradoxical effect. It carries proportions to the most absurd consequences, destroying the illusion of realism; and even more interestingly, managing to call into question the very cognitive premise of the Albertian system: confidence that the world can be grasped by reason. In anamorphosis (or, as Baltrusaitis calls it, “the dark side of perspective”), forms are projected in foreshortening so that, when viewed frontally, they appear illegible or monstrous, and it is only when they are seen from a displaced viewpoint that the figure is corrected, recovering its original figurative meaning. ⁴

The anamorphoses that depend on specular tricks are even more illegible due to the fact that the mathematical distortion is compounded by the natural curvature of the refraction of light; and within this group, it is conical anamorphoses that produce the most aberrant images because the mirror’s conicity moves the center of the original image to the periphery and vice versa. With reference to the collapse of signification that occurs in one of these anamorphoses, Baltrusaitis writes in Anamorphic Art:

The world bursts asunder before reconstituting itself. (…) Distorted round the mirror, the beautiful classical figure [Venus and Adonis] assumes a monstrous aspect. The youthful hero is bisected, his head down. His swollen limbs are turned around, his feet are in the air. The staff bends into a bow. Venus’s arms resemble intestines. The whole is a strange whirlwind of scattered pieces and shapeless anatomical debris. (1977, 145)

Hence, anamorphosis makes manifest the artificial character of Albertian illusion by revealing a disturbing fact: it is the point of view and not the representation itself that produces the illusion of reality. And if viewpoints can be multiplied ad infinitum, not only representation but even reality itself is revealed as an experience whose infinite partiality is a flagrant testimony to its illusory nature. ⁵

The confrontation of these two forms of representation illuminates the conflict between the skeptical irony inherent in the displacement inscribed in anamorphosis, on one hand, and the rationalist myth suggested by the clear, monocular vision of linear perspective on the other. ⁶

It suffices to suggest that the gap between these metaphors of artistic representation labeled clarity and distortion (illustrated here by the laws of costruzione legittima and anamorphosis) is not a matter of principle but of degree. Both categories constitute antithetical instances of the same representational spectrum which, although it ranges from transparent literalist legibility to “opaque” hermetic illegibility, assumes both the preexistence of a center of signification (a “sign” of origin) as the horizon of an expressive limit beyond which all possibility of communication expires. Every attempt to attain a “zero degree” of expressive opacity (as is manifest, e.g., in the abstract achromatism of Ad Reinhardt) functions only within the historical framework of innovation; as soon as we acquire some critical distance, these illusions of opacity turn out to be just as expressive and artificial as the opposite impulse toward a “zero degree” of transparency. The play of expression can only take place between these two limits. ⁷ Alberti concludes the treatise Della Pittura by announcing a total future for art: “I believe that if my successor were more dedicated and competent than I, he would be able to transform painting into something absolute and perfect” (98, my translation). Alberti could not have known that such a more dedicated and competent successor would exist and that his name would be Richard Estes (b. 1932); much less could he have imagined that, like the total map Borges conceived of in “El rigor de la ciencia,” “total” painting would achieve only the absolute and perfect negation of representation. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard seems to express the same idea about the problematic hyperrealist “totality”:

Through reproduction from one medium into another, the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. (72, ⁸ )

The hyperreal’s negativity refers to the idea of totality as an illusion. The attempt to make representation coincide absolutely with its object is equivalent to the death of the object, with a ritual of its death that, according to the distorted perspective of Baudrillard himself, is not emptied of contained ecstatic potency.

The stylistic resource of distortion should be understood, from this angle, as a manifestation of imbalance (an intrinsic failure of agreement) destined to upset the mechanisms of transmission. Among these mechanisms one may include the angle, distance, focus, syntax, viewpoints, illumination, legibility, ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Senses of Distortion
• 2. Metaphor: The Tragic Orchestra
• 3. Hyperbaton: The World as Syntax
• 4. Anaphora: Poetics of Laceration
• Backmatter