Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism 9780226822372

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Non-literary Fiction

Non-literary Fiction Art of the A merica s under Neoliberalism

Esther Gabara The University of Chicago Press C h ic ag o a n d L on d on

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82236-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82235-8 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82237-2 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822372.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gabara, Esther, 1972–, author. Title: Non-literary fiction : art of the Americas under neoliberalism / Esther Gabara. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022008956 | ISBN 9780226822365 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226822358 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226822372 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art—Political aspects—Latin America. Classification: LCC N6502.6 .G33 2022 | DDC 709.8/09045—dc23/ eng/20220327 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008956 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Figures . vii Negating: An Introduction . 1 C ha p t e r O n e . 45 Line: Making Fiction in Word and Image C ha p t e r T wo . 83 Motif: Recurrent Images of Walking C ha p t e r T h re e . 115 Gesture: Signals in Motion Chapter Four . 153 Corpus: Telling Bodies, Living and Dead C ha p t e r F i v e . 183 Color: Taken In by Realism E pi l o g u e : A Re f u g e . 223 Acknowledgments . 229 Notes . 233 Bibliography . 277 Index . 289

Figures

Introduction 0.1. Henrique Alvim Corrêa, illustration for La guerre des mondes, 1906 . 2 0.2. Alfredo Jaar, Estudios sobre la felicidad, 1979–1981 . 1 4 0.3. Sample ballot for Chilean plebiscite reproduced in Chile: 1988 Plebiscite Resource Book, 1988 . 15 0.4. Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, No+, 1983 . 16 0.5. Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987 . 1 7 0.6. Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987 . 18 0.7. Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconstrucción, 2008 . 2 4 0.8. Chemi Rosado Seijo, “El repartidor de noticias,” 2000, from the series Tapando para ver . 39 Chapter One: Line 1.1. Color-banded khipu, Inka, 1450–1534 . 4 7 1.2. Ulises Carrión, Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía, 1973 . 5 1 1.3. Ulises Carrión, Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía, 1973 . 52 1.4. Décio Pignatari, “Agora tal vez nunca,” 1964 . 54 1.5. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica i buen gobierno, 1615 . 63

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1.6. Ulises Carrión, Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, 1983 . 65 1.7. Waltércio Caldas, “Leitura silenciosa,” 1975 . 67 1.8. Waltércio Caldas, Espelho para Velásquez, 2000 . 70 1.9. Waltércio Caldas, Untitled, 1990 . 7 1 1.10. Waltércio Caldas, Escultura escultura, 2005 . 72 1.11. Waltércio Caldas, Momento de fronteira, 1999 . 7 3 1.12. Waltércio Caldas, Momento de fronteira, 2000 . 7 5 1.13. Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo, 2015 . 7 7 1.14. Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo, detail, 2015 . 79 Chapter Two: Motif 2.1. Antonio Caro, from the series Homenaje a Manuel Quintín Lame, 1972 . 89 2.2. Carlos Garaicoa, Homenaje al 6, 1992 . 96 2.3. Carlos Garaicoa, Homenaje al 6, detail, 1992 . 97 2.4. Antonio Caro, Proyecto 500, 1992 . 99 2.5. Francis Alÿs, Turista, 1994 . 101 2.6. Francis Alÿs, Re-enactments, 2000 . 102 2.7. Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes, 1992–2006 . 1 0 6 2.8. Francis Alÿs, 61 out of 60, 1999 . 108 2.9. Lorie Novak, Lento, pero avanzo, 2010 . 110 Chapter Three: Gesture 3.1. Carlos Garaicoa, Perseguido por la palabra, opto por el gesto, from the series La palabra transformada, 2009 . 116 3.2. Show Opinião, Polygram/Philips, 1965 . 122 3.3. Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento, 1979 . 123

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3.4. Stuyvesant Van Veen, Gesture and Environment, 1941 . 127 3.5. Cover, Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 1, 1980 . 12 8 3.6. Cover, Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 2, 1983 . 129 3.7. “Harto,” in Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 2, 1983 . 130 3.8. “Invertido,” in Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 2, 1983 . 131 3.9. Silvia Mejía, Parola, sostantivo femminile, 1978 . 133 3.10. Lourdes Grobet, La familia Solar, 1983 . 135 3.11. Lourdes Grobet, Brazo de Plata con la máscara de la Migra, toreo de Cuatro Caminos, 1981 . 136 3.12. Lourdes Grobet, Portrait of Siglo XX, 1982 . 137 3.13. Lourdes Grobet, Luchadores Nezahualcóyotl, 1975 . 138 3.14. Michel Groisman, Porta das mãos, 2007 . 1 46 3.15. Michel Groisman, Sirva-se, 2001–2004 . 1 4 7 3.16. Michel Groisman, Sirva-se, 2001–2004 . 1 4 8 Chapter Four: Corpus 4.1. Artur Barrio, Livro de carne, 1978–1979 . 156 4.2. Artur Barrio, CadernosLivros, 1978–1979 . 158 4.3. Artur Barrio, Rodapés de carne, 1978–1979 . 167 4.4. Amalia Pica, Catachresis #63 (tongues of the shoes, legs of the chair, legs of the table, teeth of the fork and arm of the chair), 2016 . 1 7 0 4.5. Amalia Pica, Catachresis #11 (teeth of the saw, leg of the table, elbow of the pipe), 2011 . 1 7 1 4.6. Amalia Pica, Reconstruction of an Antenna (as Seen on TV), 2010 . 1 7 3 4.7. Artur Barrio, Situação T/T/, 1 (segunda parte), 1970 . 1 74

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4.8. Artur Barrio, Defl . . . . . . Situação . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Ruas . . . . . . . Abril. . . . . ., 1970 . 1 74 4.9. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Nildo vestindo um parangolé de Hélio Oiticica no Viaduto da Mangueira, 1978 . 1 7 6 Chapter Five: Color 5.1. Waldemar Cordeiro, Uma cadeira é uma cadeira, 1964 . 188 5.2. Hélio Oiticica with B7 bólide vidro 1, 1963 . 197 5.3. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique, 1742 . 205 Color Plates (after p. 166) 1. Lourdes Grobet, Tigres, Zitlala, Guerrero, 1981 2. Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square: Less and More, 1969 3. Alejandro Puente, Trama, color y luz, 1969 4. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Byron, Lisa, and Emmitt (from The Garden of Delights), 1998 5. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Color Field 5 (with Casta Painting), 2003 6. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Guerrero Negro, 2008 7. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Phantom Truck, 2007 8. Cildo Meireles, Desvio para o vermelho: Impregnação; Entorno; Desvio, 1967–1984 9. Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968 10. Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968 11. Chemi Rosado Seijo, El Cerro, detail, 2003 12. Chemi Rosado Seijo, Carta de colores, 2012

Negating: An Introduction

An interview with Cildo Meireles (b. 1948) at the turn of the millennium centered on the question of fiction. Reflecting on his own practice over the decades, the Brazilian artist admitted a long-standing fascination with Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast, which famously posed as news coverage of the Martian invasion of Earth: “The War of the Worlds is an example of an art object that worked perfectly, in the sense that it seamlessly dissolved the border between art and life, fiction and reality.”1 Meireles situated the broadcast at the nexus of visual art—an “art object”—and literary fiction, as the radio show was based on H. G. Wells’s 1897 serialized science-fiction novel. The artist also described the impact of the canonical Latin American writers Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and João Guimarães Rosa on his own attempts to bridge aesthetics, politics, and ethics in the visual arts. The desire to make work at these same junctures, Meireles explained, increased as the military dictatorship that came to power in Brazil in 1964 grew more repressive. Meireles is not alone in his fascination with this particular fiction. War with Mars has reappeared at key moments as a cipher for hemispheric tensions between north and south. The alien invasion appeared in US serials as the drumbeat was amped up in the months before the Spanish-American War (1898), and it was reinvented for radio by Welles on the cusp of World War II and the country’s massive expansion of military and economic power.2 Meireles himself began to work with fictions in the 1960s, as the United States threw its support behind the repressive regimes across the hemisphere that welcomed experiments with economic privatization, political deregulation, and reactionary social logics, known broadly as neoliberalism. Brazilian art had an intimate connection to the story from the beginning. H. G. Wells disliked the illustrations that accompanied the serialized

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Figure 0.1 Henrique Alvim Corrêa, illustration for La guerre des mondes (War of the Worlds), translated from the English by Henry D. Davray. Published by L. Vandamme & Co. Jette-Bruxelles, 1906.

printing of War of the Worlds, but he enthusiastically embraced the drawings a young Brazilian artist, Henrique Alvim Corrêa, made for the 1906 French translation (fig. 0.1). Alvim Corrêa died of tuberculosis in Europe soon thereafter and effectively disappeared from Brazilian art history. However, studies and exhibitions of his drawings reappeared between 1965 and 1973, just as Meireles’s generation confronted the struggle to make art under dictatorship.3 Since then, many contemporary artists from Latin America have named the importance of both Welles and Wells to them: from Meireles

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and Waltércio Caldas in Brazil to the Colombian Iván Argote’s fictional dismantling of a colonial monument in Paris in 2021. Meireles’s brief reference therefore signals a significant and ongoing history of fiction as political art, including and beyond Welles’s famous science-fiction provocation. The reflections prompted by the interview with Meireles identify core questions about fiction, art, and politics that govern this study and demarcate the period it spans. Fiction was taken up by artists who came of age with him in the 1960s and 1970s, as neoliberal “reforms” were imposed by explicitly repressive regimes, and again by the next generation of artists who came of age in the 1990s, as they confronted the full realization of neoliberalism under democratically elected governments. South America—especially Chile but also Brazil—played a key role in Milton Friedman’s foundational neoliberal economic theory and was subjected to its proposals in the last decades of the twentieth century.4 The genealogy of fiction constituted by leading artists of these two generations provokes basic questions about its form and politics. How can a fiction be considered an “art object”? How do these art objects do the work of novels, given their tenuous narrative status? If they are not narrative, then how do we describe the temporality of their fictions? In decades when the idea of the avant-garde was under intense scrutiny, what is at stake in Meireles’s articulation of their classic theme of “art and life” as “fiction and reality”? Once we are not talking about literary texts, the fundamental question becomes, How do we know that an art object we encounter in real life is a fictional one? Substantial scholarship on contemporary artists who broke the frame of the painting, abandoned the walls of the museum, and embraced the body and performance has addressed these issues to some degree. Art historians, critics, and curators have even spoken of fiction in the same breath that they declare the radical potential of these new art practices. However, they have not answered the core question that drives this study: what is the precise nature of fiction in these visual and objectual forms? To answer, I first peel fiction apart from long-held narrative conventions. I then compose a theory of visual fiction, building upon the discipline of art history’s precise narrative of aesthetic interventions, and literary studies’ articulation of the power of imaginary texts. The concept of non-literary fiction comprehends the mechanics, composition, and inventiveness of these strange objects and recognizes their political promise for life under late twentieth-century neoliberalism. Exhibiting Fiction Three significant museum exhibitions have invited visitors to walk into and among fictions—F(r)icciones (F[r]ictions, Museo Reina Sofía, 2000), More

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Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness (Walker Art Center, 2012), and Fictions (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2018)—which they named as powerful instances of political art. Despite their focus on contemporary art as fiction, all three highlighted artists for whom that politics meant a confrontation with the history of colonialism in the Americas and its legacies of race and racism. The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano coined the phrase “coloniality of modernity” to account for the structural violence that persisted throughout the colonial, national, and now fully globalized periods in the Americas. He names racial discourse as the prime carrier of continued epistemological and social violence: “a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established.”5 The visual fictions presented in these exhibitions contend with a reality well known by the Zapatista indigenous movement in Mexico, the cultural and armed uprising led by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), which exploded on January 1, 1994, with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Neoliberalism and coloniality are coetaneous phenomena.6 The Brazilian curators of F(r)icciones took their title from the famous collection of short stories by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Ivo Mesquita and Adriano Pedrosa write that Borges offers the disordering of fiction and history necessary to provide an account of Latin America: its colonial baroque art and architecture, its modernist avant-garde experimentation, and finally its contemporary, neo-baroque reflections on cultural and racial hybridity. The curators productively mixed works from across these art-historical periods in order to disturb the modern narrative of progress—the rationality of Eurocentrism—that positions the Americas as always lagging behind. Several of the artists included in F(r)icciones also appear in this study, as they are exemplary of the politics of fiction making that this foundational exhibition signaled. However, Mesquita and Pedrosa ultimately rendered the very idea of Latin American art visible in and as difference, and so remained grounded in a logic of representation that, as I argue here, these same artists abandoned. Some two decades after F(r)icciones, Connie H. Choi and Hallie Ringle curated Fictions, which presented artists of African and Latin American descent in the United States whose “works are about breaking down popular understandings, creating new truths and constructing counter-myths. They are about both fiction and fact.”7 Their exhibition emphasized the urgency of examining the politics of fiction across a hemispheric network that includes

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Latin American and Latinx art.8 The curators did not, however, substantively adapt fiction’s literary form: metaphors, narratives, representations, signifiers, and myths pervade their writing about visual artworks. Choi even concludes her essay with a reflection not on fiction but about the increasingly narrative nature of contemporary art. Even the Dia Center for the Arts’ earlier symposium and volume Critical Fictions (1991), presented as a bridge between contemporary art and the decade’s postcolonial interventions, highlighted the politics of fiction but did not bring that discussion onto its home turf of visual art.9 More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness took on that challenge, expanding the comedian Stephen Colbert’s neologism to encompass a wide range of political art projects in the first years of the twenty-first century. The curator Elizabeth Armstrong and contributors to the exhibition catalog predominantly focus on the truth or lies of fiction, and the ethics and politics of deceiving the viewer. Carrie Lambert-Beatty revisits her precise and influential concept of parafiction, which names artworks that entrap viewers in plausible but invented scenarios. While she does not mention War of the Worlds, the mythic debates it sparked over Welles’s culpability for causing chaos among unexpecting listeners who fled their homes in fear of Martian armies, make it an important precursor of parafiction as she defines it. Lambert-Beatty offers a concrete definition of fiction, proper to the interdisciplinary practices of contemporary art, which not surprisingly comes with one of the few direct mentions of colonialism in the catalog. She writes that in these deceptions and fakes, “artists negotiate twin pressures to be locally specific and internationally legible. [The artist Michael] Blum’s Safiye Behar project concerns postcolonial subject matter, while the question of EU accession toward which the artist mobilized the story is part of the contemporary process of globalization.”10 That parallel sentence structure, however, presents the postcolonial as historical content relevant to “local” audiences, whereas the contemporary theoretical and political critique of globalization at the heart of parafiction speaks to the international art world. I return to Lambert-Beatty’s important concept in chapter 5, but I must note here that in an addendum she regrets not beginning her study of parafiction in the 1990s.11 She specifically names the landmark performance Couple in a Cage (also known as Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, 1993), which Cuba-born Coco Fusco and Mexico-born Guillermo GómezPeña produced in response to the quincentennial commemorations of the conquest of the Americas. The two dressed up as members of an invented, “uncontacted” tribe from the Gulf of Mexico and spent days locked in a gilded cage. Performers playing museum docents presented them in the style of human zoos, which existed from the colonial period until the turn

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of the twentieth century. Echoing Lambert-Beatty’s geopolitical and historical correction, Armstrong’s curatorial introduction begins by highlighting three Latin American and Latinx artists, despite naming the globalized (art) world as the context for More Real. The particular intersection of colonial history and late twentieth-century globalization in the Americas evidently plays a crucial role in the concept of fiction in contemporary art. Latin American critical theory offers a rich genealogy around the concept of coloniality that helps to comprehend that intersection with globalization. Political fictions have faced a double bind, however, in that interdisciplinary field.12 When they invent, accusations point to their irrelevance to “real world” concerns. When explicitly framed as deception, in the culturejamming style of Couple in a Cage, moralizing judgments are passed about lack of veracity as a dearth of political significance. Even setting aside the predominance of a certain instrumentality in the social sciences in Latin American studies, humanists also have focused on documentary (and testimonio) forms more than fictive invention when addressing the politics of art and literature.13 Within art history, the “Latin Americanness” of contemporary art is often cast as political, but the field generally understands that politics to be external to the work of art.14 That is to say, the boundary between “art and life, fiction and reality” remains firm. Yet the literary scholar Peter Brooks argues that the invention of fiction is fundamental to human life and dismisses attacks on fiction as “lies that don’t know it, lies that naively or mendaciously claim to believe they are truths.”15 Brooks offers a straightforward and not solely literary definition: “Fictions are what we make up in order to make believe. . . . Making in order to make up, to make believe, seems a reasonable description of literary fictions, and why we write and read them.”16 If Brooks limits his study of that making (up) to the realist novel, his vision of fiction as vital creation—neither an instrument external to creative invention nor lies or useless fantasy—enables us to encounter it beyond the written page and in the practices of making that redefined contemporary art in the last decades of the twentieth century. Without a precise concept of how artists made such fictions beyond the limits of narrative, our understanding of contemporary art and politics in the hemisphere is impoverished. Absent the history of inventive responses to coloniality and neoliberal expansion in the South, no theory of fiction is complete. American Neoliberalism Repressive regimes supported by the United States, like the one that pushed Meireles toward fiction, laid the groundwork for the core neoliberal prin-

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ciples imposed across the American hemisphere. They championed the dismantling of public institutions and safety nets, and as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval note, fashioned “certain kinds of social relations, certain ways of living, certain subjectivities.”17 If by 2013 an academic journal based in the United States felt it necessary to defend neoliberalism from accusations of being an “evacuated term,” across Latin America it remains meaningful in scholarly research, newspapers, and everyday political debates.18 These discussions typically locate its origins in experiments in Chile in the 1970s led by Milton Friedman and the economics professors known as the Chicago Boys. Sources cited throughout this book, however, trace initial experiments with these social and economic “reforms” in the Americas to the 1960s, coinciding with the radical experiments that ground histories of contemporary art.19 The economist and national security expert Norman A. Bailey published an exemplary article promoting these policies in 1965. “The Colombian ‘Black Hand’: A Case Study of Neoliberalism in Latin America” was a harbinger of now-familiar characterizations of Latin America as a “laboratory” for those social, political, and economic experiments. A decade before Friedman flew to the aid of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Santiago, and two decades prior to the North Atlantic alliance between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bailey had a plan. The early publication celebrated the Brazilian military coup d’état of 1964 as the model for an aggressive campaign in Colombia.20 His pro-business, free-market hemispheric strategy was “uniformly opposed to all forms of collectivism.”21 Bailey outlined simultaneous “defense” and “attack” strategies involving direct pressure on politicians and subsidies of right-wing candidates, infiltration of leftist organizations, the formation of independent mini-universities, right-wing think tanks, anti-guerrilla militias, and aggressive media campaigns. Like Friedman later, he was content to ally with repressive regimes, but state repression was just one tool in the broader violence employed to introduce, maintain, and expand these social transformations. Returns to representative democracy in the mid- to late 1980s undoubtedly provided relief from those widespread tactics of disappearance and martial law. Nonetheless, through the 1990s Bailey continued to work as an adviser to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush on their Latin American strategies. As much as scholars, filmmakers, and artists since have noted continuities with the still-neoliberal representative democracies that followed dictatorships, the artists working during that political transition were already aware of the trap.22 In another interview, Meireles reverses expectations about the relative freedom of artists in 1977, a moment when the Brazilian military regime eased its tactics, and the harsher years

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a decade earlier when the dictatorship had cracked down and suspended habeas corpus. Meireles explains that governmental repression at the level of the production of the artwork “little affected the vitality” (pouco afetou a vitalidade) of the artwork, while market control at the level of its distribution in the “era of multinational economies, of trans-ideological undertakings, [meant] it is necessary to look again at the very notion of ideology.”23 That concept, artistic vitalidade, is crucial to non-literary fictions in the conclusion of this study. For now, note that Meireles argues that the effective censorship by market forces was worse for art than dictatorship was and that the shared experience of the foreclosure of liberties cemented affinities among artists across the hemisphere.24 Meireles’s call to reconsider ideology under emergent neoliberalism frames a challenge to uncover the dominant and often-invisible fictions that operate as social control; his admiration of War of the Worlds proposes that to do so, artists must invent other fictions. Political left and right equally perceived the centrality of the arts in the neoliberal social and economic experiment. Meireles warned that radical politics could be hindered as much as furthered by media and the arts, and Bailey urged his conservative allies to better deploy those enterprises.25 Both understood the important shift represented by neoliberalism’s extraction of profit from knowledge and ideas more than from industry and matériel. Jamie Peck attributes neoliberalism’s reactionary force precisely to that capacity to “meld the inherently conservative with the insistently creative.”26 Suely Rolnik similarly finds that neoliberal creativity enjoys a “seductive power [that] makes it more difficult to perceive that those forms are conservative, bearers of the colonial-capitalistic unconscious that leads to its reproduction.”27 Here again, this new phase of modernity retains core elements of coloniality, and the Brazilian critic offers guidance on how to approach the equal dangers of the censorship and blossoming of art under these regimes. Artists invented non-literary fictions, I suggest, as a way to keep making (up) without fueling neoliberalism’s creativity. The mechanics of those fictions structure the chapters to come, but fundamentally, they all involve a kind of making in negation. They negate creativity, narrative, the art object, and representation at large; most importantly, these fictions negate the negation of political and social alternatives to American neoliberalism. No and Non: Making Negation Non-literary fiction builds upon a genealogy of negative prefixes that has shaped the Latin American art critical tradition. Two figures had an outsized influence on the concept of negation in contemporary art: the Brazilian Ferreira Gullar, who published his landmark essay “Theory of the Non-

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object” in December 1959 and a follow-up “Dialogue on the Non-object” soon thereafter; and the Peruvian Mexican critic Juan Acha, who began to name new practices that rejected the purity and elitism of the art object as no-objetualismo around 1973.28 If a detailed account of the relationship between these theorists remains beyond the scope of this study, Rita Eder favors considering the two within a shared genealogy, even as she identifies differences in their definitions of the non-object.29 Acha worked closely with the Brazilian critic and curator Aracy Amaral, for whom Gullar’s experimental concrete poetry and theory of the non-object were crucial points of departure. He even invited Amaral to participate in a symposium he organized for the 1978 Latin American Biennial that he co-organized in São Paulo.30 While the two articulations of non-objectualism cannot be collapsed, they signal a broad critical project that Mónica Amor eloquently names “a ‘crisis of representation,’ which was closely linked to a rejection of pictorial illusionism, but went beyond it to problematize representation as such.”31 The politics of this broad non-objectualism has been obscured, however, by studies that emphasize representation: whether artistic representations of the problems plaguing citizens, or representational democracy as the default system to identify and defend their rights. Non-literary fiction sets aside familiar avant-garde disputes over figuration and abstraction, which maintain a concern with representation. Instead, it unveils how artists joined related investigations in literature, anthropology, and philosophy in order to constitute processes, concepts, and forms of invention in negation. Gullar employed the negative prefix to articulate a materiality or plasticity of the artwork that survived the abandonment of representation, and which emerged in a variety of operations that linked literature and visual art, word and object. An oft-repeated story tells that Gullar initially used the word “não-objeto” when he encountered a work by the artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988). Upon seeing a prototype of her series of “Bichos” (Critters)— sculptures made of flat planes connected by hinges and intended to be manipulated by the viewer—Gullar mythically proclaimed it to be not an object but a “non-object.”32 In “Dialogue on the Non-object,” he explains, “[An object is] a material thing we find at hand, naturally, linked to everyday designations and uses: a rubber, a pencil, a pear, a shoe, etc. In this condition, the object is exhausted in the references of use and meaning. On the flip-side, we can establish here a primary definition of non-object: the non-object is not exhausted in the references of use and meaning because it does not belong to the realm of use or verbal designation.”33 Negation maintains the objectness of the artwork, yet protects it from use-value and market forces as much as from symbolic systems of linguistic substitution such as metaphor. To comprehend the non-object, the viewer does not erase

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the physical entity in her search for the meaning hidden behind its material presence. Gullar states that “the non-object is not a representation but a presentation.”34 This basic definition is crucial for non-literary fiction because it introduces a focus on the varied materials of non-narrative art that is not essentially formalist. Both theorists of the non-object celebrated new practices of art making, which created non-objects with little regard for medium specificity. Gullar attended to artists’ shift toward the sensible and phenomenological as they abandoned historical distinctions between sculpture, painting, and theater. Acha convened like-minded critics, curators, and artists in a landmark gathering in Medellín, Colombia, in 1981, the Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano del Arte No-objectual y Arte Urbano (First Latin American Colloquium of Non-objectual Art and Urban Art). In his overview of the meeting, Alberto Sierra Maya writes: The non-objectualists were so radical in their option that they said things like: “In Latin America we think in another way. In Latin America we are doing this or that and we are not going to hang a painting in this museum, we are not going to fetishize the object, those things you are doing, and we are going to see that people will think in a different way.” It was a critical moment, an aggressive and convulsive situation, which was situated in the context of strong Latin American dictatorships, as documented in the installation by the Brazilian Cildo Meireles.35

They celebrated earth art, performance and body art, posters, media interventions and new media, work with found objects and trash, mail art, conceptualism, ephemeral installations, and popular cultural forms including religious rituals and samba. The list of negations grows even longer among the artists involved in these practices. The Mexican collective the “No-Grupo” (Non-Group) (active 1977–1982) combined installation and performance in its contribution to Acha’s colloquium dedicated to non-objectual and urban art in Medellín. The member Maris Bustamante since has been a strong proponent of the foundational role of Acha’s non-objectualism.36 In Chile, Cecilia Vicuña wrote “Manifesto No” for a group of artists and poets that called themselves the “Tribu No” (No Tribe) (active 1967–1972), and that connected African American jazz, surrealism, and symbolism in their activities “in the temperate and unsettled night of the South.”37 The Brazilian Hélio Oiticica called the montage of film, slide shows, and installations he made in 1973, “não narração” (non-narrative), which involved “non-discourse,” “nonaudio visual,” “non-artistic photography,” and was even “nonsexist.”38 The

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Chicano art collective Asco (Nausea) (active 1971–1987) began a series of “No Movies” around 1976, organized as public presentations in the streets of Los Angeles in settings resembling movie sets.39 These imaginary films existed only as still photographs and protested the exclusion of Chicanos from Hollywood even as they rejected the influence of its commercial culture on the Los Angeles art scene. Chicanos and Latinos, like many other marginalized artists, have consistently been ascribed only an affirmative mode of address; however, Asco makes evident that negation was an equally promising political and artistic option for them at the time.40 Fiction played a crucial role in these theories and practices of nonobjectual art. Note the terms of Gullar’s meditation on the relationship between “obra e objeto” (work and object), artwork and world: “The frame was the middle ground between fiction and reality; at once a bridge and a wall that protected the painting, the fictitious space, and made it communicate in fits with the real, exterior space.”41 This narrative of non-objectual art breaking the frame is foundational in Brazilian art history, and Amor summarizes its widely accepted interpretation as a “rejection of the fictional space of representation.”42 Yet Gullar writes that the non-object resides directly in “real” space and “transcends the space, not by eluding it (like the object), but by enfolding itself radically in that space.”43 That extension into space involves a broken frame and an active spectator: the primary operation of the non-object is to inspire the viewer’s “move from contemplation to action,” and so by extension to bridge fiction and reality. In an interview published not long after he had invited Gullar to his symposium, Acha also presented non-objectualism as an activity and a kind of fiction. In no-objetualismo, he states, “I’m not interested anymore in the work of an artist, I am concerned with the process, with the invention.”44 As I detail in the next chapter, that concept of invention was central to the poets of the concrete movement in São Paulo and to Gullar’s fellow Rio-based neo-concretists. If here Acha overstates the opposition between “work” and process, he does so to signal the centrality of invention. These foundational thinkers disclose that when the non-object breaks the pictorial frame and descends from the sculptural pedestal—when it activates presentation rather than representation—it does not abandon fiction. Instead, the broken frame initiates the possibility of an encounter with the invention of fiction in the everyday. The political and aesthetic character of those fictions is better described by the word “operation” rather than “work,” “object,” or even “process.” The Argentine critic Jorge Glusberg, a powerful voice in Latin American criticism beginning in the 1960s, introduced the word at Acha’s Medellín colloquium, in order to contrast no-objetualismo with postmodernism. He reflects favorably on the former as more philosophical than the lat-

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ter, specifically in its capacity to offer the concept of operadores estéticos (aesthetic operators).45 Glusberg’s use of the term shares but long predates Jacques Rancière’s proposal to understand the “politics of fiction not in terms of what it represents but in terms of what it operates: the situations that it constructs, the populations that it convokes, the relations of inclusion or exclusion that it institutes, the borders that it traces or effaces between perceptions and action, between the states of things and the movement of thought; the relations that it establishes or suspends between situations and their meanings, between temporal coexistences or successions and chains of causality.”46 Different operations of fiction constitute relation and structure social imaginaries throughout the chapters that follow, but the Latin American “aesthetic operators” explicitly substituted “operation” for “object” in order to invent alternatives to one dominant structure that governed those imaginaries: the market. Acha’s colloquium on non-objectualism explicitly took on the biennial circuit and its promotion of the market value of objectbased art. Del Valle furthermore frames the colloquium in the context of the emergent debt crisis in the region, which was precipitated by the global oil crisis of the 1970s.47 Rancière’s primary focus on fiction as narrative distracts him from literature’s material form as a book, one that circulates as a commercial object through publishing houses, bookstores, and copyright laws. In contrast, the first chapter sets up just how important the reinvented book-object was for the fictional operations of non-objectualism. As nonobjects, these aesthetic operations of fiction could reject the market in art objects without abandoning the materiality of object-based art. The political stakes of negation grow increasingly clear for the reconsideration—through fiction—of ideologies, market, and repression that Meireles urged. Even as neoliberal dictatorships gave way to neoliberal democracies in the 1980s, the Anglo-American powers invested in that new world order pursued hegemony over negation itself. The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990), who shared a dedication to privatization and reducing the social safety net with her US partner, President Ronald Reagan, was famous for two phrases: “there is no society,” only individuals who either succeed or fail in the competitive market of capitalism; and “there is no alternative” to that political vision, which she repeated so forcefully that the acronym “TINA” became her nickname.48 The question that still must be posed, then, is how artists and theorists were able to negate within this hegemonic negation. How did they say no to the preclusion of options and to the denial of society itself? The artist Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956) asked that question precisely in the decade of transition from dictatorship to democracy in Chile, even if (as we will see) he did not positively answer it. As much as the country long has

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served as the prime example of Latin America as a laboratory for neoliberalism, in narrating his own biography, Jaar emphasizes the same broader American affinities that Meireles described. Born in the Andes, Jaar moved to Martinique as a child around 1961; the family abandoned the Caribbean for Santiago on a wave of enthusiasm after the democratic election of the socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970. Soon after, General Augusto Pinochet destroyed those dreams in a coup d’état supported by US president Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The violent military regime was friendlier to its northern friends’ economic theory, and so paradoxically, when Jaar landed in New York in 1982, he arrived in a representative democracy that was the sponsor of the undemocratic regime he fled. At the same time, his arrival in Manhattan represented a return to an island demographically, culturally, and linguistically part of the Caribbean. Jaar describes the impact of his fully American trajectory: “It was in Martinique where my strong links with Africa began. . . . I really identified myself with that place, which gradually linked into the greater culture of Africa. . . . I went to school at the Lycée Schoelcher where the intellectual elite of Martinique came from: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant. At the time, Césaire was also the Mayor of Fort de France, the capital!”49 The two major works that established Jaar as an international political artist—indebted to a Black Caribbean tradition, and articulated in its diasporas as much as his exile from the Andes—deployed visual negation in hemispheric struggles. They are exemplary of how to create the no, the not, the X, and how to signal the limits of representative democracy as much as documentary representation under American neoliberalism. In Estudios sobre la felicidad (Studies on Happiness, 1979–1981), Jaar invented a fictional plebiscite for Chileans on a seemingly innocuous question (fig. 0.2). He employed interviews, videos, photographs, and billboards that asked the viewer: “¿Es Ud. feliz?” (Are you happy?). There are three core elements to this investigation into artistic and political representation made under the full force of Pinochet’s regime. First, to ask a yes-or-no question, as in a plebiscite, which engages the spectator as a voter. Second, to frame the question such that the answer that militates for freedom is no. Finally, to conceive of affect, happiness or otherwise, as an entry into political subjectivity and the legitimate grounds for a political act. These same components later would shape the famous “Campaña del no” (No campaign), the advertising campaign that convinced Chileans to vote no to Pinochet’s continued military rule in 1988. That plebiscite, however, was not the first one held by the Chilean dictatorship. In fact, Estudios sobre la felicidad was made after a referendum on the military on January 4, 1978, and just around a plebiscite on the new constitution writ-

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ten by Pinochet’s regime in 1980. In both, Chileans were asked to vote yes or no, and (according to official reports) they overwhelmingly voted yes in favor of military rule, with only slightly less clear-cut results on the second one.50 Instructions on a sample ballot published by the US embassy in anticipation of the 1988 plebiscite reveal that to vote no in Santiago had both formal and philosophical components: “The voter must mark yes or no with a vertical line that intersects the respective horizontal line printed.”51 The ballot reveals the central paradox: to vote no, you had to create a positive, a plus sign (fig. 0.3). Voting no was voting yes. It certainly was so in the earlier plebiscites, bound to be won by Pinochet, and it almost came to pass in 1988, when he threatened to steal the results again.52 Jaar’s project highlights that key question: how to make a true no in a political and graphic context in which no kept being transformed into yes. These same years in Santiago saw the formation of the interdisciplinary Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (Collective for Art Actions, or CADA) (active 1979–1985), initially composed of Lotty Rosenfeld, Juan Castillo, Fernando

Figure 0.2 Alfredo Jaar, Estudios sobre la felicidad (Studies on Happiness), 1979– 1981. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 0.3 Sample ballot for Chilean plebiscite reproduced in Chile: 1988 Plebiscite Resource Book, published by the United States Embassy, Chile, 1988.

Balcells, Raúl Zurita, and Diamela Eltit, which made the foundational demand: “No +” (fig. 0.4). No more violence, no more disappearances. Rosenfeld obsessively generated this plus sign in her series Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on Pavement), performed first in Santiago in 1979, and in front of the White House in Washington, DC, in 1982 (see fig. 3.3). In Spanish, the plus sign of these works is read both as más (more) and as the mathematical operator for addition. Rosenfeld’s series therefore can be understood as “no plus no plus no plus no . . . etc.” as much as the commonly understood “no more.” If the latter negates fear, the former, “more nos,” is a series of negations, acts of crossing or blacking out, which resist the pressure to convert the negative sign into a positive. “No +” refused the sí imposed by the Pinochet regime in the first two plebiscites, and when read with a pause before the symbol, a rejection of the very demand to make a plus sign. Early refusals by Rosenfeld, CADA, and Jaar revealed how the first two plebiscites infused rituals of representative democracy into military rule, and they warned of the illusory restoration of

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Figure 0.4 CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte: Lotty Rosenfeld, Juan Castillo, Fernando Balcells, Raúl Zurita, and Diamela Eltit), No+, 1983. Photo: Jorge Brantmayer/CADA. Courtesy of the Lotty Rosenfeld Foundation.

democracy under the social and economic structures Pinochet put in place. They laid claim to more nos and to negation itself. Soon after Jaar joined other South American exiles in New York, he again employed negation in his landmark A Logo for America (1987), which flashed in a continuous loop across a massive LED screen in Times Square (fig. 0.5). As in the billboards asking “¿Es Ud. feliz?,” he employed the visual language and affect of advertising against its typical interests. Most photographic representations of this work maintain the same narrative order of the images: “This Is Not America,” against the backdrop of a map of the continental United States. After showing the Stars and Bars, the next image repeats the admonition: “This is not America’s flag.” After the word “America” fills the screen, a fusion of image and word replace the “R” of “America” with a map of the entire continent—north, central, and south—to constitute a new logo. Certainly, Jaar’s work rejects the US claim to own the name “America,” a foundational negation that shapes the geopolitical reach of this continental study, but it crucially also enacts an operation of negation beyond just saying no. The final image in the series enacts no linguistic negation. Instead, its fusion of image and word into a single icon operates like No+: the image of the continent creates an “R” out of the negative space surrounding it (fig.0.6). To read “AmeRica,” the viewer must convert the negative space of the image into the letter. Jaar transplants American negation—including,

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Figure 0.5 Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, Times Square, New York, 1987. Courtesy of the artist.

but not limited to, its negation of the US’s hegemonic Americanity—from its early “laboratory” in Chile to its homeland in Times Square. In a catalog for Estudios sobre la felicidad published twenty years after the initial series, however, Jaar shares his doubts: “Against the pessimism of the intelligence, [Antonio] Gramsci proposed the optimism of the will. This is where I find myself today, not completely convinced.”53 According to Willie Thayer and a younger generation of Chilean critics, the dependence of the “Campaña del no” on the visual language of public relations

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Figure 0.6 Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, Times Square, New York, 1987. Courtesy of the artist.

and advertising—and we can presume, Jaar’s related strategies—mark a final limit on the politics of no. Thayer understands negation, however, as a neo-avant-garde aesthetic operation.54 Jaar is uncertain about the pessimism of that avant-garde tradition, not about negation itself. As we will see throughout this study, this lineage of negation exceeded the dictates of avant-garde configurations of art and politics. In her landmark study of Argentinean art in the 1960s, Andrea Giunta explains the defining tension in the concept of the avant-garde in Latin America, particularly its association with progressive history, novelty, and modernization itself: “That the 1960s were characterized by ebullient confidence in the modernist view of progressive social transformation in history, and that this hegemony was consistently mined by a critical—but no less modernist—discourse of opposition, is a characterization that is not exclusive to the Argentine process.” She helpfully terms “avant-garde” a “highly disposable verbal artifact[s]” whose “significance was constantly being reformulated.”55 Rather than weigh in further on that artifact, what is important to this study is that Giunta relies on Peter Bürger’s classic opposition between fiction and self-criticism, or critique, in his definition of the avant-garde.56 Giunta directly quotes Bürger’s use of the word “fiction” specifically to discuss the realist novel of the mid- to late nineteenth century, and broadly as “the self-understanding of the bourgeois. Fiction is the medium of a reflection about the relationship between individual and society.”57 The novel is not, however, the only genre of fiction, even when we limit our purview

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to literature. What is more, even realist novels cannot be relegated to that single function of representing this social class’s unfolding within a Western history of modernity. As much as I share Giunta’s interest in the 1960s as a “repositioning process, [in which] art was increasingly both representation and action,”58 I set aside the classic avant-garde formulation of art and politics to investigate the expanded shape and political impact of the non-literary fictions signaled by Meireles. Certainly, while many artists and critics maintained an attachment to that paradoxical tradition of the avantgarde into the 1960s and 1970s, very soon after its apogee Aracy Amaral found it terribly difficult to define or defend.59 Rather than a failed avantgarde, the negation enacted by Jaar and the artists discussed in this study created another form of (realist) fiction, one that does not have to pass the tests of purity and spectacle that often accompany that artifact. Fiction need not be the opposite of avant-garde critique, and it should not be collapsed with ideology. Indeed, notwithstanding his uncertainty, Jaar quotes Chinua Achebe in the epigraph of his Estudios: “Art is our constant effort to create for ourselves a different order of reality from that which is given to us.”60 To create something like a fiction. A Grammar of Non-Eurocentric Negation Non-literary fictions defy the final limit that Thayer proclaimed on the politics of no, and their varied and continued artistic operations of negation become even more visible with attention to the broad range of Amerindian aesthetic philosophies many drew upon. When the critic and curator Miguel López names Acha’s non-objectualism one of “a multitude of notyet-articulated and potential genealogies” of political art in Latin America, he emphasizes the elder critic’s ongoing engagement with popular art.61 López’s important call to recognize that genealogy contains a fundamental challenge: “to rethink a term such as ‘no-objetualismo’ (non-object-based art) . . . as part of a Marxist approach to counter-cultural protest and collective artistic experiences . . . but most significantly to indigenous aesthetic processes, such as popular art and design, that question Western art history.”62 Acha studied Amerindian practices and concepts from the early 1960s until his last book, the culmination of a life’s work, in which he drew a genealogy from paleolithic archaeology of Amerindian settlements to the present under the rubric of “aesthetic cultures of Latin America.”63 The 1978 Latin American Biennial that Acha organized with the Argentine semiotician Silvia Ambrosini sought to enact a material and conceptual rapprochement between popular and mass culture, between Amerindian knowledge and the Latin American middle and upper classes that filled contemporary art’s academic, artistic, and professional fields.64 The thinkers and artists of

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European descent who have dominated museums, universities, galleries, and presses across the Americas often misunderstood and appropriated these works and concepts. There is no way, however, to articulate the genealogy of non-objectualism, and critical negation more broadly without studying the art practices and history of ideas of those diverse Amerindian groups. When Aníbal Quijano elaborated his critique of coloniality in collaboration with Immanuel Wallerstein, the two argued that the continent’s history of violence against and resistance by indigenous peoples made it possible to “speak of Americanity as a concept” that structured global modernity.65 Here this study has been influenced by methods and insights of long-standing research in decolonial thought led by distinct groups of theorists in the Americas, including, but not limited to, Ramón Grosfoguel (Puerto Rico/continental United States), María Lugones (Argentina/United States), Walter Mignolo (Argentina/United States), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Bolivia), and Catherine Walsh (United States/Ecuador).66 All these thinkers recognize the influence of decolonization struggles in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean on their current research that seeks to decolonize thought and life practices. Even so, they differentiate epistemological decolonization from that political process. Research into Amerindian thought permeated theories of American negation in the generation of the 1960s and 1970s, in and beyond Acha’s and Gullar’s prefixes.67 The Argentine Rodolfo Kusch founded an interdiscipline he called antropología filosófica americana (American philosophical anthropology) in his landmark book La negación en el pensamiento popular (Negation in Popular Thought, 1975).68 Amerindian epistemological, spiritual, and affective imaginaries helped Kusch to comprehend the importance and shape of American negation and led him to break with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s influential structuralist anthropology for its failure to comprehend the universality of indigenous thought: “It was thus that we opted for a drastic action: negation. Only by negating everything would we be able to capture a common element that would serve two aspects: on one side that point where we achieve our real universality, and on the other we simultaneously achieve the true margin of the universality of the indigenous.”69 Kusch conceives of negation as a bridge between the specific politics of his own middle-class, post-Peronist doubts; the diverse Amerindian practices and concepts that he engages; and broad philosophical concepts of the universal.70 He writes that negation leads him to stop thinking about popular (Amerindian) intellectuals and to start thinking with them. Kusch abandons representation, particularly modernist representations of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples as tropes of national identity. Following his earlier El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (In-

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digenous and Popular Thought in America, 1970), which was grounded in Quechua, Aymara, and Chipaya thought, Kusch’s philosophy of popular negation emerged out of conversations with Anastasio Quiroga, a Jujuy-born “criollo” ethnographer.71 Quiroga teaches Kusch to juxtapose popular negation to the affirmative form of knowledge that structures Western scientific thought. Kusch thus identifies the limits of the European tradition he calls conocimiento (knowledge), which myopically focuses on objectivity and so produces knowledge that is ultimately univocal. Instead, he embraces the popular thought that he terms comprensión (comprehension), which values subjective emotions and opinion, and so creates forms of understanding that provide multiple answers to the same question. Unlike singular affirmation, negation comprehends the uncertainty of the world in which we live, and the unpredictability of whether human action in the present can ensure some related occurrence in the future.72 As Kusch puts it: “Things wear a ‘no’ hung around their necks, and no one knows in this context if the thing can be used or not.”73 The conversion of no into this material, (non-)object further reveals the relevance of Kusch’s negative thought to non-literary fiction. Indeed, Quiroga never answers Kusch’s questions directly, offering in response instead “an aphorism, a proverb, or a story.”74 These fictions are not practical or utilitarian, or at least he leaves it up to Kusch to figure out their potential future uses and meanings. They do, however, help to imagine comprehension, that philosophy of sentiment and multiple answers to the same question. We can picture the non-object as one such “thing,” which unfolds precarious fictions into the real space of certainty. Kusch articulates a grammar of negation, which contributes key components—materiality, activity, and geopolitics—to this genealogy of non-objectualisms. That grammar, perhaps thanks to Quiroga, pushes against the hegemony and linguistic purity of Spanish. Negation, Kusch writes, resides in between the two verbs that mean “to be”: ser (to be an identity) and estar (to be in a place or state). In contrast to the fixed and affirmative being of ser, the estar en América he writes about—being in (continental) America—is a being in place, a condition of being shaped by the circumstances in which people live. This form of being in a place does not preclude ontological being, but it makes it one among a larger number of modes of living. Kusch explains: “Being (estar) is the condition, in its negativity, of the possibility of being (ser).”75 What he calls total negation embraces the negation of estar and the ontology of ser, in a composite verb that Kusch calls estar siendo: a condition or activity of existing—to be being—in negation. Kusch understands American negation as an active and imaginative presence that refuses to affirm identity. That Kusch resorts to a gerund to express this mode of negation actually

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helps to understand these grammatical abstractions on being. His choice is striking, since Spanish and Portuguese more commonly employ the infinitive in expressions of being (ser rather than siendo). Gerunds name the action of the verb, emphasizing process, even as they operate grammatically as nouns. Kusch’s total negation is substantive, un sustantivo (noun) in Spanish, as well as a verb. The materiality of that substance enhances rather than diminishes its negation. Furthermore, Kusch explains that “the distance between the West and América is that which mediates between popular and elite thought. The former, in contrast to the latter, does not emerge so much from a visual seeing but rather a mode of conceiving the abstract. It has canceled the concrete and physical aspect of the thing.”76 The grammar of estar siendo imagines a tangible American being in negativity whose materiality is not in contradiction with its conceptual abstraction. Thanks to Kusch’s and Quiroga’s antropología filosófica americana, we can understand non-objectualism in those terms: as an operation of making a thing out of negation. Acha and Gullar were similarly dedicated to the gerundial fusion of noun and verb as the ground of contemporary aesthetic operations. The same year in which Gullar published his theory of the non-object, he made a poembook, Não (No, 1959), which can be understood as the “concrete and physical aspect” of the process and concept of saying no. As a book, it invites the reader’s sight and touch. As a poem, the work allows the reader to listen for the sound of words, and so read anew his landmark neologism—“Não . . . Objeto.” Gullar thus constitutes objeto as both a noun, object, and as the first-person singular of the verb objetar (to object) in Spanish and Portuguese. “Não-objeto” is simultaneously an object under the sign of negation and a declaration: “No—I object.” While the verb objetar is less common in Spanish and Portuguese than in English, it was featured in a cartoon in the same journal that had published Gullar’s “Theory of the Non-object” not a year prior. “How to Make a Nonobject” mocks the complexity of the term, showing an artist, paintbrush in one hand, with his other arm upstretched in fury.77 The painter screams “objeto!” (I object!)—to the deconstruction of the mediums of painting, sculpture, and drawing, and to his diminishing prominence—and simultaneously cries out for the object. Even this comical vision makes clear the power of the theory of the non-object to shift the foundations of art through its grammar, as much as its better-known corruption of medium.78 Acha’s dedication to the noun-verb took center stage in an interview conducted by Jacob Klintowitz about the 1978 Latin American Biennial. His co-organizer, Ambrosini, even expressed annoyance with his grammar: “Acha, doesn’t it seem to you that you are using the gerund exaggeratedly:

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fumbling, looking, searching. . . ?”79 The widespread and ongoing use of Acha’s term no-objetualismo, even more than Gullar’s não-objeto, emphasizes that dual grammatical function. The first definition of the Greek suffix “ism” is similar: “Forming a simple noun of action . . . naming the process, or the completed action, or its result (rarely concrete).”80 The core of Acha’s influential essay on no-objetualismo appears in these noun-verbs, bound up with the continental, popular, indigenous aspirations of the Latin American Biennial. Like Kusch and Quiroga’s total negation, Acha and Gullar’s no-objetualismo takes action and makes object, a process of making that unfolds the fictional beyond the broken frame of representation. Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968) is exemplary of a new generation in this lineage of artists for whom negation—including Amerindian concepts—is part and parcel of that making, and who attempt to create without fueling neoliberalism’s thirst for creativity. Like millions of residents of the Global South, Cruzvillegas’s family moved from the Mexican countryside to the capital city in the early 1960s. His father was from Cherán, a Purépecha town in Michoacán, although as I detail in the next chapter, he was educated in Spanish. The artist came of age in the late 1980s under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s rampant reforms and introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the intervening decades, his family and neighbors designed and built their homes in the neighborhood of El Ajusco, far in the south of the megalopolis, despite the failure of local and federal governments to provide basic infrastructure including water, electricity, and transportation. That kind of architecture is called autoconstrucción—a kind of do-ityourself amid lack rather than middle-class hobbyism—and its practitioners make use of found materials, respond to the demands of the site, and reflect their aesthetic preferences as much as their needs. Cruzvillegas repurposed the practice and the word autoconstrucción in an ongoing series of mixedmedia artworks begun at the turn of the millennium, using the same rough and discarded materials in sculptures, installations, songs, and texts (fig. 0.7). While the material of these works often is the detritus of neoliberal economies, Cruzvillegas insists that the real “raw material of [his] work [is] the lack of everything.”81 As a graduate of pedagogy rather than art school, Cruzvillegas notes the influence of Betty Edwards’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979) on his thinking. The classic instructional manual details the importance of drawing the negative space of an image in order to allow the unmarked positive space to emerge. Like the unwritten “R” that constituted Jaar’s América, the various iterations of Autoconstrucción “generate a negative space to make art . . . to turn to all that is not the work in order to configure the work.”82 Autoconstrucción does not represent lack or precarity; it is an operation shaped in negation.

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Figure 0.7 Abraham Cruzvillegas. Photograph from Autoconstrucción (SelfConstruction), 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Cruzvillegas helps to translate Kusch’s delineation of the American negation of representation into defining debates in contemporary art. He draws a clear contrast with avant-garde visual and literary movements of the 1920s and 1930s, which affirmed a logic of representation of “the indigenous” through both figuration and abstraction in the interests of nationalist myths of mestizaje.83 Artists of the 1960s, those whom Giunta and others identified as a second avant-garde, embraced and rejected these earlier frameworks to different degrees. Cruzvillegas provides a distinctive view onto this genealogy among his circle of highly successful Mexico City artists.84 Even as he exhibits widely in mainstream institutions on the international art circuit and commands high prices for his works, his Purépecha family history and contemporary indigenous communities in urban Latin America weave in and out of his art practice. That is to say, Cruzvillegas cannot avoid the question posed to him by a Black metro officer in Washington, DC, whom he saw every day during a fellowship at the American History Museum. “Excuse me”—the officer asked him—“are you a Native American?”85 Recounting this experience, the artist provides a list of other affiliations he identifies in his family history along with something like Native American, including Jewish, Italian, Spanish, and more. The story, nonetheless, is telling, as it reveals Cruzvillegas’s consideration of what it means to be hailed as a continental indigenous subject, and for the opportunity it offers to intervene into the exterior construction of subjectivity that Frantz Fanon famously named in a similar encounter.86

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When that encounter is posed as a question, in respectful terms, by another person of color, it may be tempting to answer in the affirmative. As we see in the next chapter, Cruzvillegas researched Purépecha thought and history in libraries as well as with his grandmother in the family’s hometown. In an exhibition catalog on the impact of arte povera in Mexico, he even substituted Amerindian thought for European influence by grounding povera in four Purépecha concepts of land. Concepts of “resilience and restoration” provided a vocabulary for the artist to argue that it was only when the Italian movement abandoned its European origins that it “joined to other references and experiences, [and] generated true shifts in language.”87 Yet if Cruzvillegas affirmed Purépecha concepts in order to redefine arte povera, he did not represent them as indigenous people, or their culture as Mexican. He neither faithfully narrated Purépecha cultural history nor stood as a representative of native peoples himself. The Mixe linguist Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, whom Cruzvillegas cites as an intellectual important to his work, poses a warning about any outright affirmation of indigeneity: “This thing of being the roots of Mexico depoliticizes us, using us to justify something in which we never participated, that is to say, the creation of the State. That is why we are a negation.”88 Aguilar Gil explains that the word “indigenous” does not exist in the original languages spoken on the American continent; it has been imposed on diverse peoples by Spanish-speaking others. She recalls her grandmother’s negation of the concept: “Soy mixe, no indígena” (I am Mixe, not indigenous).89 Aguilar Gil writes that she discovered she was “indigenous” only when she arrived in Mexico City; before that move, she was simply Mixe. In Mexico, coloniality sustained the modern state’s discourse of mestizaje, which proclaimed national identity as the fusion of European and indigenous bodies and cultures even as it continued campaigns of Spanish monolingualism and cast Amerindian peoples as past, dead, anachronistic. Neither indigenous authenticity nor mestizo hybridity did much good for the many surviving indigenous groups in rural Mexico, or for those displaced to the capital city. Indeed, Aguilar Gil later clarifies and enacts this operation of negation, adding a powerful contemporary temporality to the concept: “We indigenous peoples are not the roots of Mexico, we are its constant negation.”90 Aguilar Gil does find the word “indigenous” useful to name a political movement uniting those peoples who most suffered colonization, and even still withstand the violence of the modern nation-state. She warns of the danger, however, when “indigenous” slips from a strategic political category into a cultural identity, into the inaccurate, folkloric representations that support rather than contest the modern-colonial state. Inspired by Kusch’s estar siendo and its interruption of Spanish, we might say—in a real grammatical violation—that Aguilar Gil “está indígena” but “es mixe.” That is, she

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admits indigeneity politically and positionally but refuses to affirm it as true, as it does not exist in Amerindian languages or concepts of being. Following Aguilar Gil, in this book, when describing a leader of a self-declared indigenous political movement, I use the word “indigenous.” However, when describing the diverse, at times related, artistic practices and philosophies of native groups, I use the word “Amerindian.” When addressing particular practices or a member of a specific group, I use their appropriate name or language group: Zapotec, Purépecha, Quechua, Aymara, Tzotzil. Only now can we return to the Black metro officer’s question to Cruzvillegas, which he was asked again, in a way, when he was included in the landmark Canadian exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (2013). The curators, Greg Hill, Candice Hopkins, and Christine Lalonde, reflected carefully and sensitively on the complexities of identification and self-identification that “indigenous” and other names entail. They invited artists to identify their own ethnic, linguistic, or other association, if they wished, and a wide variety of responses appear in the catalog, from Navajo, Inuit, and Métis to mestizo/a. Cruzvillegas, however, humorously named himself “P’urhepechilango,” creating a portmanteau out of Purépecha and chilango, a not very flattering nickname for Mexico City residents.91 Beyond its play on words, the neologism collapsed the defining opposition between rural (Indians) and urban (mestizos). Once again, the artist refused to respond yes or no to the question about indigeneity that always misses the mark, and embraced something quite like total negation. As Kusch wrote, “With negation I open reference to what is there [a lo que está] and that I do not affirm.”92 Purépecha history, thought, and form are present in Cruzvillegas’s work without affirming indigeneity: they are present as Purépecha, not indigenous, and they are present as the constant negation that shapes his practice. Aguilar Gil makes one final and crucial designation of that politics of negation. It is grounded in the imagination: We realized that resistance was a narrative that fundamentally configured our experience of inhabiting the world as indigenous peoples, and that from resisting time and again, radically utopian scenarios had abandoned our imagination. My utopias found themselves configured almost always within the limits that imply taking into account the omnipresent existence of systems of oppression: I dreamed of legal changes, radical if you wish, but always inscribed within the framework of the State, to cite an example. Reconquering the ground of utopia seemed to me therefore an urgent exercise, a valley of ineffable possibilities until now. Nevertheless, paradoxically trying to imagine those radical scenarios transformed into another type of narrative resistance. I felt trapped.

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I needed to imagine radically different worlds because even the narratives that traversed me served to avoid that. I resisted by imagining not resisting, imagining not having to resist.93

I return later to Aguilar Gil’s precise description of the trap of utopia, but for the moment, note that she differentiates this form of politics from frontal resistance, from the history of indigenous uprisings from Mixe rebellions in 1692 through the Guerra de Castas in Yucatán in 1849, and even the Zapatista uprising in 1994.94 Let us envision her non-resistance like the non-object: it does not abandon resistance but rather converts it into an act-material of total negation. The Mixe linguist insists that process involves culture and language, infiltration as much as confrontation. She explains: “In an ideal world resistance does not exist because the oppressions that motivate it don’t exist. In an ideal world they never existed. Let’s try to imagine it, in detail. That is also resistance.”95 Está siendo, she is being being, a practice of total negation that makes do with the poor materials of colonial language to enact a rich poetics and to fabricate those worlds. She makes fictions. Cruzvillegas focuses on the imagination and fictional force of that doing, within and beyond those practices and objects named as art. The English phrase “to make do” describes such practices well: responses to a bad situation that are essential and inventive. If that phrase does not work in Spanish—the same verb hacer means both “to make” and “to do,” so the literal translation would be hacer hacer—its very redundancy echoes the sense of futility and unending activeness of life within precarious conditions. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto named that kind of making do as the rasquache aesthetics of Chicano art, an “outsider” sensibility often coded as bad taste that developed in visual art, popular culture, novels, and theater. He revealed the artists to be involved in a fundamentally formal venture, deeply invested in material and medium even as they responded to the social and political conditions of making. Ybarra-Frausto writes, “Resilience and resourcefulness spring from making do with what’s at hand (hacer rendir las cosas).”96 That phrase includes the idea of stretching the last dollar but encompasses much more. Building upon Ybarra-Frausto’s foundational essay, we can recognize rasquachismo as an act of composition rather than metaphoric substitution, one that he allows to compose relations among Mexicans from both sides of the border, and to differentiate between their histories. The imagination to make do with what is given, especially when that is unpleasant or not enough, to take stock of materials at hand and repurpose them at times against their initial design, is central to the hemispheric American affinities we have been tracing. That rasquache making do in Autoconstrucción gives shape and visibility to what the Argentine sociologist Verónica Gago calls “neoliberalism from

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below”—below the equator and among lower economic classes. The vast popular market of La Salada in Buenos Aires presents Gago with ample evidence of community-generated know-how that she calls “forms of invention irreducible to, but not entirely incompatible with, the neoliberal diagram.”97 The process of creation by these social actors is not simply imposed by the Global North on its South. As counterfeit Gucci purses and Nike shoes fill the stands in La Salada, marginalized social actors invent what she calls a “fictional” modernity in the South that turns out to be just as important as its supposed original in the Global North.98 Literary and art-historical concepts offer Gago the means to understand these practices of creation in everyday life. She writes that the market’s “ensemble of interspersed modes of doing, thinking, perceiving, fighting and laboring” form a new chapter of the Latin American baroque.99 Like the art style that emerged in the colonial era of modernity in the sixteenth century, these practices from below reveal forms of domination from above, despite their disguise in “free” markets and representative democracy. Cruzvillegas describes his process in similar terms: “The premises that interest me have to do with the possibility of understanding (or inventing) reality based on the measure of each site in which one may find oneself as a possible platform of creation, based on the recuperation of the materials at hand.”100 Concepts of the Americas Amerindian practices, knowledges, and aesthetics—their modes of imagining in detail—have not been sufficiently recognized in the scholarship on contemporary art, even though many artists who were not P’urhepechilangos were deeply influenced by these philosophies of negation and aesthetic contributions. If in some chapters I study artists such as Cruzvillegas, who directly address Amerindian artistic and philosophical genealogies, in others I embrace the influence of those concepts on major figures in art history. Furthermore, this body of thought informs my understanding of how a non-literary fiction comes to be and what it does in the world. The somewhat odd subtitle of this book—“Art of the Americas”—intentionally misuses a moniker that typically names museum galleries containing preColumbian art. The subtitle emphasizes that Amerindian thought is crucial to answer pressing theoretical questions about the politics of what is often called “global contemporary art.” Blindness to the central role of Amerindian thought, art, and political history has taken different forms across the hemisphere. The United States’ rigid racialization discourse renders Cruzvillegas indigenous, visible along with others whose skin is read as brown and whose parents, grandparents,

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aunts, and cousins either speak Amerindian languages or know the stories that provide continuity across generations. However, the history of dispossession, extermination, and language erasure in this country has left far fewer people with access to that knowledge. The most recent US census counted 169 different native North American languages spoken by approximately 372,000 people in the United States and Puerto Rico, out of a population of 287 million. Compare that balance to the 2000 Mexican census, which reported approximately 6 million speakers of indigenous languages in a total population of 97 million.101 Yet even so, those native-descent residents of urban centers in Mexico are erased from national consciousness, those generational connections forced to disappear into a national discourse of mestizaje upon their arrival in the city or their entry into something like middle-class life. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo exposes the crucial lessons of Amerindian politics and subjects visibly occupying the city. She makes the radical observation that after the Zapatista uprising exploded in Chiapas and reached the capital in the 1990s, elite urban Mexicans were forced to acknowledge that the reforms introduced by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had made them, too, into “Indians.”102 Saldaña-Portillo means that they were forced to realize that neoliberalism had converted them into subjects of a state that deprived them of subjectivity as much as the basic rights and protections of citizens. Aguilar Gil’s analysis of indigenous nations without a state, which nevertheless suffer a state’s juridical rule, is therefore broadly relevant to life under neoliberalism. Aguilar Gil and Saldaña-Portillo refine and expand the general diagnosis by the geographer Jamie Peck of the unresolved problem of this dominant social, economic, and political project: “Neoliberalism’s curse has been that it can live neither with, nor without, the state. . . . For all its creativity, neoliberal discourse has never provided an elemental answer to this question.”103 The period in the Americas under consideration evidences an unrelenting creativity that succeeded in expanding the market’s power to organize society and in dedicating government to the economy above all else. Saldaña-Portillo and Aguilar Gil show that it is through the Zapatista movement and other indigenous struggles that we can see that while military dictatorship and representational democracy organized the state differently, both structures employed long-standing forms of violence to achieve and maintain the new role of government. Attempts to correct that erasure and highlight the influence of Amerindian thought and aesthetics on contemporary art and criticism are, however, embedded in a history of unpaid debts, which risks multiplying the liability. The Bolivian activist and intellectual Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui warns that universities (my home institution especially), museums, and

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non-governmental organizations in the North use Amerindian arts and peoples for their economic self-interest.104 Like Mexico’s reproduction of the image of an unnamed Tehuana on the ten-peso bill in 1936, non-native scholars and curators today profit from the artistic and intellectual labor and lands belonging to Amerindian peoples. Aimee Carrillo Rowe uncovers that tension as it extends even into Chicanx feminist thought in the claims that “settler Chicanxs” make on native history, symbols, identity, and lands. Carrillo Rowe concludes that the only way to sustain a simultaneously post- and decolonial practice that reckons with these ever-increasing debts may be an acceptance of incommensurability itself.105 She can never resolve the tension between, on the one hand, her desire, as a Chicanx, to recuperate familial indigenous histories and knowledges, and on the other, the displacement that her own residence in the Californias signifies for its native peoples. The renowned Brazilian anthropologist and theorist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro develops a related concept of equivocation to Carrillo Rowe’s incommensurability, which emerges out of his ethnographic research as much as an underrecognized lineage of art and fiction in his intellectual trajectory. Viveiros de Castro asks and answers a fundamental question for this study: “What does such a fiction consist in? It consists in taking indigenous ideas as concepts, and following through on the consequences of such a decision.”106 Those consequences are serious and merit careful consideration. While I discuss his understanding of concept in depth in chapter 4, for the moment we can understand it as a fundamental shift in the character of knowledge, which informs my method. That shift was not due to a stereotypical encounter of ethnographer and racialized Other. Before his first fieldwork in the 1970s, Viveiros de Castro collaborated and socialized with Brazilian artists in the non-objectual lineage, acting as an amateur photographer of some of their most canonical performances. He also studied literature with Luiz Costa Lima, who introduced him to structuralism via an earlier photographer-anthropologist active in Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both contributed to Viveiros de Castro’s decision as a young anthropologist to change the “rules of the game” that defined the relationship between “native” and “anthropologist.” If the anthropologist typically enjoys the power to impose form and meaning on the raw matter of native thought, Viveiros de Castro asks, “What might occur if the form intrinsic to the matter of native discourse were to be allowed to modify the matter implicit in the form of anthropological knowledge?”107 This reversal fundamentally alters the status of knowledge: it disassembles the duality of theory and practice, and disabuses anthropology of its founding illusion that native peoples lack self-reflective thought. Viveiros de Castro wishes to make anthropological

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and native discourses “epistemically continuous”—not epistemologically the same but equally able to produce philosophical concepts. He warns that this continuity requires a radical Otherness in the very understanding of the “native” rather than the assumption of translation, especially of concepts of subjectivity. Like Kusch and Quiroga, he demands the recognition of the existence of subjectivities other than the Western individual, even as those may remain beyond his own cognition. Those principles have an impact not just on anthropology but also on our disciplines of philosophy, art, and theory. In what follows, I set out a theory of non-literary fiction that seeks to be similarly continuous across typical divides between art practice and theory, and Amerindian thought and critical theory.108 Negation remains at the heart of Viveiros de Castro’s project, and it expands our understanding of fiction. To comprehend what he calls the native’s “being other than a [Western] subject,” a kind of incommensurability of concepts of the subject, he employs a vocabulary shared with literary theories of fiction. That mode of being “is the expression of a possible world.”109 While the anthropologist does not deeply engage those theories of fictions as “possible worlds,” he describes his own writing as containing “an essentially fictional dimension . . . [as an] exercise in anthropological fiction.”110 Viveiros de Castro does not explicitly state that “epistemological parity” presumes that native thought also generates structures of fiction, but that is one of the thought experiments of this book. He does remark, though, that the relationship between his anthropological research; literary figures such as Clarice Lispector, João Guimarães Rosa, and Oswald de Andrade; and contemporary avant-garde artists could be the topic of a book.111 The anthropologist’s influential concepts, in their equivocation with Amerindian thought, are unthinkable without fiction and in turn provide concepts of fiction for this study. Marília Librandi-Rocha performs such an analysis of narrative fiction and theory through Viveiros de Castro’s proposals for anthropology. In her fascinating examination of Lévi-Strauss’s account of an encounter with a Nambikwara leader in the Amazon, Librandi-Rocha highlights his description of the man’s performance of reading drawn lines on a piece of paper to reveal an “indigenous lesson of Amerindian mimesis.”112 While she gestures toward a theory of fiction not just for (Western) literature but for all art, conceptualized through what she calls the “native point of view,” LibrandiRocha does not fully elaborate how that mimesis might take material shape in non-textual practices. More discomfiting, she does not directly address the potential circularity implicit in the intellectual genealogy she and I reference, from Lévi-Strauss’s account of the Nambikwara to Costa Lima and finally to Viveiros de Castro.113 The theory of fiction in this ethnographic

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research may be as much an artifact of his academic trajectory as any record of Amerindian thought. Viveiros de Castro himself confronts that filter on the knowledge produced by his anthropological research—and on any account of Amerindian concepts—as an “equivocation” similar but not identical to incommensurability. While many anthropological “pathologies” obstruct communication between “native” and social scientist, equivocation frames both the drive for and the limits of the translation of Amerindian concepts.114 Viveiros de Castro’s equivocation differs from error, from the misrepresentation of Amerindian thought by Western outsiders, about which I have written extensively elsewhere.115 Error draws attention to a mistake committed by players playing the same game; that is, a mistaken representation still presumes that representer and represented conceive of representation in the same way. In contrast, equivocation is a confrontation across incommensurable languages, in which one speaker plays by the rules of representation and the other does not. The Mexican artist Gustavo Artigas (b. 1970) made something like equivocation the core operation of his work The Rules of the Game (2000), in which two Mexican soccer teams and two US basketball teams played separate games simultaneously on the same court. They dribbled around one another, as each sport team jockeyed not just for space on the court but also for control over the rules of the game. Equivocation would take Artigas’s confrontation one step further, such that the soccer team would compete against the basketball team, each playing by its own rules. Could the basketball players kick the ball? Could the soccer players touch it? Would each goal count for one or two points? Viveiros de Castro’s response to the dilemma of incommensurability is not that no one plays but rather a form of fictive invention. For him, fiction makes possible the practice of what Kusch called antropología filosófica americana. Viveiros de Castro makes a telling analogy to optics to explain the operation: “As in stereoscopic vision, it is necessary that the two eyes not see the same given thing in order for another thing (the real thing in the field of vision) to be able to be seen, that is, constructed or counterinvented.”116 Fiction, as invention and counterinvention, enables the equivocation that stages ontologically distinct but equally real and universal philosophies. Inasmuch as I share Librandi-Rocha’s sense that there is a theory of fiction to be articulated in the confrontation between alphabetic and non-alphabetic worlds, in what follows I frame it as that inventive equivocation. As these possible worlds multiply in this book, they contribute concepts that aid our understanding of non-literary, non-textual, non-narrative fiction. They are modes of making up and making do, in and out of negation. These nonliterary fictions do not resolve the incommensurability of the knowledges,

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histories, and aesthetics they reference, nor do they fully repay the debts incurred. At least, though, more than one team shares the field. Non-utopian Time and Space The material and conceptual shift from literary to non-literary fiction is first and foremost a change in temporality: from narrative to non-narrative time. Acha came close to naming non-literary fiction when he described the altered time of non-objectualism: “Anti-narration is precisely that which contributes, with its simultaneities and its dilution of information, to non-objectualist works’ capacity to be open and polysemic, verging on tedium.”117 He names various temporalities of anti-narration, modes of conceiving of time other than either the static or the narrative: simultaneous, non-linear, cyclical, and “polyfocal.”118 Even tedium offers its own, nonprogressive temporality. Meireles, the early advocate of art as fiction, also grounds his work in the avoidance of narrative control over time: “One of the qualities of artworks is that they permit extreme freedom with regard to time. If you want to relate to a book, you must read it from the first word to the last, although of course you have a general idea after reading a few pages. In literature, there is a kind of slavery to time. As an exception to this rule, I would mention a Brazilian concrete poem of the early 1960s by Ferreira Gullar: Lembra consists of a cube resting on a base; when you lift the cube, you read the word lembra (remember).”119 Given Meireles’s interest in fiction as a response to repressive military dictatorship, the language of freedom here reveals that the question of its temporality is central to the politics of fiction. The poem Meireles refers to is entirely composed of a command to remember and strongly evokes the concept of time. The absence of a direct object—what and when are we to remember?—leaves the extension of that time open-ended and reveals the degree to which space is imbricated in considerations of non-narrative temporalities. Indeed, Lembra, along with Gullar’s Não, belonged to a small group of what Gullar called spatial poems. Their single words occupy the bare minimum of printed space, even as we saw earlier that their transformation of poem into non-object extended two-dimensional text into three-dimensional volume. Acha similarly proposed that non-objectualism centers questions of space as it rejects narrative time.120 The concrete poems and artworks that Meireles described as “free” do not extend progressively, linearly, or horizontally in space and time. They abandon the habitual movement of the eye from left to right across the pages in a book, interrupt the viewer’s continuous path around a singular sculpture, and—we can even surmise—free the captive body that watches a narrative film from beginning to end.

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Authors of this same generation experimented with literary space as they sought to liberate themselves from narrative control over time, and prominent voices in literary theory have focused on the concept of narrative as space in order to distinguish fiction from narrative. Meireles’s description of literature as slavery echoes in Cortázar’s landmark invitation that the reader of Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) decide freely the order in which to read the chapters of the novel. He invited narrative freedom in the time of reading by relinquishing authorial control over the spatial organization of the text. The liberation was only partial, since the letters and words still unraveled in order from left to right, as did the storyline within each chapter. In the early 1980s, Jonathan Culler noted the incongruity of literary studies’ exclusive reliance on narratology for a theory of fiction. Peter Lamarque shared his circumspection, warning: “The relationship between narrative and fictionality is complex. There is a strong temptation to conflate the two concepts, or at least to suppose that in talking about narrative one is talking about fiction.”121 That is, the spatiotemporal bind of textual narrative is not the same as the space and time in fiction. Even so, like so many other literary scholars and philosophers, Culler and Lamarque ultimately deploy narratology to theorize fiction in contrast to documentary or non-fiction narrative. Neither reverses Lamarque’s very interesting proposal to separate the concepts of narrative and fiction in order to imagine a non-narrative space of fiction.122 That idea of narrative fiction as a space is so deeply engrained that Jonathan Culler even describes it as a fundamental “problem in the theory of fiction: when you leave fiction you rediscover fictions.”123 In Culler’s case, that paradox emerges as he “leaves” narrative fiction for narrative nonfiction. The same paradox surfaces as I explicitly shed the form, mode, and operation of narrative to describe a non-narrative mode of fiction and keep encountering narrative fiction. This study takes seriously the fact that generally we think about fiction as stories, and the insights of literary theory help to distinguish between fiction and narrative. Close attention to the relationship between fiction and narrative in fact helps us to picture fiction outside its familiar literary terrain. Narrative theorists provide insight into the composition of subjectivity in fictional characters, the operation of tropes such as metaphor and allegory, and the impression of verisimilitude in realist novels. As I set out in each chapter that follows, non-literary fictions take up these key elements in the production of the effect of fiction in narrative, and artists deploy, adapt, and fundamentally alter them for the plastic arts. The influential body of work by Jacques Rancière about the role of fiction in the politics of aesthetics also centers on the spaces of literature. Broadly speaking, Rancière builds toward an understanding of the “democracy of

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modern fiction” by means of a strict distinction: “fiction is not the invention of imaginary worlds. . . . It is first and foremost a structure of rationality: a mode of presentation that renders things, situations or events perceptible and intelligible; a mode of liaison that constructs forms of coexistence, succession and causal linkage between events, and gives these forms the character of the possible, the real or the necessary.”124 Rancière thus embeds narrative causality within his abstraction of the rationality of fiction, even though at times he considers non-narrative artworks. The rigid opposition between the imaginary and this ordering rationale of fiction is the consequence of a persistent blind spot with regard to coloniality in Rancière’s corpus, which appears in the spaces of the fictions he analyzes: in the places that produce the fictions, and in the rationality of space within fiction. Despite his commitment to the democracy of fiction, the Latinx and Latin American artworks, intellectual genealogies, and political and historical contexts that follow are substantially different from the Euro-American “episodes” that fill his pages.125 Freya Schiwy keenly observes the problem of space in Rancière’s assertion that postcolonial theories of the subject have no place in France, which she argues operates as a fundamental limit on his theory of democracy. Beyond that single rejection, though, Schiwy elaborates the crucial role of the imaginary that the French thinker dismissed. Her study of indigenous democratic movements reveals two fundamental facts about democracy, aesthetics, and politics that are relevant to France as much as to Bolivia and Mexico: “all states today are constructs of modernity and coloniality,” and as much as literature, art, and communications, those states are cultural products.126 Schiwy turns to fiction rather than documentary to analyze how these anti-neoliberal, indigenous, cultural and political movements imagined democracy. Dynamic processes of cultural production and historical recuperation appear in Venciendo el miedo (Conquering Fear, 2005), a fictional video produced by two Amerindian collectives.127 Like Schiwy, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay differs from Rancière in her proposal to “unlearn imperialism” through a repeated command to imagine. The photography specialist thus envisions “untaken photographs” and writes a potential but unrealized history. Azoulay does not, however, offer a detailed account of how to enact that imagination, beyond her attention to certain moments she calls “shudders,” like the click of the camera shutter.128 Close analyses of non-literary fictions in this study reveal that they follow that command to “imagine” in a variety of precise, non-narrative temporalities. Blindness to coloniality also pervades Rancière’s understanding of the space in fiction: what he calls “the space of words,” as well as the spaces between word and image. Much as Meireles emphasized the role of con-

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crete poetry in liberating fiction from narrative time, Rancière celebrates the Belgian poet-turned-artist Marcel Broodthaers and his return to Stéphane Mallarmé’s landmark visual poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance; 1897). As the inventor of an imaginary museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles), Broodthaers is an obvious choice for a theory of non-narrative fiction dedicated to democratic politics.129 Yet Rancière pays no attention to Broodthaers’s foundation of his fictive museum in the very decade the Congo gained independence from Belgium or to the colonial history of museums. He does not inquire into the politics of fiction of the palm trees, cannon, and gold bricks that pervade Broodthaers’s installations, the Imperial Eagle of his invented museum, or the collage made with the newspaper headline “Il faut sauver le Congo— Des vérités simples et des pròblemes difficiles” (It Is Necessary to Save the Congo—On Simple Truths and Difficult Problems).130 If the full answer to this question belongs in the scholarship on Broodthaers, the artist makes clear that the politics of fiction in contemporary art must confront coloniality by means of the imagination. The last unavoidable space associated with the temporality of fiction is utopia. Recall that Aguilar Gil, a Mixe linguist, felt trapped by the limitations of utopia as the primary spatial metaphor for imagining liberation. When Rancière was asked whether his logic of fiction redefined utopia, he responded by invoking Michel Foucault: “the ‘fictions’ of art and politics are . . . heterotopias rather than utopias.”131 In that landmark essay, Foucault grants primacy to former colonial sites in a neoliberal world, where one can perceive the coexistence of incompatible times and spaces. These heterotopic fictions already exist in the world, though, waiting for the critical eye to discover them. Here Foucault repeats a long-standing European attitude toward artists on its margins; he echoes André Breton’s designation of Mexico as the surrealist country par excellence, one where the avant-garde artist similarly could encounter the surreal already made. In contrast, the literary theorist Luis Costa Lima argues that an expanded concept of fiction enables intellectuals from “marginal” cultures like Brazil to articulate critical theory beyond those concepts of utopia and heterotopia. He names “pan-fictionality” as a mode of aesthetic production encompassing literary as well as what he calls “external fictions.”132 Found in prose, poetry, abstract painting, and everyday performative habits, his pan-fictionality emphasizes the creation performed by the receiver of art rather than the author, artist, artwork, or text. If we have already seen that reorientation toward the participant and outside the frame of the work in contemporary art since the 1960s, Costa Lima reveals its fundamental role in literary study’s

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understanding of critique. The following chapters reveal that the artists who make non-literary fictions time and again reject the concept of utopia, as did Aguilar Gil. Furthermore, they do not simply encounter heterotopias; rather, they make up political fictions by inventing non-narrative times and unfolding the imaginary into everyday spaces.133 Total negation, the making without affirming that is at the core of nonliterary fictions, addresses the Eurocentrism of critical theory at a moment of substantial disputes over its status. Recent debates in Euro-American literary theory have questioned the inheritance of the Frankfurt school, whose articulation of negation was so central to critique in the twentieth century. Feminism has been central to this process, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative” mode of reading. Her classic text informs mine, especially its premise that knowledge does as much as is.134 Rita Felski’s more recent provocation of the “limits of critique” reveals the cracks from within the edifice of the Euro-American New Left. She frames its negation as the constant production of ironic distance between critic and object, and asks what theory might make possible if it were to abandon what she calls its “hermeneutics of suspicion.”135 However relevant Felski’s proposal may be for an adjustment within that critical genealogy, it approximates neither the scale of intervention that Euro-American critique itself sought to perform nor the character of intervention that scholars and artists working on questions of coloniality demand. It is no accident that Jaar’s citation of Gramsci’s “optimism of the will” reappears in Doris Sommer’s important work on artists as cultural agents, which advances the study of creativity in democratic social change.136 My analysis of the fictions that follow learns from the genealogy of radical pedagogy and citizenship Sommer traces but, as Jaar articulates, is more diffident about creativity and remains attached to the operation of negation. Chon Noriega and Kristine Stiles identify an earlier abandonment of that ironic attitude as the grounds of a radical politics of negation in the work of the Puerto Rican artist Ralph Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934) in the 1960s and 1970s. In her introduction to his solo exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, Stiles writes that Montañez Ortiz’s raucous and explosive demolition—of pianos, animals, and the walls of the museum—mines “negative traditions” through destruction art, and she describes his skepticism of dominant ironic attitudes.137 Noriega contrasts that radical destructionism to the detached “irony and parody” of his contemporary, Bruce Conner, arguing that Montañez Ortiz instead propelled the viewer into a precarious, unstable, and inherently politicized position.138 More powerful than any suspicious eye, Noriega elsewhere argues that the Puerto Rican artist (along with the Chicana artist Patssi Valdez) reached the viewer’s guts, stimulating a visceral

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response. At the same time, as both Noriega and Stiles point out, Montañez Ortiz was building El Museo del Barrio (founded 1969), inventing what at the time must have felt like a fiction as sweeping as Broodthaers’s Museum of Modern Art: the first Latino art museum. That making in negation (or destruction) is a work of imagination that neither respected the purity of utopia nor accepted the agentless accident of heterotopias. That it was a Puerto Rican artist in New York in the 1960s who harnessed that forceful negation comes as no surprise. The continued legal status of the island as an unincorporated territory of the United States provides a concrete example of the contemporaneity of coloniality, a site that violates the time and space of progressive narrative histories of nation and modernity. Puerto Ricans of both generations of artists under consideration here, on the island and on the mainland, have been masters of that art of negation. More recently, the San Juan–based artist Chemi Rosado Seijo (b. 1973) created a series of interventions under the broad title, Tapando para ver (Blacking Out to See, 2000–2002). Grounded again in a gerund, the title names an obsessive operation that makes the visible invisible and the invisible visible. Rosado Seijo’s noun-verb took a variety of forms, sites, and actions that provide bookends to this study. First, “Publicidad intervenida” (Intervened Publicity) darkened areas of mass media and advertising images to create messages against their original intent (fig. 0.8). Those blackened messages were produced as videos, posters, billboards, and even an altered business card of the curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which blacked out the “n” to reveal him to be a “Whitey.” Rosado Seijo materializes and extends the “R” of Jaar’s América across the island, creating negative visual spaces that articulate counterhegemonic messages. He invents varied and individual responses, fictive messages within the homogenizing pressures of global capitalism. Echoing Jaar’s polling of Chileans, Tapando para ver began just two years after the 1998 plebiscite regarding the island’s political status, in which negation became a protagonist. With statehood, independence, and the status quo listed as options, Puerto Rican voters selected “None of the Above.” To make matters worse, since the victory of “none of the above” was ascribed to ballot confusion, a new vote was held in 2012. The process included another impossible ballot. First, all voters, no matter whether they voted sí or no to the first question of whether to change the island’s status, also had to answer a second question that asked them to select a new status. Second, voters confused the choice between a proposed new estado libre asociado soberano (sovereign free associated state) and the existing designation as the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (Free Associated State of Puerto Rico, or Commonwealth). The results were not surprising. ABC News marveled

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Figure 0.8 Chemi Rosado Seijo, “El repartidor de noticias” (The Distributor of News), 2000. From the series Tapando para ver (Blocking Out to See), 2000–ongoing. Photo: Edwin Medina. Courtesy of the artist.

at the time: “If you factor in the 466,337 blank votes, Statehood only wins 45.1 of the total votes, and if you add the Sovereign Free Associated State and the blank ballots together, that would come to 51 of the votes, in other words, the same result of the plebiscites held in 1967 and 1993. In fact, it’s almost a mirror image of the 1998 plebiscite.”139 Rosado’s tapando invented a visual operation like the voters’ repeated selection of “none of the above”: not a no vote on the plebiscite but an operation of negation that rejected the inevitable conversion of that no into yes. In chapter 5, I discuss another form of tapando that Rosado Seijo invented, a project with residents of the town of Naranjito to paint their houses (see plate 11). Painting El Cerro (The Hill, 2001–present) is an ongoing activity that responds to the desire of the town’s inhabitants to make their houses more visually attractive. Even

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though the paint used is green rather than black, it is another operation that invents and makes in negation. As the artist and his collaborators brush green paint on the walls, the town gradually disappears into the verdant mountainside. Defining Affinities Resonances such as those between Rosado Seijo and Jaar make visible the landscape of an Americanity that Jaar himself described and that grounds the following chapters. My surprising pairings among the many artists who have worked with fiction combine artists such as Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and Alfredo Jaar, who anchor the field of contemporary Latin American art in scholarly publications, commercial galleries, and mainstream museum collections and exhibitions, with less prominent but equally important artists. They emphasize the affinities Cildo Meireles described across sites with quite different degrees of economic success under neoliberalism: Chile, the epitome of Southern Cone modernizing regimes, is considered along with Puerto Rico, which typically remains invisible on the margins of Latin America as much as of the United States. Artists confronting Cuban communism and its authoritarian, statist vision of utopia appear alongside those struggling within the weak Colombian state targeted by Norman Bailey’s neoliberal plan. The decision to focus on artists who already have a significant profile within and beyond their home countries was both practical and ambitious. Practical, as these are the artists you are more likely to recognize, whether or not you specialize in “Latin American art,” a growing but still-small field within the Anglophone and European art worlds. For the most part, I have chosen artists whose images appear with a simple web search and for whom an English-language bibliography exists. As José Roca angrily declared in Define Context, a small exhibition at Apex Art in New York City in 2000, the proposed solution from mainstream art history and criticism that we always explain the historical and geopolitical “context” serves to limit the range and scope of the artists and artworks thus contextualized.140 My strategy turns ambitious, then, for while no one book can overturn that fundamental and institutional imbalance, my selection of now-well-known artists strategically skates that edge. I use mainstream institutions’ openings to a limited number of artists from the Global South to articulate a theory of fiction for contemporary art, grounded in the site where neoliberalism was rehearsed, as a potential lesson to all those surviving its now-global regime. Latinx artists in the continental United States and its insular territories therefore play a crucial role here, as they register the contemporaneity of

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coloniality to a degree that their Latin American peers do not. That distinction has to do with the often working-class background of Latinx artists and their experience of forms of racialized violence particular to the United States. They offer incisive analyses and inventive responses from the very center of the neoliberal project. Arlene Dávila makes clear that Latin American artists still benefit from the national histories that correspond to modernizing narratives and bestow value on their work. If, as Dávila argues, Latinx art is a project rather than an identity, here that project reveals key elements of the inventiveness of non-literary fiction.141 As a scholar who works more on sites that labor within, under, and against the terminology of “Latin America,” the Latinx project has offered me an important guide. In his constant tapando, Rosado Seijo reveals Puerto Rico’s centrality to “not America,” enjoying neither the freedom of an independent nation nor the full rights of states belonging to the United States.142 Powerful points of resonance between Latinx and Latin American art histories have been erased by historiographies organized by nation. They cannot fully account for the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg’s research in Chicano art in order to respond to the massacre of students in Tlatelolco in 1968 and Chicano references to those same students in the Los Angeles magazine La Raza.143 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, whose work is examined in depth in chapter 5, explicitly connects his experience of violent racialization in the United States with the Spanish colonial project, and transforms both into a critical invention of color as fiction. Even consecrated Latin American artists given entry into the “international” art world, like Oiticica, learned about ongoing forms of colonial racialization at home via minoritarian politics in the United States.144 The hemispheric expansion of neoliberalism under examination here makes that lesson unavoidable, and many of the artists who follow, from Cruzvillegas to Antonio Caro, dwell in the resulting urban marginality that Dávila describes as defining of the project of Latinx art. Once more, we see why Carrie Lambert-Beatty decided she would have to study Couple in a Cage to comprehend the full scope of parafiction. Coco Fusco, a Cuba-born artist now strongly identified with the Latinx project, provides a powerful analysis of why that early performance continues to be relevant: “The do-good bureaucrats [in the 1990s] that managed culture wanted people of color to be simple, direct and truthful. It was so very boring. Sewing voodoo dolls in a cage and listening to the racist fantasies of museum goers was much more fun and much more illuminating.”145 Fusco and her Mexico-born Chicano-Chilango collaborator, Guillermo GómezPeña, took their fictional exhibition on the road across the United States and to Spain, inventing encounters in the historical and contemporary centers of coloniality. While important distinctions must be recognized between

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Latin American and Latinx art, I hope these pairings augur the power of fiction to confront the inequities that neoliberalism furthered among these different American sites. In a contemporary era when research-based practice has grown prominent, artists like Fusco have played key roles in conceptualizing what we know about art through art and criticism. Their protagonism often disappears in critical writing, which foregrounds the analysis and research of scholars. Yet Costa Lima observes that in the “marginal places” that enjoy “pan-fictionality,” practitioners far and away exceed its theorists in numbers.146 In what follows, I seek to narratively foreground their role by often putting artists first, before scholarly references. Much as Viveiros de Castro deprives anthropologists of their control over concepts, I perform an analogous undoing of the disciplinary structures that treat art practice as similarly unaware. I privilege artists’ writings, although they can be as difficult to name as theory itself. Oiticica wrote voluminously and produced texts that combine poetry, drawing, theory, philosophy, drug-induced trip, and personal reflection. He described them in an interview for the Mexican journal Artes Visuales as “theoretical and inventive texts,” and that inventiveness implicitly bound them to the other fictions he created.147 Other artists who weave throughout the chapters—Meireles and Cruzvillegas, Clark and Oiticica, Ulises Carrión and Diamela Eltit—are authors of wideranging, conceptual, and political texts about their own and other artists’ work. Their theoretical and inventive texts join leading voices from Latin American and Latinx studies that too often are erased in US scholarship, because of either the dominance of English or the operations of Eurocentrism detailed earlier. Each of the following chapters builds upon a key element of literary fiction that contemporary artists have reshaped into visual fictions: line, motif, gesture, corpus, and color. Avoiding separations by medium such as sculpture, photography, and painting, or even newer mediums, such as performance and installation, these operations detail the making up and making do of non-literary fiction through negation, the non-narrative temporality at their core, and the political actions they invent under expansive neoliberalism. Following Meireles’s lead, this study begins with concrete poetry as the point of departure for literature’s liberation from narrative time and goes on to privilege those modes of visual art that exert little control over the time of reception. Rather than time-based media such as film and video, I focus on the interdisciplinary practices that broadly belong to the genealogy of non-objectualism on the American continent. Chapter 1 focuses on the Janus-faced drawn line, the defining element of both written letters and drawings. It enacts and examines the paradox of leaving and

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reentering narrative fiction, and so offers a bridge for the reader from literary to non-literary fictions. The Mexican artist-poet Ulises Carrión and his Brazilian friends, the concrete poets whom Meireles called the “exception to [the] rule” of literature as extension in time, invented a new art of making books. These non-narrative books expand into fictions of sculptural dimensions in the work of the Brazilian Waltércio Caldas. No longer just the preface to a completed work, as a sketch, lines here simultaneously draw and erase themselves. Andean khipus, knotted, linear threads crucial to communication across the Inkan Empire, play a key role in conceptualizing the temporality and politics of lines, and draw the reader into the world of non-literary fictions. Chapter 2 presents how motif operates in the work of artists Antonio Caro, Carlos Garaicoa, and Francis Alÿs, in activities of repetition, walking, and asking, learned from influential indigenous movements as much as Lygia Clark’s foundational contributions to contemporary art. The literary motif is reinvented in fictions that make (up) only to the point of rehearsal but not performance, offering modes of creation and invention that evade neoliberalism’s demand to produce. Chapter 3 delves into the embodied nature of those repeated activities in the enactment of gesture by artists Nara Leão, Lotty Rosenfeld, Lourdes Grobet, and Michel Groisman. This chapter delineates a genealogy of gesture studies that has been crucial to critical theory in and of the American continent, and missing from the field’s current self-definition. Through the lens of Vilém Flusser’s hybrid philosophy of gesture, which he called the fiction of everything, I introduce foundational critical texts by David Efron, Augusto Boal, Giovanni Meo Zilio, and Silvia Mejía. Embedding the artists’ gestural fictions within this genealogy, and a temporality introduced by Aymara speakers of the Bolivian highlands, the chapter provides a concrete critical referent for gesture as a mode of fiction. The violence of neoliberal societies is a constitutive element of these fictions, but as I show throughout, they do not re-create avant-garde visions of utopia and dystopia in response to that brutality. Chapter 4 elaborates instead the corpus of non-literary fiction, the body that enacted gesture, as a confrontation with the desaparecido (disappeared). The disappeared victims of the military dictatorships, as well as of declared democracies such as Mexico, were the defining figure of the early neoliberal era and have governed debates over memory and justice since. In this chapter, Artur Barrio and Amalia Pica’s carnal works invent both the possibility and the threat of speaking with rather than for the dead. Amazonian concepts of somatic perspectivism as presented by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro help to constitute a corpus that creates an intimacy innate to fiction, and characterized by a cutting, non-narrative time.

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Only after understanding the diverse temporalities of non-literary fiction and tracing artistic strategies for negating representation do I turn to the most familiar, everyday understanding of fiction and its defining genre, the realist novel. In the concluding chapter, I trace a realism in contemporary art of the Americas that does not refer to figuration but rather to the power of verisimilitude. That illusion, the “as if ” that makes realism seem real, lies at the heart of the experience of fiction. Examples of fiction that confuse the audience about its status are the exception rather than the rule. Despite Meireles’s fascination with Welles’s radical radio show, few novels are accused of deceiving the reader, of misleading her about the veracity of their contents, and few readers are confused by their realism. The treatment of color in literary realism again offers a starting point from which to explore how visual artists invite viewers to encounter that verisimilitude. Oiticica’s influential invocation of the vivência (lived experience) of color inaugurates this realism, which Manglano-Ovalle later renders similarly lifelike but profoundly vulnerable. My elaboration of the verisimilitude of enlivened color, as all the central concepts that sustain this theory of fiction, draws upon Mesoamerican and Andean understandings of color, particularly red. The chapter and book conclude with a final negation: the transformation of red into its opposite on the color wheel, green. That last negation presents the verisimilitude of non-literary fiction in works by Nicolás García Uriburu and Chemi Rosado Seijo as the invention of life under isolating and lethal neoliberal regimes. Kusch writes that Quiroga’s stories led him to seek a distinct, American logic, one that would not worry about scientific truth and its singular affirmation but that rather “emerges out of a no lesser concern for the pure being of life.”148 This book is about that place of asking, listening, and most importantly, inventing, and the imaginative fictional operations it offers to a world under neoliberalism. Written in the shadows of presidents Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro decrying “fake news” and the again-proclaimed end of truth, I submit that fiction’s mode of political intervention is still of value. As maps of the global spread of COVID-19 paint South America in the crimson red color of death, while the United States fades into light shades to off-white, and back again, the cruel inequities that the experiments of these decades instilled across the continent are intensely visible. I invite you to imagine, just for a moment, that these non-literary fictions imagine only and essentially the possibility of life.

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Line: Making Fiction in Word and Image

The most familiar way to see a line as a fiction is to draw a horizontal one on a blank sheet of paper, approximately one-quarter of the way from the top of the page. This single line converts the page into a landscape by creating the illusion of a horizon. Even as the artists and critics of the twentieth century rejected the illusionism founded in Renaissance perspective, the narrow and ephemeral material of lines that conjoin drawing and text lived on. Bridging the visual and textual, these lines provide a historical and critical basis with which to conceptualize non-literary fiction. The Brazilian artist Waltércio Caldas (b. 1946), best known for his curved and linear metal sculptures that avoid that classic horizon, explains: “A blank page is not a space yet; it comes to be once a line traverses it.” He immediately adds, “A well-made line never reduces the paper to the condition of support.”1 The line and the page mutually constitute each other, an operation of invention that, as I set out below, designs fictional times and spaces. If it is crucial for the artists in this chapter that lines share the same materiality with the letters on this page, within the trajectory of non-objectual operations these image-words are also noun-verbs. The gerund as the grammatical form of making in negation is contained in the unfolding of the line across the page and out into the world. That drawn line is the basic unit of fiction in both visual arts and literature. According to Carlos Rincón, the conceptual separation of image and word began in the Renaissance with Leonardo da Vinci, for whom the image was the source of reason, and continued in Edmund Burke’s philosophy of the sublime, which reversed the opposition but still separated them through a gendered difference: the masculine sublime of the word set against the feminine sensibility of the image.2 Rincón argues that in Western thought that designation of irreconcilable differences between image and

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word facilitated the institution of other forms of colonial difference: reason versus passion, masculine versus feminine, civilization versus barbarism. The struggle over images in colonial and postcolonial sites in the Americas “has to do in general with something very different from the traditions that prohibit the image in other global cultures, and the iconophobia that characterizes so many critical discourses in the west.”3 Rincón celebrates the authors of literary fictions in the late 1960s who conceptually collapsed the opposition between image and word in their critiques of colonialism.4 Juan Acha similarly hailed the “anti-illusionist” modes of contemporary art as a “conjuncture of counter-humanisms,” which “subverts, you see, Renaissance ideals and those of its aesthetics.”5 As Del Valle and Eder explain, for Acha the Renaissance object was a colonial artifact. His anti-illusionism therefore is not concerned with the historical avant-garde’s opposition between abstraction and figuration, but rather it names visual operations that do not adhere to the colonial oppositions that defined the field of representation. As we already saw, Acha conceptualized the counterhumanisms of contemporary art alongside and through Amerindian aesthetics, and defined no-objetualismo in relation to the practices, objects, and peoples that Renaissance ideals had misunderstood and devalued. Once again, Cildo Meireles provides core concepts for the role of the drawn line in defining non-literary fiction. When the critic Frederico Morais proposed to the artist that in his work “drawing could be an extension of writing. Or vice versa,” Meireles responded, “In principle, everything is drawing.”6 Not only is drawing the alpha and omega for an artist best known for his conceptual installations; Meireles also provided two precise and surprising references for the kind of drawing that interested him. First, he cited the Colombian conceptual artist Antonio Caro’s Quintín Lame series (1972– 2021), which forms the core of chapter 2 (see fig. 2.1). For the moment, note that Caro repeatedly, over decades, copied the unique signature of the indigenous political leader Manuel Quintín Lame (1880–1967). It is a strange kind of drawing, both by Caro and by Quintín Lame himself, which fuses letters and drawn images into one, smooth entity in a protest of centuries of violence against Amerindian communities. As the neoliberal champion Bailey revealed, Colombia was seen as fertile ground for that new form of modern coloniality, and Brazil as exemplary of the path it could take. That Meireles names Caro here again connects America’s artistic and political destinies under this new regime. Meireles’s second example of drawing as the root of art was the khipu, which is not at all the result of pencil on paper (fig.1.1). The Inkan cords made with knots, multicolored thread, and different weaves contained history, dynastic lineages, and shared statistical information across the vast

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Figure 1.1 Color-banded khipu, Inka, 1450–1534. Cotton. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Pre-Columbian Collection, Washington, DC. Gift of William J. and Barbara M. Conklin.

Andean empire prior to the conquest.7 With this reference, Meireles understands drawing as the “smallest unit of thought. Without the khipus, the un-nameable would be lost in the dust of time.”8 Note that Meireles does not empty khipus of function or meaning; it is not the khipus that are unnamable. The linear objects contain a philosophy of negation: a knowledge that exceeds and evades the substantive, the nominal, the objective. The

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anthropologists Gary Urton and Sabina Hyland explain that khipus encode a kind of binary logic—of zeros and ones, the negative and the positive—that necessitates an entirely different form and content of historical accounting.9 For the contemporary political artist, the significance of the drawn line is fundamentally linked to the negative philosophy found in Amerindian thought. The negation of the “non-literary” and the temporality of the line that follow are indebted to what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro would call “equivocal” encounters with Amerindian writing systems and accompanying aesthetic philosophies. There are countless variations among these different artistic traditions, but none of them maintained purely alphabetic forms of literacy prior to European conquest. The relationship of story, image, and text in them offers sophisticated alternatives to Western alphabetic literacy and its formulations of narrative fiction. Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins affirm that after the conquest, the indigenous literacies that spanned the oral, the performative, the alphabetic, and the visual formed a negotiated interculture in which European literacy also adapted to the American worlds the colonizers sought to understand, translate, and control.10 Tim Ingold puts this issue in terms of the line: “Colonialism . . . is not the imposition of linearity upon a non-linear world, but the imposition of one kind of line on another.”11 The line that follows, then, is a knot that binds together philosophies of word and image. Elizabeth Boone notes similarities between the Quechua word for graphics, quilca, and the Nahuatl word, tlacuiloliztli, meaning both “to write” and “to paint,” which “compose[s] a graphic system that keeps and conveys knowledge, or, to put it another way, that presents ideas.”12 She argues for the broad theoretical relevance of research into these non-Western writing (and image) systems, citing Jacques Derrida’s insight into “the fundamental ethnocentrism, the logocentrism, that has controlled the definition of writing as a utensil to express speech.”13 The French Continental philosopher and the US specialist in pre-Columbian art emphasize that mathematics, music, chemistry, and mapping rely upon notational systems, which reveal the range of knowledge that alphabetic writing cannot contain. Boone stresses the capacity of notational and graphic forms of knowledge to imagine designs for the expression of epistemologies that press up against dominant modern and colonial regimes grounded in the separation of writing from image, of line from line. Meireles studied these lines in order to overcome the West’s juxtaposition of image and word and its correlated opposition of fact and fiction. His references to Amerindian drawing emphasize the degree to which the aesthetic systems of word and image that preceded the violent interruption of conquest—preconquest image-word systems—maintain contemporary relevance, even if they are not fully accessible from the other side of that massive historical rupture.

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In what follows, I show how these lines contributed to a reinvention of the concept of the book in contemporary art. As Walter Mignolo established, the book—its material and form, as much as the content of its ideas and the social practices of its uses—was a key battleground in the imposition of the European line in the sixteenth century.14 Strictly limited definitions of literacy as much as the Bible itself were crucial tools for the conversion and conquest of the Americas. Yet one of the most important books contesting and spanning that extended colonial modernity was the Nueva Corónica i buen gobierno (ca. 1615), Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s chronicle of life under Spanish rule. Sent to Philip III of Spain, the more than thousand-page book with some four hundred drawings was made public only when encountered in the Danish royal library in 1908.15 Since then, it has become a crucial source for research into Andean thought and the aesthetics of word and image. Cummins and Rappaport point to the political significance of Guaman Poma’s portrait of a scribe writing the words of a Quechua informant: “When the tip of the pen represents simultaneously the instrument of writing and drawing, as well as a sign for these two activities. That is, Guaman Poma shifts from writing a word to making a drawing, so as to express the nature of both the communication between the speaking and listening figure, and the production of a document . . . he feels perfectly at ease in the physical transition from one code of line making to another, as it is the same gesture and the same set of instruments.”16 The force of those aesthetic philosophies—quilca and tlacuiloliztli—sustains a fuller comprehension of the political power of the intervention by Rosenfeld and her Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA) collaborators as they painted a plus sign. “No +” and the mile of pluses created a linear fusion of text and sign. The plus sign inspires a thinking, feeling, and active response that the written word más cannot. As we will see, that smooth movement between drawn and written line allows the creation of books that are not literary and fictions that are not narrative. This chapter examines drawn lines as the shared material of words, signs, and pictures that make up non-literary fictions. It begins with the affinities between the Mexican poet-turned-artist Ulises Carrión and Brazil as the center of a hemispheric and global network of concrete poetry, which established the productive and intimate relationship between art and literature in the 1950s and 1960s. Waltércio Caldas took up these lines in the mid-1970s and brought them from paper to sculpture to the political border between Brazil and Argentina. The occupation of that border by the reinvented line reveals how non-literary fiction became explicitly political in the era of neoliberal dictatorship. Finally, Abraham Cruzvillegas returned that political line as a reinvented khipu, which created meaningful and fictional ties between Mexico and Peru. Across decades, countries, and mediums, these

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artists created tangled, counterhumanist lines, which shaped their work into fictions. Just the Line Ulises Carrión (1941–1989) used the material of the line, the word “line,” and the operation of the line as the central entity of his small book Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía (1973) (fig. 1.2). Handpicked by Octavio Paz as heir apparent to Mexican letters, Carrión abandoned Mexico City and that future for Europe around 1965, received a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Leeds in 1972, and then settled in Amsterdam.17 His interdisciplinary art practices and travels between the Americas and Europe made him a unique and fundamental intermediary between major figures and movements including Fluxus, the Mexican Grupos, concrete poets, and diverse practitioners of performance or, as it is known in Spanish, acciones plásticas (plastic actions). The small book of lines represents the transition from the beginning of Carrión’s artistic life as poet and fiction writer to his later experiments with art as a system in mail art, sound art, performance, video, and alternative spaces, including the bookshop-gallery he named Other Books and So. The book was printed by Beau Geste Press, the informal, mimeograph-based, small-scale publishing house run by David Mayor and the Mexican artists Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion, who were in exile in England following the massacre in 1968, when soldiers killed protesting students in Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas. A gathering place and distribution point for experimental art and letters, Beau Geste Press translated and published small-format, bilingual books. Looking for Poetry is composed of five sections, each beginning with the word líneas/lines in red and designed with eight purple lines that run from the cover to the back of the book, continuing across the bottom of each page’s layout (fig. 1.3).18 The search for poetry traverses the meanings, images, and connotations of líneas. In the first chapter or stanza, “lines” is followed by individual pages with the words “threads,” “strings,” “arteries,” and “roads.” All of these objects are represented as lines in two-dimensional drawings of them, though none have the dividing function of a line. In contrast, in verse 4, “lines” is followed by “edges,” “boundaries,” “diameters,” and “radii,” all of which are lines that serve the function of dividing or bisecting. By the fifth and final verse, “lines” has become “latitudes,” “spaces,” “relations,” “symbols,” “metaphors,” and finally “poetry.” The word “line” that threads throughout the book constitutes a material object and its immaterial operation; the book is the line, the poem is the line, and the words are only ever lines. The poem thus pursues something not properly a space, as a line

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Figure 1.2 Ulises Carrión, Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía. Beau Geste Press, 1973. Courtesy of the Archive of Ulises Carrión.

demarcates but does not occupy space, one that can be shared and passed from hand to hand in the pocket-sized book. The character of Carrión’s lines benefited from his close relationship with Brazilian concrete poets. He made several journeys to Brazil during his short life, coedited with Aart van Barneveld and Salvador Flores a special Brazil issue of the journal Ephemera (no. 12, October 1978) dedicated to “mail and ephemeral works,” and published poets from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife, and Porto Alegre.19 The admiration was mutual. Aracy Amaral included his “Conference/Performance” at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (1979) in a list of the principal non-objectual events in Brazil.20 In its heyday, between 1956 and 1969, concrete poetry sought a new relationship between written language and visual form. In the “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” (1958), published just one year before Ferreira Gullar’s theory of the non-object, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos famously wrote that they

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Figure 1.3 Ulises Carrión, Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía. Beau Geste Press, 1973. Courtesy of the Archive of Ulises Carrión.

sought to spatialize language: “concrete poetry: tension of word-things in space-time.”21 Gonzalo Aguilar describes concrete poetry’s “anti-narrative” character, and while he rightly notes that the influential Noigandres group celebrated the ideogram as opposed to discursive, analytic language, he describes the latter as “organized syntactically according to the model of the line.”22 As I argue below, that opposition between the syntactic line and the visual space that concrete poets invented is impossible to sustain. The lines of concrete poems provide an early vision of the gerundial temporality and invention, or making up, of non-literary fiction that Carrión employed in a new kind of book art just emerging in Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía.23 Décio Pignatari’s lexical key poem “Agora tal vez nunca” (Now Perhaps Never, 1964), reveals the crucial function of a reinvented line in the time and space of the concrete poem (fig. 1.4). It appeared in the journal Invenção

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(1962–1967), a hub for the publication of concrete poetry.24 The poem thematizes time as it contests narrative extension, and it invites reader-viewers to invent another time in their reading of the poem. Each poetic line is composed of thin lines that shape and divide geometric squares and rectangles. Most are not filled in, emphasizing their character as lines as much as shapes. The simple black-and-white design makes clear that the words to be used in the lexical substitution of word for shape are composed of the same black lines as the rectangles and squares. At first the act of reading these lines seems quite easy. Substituting the image with the word offered by the key at the bottom left of the page, one can read the first two lines: “agora! / agora! agora!” (now! now! now!).25 Moving down the page, though, the visual poem presents a linguistic impossibility. How does one speak or read the icon for “perhaps” enclosed within the lines that create a square of “now!”? The line here invents a time and space at the limits of language and image, and in so doing, it invents a fictional visual time that defies narrative form even as it provides a certain extension in the time of reading. “Agora tal vez nunca” appeared in the same number of the journal Invenção that included the first part of Haroldo de Campos’s landmark poem Galáxias.26 The first episode of a long poem published in its entirety only in 1984, de Campos wrote a short preface, “Dois dedos de prosa sobre uma nova prosa” (Two Measures of Prose about a New Prose) in which he declares the segment part of “uma nova fabulação. um novo realismo” (a new fable. a new realism).27 Aguilar understands that realism as de Campos’s “acceptance of the concept of fiction as central for his poetics.”28 He notes the importance of that concept of fiction in the concrete poet’s understanding of the status of the word (as lines) on a page: Writing, to the extent to which it occupies a space on the white page, reflects on its appearance (the conditions of its appearance). This process is the dominant theme of the poems that form Galáxias, and is condensed by the poet as a concept in a lineage from Mallarmé: fiction. As one reads in the epigraph of the book: “Fiction will come to the surface and rapidly dissipate as the writing shifts about.” . . . For Mallarmé, all method is a fiction, whose instrument is language, and comes to occupy a place of ligation (as a substitute for religion) for the community of the fin-de-siècle. . . . The acceptance of the concept of fiction as central to his poetics implies a displacement of Haroldo de Campos in relation to concrete orthodoxy.29

Where Aguilar emphasizes the break represented by Galáxias, I see a continuity between the lines that constitute the space of Pignatari’s concrete poem, characterized as “invention,” and these visual-literary fictions. Two years before Pignatari’s “Agora,” Affonso Ávila published an essay on

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Figure 1.4 Décio Pignatari, “Agora tal vez nunca” (Now Perhaps Never), 1964. Courtesy of Diniz Pignatari.

concrete poetry’s relation to the real in the same journal. Ávila reflects on the power of the journal’s titular invention in his own poem “Carta de solo” (Letter from the Ground, 1961), suggesting that it provides a key mechanism to reshape the effect of the real: “Referential Poetry—The term referential, here taken to explain the poetry of Letter from the Ground, does not trans-

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late into a proposal to subordinate it to the tutelage of any extra-aesthetic imposition, whether it be to politics, sociology, or folklore. It is referential by being a creation, a foundation, an invention.”30 The line employed in concrete poetry that made its way into Carrión’s work was a form of invention, not the line of drawing from observation. The substance of these lines exercised a deep and lasting impact: they made possible a concept of realist fiction invented in the poetics of the image-word rather than in narrative. This book builds toward a full discussion of the verisimilitude of realist fiction in chapter 5, beginning here with the line as its basic component. Lines into Books Soon after the publication of Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía, Carrión wrote a theory of that inventive process of creating poetic fictions made of these lines: the often-revised and widely circulated short text “El arte nuevo de hacer libros” (The New Art of Making Books). First published in Spanish in Octavio Paz’s influential Mexican literary magazine Plural in 1975, this manifesto fundamentally changes the definition of a book from a textbased narrative into an object made of lines on a page.31 Haroldo de Campos had suggested a related shift: that through the engagement of graphic design and popular culture, the concrete poem “becomes a useful object, consumable, like a plastic object.”32 More than anything, these useful, concrete objects were books. João Fernandes concurs that Carrión’s manifesto “permits the insinuation of a story without resorting to text or narrative,” much as de Campos later explains that his prologue to Galáxias imagines “a plot without a story.”33 In this landmark text, Carrión elaborates the formal attributes and time of a fiction lacking those basic components, and positions it in the face of a looming if unnamed threat, a monster that I argue prefigures neoliberalism. The manifesto contains Carrión’s core thinking about a fundamental revolution in the meaning and making of books as a critical space for invention. It begins with a definition of “what a book is” that is clearly indebted to the concrete poets: A book is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments. A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words . . . The fact that a text is contained in a book, comes only from the dimensions of such a text; or, in the case of a series of short texts (poems, for instance), from their number.34

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These sorts of books exceed the size, medium, and potential to circulate of the objects sold in bookstores. Carrión makes clear that discursive and linguistic tools cannot achieve the greatest aim of the book, which he calls its existence as “an autonomous reality.”35 The scope of this reinvented book is grounded in but goes beyond his Brazilian collaborators: “Concrete poetry represents an alternative to poetry. Books, regarded as autonomous spacetime sequences, offer an alternative to all existent literary genres.”36 Concrete poetry established the relationship between the visuality of language and the form of action it made possible, but it is only with the new book that Carrión invents a completely different space and time. Carrión therefore continued to be interested in poetry and fiction even if he did not write typical verses and books. In search of these other spaces of fiction, he follows lines of poetry off the page and traces out the written word’s difficulty with transcribing speech. On the cassette The Poet’s Tongue (1977), a series of sound works including “Spanish Pieces” and “Aritmética” (Arithmetic), Carrión transforms the limitations of writing into fictional spoken languages. In “Spanish Pieces,” excessive repetition and the insertion of nonsense sounds make Spanish recognizable but incomprehensible. The performance of this non-existent but familiar language confronts the profound connection between the communicative function of language as a code and the possibility of alphabetic transcription. Hovering at the edge of comprehensibility, Carrión’s Spanish-like language invents a form of linguistic communication without words. The sound experiments create a temporality that has a certain extension without narrative or even poetic linearity. The impossible measure of that language appears in “Aritmética,” as Carrión recites aloud on cassette tape: uno más uno [one plus one] uno más uno más uno [one plus one plus one] uno más uno más uno más uno [one plus one plus one plus one] . . . más veintiséis más veintisiete más veintiocho . . . [plus twenty-six plus twenty-seven plus twenty-eight . . .]37

In this aural mathematics, as in Pignatari’s “Agora tal vez nunca,” there is a repetitive extension in time (the reading) but a refusal of summation. The poem literally never creates the sum of 1 + 1. That refusal is part and parcel of the unresolvable question whether I ought to have transcribed the recorded poem as “uno más uno” or “1 + 1.” The recorded poems and lines expose writing’s inability to do what we assume it does so easily: capture speech. Following Boone and Derrida, the two alternatives ground substantially

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different epistemologies: one of alphabetic (colonial) literacy and the other of mathematical notation. Through sound, Carrión references the colonial opposition between these two types of lines and avoids the reinscription of that difference. There are poetic lines here, but they do not mark their difference from an oral tradition. Soon thereafter, Carrión describes this oral aspect of his work as “las performances de lenguaje” (language performances), a practice that draws together literary poetics and visual art. In a text published by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Buenos Aires following a lecture there in 1978, Carrión explains: It is not discursive, in contrast to literature (including poetry). But also in contrast to the language that many artists use as an element in their works. In my work language is reduced to the simplest of structures, linear, unidimensional, since the works are stripped of all intentional emotional character. They lose, thus, volume, weight. But this loss has as a win that the diverse systems and subsystems that undergird verbal language are laid bare, and that they link it to [other] languages of signs of different natures. That is, for language to arrive at the status of art, it must stop being literary language.38

Carrión imagines an operation of language spanning the oral, the performative, the alphabetic, and the visual as fundamentally linear in form, even as the lines abandon the page. Johanna Drucker describes that non-literary character of his 1987 book, For Fans and Scholars Alike, as “in the genre of self-conscious codex.”39 For a Mexican artist, steeped in a modernist tradition from Miguel Covarrubias to Octavio Paz that was informed by pre-Columbian art forms, the codex was the colonial-modern poetic form par excellence. The aesthetic character of this kind of book was embodied in Amerindian forms of literacy long before and surviving conquest. Rather than the pure—and limited—alphabetic transcription that Derrida bemoans, it is that negotiated interculture of European and Amerindian literacies.40 To comprehend the importance of that claim for reciprocity between the domains of drawing and writing in the fraught history of books in the Americas, we need only look more closely at Guaman Poma’s Nueva Corónica i buen gobierno. Cummins asserts that “written words and pictorial drawing must have acted as a single unit for Guaman Poma,” and provides detailed evidence for the creation of this entity of image-word.41 The scribe wrote-drew the pages in sequence rather than inserting the drawings after the fact, as was done with illustrated manuscripts in sixteenth-century

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Europe. A series of compositional strategies unify image and word: the lack of empty spaces on the opposite side of a folio with a drawing, such that the narrative flows from image to text and back; each drawing begins with a word in the top left and ends with a word in the bottom right, as do the texts; and the solitary words at the bottom of each page operate as a bridge to following page, “as if he were weaving the parts into an irreducible ensemble.”42 No drawing appears without words, a much greater coexistence between the two than what was common at the time. What is more, words are not mere glosses of the pictures; rather, the two interact and affect each other. Cummins’s emphasis on the lack of pictorial expression in the Andes before the conquest, and the operation of image and word immediately after it, suggest that this image-word fusion can be considered a specially valenced form of political and aesthetic expression in the colonial site. He concludes that “quilca, as a colonial Quechua term, expresses writing and drawing and negates the separation between them. It has to do with the very act, an act that Guaman Poma associated with a [pre-Columbian] past.”43 Indeed, during the conquest, quilca came to refer to drawing, writing, and painting more than to khipus or the geometric patterns of tocapu woven textile art. Carrión himself did not reference preconquest writing-drawing forms, although his contact for the publication of Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía with Felipe Ehrenberg, who had begun to research Mesoamerican codices, amatl paintings, and aesthetic practices in the early 1960s, means he likely would have been aware of how his contemporaries were researching and engaging these booklike objects.44 In a letter to Juan Acha in 1973, Ehrenberg gushed about having just published Carrión’s Tras la poesía bilingually, adding that it soon would be followed by Saboramí (Taste of Me) by Cecilia Vicuña.45 His letter and the Chilean artist’s book provide traces of the initial connections between the fictional line, Amerindian aesthetic philosophies, and the sense of the growing political and social violence of neoliberalism in Latin America. The letter strikingly describes the imposition of the neoliberal experiment on Latin America with the Central Intelligence Agency– supported coup against the democratically elected Allende government, or as Ehrenberg writes in the prologue to Saboramí: “after Chile was carefully raped by starry-striped militarists.”46 Vicuña’s early understanding of the contributions of Amerindian thought to a renewed literacy of lines provides a forceful means for understanding Carrión’s new art of making books. When Carrión makes language lose depth, dimension, and literariness, he makes it become a line, which will become the basic unit of “the new art.” That literacy of lines rather than alphabets involves a practice similar to what Rappaport and Cummins describe as “a much more complex performative process marked by extraliterate ceremony, as well as by graphic

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notation.”47 More than just the communion of poetry and drawing, the new art centers on the line in its full narrowness. The Big Monster “El arte nuevo de hacer libros” reads like a manifesto, but we can note a shift in the degree and character of avant-garde utopianism proper to that genre. In a precise and insightful analysis, Heriberto Yépez presents the conflict between Octavio Paz and his once presumed heir as a disagreement over the continued potential of avant-garde radicalism. For Yépez, as editor of Plural, Paz sought to represent Carrión as “traditionally avant-garde,” in order to diminish the radicalness of his abandonment of textual literature for what the younger artist called “bookworks.”48 Carrión’s attitude to that utopian avant-garde tradition may have been the result of his experience running Other Books and So, a space dedicated to mail art, artist’s books, and stamp art that he and his partner, Aart van Barneveld, founded in 1975. Mail art was an important part of Carrión’s engagement with numerous artist movements, including Fluxus and the Escena de Avanzada in Chile, and cannot be separated from his bookmaking. Juan Agius, gallerist, editor, and the heir to Carrión’s private archive, explains that artist’s books and mail art were the “motor and the raison d’être of Other Books and So.”49 The storefront became a nexus in the circulation of artworks that were sent out from countries under dictatorship during this period, including Argentina (1976–1983), Brazil (1964–1985), and Chile (1974–1990). Posting mostly works on paper, using the envelopes and postal circuits as the medium of the work as much as the content, mail artists inserted themselves into the state’s system of exchange. They made those systems circulate the very information they wished to obscure and create social possibilities the state sought to foreclose. In an essay written in 1978, Carrión specifically includes mail art in the new art of making books and insists that these cannot be treated as an idealist realm of free exchange. The restrictions and the bureaucracy of the state become the found materials for making mail art: We are not free, we are subject to certain rules established beforehand. Not only that, we have also to pay a price that is calculated with precision concerning size and weight. . . . Seen from this point of view, Mail Art is no longer something easy, cheap, unpretentious and unimportant. Mail Art knocks at the door of the castle where the Big Monster lives. You can tell the monster anything you like, according to your experiences and beliefs. But the fact is that the Big Monster exists and presses us. Every invitation we receive to participate in a Mail Art projects is part of

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the guerrilla war against the Big Monster. Every Mail Art piece is a weapon thrown against the Monster who is the owner of the Castle, who separates us one from the others, all of us.50

The archive of Guy Schraenen, an editor, curator, collector, collaborator with Carrión, and major figure in mail art events including Latin American artists, includes an anonymous copy of a letter. In it, the artist writes: “I am very grateful to be invited to your exhibition but it happens that all the works I have sent you for The Small Press Festival, are very dangerous to be showed now in Argentina, so I ask you not to publish this material, and not to make any catalogues with it . . . if in this book appears some dangerous works (political), please don’t send them to me.”51 The direct political consequences of mail art entering and leaving dictatorial Argentina clearly exceeded the rhetorical gesture of an avant-garde manifesto. Although Carrión describes these activities as a form of guerrilla warfare, the poet’s sense of who this new art would attack is abstruse. The most prominent and triumphant of those guerrillas at the time was the Cuban Revolution, but Gabriel Wolfson notes that during this period of what he calls the deterioration of the Boom in Latin American literature, there was a breakdown around Cuba.52 Paz’s published correspondence with Carrión reveals mutual admiration between the young, gay Mexican poet and the Cuban author Sévero Sarduy. By the time Carrión writes of the Big Monster, it is likely that he was aware of the imprisonment of gay Cubans in the Unidades de Ayuda a la Producción (Units for Help with Production, known as UMAP) in the late 1960s and the ongoing bureaucratic structures that institutionalized homophobia.53 We must take it very seriously when Carrión admits, “To tell you the truth, I do not know exactly what or whom I am talking about. All I know is that there is a Monster.”54 The national, bureaucratic structures that the art historian Aimé Iglesias Lukin names as a target of the Big Monster archive—and that the anonymous Argentine artist cited earlier feared—existed equally within communist Cuba, the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone, and Carrión’s home country of Mexico’s illusory democracy managed by an authoritarian Partido Revolucionario Institucional that still traded on revolutionary discourse.55 Identifying the enemy in the battle he waged is very difficult, as the black-and-white, leftand-right terms that governed it were proving inadequate even as the Cold War continued. João Fernandes argues that Carrión referred to mail art itself as the Great Monster.56 While Carrión is not yet able to name him, I suggest that the Big Monster is the frightening confluence of coloniality, dictatorship, and neoliberal philosophies of life that were rehearsed as early as the mid-1960s in Latin America. The same number of Plural that first published “El arte nuevo de hacer

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libros” also included an analysis of the Mexican economy by the poet and essayist Gabriel Zaid, and signals the intellectual circuit in which Carrión’s early suspicions about the existence of a Big Monster emerged.57 Zaid questioned orthodoxies of progress defined as an increase in economic productivity measurable by output and consumption: “Unfortunately, these increases in material productivity have created the illusion of infinite progress, from which physical limits don’t begin to awaken. But there is something worse, in the case of personal attention: it doesn’t have on its side the virtual multiplication that the attention dedicated to material production enjoys in ever-increasing volume.”58 Zaid’s concept of personal attention governs the rest of the essay, as he compares the productivity of the traditional family unit that worked together on farms and small businesses with the efficiency of specialized labor. In this new modality, “certain old forms of attention, that were very efficient, have been lost. . . . Dividing and specializing the production and consumption of personal attention makes that attention ever more luxurious, not cheaper and more abundant.”59 Taking economic measures of human social relations and production to their logical extreme, Zaid demonstrates their failure to measure what they (incorrectly) valued. He notes that this social formation makes personal attention available to a privileged minority but not to a general populace, concluding, “The impersonality of modern life (the lack of attention typical of the traditional bureaucracy, the plastic friendliness of bureaucracy that public relations already learned, the lack of time that all of us in the city have to attend to ourselves as people) has as its origin the same divided, specialized and costly attention that produces cheap plastic or ignored people.”60 That costly lack of personal care in the context of material overproduction and consumption was made possible, Zaid notes, by the continuity of the Spanish colonial administration, the Mexican national bureaucracy that adapted that positivism under the Porfiriato (1876–1911), and the institutionalized party rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. In the same years that the Chicago Boys were using Chile as laboratory for their theories about liberalization of economies, Zaid identified a fertile ground for them in the existing bureaucratic structures of the independent yet still colonial nations of Latin America. If this was the unidentified but looming Big Monster, what did the lines of mail art and spaces like Other Books and So offer to confront it? Considered in the history of modernity and coloniality—particularly Zaid’s insight into the continuity of bureaucratic violence—the monster is in part the separation, the difference of coloniality that Rincón found at the separation of word and image, and fiction and fact. There is a striking resonance between the mail art that dared to knock on the Big Monster’s door in the last decades of the twentieth century and Guaman Poma’s let-

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ter to Felipe III. Like the works in Other Books and So, Guaman Poma’s intervention was sent by mail. These mailed missives containing lines of image-word, separated by four hundred years, present a form of political intervention through non-literary fiction. Since Nueva Corónica was lost in transit and found in a Danish archive only in the early twentieth century, it is quite literally a modern-colonial document. Most importantly, Guaman Poma imagined the enemy he addressed. As if predicting that Felipe III would not receive his letter, the scribe drew an image of what Cummins calls “an imaginary encounter” with the king (fig. 1.5). The fusion of alphabetic writing and drawing made the invented scene imaginable for the Andean author and his Spanish reader, even as it constituted the necessarily fictitious nature of the encounter on both sides of the colonial divide. If for the Castilian king the discursive register—the word of the Bible as much as of the chronicles of the conquest—would carry the weight of truth, then Guaman Poma’s constant interruption of the visual image destabilized that certainty.61 The Andean scribe, who long struggled with the viceroyalty’s administration over familial land rights, knew he could never really confront the king, in person or even in writing. The fictional encounter in word and image was part and parcel of the political intervention of the Nueva Corónica, as much as Carrión described the new art of “books, seen as an autonomous reality.” Carrión envisioned the impact of the combination of neoliberal capitalism and repressive dictatorship when he wrote of the Big Monster’s fragmented and insular society. The damage done to social relations under emerging neoliberalism was a primary political concern addressed by the artists who created non-literary fictions. Carrión’s interest in books, magazines, concrete poetry, and mail art provided his point of entry into artworks that verge on what today would be called social practice and that he called “cultural strategies.” He writes that the “old art” of poetry “establishes an inter-subjective communication [that] occurs in an abstract, ideal, impalpable space. In the new art (of which concrete poetry is only an example) communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page. A book is a volume in the space. It is the true ground of the communication that takes place through words—its here and now.”62 From the start, Carrión is interested in the material object of the book, as it is made certainly, but also always in relationship to the uses to which it is put, what happens to it when it is “perceived” rather than properly read. The materiality of the book implies not just questions of design, paper, and image but also its insertion into a social circuit as a contribution to greater “personal attention.” Carrión’s lines on paper indeed led to cultural strategies woven into the social material of life. In Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners (1981), the artist

Figure 1.5 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica i buen gobierno (New Chronicle and Good Government), 1615. Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 kvart: Guaman Poma, Nueva Corónica y buen gobierno (ca. 1615), drawing 343.

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spread gossip about himself with the help of his friends in Amsterdam over a period of three months. He followed and archived the progression of the gossip and ended the project with an academic lecture about the process at the University of Amsterdam. The presentation included a slideshow made of text, drawings, and photographs, and the artist also created a forty-fiveminute video.63 Carrión narrates the video as the typical talking head of documentary film, a technique he simultaneously utilizes and mocks. He interspersed his voice and face in the frame with a serious, scientific woman, played by the journalist Martha Hawley, who often repeats his narrative about gossip, rumor, slander, and scandal. Carrión details his interest in gossip not as a model for art but as its ideal medium. He contrasts its chainlike form, which links the individual with a broader social group via unreliable communications, with rumor’s nebulous pattern. Even so, gossip’s connection with reality diverges from rumor’s total unreliability. Carrión is less interested in scandal’s “moral indignation,” for he is enamored of the pleasure, passion, and other emotions of gossip, which enable its transformation into art. Gossip is both anonymous and collective, and it is the only one of these forms of communication chains that can be directed at people we love. Slander offers a direct contrast, not for its falseness but for its socially destructive aim. Once again, Carrión made line drawings as part and parcel of these four modes of spreading stories, in which the social relationships and the circulation of words were presented in images and definitions (fig. 1.6). The drawings are introduced in the video by a frame paradoxically titled “In Other Words,” which shows arrows drawn in red ink rather than words. The drawings represent the different flows of gossip, scandal, rumor, and slander. Carrión also produced black-and-white versions of these line drawings with Spanish texts describing the difference between chisme (gossip), rumor, escándalo (scandal), and calumnia (calumny).64 The arrows of gossip show its “free evolution” and “undulating reference,” in contrast to scandal’s “positive weight” represented by a line drawing of a cube. Carrión emphasizes the importance of tracing the spread of gossip in the city: the lines of these drawings are literal and figurative traces of the communication network the artist and his friends put into action. They are not, however, registers of actual conversations, nor do they map the trajectories of the persons involved. They are graphic reflections on how to imagine the material of gossip, and they utilize the lines featured in Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía. Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners is fictive in multiple ways: the information spread is invented, the impact on the social group is artificial (though eventually becomes real), and the diagrams do not offer any social scientific evidence.65 Carrión refers to the gossip as historias in the

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Figure 1.6 Ulises Carrión, Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, 1983. Courtesy of the Archive of Ulises Carrión.

plural, rather than historia in the singular, so while the word means both “story” and “history” in Spanish, here it cannot signify a singular truth. The drawn lines must be understood to invent as much as they trace social relations. The drawings in the video are followed by a section titled “Some Illustrations,” which presents the history of the use of gossip, slander, and

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rumor in various media of narrative fiction. Carrión collaged video clips of a recitation of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano with recordings directly from television of performances of Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville, Shakespeare’s Othello, and the Hollywood film Bells Are Ringing.66 He makes no distinction between canonical literary works and popular entertainment, and he proclaims them all to be “as accurate as a scientific analysis” for understanding gossip as a social mechanism. Furthermore, they represent a form of art he admires specifically for residing “on the borderline between truth and falsehood.” This collective project therefore investigated a “mechanism which molded and altered our social reality” without making any claim to truth. In fact, the lack of truth of gossip is fundamental to its potential to spread through real social circuits. Yet Carrión’s video also highlights the failures of the project: his friends were reluctant to spread upsetting or cruel stories about him, his social circle was so small that the gossip could not gather steam, and the gossipers sometimes just forgot to spread the stories. Those admitted failures contribute to the satirical, pseudoscientific, and exaggeratedly formal structure of project; Carrión explains, too, that they eliminate any parallel with the celebrity and spectacle of mass media. The artist reflects upon one more failure: each gossiper’s struggle in isolation with the challenges the project presented. Although the final project was collective, feelings of loneliness and uncertainty plagued the participants, which Carrión relates to sociological and anthropological evaluations of gossip as a “mechanism of social control.” The lines that Carrión followed “tras la poesía”—from short fiction to poem, to concrete poetry and mail art, and finally off the page into the social—trace a doubled and insightful borderline between that social control and a form of invention that drew social relations in different directions. During the years that the Big Monster began to haunt the Americas, art’s relationship to avant-gardism and guerrilla grew ambivalent, and the alienation that Zaid named “divided attention” increasingly isolated individuals. Carrión’s lines invented tales and wove networks, even as he feared that his failures threatened to erase them. Negating Lines: Drawing, Book, Sculpture, Border The same year that Carrión first published “El nuevo arte de hacer libros,” a short-lived but profoundly influential arts journal appeared in Brazil. Published while the country suffered under a military dictatorship that supported the neoliberal transition, the editors’ introduction declared it “a journal about the politics of art.”67 Waltércio Caldas coedited Malasartes (1975–1976) and was one of four artists charged with the design of the jour-

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Figure 1.7 Waltércio Caldas, “Leitura silenciosa” (Silent Reading), 1975. Drawing with pencil on paper, 15 × 20 cm, reproduced in Malasartes magazine. Photo: Waltércio Caldas. Courtesy of the artist.

nal. If Malasartes was said to fail because of the divergent artistic practices of its founding editors, it nonetheless reveals a crucial moment in international debates about art and society.68 Caldas’s contribution to the first issue was a two-page spread titled “Leitura silenciosa” (Silent Reading), a wordless essay composed of white lines drawn in pencil on a black background (fig. 1.7). His focus on the line in subsequent decades echoes Meireles’s description of drawing as the basic unit of art across diverse media and practices and continues the line of concrete poetry shared with Carrión. Caldas creates blinking, disappearing lines that advance Carrión’s poetic investigation of “edges,” “boundaries,” “diameters,” and “radii,” not to constitute a positive space of ground and sky of the horizon line but to imagine a fictional time and space grounded in negation. Caldas’s oeuvre traces a trajectory from a practice related to the new art of making books in “Leitura silenciosa” to Momento de fronteira (Border Moment, 2000), a large wire sculpture made of drawn stainless steel installed on the historically fraught border with Argentina. His work with lines arrives at another published essay and a series of sculptures simply called Ficção nas coisas (Fiction in Things). Other than the title and the artist’s name, “Leitura silenciosa” is composed solely of visual diagrams. A wine glass, single die, chair, book, cigarette, and clock float in shifting relationships on pages subdivided by white

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lines into eight black rectangles, but the relationship between the icons is obscure. The visual essay appears just after artist Luiz Paulo Baravelli’s complaint about the artificiality of the rectangular shape of so many works of art and just prior to a Portuguese translation of Joseph Kosuth’s “Art after Philosophy” (1969). This landmark of conceptual art similarly dismissed the idea of art attached to “a rectangular-shaped canvas stretched over wooden supports and stained with such and such colors, using such and such forms, giving such and such a visual experience, etc.”69 Caldas’s white designs in black rectangles echo Kosuth’s visual presentation of Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) series (ca. 1966–1968), and Malasartes reproduced the US artist’s dictionary definitions of “square” and “composition.” Caldas, however, replaces printed, graphic words with “silent” images.70 The simple designs are mostly recognizable, everyday objects in general circulation, with the exception of a strange, segmented semicircle. The utility of the objects mimics the functionality of the definitions, yet the simple drawings lay bare Kosuth’s pretense of art without image. The objects dangle at a slight angle on the vertical axis, such that the chair appears to balance on the verge of falling over (or it would if there were a horizontal plane representing the floor), and the viewer cannot define the object pictured by the split semicircle. As a whole, “Leitura silenciosa” elicits the kind of reading implemented by visual dictionaries but draws the viewer’s eye toward the limits of visual identification. Unlike Kosuth, who asserted the fundamental role of tautology and rejected the image in art’s fundamental claims to art, for Caldas, art’s “destiny” seems to be a wavering border of image, text, and identification. That redefined line would continue to be a foundational space of art and politics under neoliberalism. The line and the book have been constant preoccupations for Caldas, and he has noted the importance of concrete poetry in his sculptures and drawings as much as in his artist books and design work. Like Haroldo de Campos, Caldas’s “livros-objetos” (book-objects) mine the relationships of books, baroque art, and European conquest, and constitute a mode of realist fiction.71 In the artist’s book Velázquez (1996), Caldas manipulates images of the Spanish baroque masterpiece Las Meninas (1656), taken from an art history textbook, blurring them so they appear either too far away or the result of multiple, poor quality reproductions.72 Many Latin American artists have written of that shared experience of the “masterpieces” of Western art, which form the basis for so much art education in the region’s academies but are almost always accessed solely through reproductions. Caldas reproduces this experience of images blurred and discolored, which the eye can neither precisely perceive nor avoid registering. He thus creates another fiction out of the very illusionism for which Las Meninas is most famous. Gabriel Pérez

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Barreiro writes: “Yet [the book] is real and in front of us, just as the plates that traditionally seem so real are fictions because of their verisimilitude. The intricate interplay between reality, fiction, representation, present, and past creates an elaborate web,” which he compares to a Borges story.73 I return in depth to the crucial role of verisimilitude in the final chapter, but for now it must be stated that this is not a Borgesian fiction, only partially because it contains no words at all. Caldas’s books expand their fictions beyond the two dimensions of the page and into inhabited spaces. The artist refers to these works, including Velázquez, as part of a series called “Frases sólidas” (Solid sentences), in which image and text contaminate each other and transparent objects meet opaque pages.74 They dispute disciplinary claims from literary studies as much as art history: defying Wanda Pimentel’s assertion that visual images fix objects while textual narrative opens the play of fiction, and Thiago Honório’s contention that the distortion of the images makes any reading of the book impossible.75 Caldas explains that these works use art history as a medium: its books are important as proximate objects in a library rather than for the histories they contain. He thus engages Carrión’s “new art of making books,” instilling uncertainty into the very carrier of European colonial knowledge, blurring the optical illusion of mastery, and recasting the book as a site of social interaction far more expansive than the myth of the solitary reader. Indeed, the artist notes in surprise after decades of making books that they counterintuitively offer him a liberation from the narrative time of sculpture. These non-narrative, opaque pages are not at all literary. Caldas returns to these questions in the sculpture Espelho para Velásquez (Mirror for Velázquez, 2000), which features another reproduction of Las Meninas, reflected at a ninety-degree angle in a framed mirror and traversed by two intersecting cotton threads (fig. 1.8). These red strands reproduce and confuse the horizon lines of the reproduced paintings. One thread crosses horizontally over and beyond the mirror, intersecting at its center with a vertical black thread attached to hooks at the top and bottom of the frame. The sculpture can be understood as a book of the sort that Carrión imagined, such that the ninety-degree angle joining the reproduction of Las Meninas and the mirror becomes its spine. As in Carrión’s pursuit of poetry, these threads invent a fiction by revealing the limits of the illusion of mimetic representation and inventing a dizzying space that positions the viewer in a fold of total negativity. The viewer’s eye slides across the sculpture and follows the thread into mirrored horizon lines that make a position of visual mastery impossible. The lines of Velázquez’s mirror show how Caldas’s artist’s books transform the medium from the tool of conversion and conquest into a site for invention through negation. That they are

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Figure 1.8 Waltércio Caldas, Espelho para Velásquez (Mirror for Velázquez), 2000. Sculpture with framed mirror, metal, printed card and cotton string, 62 × 255 × 15 cm. Photo: Vicente de Mello. Courtesy of the artist.

made of the same material as the khipu only emphasizes that philosophy of negation. Honório identifies the threads as lines that destabilize the sculpture they inhabit, and in doing so, he invokes their contrast to the “classic tradition [of the line] . . . where it is the personification of logos.” Rather than draw a boundary around a contained space or a write a word that has meaning—much less the word of God—Caldas’s lines “become fluctuating and indecisive, they seem to expand them into space . . . [they] suggest in this case the intangible, or incommensurable.”76 The indecisive space is drawn by lines that do not sustain the operation of a boundary or a horizon. The lines of the sculptures, books, and drawings for which Caldas is best known are squiggly and curved, drawn with pencil and print on paper as well as string in space and metal pulled through a die. His lines are rarely straight or perpendicular, more akin to the baroque curve than the classical horizontal stroke that constitutes a vista or Renaissance perspective. Consider two very different drawings by Caldas. An untitled ink drawing on paper (1990) creates an organic, curving line that appears spontaneous and gestural (fig. 1.9). Yet careful preparatory drawings preceded this work, which Mari Carmen Ramírez argues “calls into question the visual logic of representation.”77 Unlike drawing from life and gestural abstraction, this drawing plots an invented space. Even as the soft curve contrasts with the

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ruler-edged, mechanical, and plotted lines of Escultura escultura (Sculpture Sculpture, 2005), both center on absence. Escultura escultura offers a failed illusion of linear containment, with lines that make image, word, and object rattle against habits of viewing the illusion of depth, the legibility of print, and the volume of sculpture (fig. 1.10). The drawn line in both works simultaneously invents and negates these media of representation, evoking a temporality like Pignatari’s “Agora tal vez nunca.” Caldas explains: “I would like to produce an object with the maximum presence and the maximum absence. . . . You would see it in an instant, then it would disappear. You would constantly be re-seeing it. This is a kind of object which it is no good looking at for a long time, which will always be at the exact instant at which it was seen for the first time.”78 Caldas continues that he wishes to change the idea of a locale, such that the very experience of place makes possible its transcendence: “instead of designating ‘you are here,’ the location informs ‘now you are where you do not know.’”79 This mirrored line of a contemporary Brazilian baroque imagines not the mastery of conquest but reflects its total ignorance. Rather than erase that site, these lines invent a narrow line of not knowing. Caldas calls this a line that negates its own duration.80 We might call these non-books, a form of what Acha called anti-humanist non-objectualism, which transform the content and material of the book into a new kind of fiction.

Figure 1.9 Waltércio Caldas, Untitled, 1990. Drawing with ink on paper, 34 × 50 cm. Photo: Jaime Acioli. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 1.10 Waltércio Caldas, Escultura escultura (Sculpture Sculpture), 2005. Drawing with India ink, painted metal, and rubber stamp on hardboard, 84 × 62 × 8.5 cm. Photo: Vicente de Mello. Courtesy of the artist.

Some thirty years after “Leitura silenciosa,” the artist created a book and a large sculpture that share the title Momento de fronteira (1999 and 2000). The artist makes clear that the small book is not secondary to the sculpture, which is seven by six by four meters in size, but is “part of the process of representation of that border. The book is not a representation of the object,

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but the graphic concentration of the place.”81 Rectangles again shape this artist’s book, here oriented vertically as opposed to the typical horizontal orientation of the painted canvas, and are cut into thick layers of bound, blue mapping paper (fig. 1.11). Caldas excavates depth into the two dimensions of the printed page and explains: “The book was made to promote a species of convergence between the graphic space and real space, suggesting therefore the space of distances . . . blue results from the multiple pages, not as an applied color but as ‘the body of blue,’ dense, sculpted, a mass.”82 Caldas’s carved-out intersection between the graphic and the real makes tangible and volumetric the concept of intense immersion of the reader in the fictional world of a novel. The viewer-reader tactically descends into the book via pages lined with the grid of mapping paper, which nevertheless tell no story and provide no horizontal orientation in space. What is the temporality of this book-object with no story? Another essay by Caldas, “Ficção nas coisas” (Fiction in Things, 2012), published in another arts journal, Serrote, provides an answer. Like Momento de fronteira, the title names sculptural, volumetric objects as well as a book-object wherein word and image are joined. The essay includes a broad range of images: a technical drawing that fuses the land survey with a stage design; an abstract blue inkblot; a black rectangle that echoes the “black page” in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767); photographs of Caldas’s own sculptures of

Figure 1.11 Waltércio Caldas, Momento de fronteira (Border Moment), 1999. Book made with papier couché and offset printing, 800 pages, 31 × 26 × 9 cm. Photo: Jaime Acioli. Courtesy of the artist.

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small glass cubes, wire, and stone; and words, from the names of Velázquez, Mondrian, and Picasso to “ZZZZZZZ.” Phrases of time dominate the words that appear: súbito (sudden), “Porque não antes—ou depois?” (Why not before—or after?), and “em seus tempos própios—irreversíveis” (in their own times—irreversible). Lines and volumetric forms intersect with one another and with typeface to draw the reader-viewer’s eye smoothly across and into space-times whose borders typically are rigidly monitored. In speaking of this essay, Caldas explains that like clocks and mirrors, these book-objects are bigger on the inside than the outside. In this work, then, the small clocks of “Leitura silenciosa” meet the Mirror for Velázquez in a new art of making books that Caldas explicitly names a form of “fiction.”83 Like clocks, they contain rhythm and sequence and so a defined temporality. Like mirrors, they respond to readers, who can read them where and when they wish, though with a physical relationship always measured, Caldas insists, at the distance of some thirty to forty centimeters at which they hold the book from their body. The temporality of the disappearing line, of objects with “a state of presence with another time, a slower time,” create for the viewer an experience of “‘disidentification’ that confers on the object a capacity to have its own world.”84 The “fiction in things” is fundamentally a temporal element, a fluctuating and indecisive border or horizon line between the unstructured time we live and the structured time of narrative, and so it invents entire worlds. When seeking to describe the character of invention in “Ficção nas coisas,” Caldas relies on words as much as images or objects. He savors the particular capacity of words to propose unreal situations that are thinkable only in words. Almost as if citing Carrión, Caldas talks about the density of poetic language and even notes that “language runs after poetry.” Tellingly, in explaining that concept, he selects words that hover between alphabetic and notational systems. Caldas proposes: “imagine a transparent number . . . now multiply it by an opaque number.”85 This imaginary math problem can neither be represented in images nor conceived of without them. Like Carrión’s aural mathematics and Boone’s deconstructive theory grounded in pre-Columbian notational practices, Caldas creates a kind of fiction of things out of the line between word and image. According to the artist, the large metal sculpture Momento de fronteira— installed outdoors in Itapiranga, in the state of Santa Catarina at the edge of the Uruguay River—is “a linear object” (fig. 1.12). The sculpture shares the same fundamental time and operation with the excavated book of blue graph paper, and with the drawings, thread works, and visual essays. Caldas further explains that its site and its space: “[by] belonging more to mass than to contour, suggests a field through which light passes. . . . The suggested

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Figure 1.12 Waltércio Caldas, Momento de fronteira (Border Moment), 2000. Sculpture in permanent installation on the border between Brazil and Argentina, on the bank of the Uruguay River, Itapiranga, Santa Catarina. Stainless steel, 400 × 670 × 540 cm. Photo: Waltércio Caldas. Courtesy of the artist.

masses come to be, then, more important than the lines, the transparent material is more evident than the periphery demarcated by lines.”86 The empty mass suggested by these drawn metal lines produces a negative volume. The linear sculpture operates as a kind of camera or telescope, with the small cubic shapes at its top intensifying the view of the land at the other side of the river, drawing it “closer” and so creating the sense of crossing the border it perches above. A “moment” rather than “monument” of the border, Sônia Salzstein suggests that the invented field of light on the southern border of Brazil reorients the country away from its historical east–west, coast– interior axis. As much as any political borders, that orientation established the logic of Brazilian national identity, up to and including the construction of the modern capital of Brasília as a counterpoint to the coastal cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Caldas draws that pivoting movement even further: “I saw the steel sculpture in an immeasurable space, strangely tied to everything, but circumscribed by imaginary lines—to be in a determined point of the border and, in a certain way, to be within the entire line of the border of the country.”87 As noted at the outset, these fictions run counter to the horizon line’s institution of mimetic representation in its creation of an illusion of depth. Caldas explains that his is a different line: “The horizon is a fundamental

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element in my work. First, because it is a place that does not exist, it is more than anything evocative. It is always there, farther away, like a mirage or abyss. Second, because the horizon configures a line that does not know for certain if it is curved or straight . . . that place, the horizon, barely suggested by the eyes but inexistent, reminds me of the destiny of art.”88 Like the other lines and threads in Caldas’s oeuvre, Paulo Venancio Filho writes that the horizon appears and disappears in Caldas’s work, and thus “its definition each time tends more to the negative. It is not this, it is not that. Perhaps it doesn’t wish to be, because its existence is almost not being. ‘No’ is the word of the work.”89 Here we see the operation of negation crucial to the composition of non-literary fiction: the invention of an almost-time and a not-quite-space of the line between image and word. Caldas’s non-literary fictions composed of books and metal sculptures draw and redraw the sense of a border—between countries, between image and word, between fiction and real—at the apogee of a period during which the status of those borders was being fundamentally altered. The decades between “Leitura silenciosa” and Momento de fronteira saw what can be called the emergence of the neoliberal border, beginning with the institution of Operation Condor in the 1970s and culminating in the Mercosur trade bloc in the 1990s. Operation Condor was a secret multinational force composed of military and intelligence units of the military dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela to share information and pursue guerrilla groups. Mercosur, in turn, was a trade agreement between four of those same countries along the lines of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which sought to enhance trade among them. As Grimson and Kessler succinctly note, “the first actual integration of Mercosur members was repressive in nature.”90 The national borders were made permeable for the regimes that Eduardo Galeano famously described as building prisons so that businesses could be free.91 Those contradictions were not alleviated under the full realization of neoliberalism. On that same border, while large-scale economic trade enjoys free transit across borders, small-scale trade and travel by border residents have been severely controlled. If the military dictatorship centralized state power at the same time that it made transnational deals with foreign corporations and surveillance agreements with other repressive states, the democratic governments that followed continued that surveillance and limited the movement of their citizens. The telescopic view through the metal square of Momento de fronteira penetrates like the scope on a rifle, echoing the permission granted via Operation Condor to capture so-called subversive Argentine citizens in Brazil. At the same time, those fictional lines constitute a mass that occupies the border itself, inventing an impossible and fantastic site in the non-space

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of a horizon. The fictional line that Caldas invents at that border blinks in and out of that contradiction between freedom and imprisonment, open and closed. Fibrous Lines and Knots As Carrión’s new books suggested, not all invented lines and threads are borders. Some create links between distant sites rather than divide or encircle them. In 2015 in the Museo de Arte de Lima, Abraham Cruzvillegas created a new installation in his Autoconstrucción series. In Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo (Self-Destruction 7: Undoing the Knot), the artist created a large installation out of found and fabricated materials, wrote an album of song lyrics to be set to music and performed by Peruvian musicians, and published a broadside that included those lyrics with a short essay and other essays by a political activist and an archaeologist (fig. 1.13).92 In this explicit engagement of negation as part and parcel of making or building—destroying and undoing as part of the autoconstrucción discussed in the introduction—the line as a thread is the central entity. While this line draws connections rather than delineates a border, it retains the fictional qualities that Caldas drew out: full and narrow, drawing and erasing. Cruzvillegas invents a woven network across the American continent, the terrain of research into what he calls his “absurd genealogy.” The story stretches between his family home in Michoacán, Mexico, and the Peruvian

Figure 1.13 Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo (SelfDestruction 7: Undoing the Knot), 2015. Installation at Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Lima, Perú. Courtesy of the artist.

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Andes, home of the khipus that Meireles declared a foundational form of drawing as political art.93 Cruzvillegas’s search for a trace of “an improbable ancestor” in Peru employs a method that skirts the edge of empirical and unscientific, scholarly and mythical—it draws connections but does not produce a concrete representation of ethnic identity. He avoids any “rigorous research that would provide hard data” even as he cites studies by the archaeologist Patricia Carot that establish that Purépecha peoples resided in his familial home of current-day Michoacán long ago and had returned to their ancestral lands. In the artist’s telling, her archaeological evidence comes after knowledge already contained in generations of stories about that homecoming. Stories of the Purépecha as a people that returned also ascribed Purépecha differences from other Mesoamerican linguistic and cultural groups to a lost origin in Inka Peru.94 Carot’s archaeology does not sustain that story, although she cites the linguist Leonardo Manrique Castañeda, who notes that the language shares “a remote parentage (more distant than that of a family)” with Quechuan languages.95 Cruzvillegas appears reluctant to grant linguists the final word on the story of that connection, especially Manrique Castañeda, perhaps because he continues to refer to the language with the Spanish colonial term tarasco rather than the group’s own purépecha. Cruzvillegas is equally compelled by the imaginative force of that slim relation as by social scientific evidence; after all, the apparently fictional stories about Purépecha origins and returns were right in the end. He tells of the real connections and profound misunderstandings that characterize his own returns to Michoacán. Cruzvillegas was not raised speaking Purépecha, since his father was sent away to be educated at a Spanish-language, Catholic residential school from a young age by his unmarried mother. When he spent time in his family’s hometown near Cherán in the 1990s, he could not speak with the people he visited in the meseta and had to be led around like a child by his grandmother.96 He calls her his guide, his Virgil, “teacher of how to be and how to exist—kashúmbikua, manners, and modes.”97 The artist repeatedly notes the depth of his own ignorance and the vast range of Purépecha language and knowledge. Even so, elsewhere Cruzvillegas recalls his father’s nicknames for him, all meaning “indigenous”—aborígen, indígena, indito—and explains that they were said with equal parts pride and longing for those modes of being.98 Autodestrucción does not produce a concrete or positive identity. Like Edward’s emphasis on drawing negative space in the introduction, it fabricates a connection out of the negative space of the line. While Cruzvillegas did not learn Purépecha in his visit to Nahuatzen, he did receive an education in threads. His uncle taught him “to card wool, to spin and weave coats in a pedaled loom, the legacy of his grandfather.”99 Like Carrión’s Looking for

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Figure 1.14 Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo (SelfDestruction 7: Undoing the Knot), detail, 2015. Installation at Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Lima, Perú. Courtesy of the artist.

Poetry/Tras la poesía, the song he wrote for the Lima exhibition, “El nudo” (Knot), includes all the following words: cuerdas (cords), trenzar (to braid), tejiendo (weaving), cortar (to cut), amarrar (to tie), lazos (bonds), mecate (cord, of Nahuatl origin), hilo (string), cordones (cords or laces), ligaduras (ties or bonds), fibrosas líneas (fibrous lines), agujetas (shoelaces), entrelazar (to interlace), jarcias (nautical rigging), rasgar (to strum a guitar), ovillo (ball of yarn), and renglones (lines). Lines literally knit the entire song together: Quien quiera cortar los lazos tan estrechos Habrá de descifrar primero los mecates Y si comprende la costumbre tal vez sepa Que en sus renglones hay muchos relatos (Whoever wants to cut such close ties / Will have to decipher the cords first / And if he understands the customs perhaps knows / That in their lines there are many stories)100

The installation includes a similar range of strings, threads, and nets. Colored strings like an unraveled khipu draw together black-and-white ethnographic photographs of Amerindian women with woven rebozos, all hung upside down and sideways. Representation is placed askew. Photographs of preconquest ceramics, a swastika, and an axolotl link to masked Zapatistas fighting for indigenous rights and against neoliberalism in Mexico. String connects the hairless dog endemic to these two places, today called perro peruano (Peruvian dog) in Peru and xoloitzcuintli in Mexico (fig. 1.14).

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Nearby tables are draped with Peruvian fishing nets, which resemble those common in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, the town made famous in tourist photos and Mexican cinema since the early twentieth century. The tables hold bound photocopies of studies of Amerindian languages and cultures from different moments in history. Each is closed with a shard of ceramic on top, resonant of Anni Albers’s recollection of her travels through Mexico with the Bauhaus artist Josef, as local children offered to sell them “fragments of pottery . . . alas, usually broken figurines, we could not believe that here in our hands were century-old pre-Columbian pieces found by the peasants when plowing their fields.”101 The setup appears to invite spectators to sit down and study, but the ceramic pieces push away interested spectators with the museum prohibition against touching. No clear evidence or logic confirms the strung-together elements of the installation; images and words blink in and out again. Even as the threads seem to gain substance in the visual echoes of familiar relation, they retain the fictional sense that first engendered the knowledge about these connections. Cruzvillegas calls his songs microrelatos (microstories). The lyrics of two of these stories were translated from Spanish into Purépecha, and all were set to music by Peruvian musicians and then performed in the land the Inka called Tahuantinsuyo. Pedestrians in Lima had to “decipher” this mixture of sounds and references in the midst of the typical urban cacophony, an act the artist compared to the decryption of khipus. The songs invent stories so short they barely retain narrative and ultimately, as the artist explains, “will represent the destruction of any communicative intent, knot by knot.”102 That destruction of communication does not empty indigenous lands nor erase Amerindian knowledge. “Deshaciendo el nudo”—undoing a knot— means both to make sense of it and to ultimately destroy it and return it to its form as a thread. It is a line that simultaneously draws and erases itself. Scholars of the khipu who are tasked with caring for them in museums note a challenge implicit in those that remain rolled up, the manner the Inka transported and stored them. Undoing them to decipher them would destroy the knowledge of how they were rolled, as that presentation also contains information.103 Cruzvillegas draws strings, cords, and lines that invent a connection, which exists only and powerfully within that shared philosophy of negation. Knocking As the stuff of image and word, the line is the first material that shapes this theory of fiction. The invention of concrete poets, the new book of Carrión, the curved and substantial horizons of Caldas, and the khipu-like

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microstories of Cruzvillegas frame fiction anew. With no concern for truth in representation and little to no extension in time, these works nevertheless make something up: a book, a border, a connection. The paradoxical fullness of their drawn lines is perceivable with the help of Amerindian philosophies of negation, which preexisted, survived, and contested the arrival and imposition of the European books that still maintain hegemony over the concept of fiction. In the contemporary phase of that history, artists faced what Carrión called the Big Monster. Although he did not identify that monster definitively, the poet, artist, and maker of books does propose how to evaluate if those lines entangle it: “When we were making paintings we could talk about sensibility, beauty, vision, craftsmanship, et cetera. But when we are knocking at the Monster’s door, what counts? The answer is simple: what counts how hard you are knocking. How can we measure the intensity of our knocking? By the echo we produce, obviously.”104 The artist does not confront the monster face-to-face—that would be too heroic, too avant-garde, and would require an enemy that revealed himself. Instead, makers of the new art of fiction must learn to hear the sound of empty space, recognize it as a structure of the enemy, and judge if they are knocking hard enough to make it protest. Caldas did so by creating a linear object, a fiction in things, empty and massive, which contained the porous and violent borders that crisscross the Mercosur. Perhaps the most poignant echo can be heard in Cruzvillegas’s performance of his threaded microstories with the poet Gabriela Jáuregui at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. Even, and especially, among the protagonists of this very real political struggle against neoliberalism, Cruzvillegas maintains the imaginary sense of these lines. He describes his father, who “dreamed of being indigenous,” and he and Jáuregui combine poetry and song “para tejer en arte cualquier dolor,” to weave that pain into art. Broadcast and archived on Radio Zapatista, their haunting refrain—“pero nos están matando” (but they are killing us)— echoes loudly as they knock on the door of the Big Monster.105 Fictive lines may erase as much as invent themselves and precarious connections across the hemisphere, but they extend and repeat in that echo. That repetition is the topic of the next chapter.

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Motif: Recurrent Images of Walking

Drawn lines provided a bridge between the material of literary and nonliterary fictions, but there is more to say about what Caldas called blinking glimpses—images within an already-visual field—and the fiction in things. In literary theories of fiction, motifs, or leitmotifs, structure the classic image system in narrative and make possible crucial fictive operations and experiences for the reader. Motifs appear as repeated, pictorial flashes in a literary text. The artists in this chapter create motifs in visual works, and so create an experience of the invention of fiction even as they evade textual narratives and their temporal control. Motifs expand the grammar of the gerundial non-object and make possible the eruption and recognition of non-literary fiction in the time of the everyday. In literary fiction, the visual motif slows down the reading time of narrative and alters its basic ordering principal through the reader’s experience of repetition and return. Motifs “work against forward progression” and “actively try to eliminate time” through techniques of “extended imagery” and “incremental repetition.”1 The group of literary theorists dedicated to spatial analyses of literature in the 1960s and 1970s privileged motif precisely for its disruption of narrative time through the instigation of a “mental action of reminiscence and anticipation.”2 Motif achieves the effect of fiction through spatiotemporal disturbances, through the reader’s experience of moving forward and backward in narrative time upon encountering each iteration of the image. This group of critics argued that the spatial reading of narrative fiction made possible by motifs “derives from a conviction that the critical significance of literature is to be found not in narrative dynamics, but in ‘patterns of imagery’ that ‘derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time.’”3 Narrative theories of fiction find a particular capacity for critique in these border cases of imagistic fiction, which carries over into its non-literary iterations.

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Motif is a border concept, common to art, literature, music, and even lace making and needlework.4 It transits between image and word, the visual, textual, sonic, and tactile, not proper to any one of them and so productively disturbing all. The criticality of motif proclaimed by narrative theorists resides in the defiance of the opposition between image and word that it shares with the line, and it is present in definitions of the word throughout the history of its usage in Spanish. Despite the strong association of motif in literary theory with the visual image, the five associative pages that motivo occupies in Joan Coromines’s etymological dictionary reveal that its root lies in mote, the base of word (mot in French).5 While more common in medieval French and Catalan than in Castilian Spanish, its broadest reach signified “the word in all of its aspects” whose literary character was taken from troubadour language and from northern French caballería. However, this general association with the word was abandoned quite early. In medieval times, mot became motivo, which was rebellious and critical, “a satirical or critical saying.” In the seventeenth century, it gained what Coromines terms a “favorable” meaning of “brief maxim, motto, especial of a chivalrous character . . . a brief musical composition, motet (choral piece)” but also the negative connotation of motejar, to brand or mark as of poor character. The list of cognates ranges from motear (speckle) and mota—as a speck, a detail, an imperfection, “a very slight defect”—to motín, from the French mutin “rebellion” or “mutiny,” which comes from the Latin movita, or “movement, revolt, rebellion.”6 The semantic wanderings of motivo circle around images of a spark, an instant, a very brief theme, which themselves reappear and so create the feeling of movement through space, and even a political movement. The motifs that follow create a time and space of repetition that generate (a) movement but do not promise revolution. Minuscule in scale, the motif does not constitute a utopia or even a rebellion, just a small diversion. It is a speck (mota): a dust mote on the camera lens that registers— magnified—on every single picture taken, marring the perfect illusion with its presence. Less than a fold, more than reproduction without difference, motifs in contemporary art help to create a time and space of fiction.7 They repeat in the everyday, tiny reminders of what can happen when artists shape, imagine, invent; they do not offer sufficient structure to compose a narrative or disappear enough to allow for an experience of the quotidian as such. I suggest that the redundancy of visual motif invents a strange time that viewers bump into during their activities in the world, one that invites them to experience these insertions as fictions. Practices of walking in contemporary art combine these two basic components of motif—brevity and repetition—to invent non-literary fictions. Lygia Clark, so closely linked to Ferreira Gullar and his non-object, created

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a work about walking in 1963 that since has become a fundamental reference for artists across the Americas. The Colombian Antonio Caro (b. 1950) and the Cuban Carlos Garaicoa (b. 1967) added repeating numbers—those special visual signs Carrión read as poetry—to the practice of walking, transforming them into motifs that occupy commonplace times and spaces. Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Belgium), resident in Mexico since 1986, walks and repeats in compositions of motifs as rehearsals without any performance. The word “fiction” suffuses the critical bibliography dedicated to these artists but suffers from the same lack of explanation of how these non-narrative and non-objectual practices invent. Projects of long duration composed out of many, short iterations, they show motif to be a crucial element in the imaginative fabrication of operations in the humdrum world. Motif ’s repetitions compose a tempo and shape the curving spiral of their works. They imagine art’s potential to offer only and vitally what Alÿs calls a “space to catch your breath.”8 Once again, the generation that came of age under neoliberal dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a critical operation— walking—subsequently taken up within the neoliberal democracies of the 1980s and 1990s. Clark’s small detours under Brazil’s military regime were followed by Caro’s serial works in the country that Bailey proposed as the next promising site for the expansion of neoliberalism. They reappear in Alÿs’s paseos, enacted during the presidency of the economist Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico (1988–1994), known for large-scale privatization and the expansion of free trade under the North American Free Trade Agreement. These motifs, especially those composed by Caro and Alÿs, emerged in the context of indigenous movements that employed walking as a political strategy grounded in Amerindian philosophical traditions.9 Caminhando: The Indelible Lygia Clark Lygia Clark’s artistic trajectory began with concrete abstract painting, moved on to neo-concretism’s reinvention of sculpture and performative actions through non-objectualism, and culminated in therapeutic practices based on the manipulation of those non-objects. Throughout these varied practices, she maintained a profound and creative engagement with writing. Clark’s close friend and fellow artist Hélio Oiticica described one work that combined all of these interests as “a fundamental discovery”: Caminhando (Walking, 1963).10 The written instructions for Caminhando contain details revelatory for our questions about how motif structures non-literary fiction: Make Caminhando yourself with the white strip of paper around the book, cut it across its width, twist it and glue it in order to get a Möbius strip. Then take a pair of scissors, stick to a point into the surface and cut it along

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its length. Take care not to go into the already cut part—which would separate the strip into two pieces. When you have gone completely round the Möbius strip, choose between cutting to the right or the left of the cut already made. This notion of choice is decisive, and within it resides the only meaning in this experiment. The work is its act.11

The history of the performance and exhibition of this work is complex. A photograph of the artist performing the work often represents it, although it was taken almost two decades after this initial articulation of the work.12 More than any document recording someone making Caminhando—even the artist herself—the work comes into being once the spectator enacts it. I encourage you to stop reading now, and to take out a slip of paper, scissors, and a piece of tape. Twist the paper once and tape the ends together, so that it forms a Möbius strip that resembles the infinity sign (∞). You will see that as your scissors cut through the strip, they pass seamlessly from inside to outside: visually, somatically, and conceptually. That experience of inside and outside is the foundational reading of the proposition, and the act breaks the frame, much as Gullar proposed for her bichos. The grammar of Clark’s title—which is a gerund like the “objecting” discussed in the introduction—accentuates the activity of the spectator. An early article by Walmir Ayala titled “Vamos fazer um ‘Caminhando’?” (Let’s Make a Walking?, 1964) emphasizes its strangeness by inserting the indefinite article in front of the gerund.13 Ayala even writes that Clark was involved in making “os ‘caminhandos’” (the ‘walkings’), which sounds as odd in Portuguese as it does in English. Clearly the grammar of noun-verb was crucial to the critic and poet’s interpretation of the operation of walking introduced by Clark. To be precise, though, the frame here is spliced, not broken. As the cuts “walk” along the path of the Möbius strip, they create swirling spirals of paper that register an endlessly evolving number of possible paths. The planes of the two-sided paper transform into something like a sculpture, which gains volume but not defined shape. That spiral form, emerging out of a repeated encounter, recurs as the shape and time of motif throughout the chapter. Eventually, though, the scissors cannot slice more, the “walking” must end, and the Möbius strip breaks. Caminhando reimagines the shape, substance, and temporality of the work of art as an act of unmaking that is its making. Ayala also notes Clark’s desire to take “sua experiência pelos caminhos” (her experience on the road). Of the many temporalities present in the work—the narrative time of the instructions, the almost-infinite time you could keep cutting with sharp-enough scissors and a precise-enough eye—it

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is the time of repetition that made this canonical work-act accessible to you. For Clark, the Möbius strip condenses time and space: “[It] makes us live the experience of a time without limit and of a continuous space. . . . There is only one type of duration: The act. The act is that which produces the ‘Caminhando.’ Nothing exists before and nothing afterwards.”14 That intersection of time and space in the repetition of the work echoes the definition of literary motif, which theorists of space in literature argued enhances the reader’s experience of narrative fiction. Clark remarks that, “‘Caminhando’ in the sense of literature would be a general abstract structure, without a defined context, but having the potentiality of being filled by the spectator.”15 In enacting the work, each individual repeats the same decision over and over again, each time she completes a loop of the Möbius strip. The reenactments of the work by an infinite number of participants also repeat unendingly over an undefined time. Art “in the sense of literature” is an operation that repeats without constituting narrative duration.16 There is an important detail about that “sense of literature” in Clark’s early instructions, which the extant scholarship has not addressed. The material she designates for Caminhando is “the white strip of paper around the book.”17 Before the advent of shrink-wrapped plastic, publishers in Brazil wrapped new books with a narrow paper band. To read the book, the new owner broke that strip. To enact Clark’s work, the participant-spectators repair that wrapping with glue or tape, after first twisting it into a Möbius strip. Their cuts then splice that external divider. Here it is crucial that they do not break the strip but rather slice in and out of the binding that just recently had contained literature. Not all books are fictional, but Clark specifically references the relationship between Caminhando and literature, and her oeuvre includes fascinating experiments with artist’s books that echo Carrión’s “New Art of Making Books” and concrete poetry’s poetic fictions. The act of “walking” thus penetrates the internal space of the literary with quotidian scissors; it transforms the strip of paper into an eruption of twisting slivers that take up three dimensions, bringing the fictional out of the book even as it abandons narrative duration within it. For subsequent artists, walking is the very operation of motif, and itself becomes a motif within non-literary fictions. Before tracing that lineage of walking, we must understand more about the nature of repetition in motif. Artifice: The Repeating Sign The work by Antonio Caro that Cildo Meireles named as a foundational referent actually was not a drawing. It was a repeated operation of drawing, of copying: a motif, which the artist distributed across the country over four

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decades. In 1972, the young artist made the first version of Manuel Quintín Lame: Información y variación visual (Manuel Quintín Lame: Information and Visual Variation, hereafter MQL) at the Primer Salón Independiente in Bogotá (fig. 2.1). Just one year earlier, La Rosca press had published the writings of the indigenous political and military leader— “Los pensamientos del indio que se educó dentro de las selvas colombianas” (The Thoughts of an Indian Who Educated Himself within the Jungles of Colombia)—under the title En defensa de mi raza (In Defense of My Race).18 Caro’s serial work consisted of creating enlarged and repeated copies of the signature of Quintín Lame (1880–1967). The idea of artwork as motif permeates MQL: Caro repetitively copied the signature and reproduced the work in varied formats, from offset-print posters to flyers to museum walls. His works on paper have reproduced the signature either partially or in its entirety, at times with a brief biography of Quintín Lame and a quote by him, and other times with a summary of the scope of the project. Even the repetitions make use of different types of multiples: one “singular” of ten copies of Quintín Lame’s signature; a “multiple,” which was a flyer that included the same image and information; and ephemeral paintings on walls inside and outside galleries and museums. For MQL and his later Proyecto 500 (Project 500, begun in 1987), Caro also walked. He walked and drew and painted and repeated; walking around, he presented the visual motifs that constitute these series, and, as Clark showed, the walking itself was a motif.19 Luis Camnitzer famously called Caro a “guerrillero,” the archetype of the politically engaged artist upon which the Uruguayan artist-theorist based his overarching argument about the nature of conceptualism in Latin America.20 Caro’s description of his own work, however, is less directed and less heroic. He recalls a crucial moment in his career when he discovered—as a methodology—what I am calling motif: “I return and repeat, I never had theoretical elements a priori, but I had them a posteriori and nor was it any effort to have them because I simply took them as they gave them to me. Calzadilla said: it’s arte povera, it is a conceptual manifestation and it is political. The next day I knew it: I’m conceptual, in the form I have a povera tendency and I am interested in the political, which I didn’t know until Calzadilla said it. And already stuck in there, it fell to me to take it up.”21 The inverted temporal return and repetition of images, icons, and actions ground Caro’s work. In his narrative, it was not just the historical content of Quintín Lame’s biography and published texts that mattered: the Cauca leader taught him the artistic operation that he would practice from that point forth. Caro called MQL: “A very fortunate approximation without theory and in the strict methodological sense, without prior prejudices . . . I must say that my things have always been encounters.”22 He has gone so far as to defer authorship of his work to the indigenous leader, protesting,

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Figure 2.1 Antonio Caro, from the series Homenaje a Manuel Quintín Lame (Homage to Manuel Quintín Lame), 1972. Ink on paper, ed. 15/24. Courtesy of the Estate of Antonio Caro and Casas Riegner, Bogotá.

“I always have said that Quintín Lame is a very good work not so much because of me, but because of Quintín Lame himself.”23 Caro’s concept of an artwork deemed so after the fact requires that we treat both—Quintín Lame and him—as artists and theorists. The encounter between these two conceptualists, joined in a copied signature that is neither purely text nor

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purely image, offers an opportunity to refine our understanding of art and politics in the Americas. The aesthetic, the conceptual, and the political come after a repeated act, after walking as motif and material, and most importantly, after Quintín Lame. Quintín Lame initially seems an unlikely source for what has come to be known as conceptual art in Colombia. The son of Nasa migrants from Tierradentro, Colombia, Quintín Lame was born on the hacienda of San Isidro. While revered as a leader for indigenous rights, he called himself a cacique sin cacicazgo, a terrazguero, two phrases that defy easy translation.24 A cacique is a kind of overlord, the omnipotent local landowner who reigns unrelentingly in many rural areas of Latin America. A cacicazgo is the area over which he has control; it begins with his own landholdings and extends to all the neighboring territories under his power. A cacique sin cacicazgo, then, is like a king with no kingdom. Terrazguero, in contrast, is a Colombian word meaning “an Indian without land,” and it refers to those indigenous people who dwell neither in the shared land distributed to communities nor on privately held land. Quintín Lame’s birth as a terrazguero emblematizes the total violence against indigenous communities during the colonial and national periods.25 Although many analyses of MQL assume Quintín Lame’s autochthony and authenticity, the terms he uses to describe himself emphasize his lack of territorial belonging in a society in which land is of fundamental importance. That apparent illegitimacy carries over to Quintín Lame’s signature, which fascinated Caro for so long. Signatures gain legitimacy first and foremost for their repetition; they are a kind of legal motif. Yet even before Caro copied it, Quintín Lame’s signature already was a type of forgery within the lettered world of the Spanish colonizers and Colombian creoles. The curving lines formed a signature that sought to make a legal claim, even though they were drawn by an indigenous man denied the legal authority to sign anything.26 The landless cacique concentrated power in that signature, in alphabetic letters written in order to reclaim lands stolen using a European logic of private property. In the first half of the twentieth century, he learned to use the tool of the letrados—the literate men who penned both the laws and literature of Spanish America from the period of colonial rule through the national period—as his weapon, as much as rifles and machetes. Romero Loaiza names this strategy the “appropriation of a technology.”27 Quintín Lame’s written texts, including hundreds of legal briefs and his memoir, made advances on the battleground of laws. He tapped into the authority of written texts, contracts, and signatures, even as he revealed that they were employed illegitimately to wrest lands out of the hands of indigenous groups.28 By foregrounding the imaginative and illicit nature of his own

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signature, Quintín Lame contested the violent and illegitimate capture of indigenous lands. Quintín Lame also exploited the signature’s defining space in between written word and spoken name, body and image. The legibility of the signed name is secondary to its recognizable visual form and to the trace it represents of the physical presence of the signatory. His alphabetic and drawn signature features a tiny face filling one of the repeated curlicues that branch out from the letters of his name. That anthropomorphic signature is the visual sign of a lifelong struggle to counter the violent dehumanization and defacement of the indigenous peoples of Colombia, the repeated mark of his declamations against European and mestizo abuses.29 The small man included in his signature holds two stars, a tiny and repeated reference to Juan Tama de Estrella that appears in each iconic production of his name. Quintín Lame proclaimed himself a descendant of Tama, a Cauca cacique during the colonial period, although they shared no familial relationship: the genealogy was invented, imagined, and reinvented in the visual motif of his signature.30 Neither a “genuine” indigenous pictogram nor a truthful register of Quintín Lame’s family history, his iconographic signature is a visual fiction used to establish another form of authority than those that the colonial apparatus and the national state recognized.31 Caro repeated and redoubled that practice of invention by copying Quintín Lame’s signature soon after the publication of his memoirs. Through his performance of calligraphic repetition, Caro created MQL as an explicit forgery. First, he copied Quintín Lame’s signature. Second, he copied an already-falsified signature, as Quintín Lame forged that invented lineage from Tama. Third, Caro’s apparently modest gesture of returning authorship of the work to Quintín Lame, discussed later, only repeated the practice of forgery: he passed off his own work (of copying) as if it were by Quintín Lame. In decades of writing Quintín Lame’s signature, Caro duplicates ad infinitum the falseness of a graphic form that was meant to ensure authenticity. Caro described his obsession with repetition in the same self-deprecating terms that he always used about his work: “Since I’m a half-wit, one idea comes out per year and I gnaw on it until people are tired of it.”32 The real target of Caro’s humor about and through repetition are the privileges and exclusions reproduced by the institutions of art, the state, and education. In the case of MQL, Caro’s “one idea” was a copy of one conceived by Quintín Lame some sixty years prior: the duplicated and forged signature as the sign of protest against the oppression of indigenous people. It is a motif that invents fictional authority and whose repetition constitutes a real challenge to authoritarian rule.

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The Copying Body The scholarship on Caro and Quintín Lame largely has examined the combination of word and image in their signatures as a reference to indigenous literacies. However, curlicues and even drawings of butterflies also featured in Spanish colonial chronicles, as in the elaborate signature of the royal scribe Francisco de Orellana archived in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.33 These fusions of word and image registered the physical presence of a signatory who enjoyed the privileges of civilization and reason, and crucially, one whose body obeyed the strictures of a religious and academic education taught through calligraphic repetition. In Colombia in the first three decades of the twentieth century, education still centered on the rigid instruction of calligraphy. That pedagogy produced the visual repetition of the form of the word by exercising strict control over the body and the virtue of the students. A manual from the time warned, “The teacher must constantly surveil so that the students do not acquire immoral habits in their way of holding the pen.”34 Quintín Lame’s forgery thus represented a further intervention in the promise of authenticity implicit in the signature. The indigenous body it registered was excluded from the position of authority of a signatory in the world of letters and defied the moral code that, with the flourish of a pen, separated indigenous peoples from their land and sanctified violence against them. Caro’s decades of copying Quintín Lame’s signature emphasized that corporeal activity: he hand painted enlargements on walls, silkscreened it on posters, and wrote it painstakingly on paper. In his enlargements of Quintín Lame’s signature, Caro magnified those rigid pedagogies of writing that disciplined the bodies of illiterate and semiliterate Colombians. He copied a practice of illicit copying, transferring its undisciplined rigor onto his own body. The 1971 edition of Quintín Lame’s text, which would have been the original source of Caro’s access to the signature, reproduced photographs of the original manuscript. However, more than one handwriting appears. The first photograph includes a caption that instructs the reader to admire the “fine calligraphy” of Florentino Moreno B., identified as the political leader’s indigenous scribe. Another reproduces a letter from Quintín Lame to a government official, with a caption that demands the reader pay attention to his original puño y letra (handwriting) and recognize the physical difficulty that writing presented to the indigenous leader, especially in the last years of his life. Caro’s copies highlight both the corporeal violence of calligraphy and the second hand that copied Quintín Lame’s autobiography onto paper. Close comparison of Caro’s work with Quintín Lame’s original signature reveals the degree to which the corporeality of calligraphic copying enacted

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the motif of his signature and refused to erase the radically different lived experiences of Colombian citizens. The first edition of En defensa de mi raza, Caro’s inspiration for his piece, included both the signed letter mentioned earlier and a close-up photograph of that signature. The photograph cuts out “Manuel Quintín” and includes only “Lame” and the elaborate designs surrounding it. The caption describes the signature as a “rubric” and a “stamp,” noting that Quintín Lame reproduced it “without missing a single detail in all of his letters, memorials, petitions, and even receipts that he wrote over more than sixty years.”35 Caro’s copies vary, however, contesting the transformation of Quintín Lame’s vulnerable body into a calligraphic machine. At times he copied the full signature seen in the letter; at others, he copied only the portion reproduced in the La Rosca edition, as if referencing the partiality of the photographic close-up. None of Caro’s copies that I have seen, however, include the trembling hand that held the pen in the letter to the official. Caro’s explicit forgery never provides an image of Quintín Lame, avoiding the kind of appropriation performed by Diego Rivera’s white-clad campesinos as the image of modern Mexicanness. Nor did he take “Quintín Lame” as an avant-garde, indigenized nom de plume, as did artists and poets such as Dr. Atl and Nahui Olín.36 Instead, he submitted his own body to the kind of calligraphic control that Quintín Lame’s generation endured in the process of alphabetization. Manuel Quintín Lame enacts a brilliant paradox: the act of signing another’s name, in order to reveal that signature as an artifact of the artist’s own legal presence and highlight his bodily absence. Caro’s forgery makes the absence of the signatory that is part and parcel of any signature—there is no need for a signed affirmation if the person is physically present—a redoubled absence that acts as more than just a demand for presence. Instead, converting the signature into a motif, the artist expands the political potential of invention. As motifs inserted into the time and space of the everyday, Caro and Quintín Lame’s falsified signatures invent an alternative to what Doris Sommer calls the “foundational fictions” of Latin America.37 In contrast to the independence-era novels that narrate an arc culminating in creole national identity, these visual fictions destabilize those foundations. José Roca precisely observes the overlapping practices of writing, drawing, and history making in this work: “Learning by heart Lame’s signature, Caro reinstated a presence that all official histories had systematically obliterated (and they still do). Lame’s signature in itself is highly symbolic: a syncretism of nineteenth-century calligraphy and Indian pictograms, it has a formal quality that goes beyond an individual, coming to bear presence of two communities in uneasy coexistence.”38 Despite his characterization of unease, Roca still falls into a habitual logic of syncretism, which risks fus-

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ing Quintín Lame and Caro into a seamless historical narrative. As a visual motif freed of that arc, Quintín Lame’s fictitious signature foregrounds a struggle precisely against the logic of narrative as contextualization that Roca wishes to contest. Recall that earlier, Roca himself argued against the constant demand for narrative context placed on art from the so-called periphery, which limited its relevance to the particular or the local and erased its contribution to broad critical and theoretical concepts. If art production from centers such as New York and London is free to be universally meaningful without that burden of situated belonging, Roca argued, then art from Colombia is made marginal by the very demand that it explain and be explained by its “context.” Caro’s learned signature of Quintín Lame literally takes it out of narrative context—it is a signature without a document, an artist’s signature without an artwork, an artist signing a signature that is not his own. Both forgeries interrupt the local story of national coherence as much as the power of narrative itself; they invent new fictions for what Roca rightly names as a violently disputed national space and invent a kind of visual fiction in their motivation of motif. In these fictions, Caro makes present the violence against indigenous bodies and theft of indigenous lands that official Colombian history obscured and that European and US histories ignored. As layered falsehoods, however, he never offers up to the viewer an authentic Quintín Lame. Instead, that signature in the hands of both men—already a contestation of the Western privilege of alphabetic over iconographic written languages, and of its accompanying discipline of bodies—operates as a fiction without literature. Repeating in “a Certain Way” Neither a reproduction nor an original, not instantaneous or narrative, the shape of repetition of these motifs is crucial to their invention of fiction and their political intervention. In his canonical essay The Repeating Island (1989), the Cuban novelist and scholar Antonio Benítez Rojo rethinks the Caribbean through and as a spiral of repetition, which describes a specific region even as it expands to encompass the entire “postindustrial” world. Caro’s Colombia, which stretches between the Caribbean Sea and the Andes Mountains and connects Central and South America, is a key conduit between this expanded Caribbean and the Americas at large. If on the surface, Benítez Rojo’s theory of repetition glosses French poststructuralism and US postmodernism, the heart of the essay—what he calls “the Caribbean of the senses, the Caribbean of sentiment and foreboding” (sentimiento y presentimiento)—beats to the rhythm of a machine that “produced imperi-

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alism, wars, colonial blocs, rebellions, repressions, sugar islands, runaway slave settlements, air and naval bases, revolutions of all sorts, and even a ‘free associated state’ next to an unfree socialist state.”39 His very words embed repetition in a shared expressive culture whose influence and logic exceed the oppositions that governed the Cold War and artificially separated Cuba from Puerto Rico and the extended Caribbean. In syncopation with this beat come the sounds of music and bodies. Dancing to be sure, but also, Benítez Rojo writes, the “ordinary act of walking” that completes Caribbean performance.40 This performativity floods all other artistic practices, sweeping through text, theater, music, art, and even sports. That simple act of walking is the elemental form of Caribbean performance and enacts the constant repetition of signs. Benítez Rojo makes clear that this repetition encompasses Derridean différance, although the expanded Caribbean “floods it with a vital stream” that soaks European deconstruction with the historical and contemporary violence of life.41 The repetition of motif profoundly shapes this Caribbean performance, theoretically, historically, and politically. Within this expanding, repeating Caribbean, Caro kept walking, and he was joined in a sense by Carlos Garaicoa, a Cuban artist of the younger generation, as both created fictions out of the motifs of painted signs. Born in Havana in 1967, Garaicoa formed part of a defining group of artists active in the 1990s. As much as the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was fundamental to art and politics across the hemisphere in the 1960s, the so-called Special Period of the 1990s—years of great economic hardship following the fall of the Soviet Union, and the end of the country’s subsidies for Cuba—had a crucial impact on artists of the generation. The decade was also marked by the quincentenary of the conquest of América, a fact highlighted in Garaicoa’s mention of a specific date in his broader recollection of walking around Old Havana, taking pictures of and copying city signs: “Havana, 1992. When you are a student and you cross your home city every day to go to the university and back you have a lot of time to think.”42 Even though the artist writes that he thought about the history of the city, the history of his walks, and what appeared and disappeared in these urban migrations, the scholarly and critical literature about Garaicoa is full of descriptions of his work as a kind of fiction.43 Furthermore, in interviews throughout his career, the artist has emphasized his foundations in literature more than visual arts. One specific sign caught Garaicoa’s eye as he walked: the number 6 painted on a column that held up decaying colonial buildings in Old Havana. In his work, Homenaje al 6 (Homage to the 6, 1992), Garaicoa repeated the curved 6 in paint beside the existing numeral, took a photograph of

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the two, and created a painted gesso reproduction of that photograph and installed it on the same column (figs. 2.2 and 2.3).44 The plaque includes three 6’s: the two that were already painted on the vertical column and another painted on the represented street, with a line that appears to measure 6 units from the column into the center of the street. The plaque also includes the word seis (six), painted in dripping letters on its frame. Finally, Garaicoa photographed the curiosity of his fellow pedestrians as they encountered the sixes.45 That sudden awareness of the everyday signs reveals the power of repetition, of the doubling of the original 6’s. Eugenio Valdés Figueroa ascribes the impact of Homenaje al 6 to its position “halfway there in that perpetual transaction between fiction and reality [such that] . . . the daily custom becomes strange and new rituals appear.” To locate Garaicoa’s work in this in-between, Valdés Figueroa describes the city as a “fictional narrative.”46 Yet Homenaje al 6 provides neither text nor any ordering schema of narrative. There is only the repeated, wandering time of motif. Those motifs invent a city within Havana, which José Roca describes as “a fictional city built on the ruins not of a city that once was, but one that never could be.”47 Garaicoa explains that the “conception of history as a fictitious element” has been a constant in his work; his fictions are built upon other fictions, which repeat backward and forward in time.48 The already-existing painted numerals and the added plaque of Homenaje al 6 disrupt the signs that order cities, for they replace the numbers on buildings that typically orient inhabitants. Garaicoa’s inclusion of history as a fictive element takes its place among many numbering schema that sought to order Havana throughout the colonial and national periods, to modernize the city by making it legible and more productive. The historian Arturo A. Pedroso traces five distinct attempts to impose numbering systems in Havana since the conquest, some aborted and some overlapping. In 1763, street numbers increased from north to south and from east to west; in 1808 they

Figure 2.2 Carlos Garaicoa. Homenaje al 6 (Homage to the 6), 1992. Photograph. Courtesy of Carlos Garaicoa studio.

Figure 2.3 Carlos Garaicoa, Homenaje al 6 (Homage to the 6), 1992, detail. Installation: object in polychrome gesso, two Cibachrome photographs, three sepia photographs on color paper. Courtesy of Coleção Teixeira de Freitas, Lisbon, and Carlos Garaicoa studio.

included fractions; in 1835, even numbers were placed on the right side of the street and odd on the left; in 1860, the numbers of the Old City (intramuros) and the neighborhoods beyond (extramuros) were integrated; and the final and current numbering was established in 1937, which ultimately restored street names from the colonial period.49 Curiously, the numbers

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remained unchanged after the Revolution. The 6’s in the homage invent yet another system of signs but one that neither increases nor decreases, proceeds neither north–south nor east–west; it only repeats. There is no progress through this non-literary, fictional city, no modernizing narrative: the redundant 6 is a motif, a speck, a flash, repeated enough to create a motivo and possibly a motín. As invented as the disappeared numerical systems of the past, Garaicoa’s motifs create visual fictions in the everyday. In this fictional Havana, as we will see, utopias do not govern. At the same time that Garaicoa was painting his 6’s, Caro also walked around painting a single number on walls: 500. Using funds provided by the Colombian state to “celebrate” the quincentenary of the conquest of America, Caro traveled widely throughout the country, from major urban centers with art museums to small towns, painting that number on public walls. Proyecto 500 (Project 500) consisted of those three painted digits and the conversations they sparked about coloniality, history, and violence (fig.2.4).50 These “conference performances” held under the sign of the conquest included texts and poems by Christopher Columbus, José Emilio Pacheco, Gonzalo Arango, and crucially, Quintín Lame. Caro made more than fifty such presentations in fifteen different cities in Colombia, including in the Caribbean city of Cartagena in 1990. Later that year, he began to paint the number 500 in achiote, a native seed used for red coloring; in 1992, he repeated MQL to paint the signature in achiote.51 Caro notes that the focus of Proyecto 500 changed substantially in 1998: “Until ’98 the workshop was something secondary, after ’98 it became my work, and now, more modestly, I say that it is my activity.”52 After years of repeating the MQL motif, Caro replaced the practice of art with an activity that more fully embraced the quotidian performance of walking that Benítez Rojo finds in the greater Caribbean. In these activities, Caro once again copied Quintín Lame. He imitated the Andean ritual of the minga, a ceremony celebrating communal work that the indigenous leader employed during his years building resistance to creole and mestizo oppression. Quintín Lame began the minga by standing on a box or a table and playing the Colombian national anthem. The indigenous leader then proclaimed that national ritual to be based on a lie, and he called for renewed participation in the indigenous ritual of minga and the political struggle for rights.53 Caro’s painted motif of the number 500 functioned similarly, as a kind of table upon which to stand and to invite discussions about communal struggles under contemporary forms of coloniality. In Quintín Lame’s time, the only way into the communities of the Cauca peoples to celebrate the minga was to walk. The historian Luis Vasco Uribe describes the slow, arduous process of going from house to house, across the region, to convince people to join Quintín Lame’s movement in the first half

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Figure 2.4 Antonio Caro, Proyecto 500 (Project 500), 1992. Annatto pigment print on handmade paper, ed. 5/500. 59 × 78 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Antonio Caro and Casas Riegner, Bogotá.

of the twentieth century. He also notes that the indigenous movement of the 1970s took up this same strategy.54 To achieve and maintain his authority as a cacique “Lame walked throughout Totoró, Inzá, Silvia and Belalcázar ‘conferencing’ with the indigenous peoples through ‘indoctrinating’ mingas, in which he defended the right of Indians to possess and use of the land of their ancestors. With Lame at its head, the group of secretaries, women and followers entered towns amid the music of hornpipes and the noise of rockets. In his talks, Lame set out that Independence had been a betrayal because the lands of the Indians had never been returned. . . . After these talks, those who gathered ate and paid homage.”55 Caro also walked a lot. The act of walking was part and parcel of many of his series: through urban and rural contexts for MQL and Proyecto 500, and for his workshop “activities” in his hometown of Bogotá.56 He even unhappily walked the Portuguese decolonial theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos across the border bridge between Colombia and Venezuela as the economic and migration crises surged in 2017, on the invitation of a curator.57 The practice of mingas was long-standing in the region, but recall that Quintín Lame literally did not belong to the lands through which he walked. Espinosa Arango insists that “Lame occupied a border position within these communities and sectors . . . he was not a reservation Indian but a

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terrazguero without land, and this influenced his political vision and his practical options for fight.”58 She calls his voice that of “un otro de otro modo”—an other of another mode.59 Caro evidently and insistently was more of an impostor than the terrazguero, Quintín Lame; his minga was as much a forgery as MQL. Both series slid Caro’s copies of Quintín’s copies into the realm of fiction. The repeated encounters under the sign 500, like Garaicoa’s 6, invented a fictional space at the same time they drew attention to the violent fictions of official histories. Repeating “in a certain way”—which spirals like a hurricane from the insular Caribbean to its continental neighbors and beyond, and provides a temporality of non-literary fiction—also places a demand on art theory. Caro created motifs in a refined art of forgery and encountered an appropriate theory of that art after indigenous thought. The same nationalism in political history that, as José Roca wrote, ensured the power of creole classes by obliterating the value of indigenous cultures, also has structured art history and theory. Caro’s art of copying neither claims authenticity nor permits contemporary art theory to continue that erasure. Neither his work nor mingas can be reduced to mainstream concepts of social practice, relational aesthetics, or political art. If Caro instructed us that his “activities” came after Quintín Lame’s, we must take account of the indigenous genealogies of the contemporary practices of walking that have become the focus of contemporary art history and many exhibitions. Repetition as Rehearsal, Walking as Negation Francis Alÿs is perhaps the best-known practitioner of walks currently living and working in the Americas. His paseos (strolls) have formed an integral part of his practice since the Belgium-born artist, trained as an architect, began to make art after his arrival in Mexico in 1986.60 In a review of Alÿs’s work in London’s Lisson Gallery in the late 1990s, Jaime Gili frames the exhibit as the artist’s recommendations on how to pass time. He describes an animated loop of a line drawing, hands touching thumbs and index fingers without stopping “as in a Möbius strip.”61 Gili’s observation rightly locates Alÿs’s work within the genealogy of Clark’s Caminhando, marking the continuity of walking as a motif in non-literary fictions and motif as a mode of producing them.62 However, he does not recognize a much closer referent for the activity, the Zapatista walks and caracoles that emerged in southern Mexico and arrived just a few blocks from the artist’s studio in the early 1990s. Alÿs has repeatedly addressed what he learned about global modernity as a result of his displacement from the First World to its margins. By employing Caro’s method and placing Alÿs’s walks “after”

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the Zapatistas, it becomes clear how they employ motifs to invent a fictional time and space of small interruptions in neoliberal life. Alÿs presents the privilege of his European origins and the lessons learned about modernity as a motif in his artworks, not simply as autobiography.63 In Tourist (1994), he stood beside carpenters and plumbers in the Zócalo, the major plaza in the historical center of Mexico City, beside a small sign that offered his (useless) services as a tourist (fig. 2.5). Re-enactments (2000) returns to this motif, presenting side-by-side screens that show edited videos of Alÿs purchasing a handgun and walking with it in his hand through the streets until two policemen stop him, handcuff him, and place him in a police car (fig. 2.6). The left screen is presented as the initial performance, in which the police were not informed of what was happening; the screen on the right is stamped “re-enactment,” as if were a repetition of the first, in which the police and artist acted their parts. Implicit in both, however, and made evident by the skipping time stamps that display edits to the left and right video streams, is that both are reenactments of a sort. Even in the first instance, Alÿs was never in the same danger as someone who was not over six feet tall and visibly European. The first walk with the gun was a reenactment of the privilege his whiteness grants, offered as a trade in Tourist. Indeed, the artist has expressed remorse over how this piece circulates outside Mexico, functioning as confirmation of a stereotypical violence in the periphery. The failure of interpretation is due to the treatment of the first video as if it were a straightforward document of reality. While the perfor-

Figure 2.5 Francis Alÿs, Turista (Tourist), 1994. Photo documentation. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 2.6 Francis Alÿs, Re-enactments, 2000. Photo documentation. Courtesy of the artist.

mance really happened, both the enactment and reenactments are fictive: both portray a danger from which the artist knew he was mostly protected. If Re-enactments brought together two central concepts in Alÿs’s oeuvre that contribute to the operation of motif—walking and repetition—Walking a Painting (2002) created the most literal translation of literary motif: an image in movement through time and space. The painting “sleeps” at night in one place and then is walked through the city during the day to its next location.64 Alÿs’s frequent work with musicians and musical instruments further draws out the relationship of literary motif with musical leitmotifs. In Duet (1999), Alÿs and Honoré d’O each carried half of a tuba as they searched for each other through the streets of Venice. The artist describes these motifs as the exploration of a temporality that approximates a fusion of music and image, and as the outcome of his experience of time in Mexico. Russell Ferguson comments that the artist resists bringing his work “to an unequivocal conclusion. Certain ideas and motifs are kept open.”65 That time of motif in his work is repetitive and iterative, openly confronting modernity’s unidirectional time of progress and implicitly replacing the narrative structure that carries it forward. Alÿs has often drawn parallels between his paseos and storytelling, fables, and other basic structures of fiction, and at times seems he content to accept the relationship between narrative and fiction that I am trying so hard to pry apart.66 However, like Caro, Alÿs emphasizes the simplicity of his concepts in contrast to the narrative complexity of literary fiction. In an interview he

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explained, “I rarely deal with more than one idea at a time. . . . In that sense, paradoxically, I am not a storyteller.” He refined that distinction further, stating that he was interested neither in the beginning nor in the end of a story, but in “the middle point, the ‘in between,’ is the space where I function the best.”67 Given the too-easy translation of walking into narrative time, Alÿs had to invent a mode of walking that would concentrate on that single idea, on that middle part. He did so by conceiving of walking as negation rather than continuity. An early piece from that same quincentennial year, As Long as I Am Walking (1992), consists of a list of negations: “As long as I’m walking I’m not choosing . . . not smoking . . . not losing . . . not making . . . not knowing . . . not painting . . . not believing . . . not reaching . . . I will not repeat . . . I will not remember.”68 The negation of non-literary fiction interrupts the narrativity of the walks, so that his paseos achieve a temporality that is neither fixed nor unfolding; they are repeated, still images in motion through space. They are motifs. Alÿs’s motifs constitute the image as repetition and negation: as a form of the interruption of narrative that literary theorists described earlier, and loyal to its origins in a mota, or speck. His video Tornado (2000–2010) creates both the motivo and motín of motif in the spiral form of the hurricanes that shaped Benítez Rojo’s repeating islands and the sinuous curve of Clark’s cut paper. A handheld video camera jumps and jolts with the body of the cameraman, who walks and runs across fields chasing tornadoes and smaller whirlwinds. Seeing the corkscrew-shaped dust cloud on the horizon, he dashes toward and into it. In the moment just before entering the dust cloud, that radial movement creates an optical illusion: as if the cameraman were moving backward at the same time he walks forward. Alÿs wrote a brief text about the process of making Tornado out of hours of video footage, which makes clear the abandonment of narrative: I read somewhere, I don’t know where, that concepts are timeless. Open, thus lasting, continuous. That they can’t be told, that they are only actable. I say: how does one narrate a concept that can only be enacted in time? . . . In the absence of a linear narrative, a series of words were pinned up on the studio wall, words that had come to mind while filming. The words were dispersed amongst the video footage, but that proved redundant and was abandoned. Back to the studio wall. . . . The words were joined, they became lines and the lines drew shapes. The spaces in between the lines were colored and forms began to appear. Or was it that one could start imagining forms? Flat or solid, geometrical or lyrical, abstract or figurative, organized or chaotic: no matter. Autonomous figures; images. Color frames were also placed amongst the video footage. As they were still, they marked pauses. A space to catch your breath.69

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This work, created over a decade of chasing tornadoes to film them, fills in content for Ferguson’s concept of open motif. The tornado kicks up small pebbles and stones that mark the lens of the video camera, inscribing the scratch or speck of motif onto the images. Alÿs struggles with the medium he utilizes, for unlike analog film, digital video has no technical “pauses” between each image. The scratches on the lens and the inserted, non-referential frames of color invent those pauses. Their broken repetition in the continuous medium of video constitutes an invented leitmotif, a non-literary motif that creates the sense of fiction. Caminar preguntando (To Walk Asking): Zapatista Walks There are many excellent studies of Alÿs’s paseos, which assert their relationship to Michel de Certeau’s practices of everyday life, to Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, and to Deleuze’s nomadism. However, Alÿs’s extensive walks in small rural towns disturb translations into a contemporary version of that modern flâneur. Even that opposition between urban and rural does not survive Alÿs’s own critiques of Eurocentric definitions of modernity. His earliest works were intimate engagements with the area around his studio in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City. In The Collector, dated between 1990 and 1992, Alÿs dragged a small magnetic sculpture on wheels with a leash, attracting metal trash as he passed by. In noting the importance of this piece, his longtime collaborator, the curator and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina wrote that “the possibility arose of creating an action that would simultaneously suggest a fiction.”70 Alÿs famously pushed a large cube of ice through the same streets in Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) (1997). Some two decades later the artist clarified, “All these people who live around my studio in the historical center of Mexico City remain the principal inspiration for many of my projects.”71 Alÿs names the people rather than the streets as the motivation for his work. The history of mass migrations from the country into the city in the midtwentieth century means that Alÿs’s neighbors in those early years, in the then-dilapidated Centro of Mexico City, were from the countryside even as they were true chilangos.72 Furthermore, just around the corner from his studio, excavations continued of the Templo Mayor, the main temple of Tenochtitlán, buried underneath the Centro Histórico after Spanish occupation. Alÿs’s early walks took him among his multilingual, Amerindian neighbors and through the reemerging architecture of a great Aztec city. In 2013, Ojarasca, a monthly supplement dedicated to indigenous issues in the progressive newspaper La Jornada, included one of many photographs that Alÿs took of his neighbors. It was originally part of the series

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Ambulantes (Walkers, 1992–2006), which captured the creative means that street vendors used to transport enormous packages (fig. 2.7).73 Alÿs studied their inventive solutions to the challenge of moving heavy parcels with ready-made materials, and their widespread, informal occupation of public spaces.74 The series functioned as an investigation into the forms of “making do” discussed in the introductory chapter as formal and practical design. Yet Alÿs’s photograph of a small woman in Ojarasca appeared in a survey of the history of literary criticism of indigenous literature. She appears from the back and drags a plastic crate with a thin string wrapped around her body. The essay also includes a portrait of an elderly woman by the US expatriate photographer Mariana Yampolsky and a portrait from the series Ríos by the Mexico City–born photographer Eniac Martínez. All three photographs figure indigeneity in the bodies of elderly women wrapped in textiles. The other two images display the faces of these women, one titled The Blind Woman and the other featuring a face with eyes that appear distorted. Alÿs portrays a subject who turns her back to the camera, thus evading any ascription of racial codes such as skin color and facial features. It is more difficult to explain what makes Alÿs’s photograph appropriate for an essay on literary criticism of indigenous literature: the article does not explain why, and the artist was unaware of its reproduction in this context.75 Certainly, the European photographer’s height exaggerates the woman’s small stature, and the history of racial codes in Mexico equates height, poverty, and the labor she performs with indigeneity. The unauthorized reproduction of the photograph in Ojarasca is like a Rorschach test that reveals how viewers see bodies and spaces through conventions of race. As much as Alÿs’s photograph sidesteps the faciality of race associated with racism, the people among whom he lived in the Centro Histórico and whom he described as the protagonists of his works are recognized as indigenous by most Mexicans. Ojarasca also directs the reader’s eye to the relationship between Alÿs’s paseos and an entirely different genealogy of thought, design, and politics from the European flâneurs, Fluxus artists, and situationists that often frame his work. The title, Ambulantes (Walkers), names Alÿs’s neighbors as featured collaborators in his expansive practice; they are maestros, instructors, for the self-proclaimed tourist and apprentice walker. Indeed, during the same years Alÿs began to enact his paseos in the early 1990s, another group of Mexicans began a movement that would eventually lead them to walk through the country and toward Mexico City. During the early 1990s, the Zapatista movement grew stronger, and it exploded into international news with the rebellion on January 1, 1994. Alÿs’s neighborhood began to fill with visitors. In October 1996, Comandanta Ramona defied the Mexican government’s threats seeking to keep her in Chiapas, and she joined the

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Figure 2.7 Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes (Walkers), 1992–2006. Courtesy of the artist.

first meeting of the National Indigenous Congress in Mexico City. Ramona spoke in the Zócalo, within the ten-block radius of Alÿs’s studio that a decade later would name the important exhibition of his work in the nearby Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso. On September 8, 1997, 1,111 Zapatistas and thousands of members of that congress set off toward Mexico City. These marches, campaigns for communication and solidarity in long walks from Chiapas to Mexico City, coordinated long periods of silence, symbolic of exclusion, with another form of making.76 They brought indigenous ne-

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gation to the bureaucratic center of Mexico and built alliances among antineoliberal and pro-indigenous groups. Alÿs confirmed that, like other informed residents of Mexico in this period, he was captivated by the evolving news of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas.77 In his exhibition in the Lisson Gallery at the end of that decade, next to recommendations on how to pass time, stood a work entitled 61 out of 60 (1999) in which sixty plaster models of Zapatista guerrilleros were broken and reshaped to form sixty-one new figures. Alÿs has described the work as a reflection on the remarkable multiplication of the movement.78 Alongside the refashioned figures was a computer connected to the website of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, displaying for the gallery’s European audience the audacious and innovative use of new technology to spread information about the indigenous movement and to forge international alliances. If Alÿs did not directly connect his paseos with the Zapatista marches, elsewhere he explained the importance of the 1994 eruption for all residents of Mexico. The movement revealed the collapse of President Salinas de Gotari’s neoliberal economic measures and a profound lack of well-being in society at large. Alÿs further admitted the impact of Zapatismo on his own political engagement, specifying that by “political” he meant the city as “polis.”79 He thus measured the scale of the political intervention in his practice: it was not a rebellion, just a small motín, especially in comparison to the groundswell represented by Zapatismo. Photographs and references to the Zapatista uprising are interspersed throughout the book El profeta y la mosca (The Prophet and the Fly, 2002), and a photograph of 61 out of 60 accompanies the curator Catherine Lampert’s comparison of Alÿs’s found objects with the public epistolary exchanges between two diagnosticians of emergent neoliberalism: the Zapatista guerrillero Subcomandante Marcos and the English academic John Berger. Given the literal boots on the ground around Alÿs’s paseos, the erasure of his debt to Zapatista walking must end. Akin to Quintín Lame in Colombia, walking forms a crucial part of the Zapatista political, cultural, social, and military movement. They pair walking with asking—caminar preguntando—as simultaneous activities that lead to knowledge and solidarity. These practices are necessary in the rural parts of southern Mexico, where roads are in bad shape, but more importantly, where the walking and asking of the Zapatistas are part of a political philosophy and philosophy of life embedded in Tzotzil and Tzeltal belief systems and the colonial and precolonial history of southern Mexico. The full reach of the Zapatista movement is beyond the scope of this study, but its combination of anti-neoliberal political resistance and an indigenous rights movement offers crucial terms and concepts. The EZLN counted in

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Figure 2.8 Francis Alÿs, 61 out of 60, 1999. Plaster figures. Courtesy of the artist.

its arsenal not just a military wing (although it has had a crucial role in the movement) but also fiction and storytelling; philosophies of time and space from the Maya-speaking groups in Chiapas form the framework for legal concepts of justice, shared governance, and autonomy. Subcomandante Marcos tells that his comprehension of revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata’s true history, and what it means to walk and ask, came through a story. His stories are rarely clearly non-fiction or fiction; a loose poetry clings to them and imbues the visual arts that are also a crucial part of the movement, from photography to graphic design, painting, and public interventions. In “The History of Questions,” Marcos recounts how the elder El Viejo Antonio taught him the true story through the history of walking in Chiapas. Antonio tells of the gods, Ik’al and Votan, two parts of one being, who were sad because they were stationary and could not walk. They decided to begin to move, but when they came to a long road, they discovered that they could keep moving only if they asked themselves where the road went: “So that is how the true men and women learned that questions serve to learn how to walk, and not to stand still. Since then, true men and women walk by asking, to arrive they say goodbye and to leave they say hello.”80 In hearing the story, Marcos realizes that he must ask El Viejo Antonio about the story’s connection to Zapata—he learns to ask and to walk—and the older man explains that according to some, Zapata was a fusion of Ik’al and Votan who appeared fully formed in the mountains of Chiapas. Antonio then shows Marcos a historical photograph of Zapata,

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which becomes a kind of talisman that helps him to ask as he walks with fellow members of the EZLN. The final lesson that Antonio gives Marcos is that he always “greets upon arriving with a ‘goodbye,’ and says goodbye raising his hand and walking away with an ‘I’m coming.’”81 The repetition and return offers the movement of motif, and also mirrors a vision of time that will appear in the next chapter’s discussion of gesture. The temporality of saying hello upon leaving and goodbye upon arriving inverts Western narratives about and structures of past and future, and the position of human subjects in ushering in a division between them. In another story, El Viejo Antonio informs Marcos: “Don’t tire of asking when your walk will end. Over there where tomorrow and yesterday meet, that’s where it will end.”82 Walking and asking allows a vision of the temporality of motif: a repetition, to be sure, of questions, but also an inversion of discourses of modernity that associate learning with progressive time and developmentalist discourse. Walking and asking inverts and slows down time. In 2003, the Zapatistas began to use the caracol—literally, “snail”—as the structure for community meetings and shared decision-making (fig. 2.9).83 The form communicates a great deal: the snail is an animal not known for its speed, and the spiral shape of its shell had shaped the path for the Zapatista Marcha del Color de la Tierra (March of the Color of the Earth, 2001), which brought communities from across Mexico to the capital in a massive demonstration. The procedures of the caracoles, the political discussions and the marches, did not value rapid productivity. Marcos describes how they worked: During various hours, these beings of dark heart have traced, with their ideas, a large snail. Departing from the international, their gaze and their thought have gone, penetrating inside, passing successively through the national, the regional and the local, until it arrives at that which they call “El Votán. The guardian and heart of the people,” the Zapatista peoples. Thus from the most outside curve of the snail they think through words like “globalization,” “war of domination,” “resistance,” “economy,” “city,” “country,” “political situation,” and others that the eraser eliminates after the rigorous question: “Is it all clear or are there questions?” At the end of the walk from outside to inside, in the center of the snail, only the initials remain: EZLN. Afterward there are proposals drawn up, in the mind and the heart windows and doors that only they see (among other things, because they still don’t exist), the dissimilar and dispersed word begins to make its shared and collective walk. Someone asks “Is there agreement?” “There is.” The collective voice affirms. Again the snail is traced, but now in an inverse path, from inside to outside. The eraser also continues its inverse

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Figure 2.9 Lorie Novak, Lento, pero avanzo (Slow, but I Advance), 2010. Photograph of Zapatista Mural, Oventik, Chiapas, Mexico. Courtesy of the artist.

path until only a sentence remains, filling the old chalkboard, which for many is a delusion, but that for these men and women is a reason to fight: “a world in which many worlds may fit.” A little later, a decision is made.84

Walking the snail’s path, the international challenges to neoliberalism are brought into and subjected to the political and philosophical work of the Maya peoples of southern Mexico. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo draws out the sophisticated and complex modes of identification that the Zapatistas use, under the cover of silence, to articulate a critique of neoliberalism that placed the failure of resistance on the “left” in the so-called developed world. Most strikingly, as we saw in the introduction, they used the imagination of what she calls Indian “difference”—as highlighted in the inclusion of Alÿs’s photograph in Ojarasca—to show Mexican elites that they too had become “Indians” under Salinas’s neoliberalism.85 Alÿs’s photographs in Ambulantes may not successfully avoid reification in Indian specificity, but read in the context of this walking, they too show that all Mexicans bear the burdens of neoliberal life. In walking and asking, in tracing and erasing, the Zapatista caracoles provide a conceptual model for non-literary fictions to confront the creativity and productivity demanded by neoliberal modernity. That non-narrative time of doing and undoing structures Alÿs’s paseos. The snail drawn and erased on the chalkboard provides a partial etymology of the often-cited explanation that Alÿs has offered of his work, the Mexican

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popular saying: “the doing but without doing, the not doing but doing.”86 Both Ferguson and Medina describe that temporality as a rehearsal, the really productive time of creation when the artist is practicing, rehearsing, attempting to make or do something. The finished work is—for the artist—a latent rather than productive period. If Ferguson assumes those acts of postponement to imply futurity, Medina instead describes a “nonlinear time oscillating somewhere between an irretrievable origin and an unreachable destiny. . . . [Alÿs performs] research into the ways people circumvent [modernization’s] demands and constrictions. His practice aims to complicate and obstruct the mechanics of progress, rather than to oppose them.”87 Motifs appear and reappear not quite as a performance but as a rehearsal that will provide a concept after the fact. Far from familiar forms of the critique of modernization, the motifs created of and through walking are merely what Caro called an “encounter.” Walking as negation—the snail-like pace and path led by the Zapatistas and Quintín Lame, and rehearsed in copies by Alÿs and Caro—rejects the contemporary demand that our bodies and minds be constantly productive. It nonetheless makes (up) something. These artists never perfect the practiced method or complete the work in progress. The activity is only ever an incomplete forgery, as much of indigenous forms of knowledge often erased or obscured in the category of “popular” sayings, as of the discourses of modernization imposed from abroad. The greetings and encounters made possible by these walking activities emphasize the centrality of social relationships to the practice. Remember that Alÿs was inspired by the people among whom he lived and walked. His paseos, the Zapatista walks, and Clark’s caminhando create motifs that make time for forms of sociability that neoliberal philosophies destroy. According to Medina, Alÿs researches “attitudes and ways of living that at first glance might seem irrational or economically inefficient, but that in fact sustain a variety of economies of survival and relative freedom dwelling inside the cracks and openings left by the hegemonic social system.”88 Medina highlights this generation’s abandonment of avant-garde strategies of alienation and distanciation, and their adoption of forms of socialization. Clark’s simple exercise of “walking” scissors in and out of the shifting planes of the Möbius strip highlights each individual subject’s vital role as a participant, one who must decide where to cut next and how long the process can take. But as we will see more concretely in Clark’s writings on gesture that follow, this decision constitutes a form of sociality to which the spectator-participant contributes in the act of “walking.” Clark wrote: “The [spectator] would apparently be depersonalized and would belong to a whole collectivity, as he would have to abdicate from his own personality

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and stop playing with singular data.”89 The splice enacted by Caminhando involves the viewer as an active participant, joins participants together in the motif of walking, and embraces the potential of art to invent fictive times and spaces. Alÿs continued this movement, echoing the walking and asking of the Zapatistas much as Caro reenacted the mingas of Quintín Lame. The genealogy of walking as motif splices theoretical proposals by the Zapatista communities and Manuel Quintín Lame and the Lamistas into better-known, European proposals about institutional critique, site specificity, social sculpture, and relational aesthetics. Non-utopian Fictions The fictions constituted through these motifs do not invent the familiar, avant-garde terrain of utopia. Alÿs writes in an aphorism: “Whereas the highly rational societies of the Renaissance felt the need to create Utopias, we of our times must create fables.”90 Garaicoa and Caro explicitly rejected utopias as the imaginative possibility needed to confront American rehearsals of neoliberalism. In the country that Bailey greedily eyes for the rehearsal and achievement of neoliberalism, Caro explains that his shift away from art and toward activity was a response to a fundamentally changed world in which utopias have disappeared even for ideologues, and the “artist” as such no longer exists even if he or she is making work.91 People no longer have defined professions, he observes. Instead, we have this kind of a doing, a making up, which is no longer framed as a calling, or a work of art, something so tenuous that the maker does not know its outcome until after the fact of doing. Rather than the guerrilla that Luis Camnitzer celebrated, then, the origins of a distinct approach to political art is evident in Caro’s work. The work that rocketed Caro to national attention in 1970 contained the seeds of this non-utopian invention. The work, colloquially known as Cabeza de Lleras (Lleras’s Head), staged an early “encounter” with then expresident Carlos Lleras Restrepo in the form of a bust made of salt. Having placed the sculpture in a glass vitrine in the gallery of the annual Salón Nacional, Caro, at the height of the inauguration, filled the vitrine with water, which dissolved the white sculpture and flooded the gallery. As many scholars have noted, the artist took on art history’s centuries of collaboration with oligarchs and colonizers. The title the artist gave to work at the time, however, was Homenaje tardío de sus amigos y amigas de Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba (Belated Homage by Friends from Zipaquirá, Manaure, and Galerazamba, 1970). The title named communities that have harvested large salt fields before and since European conquest: the Muisca northeast of Bogotá and the Wayuu, who clam the area of the Guajira Pen-

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insula that extends into the Caribbean Sea.92 While Caro did not repeat Homenaje tardío de sus amigos y amigas de Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba, the temporality of homage and references to indigenous knowledges and practices formed the basis of the works discussed earlier, MQL and Proyecto 500. The dissolution of the salt bust rehearsed undoing as doing as an initial artistic response to emergent neoliberalism. Caro’s encounter with Lleras Restrepo displayed—whether or not he knew it at the time, as Caro himself would readily admit—a new era of the violent, global modernity initiated by the colonial enterprise, the neoliberalism of “The Colombian Black Hand” that Bailey found to be the ideal case study in 1965. Caro’s unmaking of Lleras operates like Garaicoa’s 6’s, which refused to invent a new numbering system for Havana, and Clark’s Caminhando, which cuts and cuts and cuts. More explicitly than Alÿs’s citation of the popular refrain “As long as I’m walking I’m not choosing,” Caro’s belated homage led to his simply named “activities.” Many years later, the artist would come to position the politics of those activities “in the face of the rejection of the political orthodoxy of the left, and in the face of assimilation by the right.”93 Caro’s self-destructing homage in salt prefigured the looming challenges for political action and artistic production in Colombia during the years of neoliberal expansion to come. In Cuba, Garaicoa confronted the other grand narrative of Western modernity—socialism—at the moment when neighboring capitalism infiltrated its borders to a greater degree than ever since the triumph of the Revolution. José Roca succinctly frames the context in which Garaicoa began to work as “the fall of the socialist utopia in 1989.”94 The artist noted the physical and ideological fragmentation of Havana in the 1990s, as “luxury and comfort” filtered into Cuba.95 That adulterated socialism offers insight into Garaicoa’s complaint that despite being “at odds” with the word “utopia,” much criticism obsessively associated his work with the idea: “Somehow my works place themselves as much against the idea of pure sensuality as against the idea of a purely intellectual debate about utopia. The word ‘utopia’ encompasses many facets, but I believe the excessive use of it has converted it into an empty word, which simply is used to name ways of confronting the construction of cities, of ideal spaces. That is, it is as if it acquires a pejorative sense, invalidating the previous intellectual, conceptual, historical, political debate about an object.”96 While falling into that habitual use of “utopia,” Pepa Palomar notes that one of Garaicoa’s many maquettes of Havana, Autoflagelación, subsistencia, insubordinación (Self-Flagellation, Subsistence, Insubordination, 2003))—made of wood, DVDs, razor blades, bread, Molotov cocktails, threads and pins, and drawings—“begins with the reality of the city and then transforms it through . . . artistic interven-

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tions, inventing a fictitious landscape.”97 Garaicoa emphasizes that these fictions are substantial, calling Autoflagelación “a song to the imagination, nevertheless it is that imagination converted into a real, useful object.”98 His maquette of the city avoids utopian genealogies in an urban imaginary littered with them, even as it literally invents a model for political fiction. Motifs are crucial to that invention, as they offer ways of doing, redoing, undoing, and doing again that get us nowhere, even as they invent a fictive time and space of respite and collaboration. This time of not doing—again— borrows from motif as a special kind of literary activity. William Freedman remarks that motif is the thing described in the text (a motif of yellow flowers) and also often forms part of the description. More than a symbol, motifs can recur without always being the same entity. They are a kind of fictional activity, to use Caro’s word, which Freedman goes on to explain can operate cognitively, affectively, or structurally. While they are part of the landscape of the text, Freedman notes that motifs stand out enough to disrupt the normal flow of words and ideas, such that they call the reader’s attention to their presence and thus alter the temporal experience of narrative.99 I would adjust Freedman’s observations slightly, as frequently motifs are subtle, and so impart a sense of return, a sense of coherence, and a sense of a fiction without always explicitly calling the reader’s attention to them. The reader may or may not consciously recall the motif of yellow flowers, or the color yellow, but as it repeats through the text it creates a sensation of déjà vu. That feeling is crucial to the invention of non-literary fiction, for it grants artworks the minimum of temporal coherence without expanding into narrative. Motifs rest lightly within the time of the everyday. The resulting fictions do not pretend to resist the overwhelming power of neoliberal capitalism all around. Indeed, the objects that these artists have made— Alÿs, Clark, and Garaicoa more so than Caro—demand high prices in the contemporary art market. Their activities nonetheless cut in and out of that hegemonic time and space and create repeating spirals from Clark’s Caminhando to the Zapatista caracol to the curved line of Garaicoa’s 6. Havana’s old city repeats in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Bogotá, in twisting and uneven urban landscapes that reprise Benítez Rojo’s expanding “Caribbean of sentiment and pre-sentiment.” Caro’s red 500 and Garaicoa’s black 6 flicker as leitmotifs of signs that just barely but repeatedly invent a time and place where it is possible to walk, to ask, and to imagine in detail.

* Chapter thr ee *

Gesture: Signals in Motion

Corina Matamoros asked of Carlos Garaicoa’s works, If they are not utopian, what are they? To answer, she studied how the artist modeled his process on an architecture studio, where work is highly collaborative and imaginative.1 One can even say that work in the studio “prefigures” but does not realize a building, a process that resembles the time of rehearsal seen in the work of Alÿs, himself a trained architect. The fictional city of Homenaje al 6 takes new form in Garaicoa’s series Transformar la palabra política en hechos, finalmente (To Transform the Political Word into Deeds, Finally, 2009). Composed of photographs of vacant billboards and scaffolding, the series converts empty political promises into acts by not representing them in images. The photographs are printed directly onto metal and laser-cut stucco. Made of the same material as Havana’s buildings, they transform image into hecho, which in Spanish signifies “matter” as much as “deed.” But Garaicoa is not fully satisfied with this materialization of empty words, and transfers the imaginary scaffolding and photographs onto vinyl light boxes where they etch out a phrase: “perseguido por la palabra, opto por el gesto” (pursued by the word, I opt for the gesture) (fig. 3.1). It is not surprising, given the written word’s history in the hemisphere, that Garaicoa finds only temporary relief in the written lines in relief, engraved on stucco. The word continues to pursue him, etched into the political utopianism that not only failed to fulfill its promises but also represented a failure of imagination. This chapter presents the potential that Garaicoa identified in gesture: its complex entanglement with language and the kind of political act that comes into being in its fictions. Gesture has been studied in linguistics, sociology, and anthropology as much as in art history, rhetoric, and more recently, performance studies. Gesture layers sign onto body, combines imagination and collaboration, and

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Figure 3.1 Carlos Garaicoa, Perseguido por la palabra, opto por el gesto (Pursued by the Word, I Opt for the Gesture), from the series La palabra transformada (The Word Transformed), 2009. Lightbox, hand-cut adhesive tapes on cutting mat, insets. Courtesy of Carlos Garaicoa studio.

makes possible invention as much as communication. Garaicoa rejects the treatment of language as messages sent and received, or as a kind of code to be broken, and escapes instead into a genealogy within non-objectualism that has engaged gesture for its social potential. The turn toward gesture embraces its paradoxical status as both formal sign and informal, bodily habit. As they abandon representation, artists employ gestures that act without performing. They take up the popular character of theater and performance even as they reduce its grand scale and the distance between actor and audience. There is a fine but important distinction between gesture and pose grounded in the rejection of representation, which is necessary to comprehend the non-literary fictions that follow. Gestures can be intentional but are not put on, faked, or scripted. They communicate but disrupt and exceed strict semantic systems. Contemporary artists have explored that nexus of bodily movement and sign, and knowledge and sensibility, in order to invent forms of relation. Deborah Cullen draws on the composer John Cage’s distinction between protest as “critical” action and art as “compositional” action to differentiate such practices from performance. For Cullen, “artists craft responsive, thoughtful, composing actions that are extraordinary—out of our quotidian realities, opening doors, bringing about worlds, making connections.”2 If

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she shows that such work can neither be collapsed into life nor extracted entirely from it, I find its world making to be a fundamentally fictional act. While some performance artists engage gesture, the non-literary fictions it invents are not limited to that discipline of contemporary art. Two defining components of the temporality of gesture contribute to its capacity to make (up) fiction: duration and directionality. Adam Kendon, an experimental psychologist and leading scholar of gesture studies, calls them “‘excursions’: phrases of action [that] move away from a ‘rest position’ and always return to a rest position.”3 To be distinguished from simple motion, gestures must have a beginning and end, but those are difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint. These often are subtle: a hand resting briefly on the shoulder of a friend to express sympathy, a raised eyebrow to communicate doubt. Like motif, gesture creates meaning through repetition. Unlike those granular motes, its embodied swing, swoop, and push embeds a slight temporal extension before returning to the form in which it began. Gestures exist in small doses, on a reduced scale that makes them barely perceptible even as they are fundamental to communication. As much as they compose that sliver of time, physical gestures mediate our experience of time: the flick of a wrist refers to a memory from long ago, a hand reaches forward to signal an event in the future. Gesture’s time, corporeality, and sociality sustain a core political function of non-literary fictions: collaborative invention. Gesture resides at the heart of the broader genealogy of non-objectualism I have been tracing. Lygia Clark’s writings about Caminhando place gesture at the intersection between literary and artistic fiction: “How could literature express itself within this new concept of ‘art without art’ and of the act-gesture and of the immediate moment, but which should transcend this same moment and act?”4 The redundancy of her hyphenated word— “act-gesture”—is striking. Why not simply an act? What does gesture add to the concept of non-objectual art as an act? And why would an artist known internationally for phenomenological work with the body turn to the literary text to understand embodied gesture? Clark is best known for one important answer to these questions about the act-gesture: “The reader should have an active participation in the story.”5 If Clark returns again and again to the spectator, it is striking that it is a reader she names here. Unlike Carrión, Clark was neither a poet nor a writer of prose fiction, and her fascinating thought experiment leads us to another response to her question about art without art in gesture. For that imagined reader to exist, Clark empties fiction of time, content, setting, narrative, and character: “It is the story. Listen, it is the story. The story of what? It is the story without a story. It is the story of the emptiness, anything may happen. Nothing should fill this emptiness, because then the story will end.”6 Rather than fill that

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emptiness, Clark reflects specifically on the capacity of fiction to create a connection across the interiority and exteriority of subjects through gesture. Both literary and non-literary fictions gain their character as fiction through a hailing gesture toward a reader or viewer. Literary theorists argue that narrative fiction maintains its coherence by imitating the referentiality of natural discourse; it refers to fictional entities in texts as if they were real. Barbara Hernstein Smith names this gesture “the unreality of the alluding” in literary fiction.7 Clark instead uses that gestural bridge to bring fictive references into the experiential world. In a text written around the time of Caminhando, she explains, “It is the hand which the novelist stretches out like a bridge but only at the beginning of the crossing.”8 The reader must exist for the fiction to matter but does not exist as a reader until he or she is summoned by the fiction. At the same time, the fiction within does not come into being until the reader grasps its extended hand, pulling it outward. This powerful gesture of fiction is crucial to the capacity of nonobjectual art to reach across the seemingly unbridgeable abysms of act and object, self and other. A few years after Caminhando, Clark revisited the composition of relation through fiction, and the inside and outside of the Möbius strip, in Dialogue of Hands (1966). This time a twisted elastic band connects the hands of two participants. Clark makes explicit and corporeal that intimate intertwining of the two subjects whose hands touch within the insideoutside space it constitutes. That relationality differentiates her work from perhaps the best-known gestural art of the mid-twentieth century, Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Clark writes: “Pollock has his own ritual but it only serves for him to express himself . . . [while] . . . in Neo-Concrete art there is another type of revalorizing of the expressive gesture. The gesture is not the gesture of the artist when he is creating, but is the very dialogue of the work with the spectator.”9 The problem with Pollock is that his gesture is unidirectional and constitutes only an object. The act-gesture, in its relation with spectator, reader, or collaborator, is simultaneously social and fictional; it is, as Cage would say, compositional. The generation of Brazilian critics and theorists surrounding Clark— including Ferreira Gullar, Vilhelm (Vilém) Flusser, and Augusto Boal—was fascinated by the intimate relationship of gesture, fiction, and the social sphere. Recall that in his foundational definition of the non-object, Gullar wrote that its lack of frame brings the space of the painting, which he called fictional, into everyday space. He clarified that it only can do so once “the human gesture actualize[s] it.”10 Flusser, the Czechoslovakia-born, Germanspeaking, Portuguese-writing Jewish theorist who escaped to Brazil from Nazi Europe and stayed for thirty years, created a hybrid genre of philoso-

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phy and media theory that he ultimately described as form of fiction. Flusser dedicated the final years of his life to gesture for its transformation of the relationship between language and reality, and the mode of participation it provided for what he called the contemporary moment’s all-encompassing sense of fiction. Boal, the Brazilian theater director and theorist, radically reconceptualized Bertolt Brecht’s theory of gesture through acting exercises and games for a theater of the oppressed that revolutionized political art globally. The complex time and relation of gesture has been part and parcel of the coloniality of modernity, both as a tool for colonizers and as a resource for those surviving its violence. Quotidian and collaborative, the commonality made through gesture invents an alternative to the isolation of neoliberal extremes of individualism. As in Garaicoa’s pseudo–architecture studio, the artists Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) in Chile, Lourdes Grobet (b. 1940) and the wrestlers of lucha libre in Mexico, and Michel Groisman (b. 1972) in Brazil have made full use of what sociology and communications studies describe as gestural creative collaboration. They embrace and explode the paradoxes of gesture as language and invite spectatorparticipants into fictional times. The art viewer as much as the artist becomes a fictional character summoned by gestures, who—for the time being—exists outside narratives shaped by neoliberalism’s progress and historicism’s closure. From Gest to Gesture A key event in Brazil set the stage for the centrality of gesture in art made under repressive neoliberal regimes and signals how the resulting nonliterary fictions move away from a European leftist tradition of critique and toward commonality. During the years that Clark focused on the actgesture and just eight months after the military coup, a musical play directed by Augusto Boal premiered in the Arena Theater in Rio de Janeiro. Opinião (Opinion, 1964) featured samba musicians and the composers Zé Keti and João do Vale, and the bossa-nova superstar Nara Leão singing protest songs. The play thus combined two different musical traditions of Brazil: the first associated with the morro (hill) or favela, and the second considered popular but bourgeois. The script for Opinião was created through dialogues among its diverse actors, and Boal presented it on the sunken, circular stage surrounded by seats of the Arena Theater, which diminished the divide between actors and audience. Moving between spoken word and song, the conversations between the two Afro-Brazilian actors, representing residents of the favela and more recent northeastern migrants to the city, and Leão,

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playing a middle-class white woman, imagined a small political goal: the possibility to express an opinion. The play nevertheless had an enormous impact. Estimates range widely between twenty-five thousand and one hundred thousand spectators.11 It inspired two influential contemporary art exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderno in Rio, Opinião 65 and Opinião 66. Including Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Antonio Dias, and many more, the constellation of art and politics around the term opinião drew together neo-concretism, participatory publics, and the human hand in protest against the dictatorship.12 Artists across the spectrum were swept up in this moment, including Waltércio Caldas, who recalls that his first public artwork was a set design, and explains that the vibrant theater scene in the late 1960s led him to two crucial questions that would shape his work from that point forth: how to create intimate work on a public scale and how to comprehend the space that an object demands for itself.13 Even Ferreira Gullar, as famous for his rejection of avant-garde art as for his early contributions to the concrete and neoconcrete movements, recalls Opinião as the rare event of experimental art that won over masses of audiences and confronted the newly established repressive government.14 Boal introduced a strange proposal into these debates spanning the visual, literary, and performing arts: to combine Stanislavski’s method acting with Brechtian Gest. Roberto Schwarz affirms Brecht’s role in the impact of Opinião: “Brecht recommends that actors should collect and analyze the best gestures they can observe, to perfect them and give them back to the people, from whom they originally came. The premise of this argument, in which life and art are harmonized, is that the gesture should exist on the stage just as it does outside it.”15 For Brecht, Gest made possible the “alienation effect” (A effect) in political theater, a fundamental concept for critical theory in the twentieth century. Boal’s memoir, however, describes his return to Brazil from the United States, his unlikely position as the director of the Arena Theater, and his understanding of theater as a fundamentally communal art form. That experience resulted in substantial adaptations of those concepts of gesture and critique in the introduction of his “theater of the oppressed” in Brazil in the early 1960s. Theatrical collaboration had to combine Stanislavksi’s idea that “the character comes out of the actor, who has been carrying it within,” with Brecht’s proposal that “the smallest unit of theatre is two actors.”16 Understanding political theater as at base a relationship between two people, Boal discarded reductive versions of Brecht’s rejection of method acting as an “emotional orgy” and promoted the importance of sentiment as knowledge.17 Like Flusser and the Argentine David Efron, as we will see, Boal threw out the

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opposition of reason and emotion, and found in gesture the direction and duration of a mode of collaborative invention that the actors of Opinião produced together. Boal’s theater of the oppressed directly engaged fiction. Its participatory process fused spectator and actor into a figure he called the “spect-actor,” who emerged at “this frontier: the truth of fiction and the fiction of truth.”18 Rather than distance theater from politics, for Boal fiction provided the time of rehearsal that Garaicoa and Alÿs also sought. In contrast with Aristotelian catharsis and Brechtian critical consciousness, what Boal called “the poetics of the oppressed” shared Clark’s interest in “the action itself.” He wrote: “Perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution. The liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into action. No matter that the action is fictional what matters is that it is action!”19 On the album cover of an audio recording of Show Opinião produced in 1965, the three stars appear in parallel columns, each against a black background (fig. 3.2). Only Leão is shown in color, with brown skin and a red T-shirt, her arm outstretched out in a gesture that, despite her very short run in the role, came to be profoundly associated with her performance, with this landmark play, and the idea of art and politics in resistance.20 The same gesture appears on her album Opinião in 1968 and helps to articulate the difference between Boal’s focus on gesture as rehearsal and Brecht’s concept of an entirely externalizable gesture that emphasized citationality.21 To quote is to cut out and paste, whereas to rehearse maintains extension, direction, and bodily coherence. The rehearsed gesture pulls in the spect-actor as much as it externalizes the idea and feeling to be known. The image of Nara on both albums shows her performing this doubled movement of gesture: her arm reaching diagonally forward and outward, her hand turned gently inward. Even the mass-produced photograph registers something of the direction and duration of that rehearsal. Nara’s reach extends toward the participatory respondent in the face of a brutal military dictatorship and rehearses a collaboration at the border between truth and fiction. The visual arts played an important role in the development of Boal’s revolutionary rehearsal. In his work with people’s theater in Peru in the early 1970s, he distributed cameras among participants and discussed their photographs, and designed games as exercises for “sculptor-participants” who shaped one another into imagined images. Boal’s exercises “[made] thought visible” in “image theater” by heightening participants’ awareness of their bodies. The “slow motion race” exercise pinpointed the importance of time in that process by prohibiting the actor from completely stopping the motion of her body and rewarding the participant who arrived last.22

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Figure 3.2 Show Opinião, 1965. Album cover of live recording. Courtesy of Coleção Robespierre Peixeira, Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles, and Universal Music Enterprises.

Boal’s concept of gesture, a key component of political theater, depended upon non-narrative temporalities of visual art. Signs of the Body Despite the influence of Boal’s and Clark’s proposals for the embodied rehearsal of gesture, they do not delve into its equally powerful engagement of the sign. For that question, we must return to the influential work of the Chilean Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on Pavement, 1979), produced first in Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A touchstone for political art in the Americas, Rosenfeld created this individual work just before she began to collaborate with the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA) collective on No+.23 She repeated it four years later in front of the Reagan White House in Washing-

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ton, DC, a little over a mile away from where the Chilean resistance leader Orlando Letelier had been assassinated with a car bomb set by Pinochet’s forces in 1976. The execution of Una milla de cruces is as simple as Clark’s Caminhando: just paint glue across a strip of white cloth and adhere it perpendicular to the broken dividing lines of the street.24 The work performs a powerful conversion of the meaning of a sign: it transforms a street sign into a mathematical symbol and converts a parallel dividing line into a perpendicular intersection. Rosenfeld’s combination of bodily gesture and gestural sign invents an imaginary crossroads, and so presents a crucial operation in the invention of non-literary fictions. All the contributors to an early edited collection dedicated to Una milla de cruces, published while Chile was still under the Pinochet dictatorship, use the word “gesture” to describe the intervention. In the introduction, the

Figure 3.3 Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on Pavement), Santiago de Chile, 1979. Courtesy of the Lotty Rosenfeld Foundation.

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editor Francisco Zegers describes the subtle work as “the reiteration of (a) gesture.” Zegers’s description of the work is precise and revelatory: “Rosenfeld uses as a model the discontinuous lines that separate the lanes of circulation; a sign of transit that intervenes, crossing it perpendicularly with a white identical to its trace, generating a series of + signs in the pavement.”25 In this unspectacular action, the artist’s body registers lightly on the hard pavement and yet dramatically inverts the value of the mathematical symbols of plus and minus. The author and artist Diamela Eltit calls the work “the insurrection of the code by dangerous, simple, popular gestures.”26 Even when photographs of the work show only a plus sign absent the artist’s body, the sign alone continues to be designated as a gesture. That lingering corporeality allows gesture to short-circuit some of the most powerful archives of knowledge: those that connect linguistic and visual signs with their meanings. Gesture makes Una milla de cruces uniquely capable of defying the prohibition against interfering with certain social codes, as Eltit writes: “There is no dialogue with these signals. One does not bicker with these signs.”27 The insistence upon dialogue is a recurrent theme in political movements against repressive regimes, as much in Chile as it had been in the student movement in Mexico in 1968.28 Nelly Richard, the critic who accompanied the CADA artists from their earliest interventions, credits that residual corporeality with creating a new collective sentiment, despite Rosenfeld’s solitary body on the pavement. This observation does not entirely fit, however, with Richard’s broad conclusions that these artists emphasized “the cut, the fragment and interruption, to emphasize the violent rupture of the codes with which the military dictatorship overturned the universes of meaning in Chilean society.”29 The gesture that Richard herself names does not interrupt conversation but rather enhances it, at times in agreement and at others in dispute. The lack of precise beginning and end of its bodily motion weaves collectivity into the communicative loop. Rosenfeld, laying her body on painted directional signs of the road, does more than discuss or defy them; she invents new operations for them. The crossed lines open another conversation, imagine another road, one that intersects with the state’s road and suggests another horizon not visible in the photographs. The transmission of signs through the body carries risks, which are visible in the documentation of Una milla de cruces. Rosenfeld looks terribly vulnerable, sitting there in the center of a highway. The harm that threatens is partially the violence of Pinochet’s regime, which the artist links directly to the United States in the later action in front of the White House. More broadly, though, it reveals the vulnerability of the subject when gesture is read only as a sign. Richard calls Una milla de cruces a gesture again in an

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essay on women artists under the dictatorship in which she analyzes an iteration of the project carried out inside the Santiago stock market in 1982. In this later action, the plus signs appeared on monitors installed alongside the screens that registered the rise and fall of the market for brokers.30 Richard writes: “‘Art’ and ‘woman’ infringed on the rules of masculine traffic and economic exchange violating its capitalist logic, making it skip its agreedupon exchanges regarding value and surplus value, from the eruption of the gesture +, that is to say, of too much of a gesture, which carries the remainder to defy the utilitarianism of the System.”31 Rosenfeld’s gesture disruptively inserts both the sign and body of “woman” into an emergent digital field, and in the heart of new global forms of financial speculation.32 The plus as a negation—the “more no’s” seen in the introductory chapter—inverts the value of 0 and 1, + and –. The gesture creates a fictional, alternative stock market, which challenges the hegemonic narrative of ever-increasing value. Rosenfeld’s plus sign reveals the degree to which the paradox of gesture as body and sign pervades the history of modernity and coloniality in the Americas. When Eltit linked Una milla de cruces with “dangerous, simple, popular gestures,” she implicitly connected the work to the vulnerability and expressiveness of racially marked lower and working classes signaled by the term lo popular across Spanish America. The densest layering of cultural knowledge through gesture happens on and through bodies marked by race, gender, and non-heteronormative sexualities, which have been most surveilled and controlled by these modern regimes. Franciscans conquering Mexico in the sixteenth century sought to use gestures as a supposedly universal language with which to convert Amerindian peoples to Catholicism, even as they repressed gestures and movements that embedded their religious beliefs, epistemologies, and practices into everyday life. As Diana Taylor has shown, Europeans were right to fear those gestures, which passed along a history that the colonizers were unable to decipher and could not entirely extinguish. Much greater violence, however, threatened indigenous, female, and Black bodies, which have borne the brunt of colonial semiotic systems of race and gender.33 An American Genealogy of Gesture Studies The interdisciplinary field now known as gesture studies was born of twentieth-century developments in that global history of race and racism, in struggles over the semiotics of gesture with a specifically American genealogy that warrants a brief detour before returning to how gesture is taken up in non-literary fiction.34 Adam Kendon names the Argentine David Efron’s Gesture and Environment (1941) as the book that founded

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the field. Efron introduces his study with a strong denunciation of Nazi theories of race and gesture, against their claims “that both the amount and the manner of gesticulation of an individual are basically determined by racial descent.”35 He criticizes the lack of scientific method and evidence in the Nazi “spiritual-racist theory of gesture,” which asserts that race is a mentality and “the primary expression of the mind-race is its typical gestures. Morphological traits, more or less correlative to these gestures, are of secondary importance.”36 Efron’s study reveals that in the 1930s, visual artifacts of race (e.g., skin color, nose, skull shape) were considered secondary to the gestural signs of race described in the Nazi propaganda that circulated as “science.” The Argentine Jew developed a countermethod in response, which read gesture as the changing social practices of body and sign. Initially a doctoral thesis in sociology written under the direction of Franz Boas, Efron’s ethnographic research among Eastern European Jewish and southern Italian immigrant communities in New York City studied the gestural habits of immigrant groups “(a) with regard to their spatiotemporal aspects, i.e., gesture simply considered as ‘movement,’ (b) from the standpoint of their referential aspects, i.e., gesture envisaged as ‘language.’”37 Efron asserts throughout his study that gestural behavior is “conditioned by factors of a socio-psychological nature,” not by “biological descent,” and that those social conditions are always hybrid and processual.38 Efron’s conception of gesture as sign and body also relied upon humanist methodologies, what I would call a poetics as much as the grammar of social science. Before studying ethnography, he had received a doctorate from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Furthermore, Gesture and Environment describes a highly collaborative process between the author and its illustrator, Stuyvesant Van Veen (1910–1988), a New York City artist who studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York and worked with the muralist Thomas Hart Benton (fig. 3.4). Surprisingly for a social scientist of the time, Efron refers to his personal experience of ethnicity, language, and migration in his study, foregrounding his Latin American background: Case of the writer of this report. Born and educated in a Latin American country (Argentina), with the language and culture of which he is strongly imbued, he has, on the other hand, kept in touch with the “traditional” Eastern Jewish groups in Buenos Aires and New York, having spent his childhood and early adolescence in an orthodox Jewish home. When he speaks Spanish, and particularly about a matter related to his native country, his gestures show the effervescence and fluidity of those of a great many Argentinians. When he uses the Yiddish tongue, and particularly when it

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is in connection with Jewish affairs, his motions often become tense, jerky, and confined. . . . On occasions he may be seen combining spontaneously “Argentine” and ghetto Jewish gestures. This is likely to happen when he is discussing a Jewish matter in Spanish, and vice versa. After several years of sojourn in the United States . . . he has turned out to be . . . an adroit table-pounder, regardless of the language in which he talks.39

Efron’s reflections on his passage between Europe and the Americas encompasses language, memory, place, and an entire bodily rhythm. The founding text of gesture studies is hybrid in every way—social scientific and subjective, semeiological and corporeal, scholarly and artistic—and entrenched in (Latin) American intellectual genealogies of hybridity and creolization. That same American lineage produced the fascinating and troubling Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America, 1980 and 1983), which also examined the intersection of sign and body in gesture, and combined art and social science (figs. 3.5 and 3.6). The Italian linguist Giovanni Meo Zilio and the Colombian photographer Silvia Mejía announce that it contains “almost a thousand representative gestures (symbolic and natural) and contextual gestures

Figure 3.4 Stuyvesant Van Veen, for David Efron, Gesture and Environment (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941).

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(expressive-apellative, pragmatic and indicative) gathered by experts from countries across Spanish America and Spain.”40 The anthropologist and dramaturge Jorge Manuel Pardo describes the two-volume study as “rich” and “original,” an exemplary study of what he calls “representative gestures.”41 These non-linguistic communications include iconic, metaphorical, and indexical gestures that stand in for something else. While Pardo recounts long-standing debates over the universality and particularity of gesture, and notes that gestures constitute social hierarchies and can lie as much as tell the truth, he does not address the deep anxieties and violent

Figure 3.5 Cover, Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America), vol. 1, 1980. Courtesy of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

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Figure 3.6 Cover, Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America), Colombia, vol. 2, 1983. Courtesy of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

impositions that the mandate of representation imposes upon the gestures in the dictionary. Those tensions appear most conspicuously in the dictionary’s attempts to represent and control the explosion of gestures having to do with gender and sexuality. Out of some two thousand gestures, the dictionary represents women performing only three, including “harto de comida, de problemas, de algo” (fed up with food, problems, something), and women’s apparent “variation” on “¡Basta!” (Enough!).42 The two singularly feminine gestures both signify “enough already!” There is no other communication particular to women’s subject position: women essentially are muted in gesture’s uni-

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Figure 3.7 “Harto” (Fed Up), in Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America), vol. 2, 1983. Courtesy of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

versal language. There is an entry to show how to signify “fea [mujer . . .] y sim.” (ugly [woman . . .] and similar) but no “feo” (ugly, masculine). There is, however, a sign for “fuerte, bueno, notable; fuerza, potencia (o carga) sexual; machismo (y sim.)” (strong, good, notable; sexual strength, power [or charge] machismo [and similar]). That gender imbalance was apparent at the time of publication, which Gastón Gainza rationalizes in his review: “The predominance of masculine models is consonant with the behavioral

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codes of bodily expression governed, among Hispanic communities, by a machismo that the very descriptive discourse of the gestures puts into evidence.”43 Rosenfeld’s gestural intervention into signs lays bare the faulty logic displayed here. It is not the case that women do not employ gestural language in a misogynist society, but rather that the repressive structures of knowledge that ascribe meaning to gesture silence and demean those expressions. A similar discrimination haunts the representation of communication around non-heteronormative sexualities in the Diccionario de gestos. While most gestures warrant only a few lines of explanation and exceptionally a single photograph, the entry for “invertido (homosexual, pederasta, marica) y sim.” (invert [homosexual, pederast, fag] and similar) takes up five full pages and includes eight different photographs.44 The linguists and social scientists externalize and systematize gesture as sign when embodied by straight men of European descent, but the signs and bodies of queer subjects and women make frantic excitations erupt. The dictionary happily declares its mission to set out the variety of gestures used across the Hispanophone world, but a threat lurks within that defines the very concept of gesture: some of them can break the ordering function of the dictionary itself. Even so, the character and history of gesture precludes the complete repression of those subjects and bodies. The cover of the first volume of the Diccionario de gestos prominently displays a photograph by Mejía of two

Figure 3.8 “Invertido” (Inverted), in Giovanni Meo Zilio and Silvia Mejía, Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America), vol. 2, 1983. Courtesy of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

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hands with the fingers forming a triangle, although it buries the explanation of its meaning in a footnote. This international sign of feminism, the authors write in that note, combines three meanings. First, the triangular shape of the hands represents the female sexual organs “sex, vulva, and similar,” which is followed by a detailed list of slang equivalents from across the Americas of the denigrating “cunt”: chucha, chocho, pan, coño, almeja, pusa, cuca. Second, the raised middle fingers add the “V” of the victory sign, and the extended fingers the number 3, which they call “the perfect number.”45 Demeaning language plagues the carefully composed feminist gesture, a bodily movement that references the female body and a movement for women’s rights; it wins place of pride on the cover but is so unsettling that its meaning is exiled from the other definitions found easily within. This particular gesture on the cover of the dictionary highlights the unsettling impact of its larger paradox: so attractive in its universal capacity for meaning, yet so particular it requires an encyclopedic reference book to decipher. Notably, Mejía appeared as coauthor with her male, social scientist counterpart, and her photographs were described as visual complements on par with the textual descriptions of bodily gestures. Although it has been extremely difficult to trace her artistic production since this period, Marta Traba named Mejía as part of an important new direction in contemporary art in her canonical survey of the region (fig. 3.9).46 Surprisingly, given the apparent reproduction of misogyny in the dictionary, Mejía exhibited some of these photographs in feminist art exhibitions. Her biography in the dictionary notes that her “gestural photographs” were included in the exhibition From Page to Space: Women in the Italian Avant-Garde between Language and Image.47 The catalog for that exhibition includes a different version of the cover photograph, Metaphor with the Feminist Symbol (1978), which retains the bright hands shaping that triangle against a completely black background. A photomontage version adds an open mouth with large teeth in the center of the triangle and converts the symbol into a vagina dentata, a centuries-old metaphor of fearsome female power. Meo Zilio and Mejía, like Efron and Van Veen, reveal the imaginative potential and intense risks of Rosenfeld’s gesture at the crossroads of sign and body, and also reveal connections between an emergent academic field and contemporary art. The hybrid discipline was hyperaware of these tensions and their potential to change the status of knowledge. In his founding text, Efron describes a decisive shift in gesture studies when scholars refused to divide human beings into racialized hierarchies of “cool” northern peoples who enjoy reason and hotheaded southerners who succumb to irrational swings of emotion. Much like Boal two decades later, the Argentine argues that the informed study of gesture embraces the coexistence of reason and

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Figure 3.9 Silvia Mejía, Parola, sostantivo femminile (Word, Feminine Noun), 1978. Sequence of three black-and-white photos, cut out and mounted on black cardboard, 80 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci and the City of Prato, Italy. Gift by Mirella Bentivoglio (2000).

emotion. Efron reveals the ethical, political, and philosophical stakes of maintaining the defining paradoxes of gesture in productive tension—body and sign, reason and emotion, intellect and desire, particular and universal, quotidian and artistic. These are the gestures that artists Lourdes Grobet and Michel Groisman take up in the non-literary fictions that follow.

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Bodies in Time While watching a lucha libre (professional wrestling) match in the Arena México in Mexico City, I watched in amazement as the great rudo—or bad guy—known as Dr. Wagner Jr., defeated his opponent, the técnico (good guy) Místico. At various moments, Wagner interrupted his match with a very slow-motion bid for cheers from his supporters. Like Boal’s slowmotion races, his body barely moved through a gesture that never congealed into a pose. Thanks to the artist Lourdes Grobet, I came to see that—as much as Rosenfeld—Wagner placed his body at the intersection of race, sign, and neoliberal modernity, and thus fashioned a relationship with his cheering fans. The artist Rubén Ortiz Torres observes that “it [is] hard to distinguish the history of Mexican wrestling or lucha libre from Lourdes Grobet’s photographs of it.”48 Grobet, who collaborated with the luchadores throughout two crucial decades of the rehearsal and achievement of neoliberalism, captures gesture in a sensitive and varied practice of photography. Her work plays with lucha libre’s explorations of time, its dynamic invention, and the fighters’ careful exploration of gesture, celebrating and expanding upon its capacity to make up fictions that enact a politics of collaboration. Ortiz Torres explains that feminism and collective art practices prepared Grobet to collaborate successfully with the luchadores. Grobet participated in the Grupo Proceso Pentágono, one of the influential collectives known as “los Grupos,” active in the mid- to late 1970s in Mexico City. Originally founded by Víctor Muñoz, Felipe Ehrenberg, Carlos Finck, and José Antonio Hernández Amezcua in 1976, Pentágono focused its actions and interventions on the relationship between state repression and bureaucracy, and their methods of controlling artists through funding and prizes.49 Her generation was formed by the student movement that used the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City as an opportunity to draw national and international attention to social injustices and state violence, which culminated in the state’s massacre of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Tlatelolco. In a country in which state-sponsored muralism had shaped modernist painting, the art market and government support were equally tainted. Calling themselves “cultural workers” instead of “artists,” the groups experimented with acciones plásticas (literally, plastic actions), created installations, and made art in public spaces. Grobet explained that two action-based works made just before and following her participation in the Grupo Pentágono, Hora y media (Hour and a half, 1975) and Walking Exhibition (1985), confronted the production of women’s bodies as an image. However, it was her collaboration with the women of lucha libre that taught her to embrace a feminism not designed for the interests of middle-class white women.50 Grobet

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Figure 3.10 Lourdes Grobet, La familia Solar (The Solar Family), 1983. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

grew close to these women wrestlers, whom she portrayed masked and unmasked as they trained, competed, celebrated victory and despaired in defeat, and as they completed domestic tasks, including giving a child a bottle. With luchadores and luchadoras as collaborators and teachers, Grobet captured gesture at the intersection of signs and the embodied knowledge of race and gender (fig. 3.10). The pinnacle of urban popular culture in Mexico, lucha libre is explicitly fictional. Known for the creation of dramatic masks and spectacular characters and elaborate physical performances, the fiction begins when the wrestler enters the arena, posing and swaggering to the backdrop of a dramatic voice-over introduction and blaring music. Not entirely nonnarrative, the matches are so repetitious and predictable that narrative fades into the background. It’s not suspense you go to luchas for, but something else, something like the suspended pleasure of fiction, which Grobet drew upon in this long-duration collaborative project. Ortiz Torres calls them

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“puzzling pieces of a non-existent narrative whose gaps we fill with our own desire and imagination.”51 This fictive sensation is heightened by the suspicion, or knowledge, that the matches are choreographed. Audiences flock to the luchas to see the genius of each wrestler’s performance, knowing that the two collaborate to create impressively athletic illusions of battle. That the matches are fictional neither diminishes the physicality of the sport nor damages the relationship between wrestler and public (figs. 3.11 and 3.12). Grobet’s photographs were produced and exhibited over two decades, and finally published comprehensively in the book Espectacular de lucha libre (Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling, 2005). The

Figure 3.11 Lourdes Grobet, Brazo de Plata con la máscara de la Migra, toreo de Cuatro Caminos (Brazo de Plata Holding La Migra’s Mask, Cuatro Caminos Match), 1981. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 3.12 Lourdes Grobet, Portrait of Siglo XX (Twentieth Century), 1982. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

book opens with a series of photographs of children in masks and dressed for wrestling. Black-and-white photographs show kids in capes in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a poor and vibrant neighborhood in Mexico City (fig. 3.13); color photographs present children in Zitlala, Guerrero, dressed as tecuanes (tigers) to celebrate a ritual combat dance for a good rainy season (see plate 1). Grobet describes the lucha libre audience and wrestlers with whom she collaborates as “urban Indians,” and she replaces the stereotypical photographic canon of black-and-white images of an ancient (dead) and rural (distant) Indian with images of the active and contemporary Indians and mestizos who live in the ever-expanding city and maintain relationships with small towns.52 Unlike the photographic tradition of representing indigenous people to middle- and upper-class mestizos and criollos, which Grobet calls “folkloric images of misery,” her photographs focus on the powerful role of non-Western knowledge in contemporary urban Mexican culture.53 One of Grobet’s “urban Indians,” the wrestler named Siglo XX (Twentieth Century), dominates the city landscape from his post on top of the Arena Coliseo, at the very geographical center of Mexico City. He is a contemporary and active master of the capital who has the temerity to name himself after the very century that Western narratives of modernity claimed as theirs alone. The muscular fictions of lucha libre apparently obey a rigid sign system: an opposition of good and evil, played out by characters known as técnicos and rudos, clothed in black and glowing silver. They unfold in a uniform

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Figure 3.13 Lourdes Grobet, Luchadores Nezahualcóyotl (Nezahualcóyotl Wrestlers), 1975. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

pattern of llaves, which are set out in standardized instructional manuals such as Carlos Hoffman’s Manual de lucha libre (1960). Yet each match also acts out an interpretation of the code of llaves as gestures; they make evident the paradox of intuitive body and formal sign. Together, the fighters of lucha libre and Grobet use the four-cornered ring and the language of gesture as a space for the reversal of logics grafted onto bodies by way of hegemonic discourses of sex and gender, as well as race. As Efron’s classic study set out, gesture’s hybrid and shifting practices become especially powerful when projected onto racialized bodies. “Popular” wrestlers—broadly identified by elite Mexican culture with socially marginal groups, who are both racialized as indigenous and marked as poor and working class—are converted into active, dominant, and attractive partners. In Espectacular de lucha libre, Grobet embraces the fictional character of lucha to present the body in motion as a language of signs that counters Mexican racism. A crucial difference exists in the status of the sign between the language of gesture in the dictionary and the movement of gesture in lucha libre. Carrie Noland notes the limitations of Kendon’s purely linguistic methodology and of those theorists who are “concerned with how gestures signify, the work they do, rather than how it feels to perform them.”54 Grobet’s photographs revel in that sensual pleasure of the gestures performed by the wrestlers: action shots capture them in full flight through the air, with

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arms outstretched in performed and genuine triumph and despair at the outcome of a match, in the moment of perfecting a classic llave, in snapshots with her friends, and posed formally and elegantly in their masks. Noland also warns of the danger of systematizing gesture only as external sign, evidenced in the homophobia and misogyny of Diccionario de gestos as it seeks to control the bodily signs of non-normative sexualities and femininity that invade its pages. The academic dictionary is more repressive than the world of lucha libre, which has long featured matches between exóticos, or exaggeratedly effeminate and sometimes transvestite wrestlers, since the literary vanguardist Salvador Novo attended them in the 1940s. Certainly the luchas are no utopia: the exóticos are still subjected to homophobic insults, and women were prohibited from performing in the major spaces in Mexico City such as the Coliseo and the Arena México. Even so, all of the rudos, not just the exóticos, are verbally and even physically attacked as part of the participatory performances. Women long have competed in lucha libre, and Mexico’s own Estela Molina won the woman’s world crown in 1979 to great national acclaim. The inventiveness and fictional pleasure the luchas offer their audience results in part from their gestural inversion of the repressive, moderncolonial systems that codify race, gender, and sexuality. Against the rigidity of gesture as sign, Noland emphasizes “performative gesture” as a kinesthetic experience that exceeds language. She explains: “A gesture is a performative—it generates an acculturated body for others—and, at the same time, it is a performance—it engages the moving body in a temporality that is rememorative, present, and anticipatory all at once.”55 The performed gesture resides in a simultaneously anticipatory and reminiscent time that defies narrative order and so returns us to Dr. Wagner’s performance of slow motion that interrupted the match I saw. Unlike the photographic representations of Amerindians that portray them always out of time, as a relic, as the last of a people on the verge of extinction, Wagner’s slight movement kept him in our time. By putting the pose in motion, his gesture defied the stillness of nostalgic and monumental photographic representations of racialized bodies that Grobet rejected. Furthermore, that slight movement controlled the accelerated rhythm of the televised sport, which is entirely controlled by transnational media corporations.56 By mimicking the effect of slow motion so often used in sports broadcasts, Dr. Wagner Jr. put his own body in a llave in space and time, which neither the photographic nor televised image could register: the former for its stillness, and the latter for its inability to visually distinguish between performed and technological slow motion. That gesture persisted briefly in the personal time Dr. Wagner Jr. shared with his live audience. Wagner joined in the battle both for

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and against the transnational market, and, as I will elaborate, opened up a site of creative collaboration and invention with a public that roared its appreciation. Official Thought of the West Despite its massive marketing and televised events, Grobet and her collaborators make visible a relationship between the fictions of lucha libre and what Diana Taylor calls a “repertoire” of embodied knowledge. Transmitted from generation to generation despite centuries of violent repression of Amerindians in Mexico, this knowledge transfer continues to be crucial during the intense imposition of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s.57 Given the central role of gesture in the politics of fiction, it is necessary to distinguish this American genealogy from how European thinkers have framed its critique of neoliberalism. In fact, the French literary theorist Yves Citton argues that the future of literary studies and the humanities at large lies in that relationship between fiction and gesture. He proposes that the classic immersive experience of literary fiction, when the reader loses track of time or gets lost in a story, positively trains her in affective responses that initiate intimate personal emotions and social relations. Here he follows to some degree Peter Bürger’s characterization of the nineteenth-century novel as a praxis of “solitary absorption” of the bourgeois reader.58 Citton finds a social benefit in “relational gestures,” defined as the impact that the thoughts of fictional characters have on the reader, “powerful affective reactions (of relief, frustration, disgust, suspicion, etc.).”59 He suggests that the immersive experience of (reading) fiction can offer a critical selfconsciousness about “semiocapitalism”—the increasing insinuation of capitalism in all aspects of human existence—but like Bürger, he warns that it can also provide emotional rehearsal for the relations that sustain it.60 That is to say, the simultaneously reflective and critical posture of reading fiction offers an alternative to the mechanized bodies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization but trains people in the habits that drive contemporary neoliberal economies “of services, communication, and entertainment.”61 The pleasure of the inversions of lucha libre, then, may be another means by which semiocapitalism profits. Citton concludes with a call: “A most important political struggle, at all levels of our lives, consists therefore in asserting, defending, and reclaiming the status of our human and subjective relational gestures against the generalization of mechanical a-signifying semiotics imposed by the race to profit that is driving semiocapitalism.”62 He exhorts the humanities to embrace the performative, bodily, and fictive possibilities of gesture as a means to counter the

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protocols of neoliberalism. Dr. Wagner’s slow motion in real life could be just such a gesture, which caters to the popular audience alongside the ring and confounds the television cameras of the media corporations that profit from lucha libre. The problem is that Citton ascribes that power of gesture to its reservoir of the irrational, the unintentional, and the unreflexive; that is, to its position outside the logic of (Western) modernity. He locates its alternative to neoliberalism in a primitivist return to “craftsmen of the past [who] inherited complex, subtle, and refined bodily gestures necessary to weave a basket, to sculpt clay, or to carve wood.”63 Even as he celebrates gestural fiction’s capacity to restore a time and presence destroyed by the impact of industrialization and semiocapitalism, Citton provides a singular history of modernity that moves in one and the same direction globally. Giorgio Agamben similarly builds a theory of gesture upon this vision of its modern destruction, a historical process completed “by the end of the nineteenth century, [when] the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.”64 Agamben sees some remnants of gesture in the image, in which he finds a demand for liberation sustained from the time of ancient Greece to— strangely—Diego Velázquez’s colonial-era painting Las Meninas. For Agamben, cinema leads the image fully back to its “homeland of gesture,” from which it was temporarily exiled but to which it is not conceptually foreign.65 Both theorists conceive of a historical progression that eliminated gestures worldwide and presume that the “craftsmen” who retained its bodily expression were not conversant in its semiotic exchange. It is no surprise, then, that Citton’s proposed solution to counter neoliberalism is a familiar one in modernizing discourse from the West: literacy, in this case, computer literacy. While literacy campaigns have helped select individuals participate more successfully in modern economies, they have not solved the systemic exclusions constitutive of modernity. As Diana Taylor and Walter Mignolo have shown, such campaigns were key agents in the sustained attack among colonized peoples of the very social relations that Citton wishes to sustain. Moreover, contrary to the premise that the value and praxis of gesture is as a historical recuperation, Grobet’s lucha series reveals gesture to be a historically continuous and contemporary mode of aesthetic, cultural, and historical expression. Her photographs of masked participants in the ritual dance of tecuanes alongside lucha libre masks reflect that long-standing and ongoing expressive power of gesture. In fact, though it goes unremarked, Citton’s manifesto for fiction as a mode of creating “a political ecology of gestures” and human rights in the age of neoliberalism rests on the contributions of two theorists from the Americas: the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant and the Brazilian anthropologist

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Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. These thinkers ground their contributions in genealogies of Afro-descendant and Amerindian thought, not as primitive objects available for rescue by European theory but as philosophies themselves. Furthermore, Citton writes exclusively about the concept of opacity that Glissant and Viveiros de Castro share, and so only partially comprehends what they reveal about the inventiveness of gesture. Glissant certainly defends colonized peoples’ right to opacity in confronting the European gaze, yet a different concept titles the very work that Citton cites: A Poetics of Relation. Glissant insists that, among certain people, gestures share or transfer something very profound across history and despite violence. The people who survived the Middle Passage: “hail a renewed Indies: we are for it.”66 That hailing takes shape in a powerful gestural encounter the narrator shares with a “ghostly young man,” in which “a minute, imperceptible signal, sort of seesawing his barely lifted hand . . . became our sign of complicity. It seemed to me that we were perfecting this sign language, adding shades of all the possible meanings that chanced along. . . . [W]e shared scraps of the language of gesture that Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed preceded all spoken language. I thought of all the people struggling within this speck of the world against silence and obliteration.”67 These are gestures enacted by people who carry within them the abyss of the Middle Passage. Abject fear of an unknown continent was caused by the brutal physical violence of European slave traders, by the deterritorialization of African languages, the stifling of their cries, and the conversion of people into commodities. That hailing gesture corrects the history of modernity that Citton only partially recounts and threads together an ongoing poetics (not just a theory) of relation that is both sign and body. These gestures did not disappear with economic modernization from colonization to industrialization to neoliberalism. Glissant shows that they survived them, if under the cloak of opacity to others. The relation they shape counters the “poetics of depth, science of language, and textual disclosure” of the French literary and humanist canon—the literary baggage from which Citton cannot free himself—with that slight movement of hailing.68 The poetics of relation balances between “the present moment and duration” in a “sign of complicity” that, as Caribbean artist Garaicoa signaled at the outset of this chapter, flees from the word to the gesture.69 Unlike Citton and Agamben, Flusser does not present non-Western gesture as a vanished past. In a series of eclectic writings on gesture that were the culmination of a lifetime of critical and media theory, he sought to identify and understand the presence of indigenous and African contributions to gesture in Brazil. Flusser writes, “For decades, I was involved in an experiment to synthesize Brazilian culture from a larger mix of Western European,

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Eastern European, African, East Asian, and Indian cultural phenomena.”70 Indeed, he identifies a profound contradiction between the literary tradition of reading and the philosophical range of gesture that interests him. In “The Gesture of Writing,” he explains: “Thinking expresses itself in a whole range of gestures. But writing, with its unique straight linearity and inherent dialectic between the words of a whispered language and the message to be expressed, has a special place among the gesture of thinking. What expresses itself in this gesture [of writing] is the ‘official thinking’ of the West.”71 Flusser’s overly utopian view of cybernetics led him to proclaim the end of writing with the emergence of new digital technologies, and the introduction of a new modality of gesture. However, his characteristic equivocation still denies that historical changes in technology obey the forward motion of modernity. He describes an unending process of gestural signification, which itself creates a shared historical time that defies that “official thinking” of the West, specifically in regard to time: “The gesture not only reaches from the present into the future but also brings an anticipated future back into the present and returns it to the future: the gesture is constantly monitoring and reformulating its own meaning.”72 Flusser revels in the strange and particular temporality of gesture noted by Noland, but expands it from an individual to a historical scale. From his exile in Brazil, Flusser perceived that gesture was not a destroyed primitive element to be rescued by modern subjects, and like Glissant, he saw that the particular temporality of gesture provides another rhythm of history. Flusser conceives of a “clockwork of disparate phases in current society and consciousness” in which “the Third World is poor in realizations but rich in virtualities. The First World has effected a great part of its virtualities: it is effectively rich and virtually poor.”73 His articulation of a gestural time of history itself preceded recent scholarship that outlines the paradox in which neoliberalism put the South “ahead” of the West, even and especially Pinochet’s desire to be “ahead” of Reagan and Thatcher in his implementation of their policies.74 Grobet visualized another such historical about-face in her placement of the first photographs in Espectacular de lucha libre, which reversed the standard aesthetic divide between ethnographic photography’s gray images of indigenous people and contemporary art photography’s saturated hues. Flusser lamented his own failure to produce more concrete results from his research into indigenous and Afro-descendant philosophies of gesture, time, and history. However, his early identification of the need for a mode of critique along the lines of Kusch’s American, philosophical anthropology and one grounded in gesture requires that we do. The linguist David McNeill explains the common function of gesture

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to communicate temporal sequence while telling a story. Among speakers of European languages, he notes, a gesture of pointing forward commonly designates the “next scene” in the story. However, the anthropologists Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser find that among speakers of Aymara—one of the two major Amerindian language groups in the Andes—“past is the space in front, future the space behind, . . . indicating the next day could be via a gesture over the shoulder.”75 The anthropologists elaborate: “In Aymara, the basic word for front (nayra, “eye/front/sight”) is also a basic expression meaning past, and the basic word for back (qhipa, “back/behind”) is a basic expression for future meaning.”76 Echoing Efron’s observations of generational shifts among his Jewish and Italian subjects, bilingual Aymara speakers point backward when speaking in Spanish about the past and forward when speaking in Aymara. Not surprisingly, these Aymara gestures do not appear in the Diccionario de gestos. The linguists argue that the best metaphor for this Aymara relationship to time is that of walking along a path, such that the “known is in front of ego/unknown is behind ego,” and they propose that this metaphor embodied in gesture reflects “deep cognitive structures.”77 The logic is strikingly clear: Because we can see what already happened in the past, it is in front of our eyes. Because we cannot see the future, it resides behind our back. Taking Aymara gesture as a philosophy of time, as Flusser proposed, against the “official thinking of the West,” provides another critical concept for the non-narrative temporality of fiction. Dialogue of Gestures The image of hands in motion dominates Flusser’s writings on the excursions of gesture. He describes the gesture of making as “a method of bringing the two hands together in an object,” protests Plato’s “cultivated refusal to get his hands dirty,” and wonders how to counter industrial societies’ erasure of the presence of “naked hands.”78 As much as he recognizes that hands can perpetrate violence, he finds that the exploration by those naked hands allows humans to recognize one another and to differentiate sentient beings from objects. Much like the distinction Clark drew between Pollock’s egoistic gesture and her own appeal to others, the moving, making hands of gesture in Flusser are always touching—something or someone—in both senses of the word. Even more compelling, he finds “a border situation” in the imperfect symmetry of two hands, in which the gesture of making is never completed. Flusser writes that the blurred and imperfect beginning of the gesture of making lies in creativity and ends in presentation and resignation. His concept of gesture as making enables an imagining without producing, making without affirming—that is to say, a making in negation.

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That gesture of making is a crucial element of non-literary fiction, the culmination of its role of thinking the political in this American genealogy. The two touching, naked hands in motion are a repeated trope in contemporary art, one that the Brazilian artist and dancer Michel Groisman powerfully took up at the turn of the millennium. Groisman practiced his Door of Hands (2004–2007) in public performances and in private repose (fig. 3.14). Indebted to Clark’s Dialogue of Hands (1966), in which a banded Möbius strip connects the two and closely resembling Mejía’s gestural photographs, Groisman’s work is slow and drawn out. He performs the excursionary time of gesture by creating what Flusser would call a shifting border with his hands. The basic premise of the work is to explore the geometries of the space that two hands can create, without ever allowing the fingers to separate. Touch, contact, and constancy provide the coherence of the work: it begins with the touching of the two fingers and ends when that touch breaks off. The work began as a series of one-on-one performances—just artist and spectator in an intimate exchange of presence. I experienced Door of Hands sitting on top of a table in the kitchen of his apartment in Rio de Janeiro, which was hot and close and full of the debris of everyday life. I was completely drawn in for some time—maybe ten minutes—as he moved his hands in evolving abstract shapes, never allowing the fingers that began pressed together to part. The unbreakable touch was the skeleton of the idea of gesture itself, the imperfect communion of asymmetrical hands, and a communication that was intimate and yet without language or metaphorical meaning. In contrast to Clark’s mediated dialogue that uses a band to connect two people’s hands, Groisman uses only his own hands. The pressure of each finger on the other never overcomes that minuscule distance between two fingertips, and so maintains each hand simultaneously as gesture and object. He thus avoids what Flusser calls the “solipsism” of the tool, when gesture is just a code to communicate, and instead engages the gesture of making. If his hands create the momentary illusion of an image seen through their frame, their constant motion and the title of the work replace the idea of the frame with the titular door, through which one conceivably might pass. Neither the image-window of Renaissance illusion nor the version of phenomenology that gives unfettered access to the Other, those mobile and touching hands shape a border within the border situation of gesture. The “door of hands” imagines another space through that door, like the other route created by Rosenfeld’s body and the repeated gesture of +, which created conduits in their insertion of perpendicular lines on the street. Aymara gesture offers another point of entry into Groisman’s Door of

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Figure 3.14 Michel Groisman, Porta das mãos (Door of Hands), 2007. Photo: Rudy Hühold. Courtesy of the artist and Rudy Hühold.

Hands as a non-literary fiction, a concept for how he draws out the time of gesture into a fiction that does not settle into narrative. There is a very strong visual component to spoken Aymara: the future is unseen, the past and present are seen, and the grammar of Aymara registers whether or not the speaker witnessed the events he or she describes. When interviewed by Núñez and Sweetser, elderly Aymara often refused to talk about the future, as they thought that “little or nothing sensible could be said about it.”79 As much as the direction of Aymara gestures indicating time—the future to the back, the past in the front—surprise Westerners, they nonetheless sustain a familiar figure-ground relationship of positional metaphors for time. Most crucially here, Núñez and Sweetser remark on the capacity of these gestures to “blend” real space with “other spaces.”80 We can understand Groisman’s work, like Clark’s, to perform something like the gesture of a bilingual Aymara speaker: an ongoing shift between the past in the front and the past behind. The shifting ground and lack of figure in the Door of Hands create a swoop and pull of openings between those real and other spaces. This gestural work creates a non-narrative fiction experienced in real time, a fiction that I suggest excludes modern and neoliberal ideals of futurity as well as avant-garde utopias. It simply and powerfully invents an imagined excursion. In Sirva-se (Help Yourself, 2001–2004), Groisman invites others onto one

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such excursion and into the kind of poetics of relation Glissant perceived in gesture (figs. 3.15 and 3.16). Participants pass water to one another in plastic cups attached with ties to their hands, legs, feet, and even heads. Like Boal, Groisman describes the work as a series of games that transform water into a “vehicle of communication.” The control required of the body to successfully pass the water to another person’s cup converts the participants into dancers, the discipline that Groisman studied. Although he eventually designed a special cup that allowed the ribbons to be threaded through and attached to the body more easily, early performances of the piece utilized plastic water bottles cut in half and attached to the body with simple straps. The elicited gestures are simultaneously natural and artificial, humorous and focused, directed inside and outside. The artist suggests to the partici-

Figure 3.15 Michel Groisman, Sirva-se (Help Yourself), 2001–2004. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 3.16 Michel Groisman, Sirva-se (Help Yourself), 2001–2004. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

pants that they close their eyes as they pour out the water and trust that someone will catch it in a waiting cup.81 Slowed down, slight, and simple gestures produce laughter and sociability, forms of communication without language, and attention to the corporal and social presence of others. The gestures of Sirva-se invent very small fictions in the magic of blindly pouring and not spilling, and of receiving something out of nothing. The participants share an intense focus that resembles the individual, textual “immersion” in literature, so essential to narrative theories of fiction but invented in communal, embodied fictions. Recalling Nara Leão’s outstretched hand on the cover of Show Opinião, Groisman’s work brings to life the character of fiction that Flusser describes in a very short essay published in Portuguese in Brazil, “Da ficção” (On Fiction, 1966).82 Flusser writes with some concern about the “the sensation of the fictitious nature of everything that surrounds us, and of faking as the climate of our lives, [as] the theme of the contemporary.”83 Drawing on phenomenology, though, he declares that this all-encompassing fictive sensation is constituted by the mutual invention of subjects and objects in the world: the table only exists as a fiction of our subjective perception, and we only exist as subjects due to the presence of that table in the world. Groisman’s Sirva-se provides an experience of that sensation of total fiction: each subject receives the water in the cup at the moment of encounter, but the participants are blind to one another and the cups.

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In this contemporary period, Flusser continues, it is possible to state that “fiction is reality.”84 He describes that statement as a total negation; it reveals that the only reality is that previously reliable sources such as experience and knowledge are deceptive. That condition presents equally the profound threat of destruction and a promise of connection through shared vulnerability. Flusser grounds his nihilism in the contemporary madness he sees all around: the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb that he mentions explicitly but also the recently installed military dictatorship and its social destruction that he does not. That devastation also hovers around the relation of fiction in Sirva-se. The title suggests both a generous spirit, “help yourself,” and the dangers of excessive consumerism, “serve yourself.” The materials are cheap or free, so participants feel emboldened to play with them. No one is worried about spilling the water or breaking the cup. Groisman later designed reusable cups, but the early use of disposable bottles and the water that are the medium of the performance contribute echoes of ecological concerns. Those materials are the stuff of current and impending disasters: water shortages and garbage dumps full of plastic. The gestures of the participants invent a relation, make up a fiction, which hovers between a small promise of connection and the looming global disaster of neoliberal economies of scale. Common Imaginations of Freedom The social exchange of gesture initiated in Opinião and continuing in Sirvase involves more than just collaboration and communication; it makes a certain kind of imagination and invention possible. The linguistic anthropologist Keith Murphy studies gesture in the architectural studio environment that Garaicoa replicated in the art studio. In these collaborative creative settings, participants use gesture as they jointly produce a design. Murphy finds that “imagining can be seen as a social and embodied activity that is supported by material objects, mediated by gestures, initiated by conversation, and maintained through the external force of all of these things as they are simultaneously employed in some social setting.”85 Murphy’s study of gesture ultimately redefines imagination itself as a creative practice no longer granted to the individual but as a communal process. The poetics of relation that Glissant encounters in those subtle gestures emphasizes this shared imagination. He explains that gesture is a way to know totality: “we imagine it through a poetics.”86 Produced and sustained by the survivors of the Atlantic slave trade, this gestural invention was not erased but rather produced by the regimes of modernization that controlled the trade in human beings, and it was those human beings who invented a gestural poetics

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that spoke across oceans and continents using bodies and signs. This theory of gestures that invent non-literary fiction is not an exception or holdout or a periphery to the neoliberal world system, but rather a mode of intervention within it that is needed the world over. Flusser’s words on gesture in painting reveal that commonality to be fundamentally political. In the decades when neoliberalism proclaimed freedom to be an individual’s right to sink or swim in a free-market society, artists and critics of the Americas instead collaborated in gestures to imagine, to make up, common fictions. In his series of essays on gesture, Flusser writes: “All this is only an effort to speak about freedom. . . . To be free is to have meaning, to give meaning, to change the world, to be there for others, in short to truly live. Freedom is not a function of choice in the scene of more options producing greater freedom. . . . The gesture of painting is a form of freedom. The painter does not have freedom, he is in it, for he is in the gesture of painting. Being free is synonymous with actually being there. . . . Freedom is actually indivisible: it is the way we recognize that others are in the world with us.”87 That being in the world together directly contradicts the bill of goods neoliberals have tried to sell about freedom. In “The Fragility of Freedom” (1976), one of the primary architects of contemporary neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, defined freedom as a freemarket economy that radically limits public funding and feeds individual self-interest. The economist struggled with his close advisory relationship with Chile’s military regime, at times deploying it as an ominous warning of the future of the United States should the share of the economy dedicated to state funding increase, at others declaring the regime as the exception to the rule that free markets and representative democracy flourish together. Friedman had to twist history to make this argument, and not just the recent history of Chile. He proclaims the greatest period of freedom in the United States to have existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, erasing the fact that slavery was both legal and the economic backbone of the South at the time. He writes as fact the falsehood that the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, had been “clearly seeking to turn Chile into a communist dictatorship.”88 Beyond the perversion of the historical record, the centrality of the Chilean case among Friedman’s Chicago Boys also created unresolvable contradictions in the proclaimed status of individual freedom. Greg Grandin cites the University of Chicago professor’s former student, Chilean finance minister Sergio de Castro, who wrote that “a person’s actual freedom . . . can only be ensured through an authoritarian regime that exercises power by implementing equal rules for everyone.”89 The contrast could not be greater with Flusser’s gesture of painting—and all the preceding gestures—as constitutive of freedom.

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The commonality of gesture resides at the heart of its invention of nonliterary fiction. The gestural imagination of the luchadores as much as of Grobet, Rosenfeld, and Clark play a central role in creating what José Teixeira Coelho calls the “political culture” necessary to remedy contemporary social and artistic ills, specifically the “weakness . . . of ethical links that permit the construction of a common we.”90 Here the American genealogy of gesture studies departs somewhat from Noland’s landmark discussion of kinesthetic gesture. Certainly, they share a focus on the sensorial and corporeal performance of gesture as a means to create new cultural meanings, produce “agency,” and push back on the dominant habitus of the neoliberal philosophy of life. However, her primary concern remains with individual subjectivity and individuation.91 If the habitus of neoliberal life is rigid individuation itself, then a theory and practice of gesture as such provides little relief. Gesture in this chapter has instead imagined profound relations, under and against neoliberal philosophies of individualism. Stories without a story, these non-literary fictions engage the spectator in a collaborative process of making (up) in the midst of neoliberalism’s destruction of the social fabric. They come into being through cooperative invention as opposed to individual genius and share an excursion through freedom within neoliberalism’s constant demand for profit and productivity. They reach out and pull another in, at times inventing that fellow collaborator in the process. Some communication takes place in this encounter at the intersection between body and sign. As Rosenfeld’s Una milla de cruces hinted, though, the bodies that go on these excursions remain profoundly vulnerable. The fiction of gesture may offer a shared respite from the social order of neoliberalism, but only for the time being. The next chapter looks closely at artists whose non-literary fictions dwell in those vulnerable bodies.

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Corpus: Telling Bodies, Living and Dead

During and following the military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, and in the pervasive quotidian violence in declaredly democratic Mexico at the turn of the millennium, artists and critics agonized about the necessity and risks of making present the victims of state violence, about representing them. These debates have provided important insights into how the same documents that surveil citizens—identification cards and passport photographs—can be used to demand their rights. However, in the aftermath of the transition from emergent neoliberal dictatorship to full-fledged neoliberal representative democracies, fiction presents an alternative to this well-known genealogy in art and theory. This chapter sets out how non-literary fictions embody the political violence of neoliberalism. I say “embody” rather than “perform,” for these works neither offer an agentive form of resistance nor participate in a critique of representation. If the swish and swoop of gesture invented social relations, here the fragility of these embodied fictions is laid bare: in the double bind between documentarian impulses and critiques of representation, and in representative democracies that reproduced the political and ideological violence of neoliberal regimes. The artists consider intimately and painfully what is at stake in these moments of making up and making do, and they create an alternative corpus of non-literary fictions to the testimonials and documentaries that have sustained literary investigations into these questions. “Corpus” has named the organizing logic of knowledge production and claims to mastery since the Enlightenment: scholars of art history and literature today still demonstrate their expertise through their command of a certain corpus of texts. That mastery was grounded in literal violence. Modern regimes of colonialism and nation-state formation communicated their power through the Inquisition’s torture, brutal slavery, and other abuses.

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Saidiya Hartman has established the need for a different critical method for African American studies, one that might correct the failures to account for the history of Black enslavement. She describes: “[her] strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements and which enabled [her] to augment and intensify its fictions.”1 To learn to tell these impossible stories, especially of the brutalized bodies, erased accounts, and what she calls the “unsayable” of lived experiences of slavery, Hartman drew on the speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler. The resulting corpus looks and sounds nothing like the confident histories of the authors of this violence, but as she regrets, it cannot bring her subjects back to life. Under the military dictatorships in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s, citizens were tortured and murdered, their bodies first made to speak against their will and then disappeared. More like Hartman’s reckoning than the pretended totality of the scholarly canon, the redefined corpus of non-literary fiction is wounded and partial. Marguerite Feitlowitz writes that the forms of violence used by the Argentine military regime were so horrific that they spawned “a lexicon of terror,” most memorably a neologism still used today: los desaparecidos. The Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española (RAE) includes a separate entry from the verb desaparecer (to disappear) for this word: “1. Adjective. Said of a person: That is found in an unknown location, without knowing if he/she is alive. 2. Adjective, euphemism, dead (that is not alive). Applied to a person.”2 Across the Americas, the figure of the desaparecido initiated the contemporary phase of the modern history of the human body. If the body continued to be the site that conjoins the state’s control over its citizens with claims to fidelity in representation, the desaparecido created a fundamental break, both political and tropological. While the dictionary entry foregrounds the social and political violence embedded in the emergence of the word, it obscures two crucial elements of its meaning. First, the RAE designates the neologism as a euphemism, which is a figure of speech that diminishes harm and insult. Desaparecido in fact exacerbates pain, for it perpetuates the state’s avoidance of naming its acts of murder. However, the families of the disappeared transformed that perverse euphemism into a demand to know what happened to the bodies of their loved ones. The RAE misses this struggle over the word, one that I explore further here, by designating desaparecido only as an adjective and ignoring its use as a noun that designates an entire group of people. The paradox of the definition of desaparecido exemplifies the conundrum presented by the tactic of disappearance, as again neither representation nor its critiques were sufficient to confront this form of violence and the wounds left in its wake. The artistic fictions that follow go so far as to reinvent habeas corpus, the basic tenet in the defense of human rights that requires the bodily presence

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of an accused person in any trial. They abandon attempts to re-present the bodies of the disappeared and instead present a fictive corpus marked by the violence of expanding neoliberalism. In her study of the desaparecidos in Argentina, Feitlowitz tells of the unrelenting efforts by victims’ families to document testimonials by military torturers and murderers. Yet she also compellingly reveals the added trauma of what became known as the “Scilingo moment”: a dramatic radio broadcast of the testimony of naval officer Adolfo Scilingo about the weekly flights from which drugged desaparecidos were thrown, still alive, into the Atlantic Ocean. While framed as a crucial revelation of the hidden truth about the desaparecidos, these testimonials became lucrative commodities for the very perpetrators of the crimes. That financial incentive led to doubts about their veracity, not because they denied these crimes but because some soldiers appeared to claim direct knowledge of real crimes they had not committed, with the expectation of profiting from the resulting media sensation. The Scilingo moment reveals that the documentary genre that families of victims hoped would counter the violence of disappearance was available to its perpetrators—for profit—under the ongoing neoliberal order that persisted beyond the military regime. León Rozitchner calls the desaparecido “a figure of neoliberal capitalism.”3 The corpus of this chapter—material and fictional, figures of speech and flesh—foregrounds the vulnerability of living in a neoliberal society permeated by death. Artur Barrio (b. 1945), under the Brazilian military regime, and Amalia Pica (b. 1978), reflecting on the Argentine dictatorship from the distance of a younger generation, created a fictional corpus of visual art. Across these two generations, the corpus of non-literary fiction reveals the great danger when the state uses its full power not to deny all rights owed to its citizens but to parse them. Abandoning the failed promises of both representation and its critiques, both artists fashioned bodies out of the broken remnants of words and flesh. They reject the demand to re-present the disappeared and instead recast what Bürger condemned as the “solitary absorption” of reading, by taking up and reinventing the touch of the reader on the book. These fictions reverse the direction of the gaze: rather than looking for the disappeared or at the tortured body, the bodies turn to look at us. They imagine an intimacy, a connection or relation with those (missing) bodies that is only ever partial and risky, and they provide a concept of the fictional corpus of contemporary art. Book of Meat, Book of Flesh Artur Barrio’s Livro de carne (Book of Meat, 1978–1979) is a cut of beef, sliced vertically like the pages of a book, and placed on a platform for the

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Figure 4.1 Artur Barrio, Livro de carne (Book of Meat), 1978–1979. Courtesy of the artist.

viewer to browse as it rots (fig. 4.1). It was part of a series of works with meat made during a key period during the military dictatorship in Brazil: the decade after the declaration of the infamous Institutional Act No. 5 of 1968, which suspended habeas corpus. Barrio wrote simple instructions to read this book with no text, this fiction without words: “The reading of this book was based on the cut/knife action of the butcher on the meat, the sectioned fibers, the fissures, etc. etc., as well as the different tonalities and coloration. In conclusion, it’s important not to forget to mention the temperatures, sensorial contact (of the fingers), social problems, etc. etc. . . . Enjoy your read.”4 The last words are a play on what one says before a meal in Portuguese: instead of bom apetite (enjoy your meal) he wishes us a boa leitura (enjoy your read). To learn to read this non-literary fiction, we must approach it as a book, as meat, and as the act of slicing. It names its kinship to the new corpus that Ulises Carrión declared to be “El arte nuevo de hacer libros,” which escaped the limits of literature, and it adds intensities of sensoriality and corporeality. Barrio was born in Portugal and moved to Brazil as a child. His work since the 1960s has been largely ephemeral, consisting of actions that often take place in public spaces; materials of choice have been old bread, toilet paper, trash, blood, and dirt.5 Paulo Herkenhoff observes the impact of Frantz Fanon and Ferreira Gullar on the artist’s “Aesthetic Manifesto of the Third World” (1969), in which Barrio proclaimed he used these materials “because creation cannot be conditioned, it has to be free.”6 Barrio’s longstanding concern with poverty—defined as cultural as much as economic lack—comes into focus in the Livro de carne, a book that does not require alphabetic literacy. In that sense, the book advances the concerns of his works with detritus, materializing forms of knowledge that emerge out of scarcity rather than the luxuries of wealth and higher education. Livro de carne can be thought of as a textbook for how to make do. However, the

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book stages a defining tension: if the rotting meat echoes Barrio’s other works with trash, dirt, and other organic materials, this particular artwork is not made of a material meant to be discarded. To the contrary, meat is a cherished luxury.7 What is more, Barrio’s choice of beef takes up a substance already saturated with the task of national representation. Carne de boi long has been considered a symbol of Brazilian national identity: the boi (ox) that provides the meat appeared in evocations of Brazilianness in founding literary figures including Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Mário de Andrade. Livro de carne reverses the outcome of that metaphoric representation by converting the crescendo of national triumph in the figure of the boi into a decaying lump of flesh. Livro de carne emerged in the period of active experimentation with the book detailed in chapter 1 and provides a powerful connection with contemporary artistic investigations into the body. Throughout Barrio’s life, the writing and workbooks he calls CadernosLivros—workbook-books— have played a crucial role (fig. 4.2). In them, he attends both to the idea of a literary “corpus” (rather than work of art) and to that body of work as simultaneously intimate (private) and shared (public). Since the invention of movable type, books have circulated more widely than fine art. Thanks to its relatively mass production, many individuals read a book, and its artistic value is not determined by the uniqueness or scarcity that shores up the market value of visual art. Those multiple copies paradoxically permit each reader an intimate physical relationship with the book-object, held in her hands and left by her bedside. Barrio extends that physical intimacy in the CadernosLivros, which he describes as a “new medium” in which he jots down words and drawings, plans for actions that may or may not take place and that may or may not leave some residual trace in the world.8 The artist states they constitute a “new way of reading” in which the textual always requires an intervention into the material, into the “plastic.” Ricardo Basbaum writes that the CadernosLivros reveal the “possibilities of non-linear writing . . . the virtual/real processing and production of the sensory.”9 In Barrio’s hands, the book takes on the full sense of the “corpus” as a space of fiction. Barrio made Livro de carne two decades after the landmark Neo-concrete Manifesto, signed by Gullar and Clark among others, declared the nonobject to be a “quasi-corpus.” Although Barrio maintained a distance from the group, Gullar’s later explanation of the neologism helps to understand the context in which his work with carne circulated: “We don’t conceive of the work of art as a machine or as an object, but more as a quasi-corpus, that is, a being whose reality does not exhaust itself in the exterior relations of its elements.”10 The plasticity of the non-object as a quasi corpus includes an interiority, a lifelike quality breathed into the works they named with one of

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Figure 4.2 Artur Barrio, CadernosLivros (WorkbookBooks), 1978–1979. Courtesy of the artist.

the foundational American negations. Recall that Clark expanded Gullar’s limited vision of that semisentient entity beyond modernist differentiations among mediums and between abstraction and figuration. Her Bichos radically reimagined the plane as a constructed, invented surface that she declared “should be an organic body, like a living entity.”11 Grounded in phenomenology and gestalt psychology, Clark sought to bring her work to life. She transformed the quasi corpus into not just a sentient artwork but what critic Suely Rolnik calls “the knowing-body . . . the outside-of-the-subject experience of subjectivity, the unsayable and invisible vital experience of a world in its virtual state—a seed of a world composed by those percepts and affects that pulsate in all the bodies belonging to the same environment with the body.”12 Barrio’s books similarly do not abandon the transmission of knowledge but radically alter the mode and content of that knowledge. While both artists placed a corporal entity into the spectator’s inquiring hands, Barrio’s Livro de carne offered a very different sensuality than the smooth metallic and fabricated materials of many of the bichos. He pushed the quasi corpus further, darkening the playful fantasy and introducing pain and scarcity into the eroticism of their shared genealogy of cannibal performances, creating a form of non-objectualism distinct from the more market-friendly objects by Clark.13 Almost a decade before Livro de carne,

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Barrio had contributed “burlap sacks filled with raw meat and trash [tossed] into an open sewer” to Frederico Morais’s landmark exhibition, “Do corpo à terra” (From Body to Earth) held at the Municipal Park in Belo Horizonte in April 1970.14 The curator’s manifesto for the exhibition revived Gullar’s non-objectual grammar as the governing operation of a surprising range of contemporary art practices, from land art and performance to pop art. Morais renders art as “object” as a bridge: between the affective body and terra, which in Portuguese means both earth and land: It is necessary to recuperate or retake the body. And land. Between both lives the object. “Pop” is the reification of common objects, fetishization of the obvious and the quotidian. . . . With “Pop” the playacting has ended. It is the kingdom of the object, which is presented and does not represent. Object modified, serialized, transformed, accumulated, prepared, augmented, terrorized, mummified, destroyed, compressed, reused, combined, divided, multiplied. Enigmatic object. The entrails and the blood of the object—abject, objectum, object, contest, counter. Locating itself face to face with man, obliging him to its initiatives. Object amplified to the limits of gigantism—for that reason situated outside the museum. The found object. The ludic object—piece of a toy, ritual or game. Might it be possible to follow the life of an object?—up until its death and final destruction? The being as an object, an abject thing. Man as merchandise in a mercantile society. The object is his shell, his image, his packaging. The cardboard box, cardboard man. Industrial trash—and the peripheral country lives from the surplus, as from the leftovers, as frequently does the artist.15

The objecting object makes tangible the vulnerability of these enlivened entities under the shared political and economic reality of the most intense years of the military regime. Like Acha later, Morais concludes in the manifesto that the (non-)object as action “corresponds to a new existential situation for man, to a new humanism.”16 For Morais, Barrio’s work with meat was at the heart of a Brazilian genealogy of embodiment as a crucial mode of political art. In the lead-up to the exhibition in Belo Horizonte, the curator had published an essay, “Contra a arte afluente: O corpo é o motor da ‘obra’” (Against Affluent Art: The Body Is the Motor of the “Work”). After placing Clark’s Caminhando at the center of a defining shift to “arte vivencial” (enlivened art), he argues that Brazilian versions of arte povera had the same “symbolic meaning” of guerrilla wars against technological societies and anti-colonial wars of liberation; he cites Marcuse’s vision of “the energy of the human body against repressive machines” and Frantz Fanon’s recognition of the revolutionary

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bodies of Algerian women.17 Morais declares the Third World the privileged site for the articulation of a contestatory art of the body in the street, and he dedicated “Contra a arte afluente” to Décio Pignatari, specifically his essay, “Teoria da guerrilha artística” (Theory of Artistic Guerrilla, 1967). However, he also cites a different study by the poet, one dedicated to the theory of information, which argued that generations of avant-garde declarations of the death of art showed only that “there is no reason to lament [its] glorious cadaver.”18 As much as Morais imagines a rebellious body from the revolutionary Third World, a dying or dead corpse haunts its experimental art. When Barrio let the book of meat rot in an art gallery, he revisited these questions of violence at the core of guerrilla movements and the hemispheric political debates following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The Brazilian Glauber Rocha’s landmark manifesto, “A estética da fome” (Aesthetic of Hunger, 1965), proclaimed revolutionary violence as the right and moral response of a starving human to the unbearable pain of hunger. Yet Barrio’s rotting meat in Livro de carne offers no clear evidence of a rebellious act and could just as well display Pignatari’s unmourned cadaver: art’s indifference to the pain of the marginalized hungry of Brazil. Morais makes full use of the multiple meanings of the word carne in his manifesto for “Do corpo à terra,” which English requires three words to express: meat, flesh, and carnal. You are composed of carne—flesh and bone—as much as you consume it. Barrio’s book confronts the viewer with the specter of his own decaying, organic matter as much as the corpse of art, even as the invitation to read through touch enlivens the sensation of flesh’s sexuality. For Adriano Pedrosa, Livro de carne “evokes the complex intangibility of corporeal, carnal knowledge, something that only art (and not the Dictionary, the Encyclopedia or the Bible) can record.”19 If this insubstantial and yet material quality was constituted by Barrio’s book of meat to a degree that the most powerful written texts cannot approach, not all art can create that combination of desire and disgust.20 Furthermore, Barrio’s entire oeuvre made of detritus looks askance at proclamations about art as such a privileged operation. The fleshy remains of Barrio’s work with meat do not mourn the cadaver of art but instead bring the viewer face-to-face—or hand-to-hand—with the sensation of the lingering presence of the dead. If it seems incongruous and even disrespectful to approach this most real and pressing tragedy of the disappeared—presumed dead—through fiction, the history of habeas corpus reveals the necessity to do so. Barrio’s series of works with the flesh of words and the word “flesh” constitute a form of guerrilla that does not simply protest the intensification of the oppressive military regime and its suspension of habeas corpus in the Institutional Act No. 5. They confront the viewer with the terrible dilemma represented

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equally by the suspension and the subsequent reinstatement of habeas corpus by the military dictatorship. That is, his works embody the radical uncertainty underlying this foundational legal tenet in representative democracies. In response to Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the founding 1679 writ of habeas corpus, Nikolai Duffy warns that “the institution of democracy is also in fact the establishment of an irrefutable physical demand: in order to receive one’s participatory rights it is necessary to submit one’s body to state scrutiny and surveillance, or what Foucault would refer to as nothing less than another example of the ‘numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.’”21 The presentation of the body in response to a writ of habeas corpus risks offering it up to receive the violence of the state and to participate, under duress, in its juridical and political operation of meaning making. In proposing to read the sliced chunk of meat like a book, Barrio references a widespread and long-lasting semiotics of violence in the Americas. That violence destroyed books—the colonizers burned codices in Mesoamerica and destroyed khipus in the Andes—and filled the archives of the Inquisition with detailed descriptions of torture in the viceroyalties. Passersby through major cities in the continent today cannot avoid that history and its paradoxical uses in modern national discourses. A monument forged in 1887 to Cuauhtémoc, the last ruler of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, still stands in Mexico City as a cornerstone of nationalist mythologies grounded in indigenous cultures exiled to the past. The bas-relief on its base shows Spaniards burning the upturned feet of the indigenous leader to compel him to speak and to reduce him in status from prince to slave. The monument itself occupies a central place on the Paseo de la Reforma, a major urban throughfare, and recurs in the Mexican visual imaginary, including as the backdrop to photographer Nacho López’s portrait of an unnamed Native American in the mid-twentieth century. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone and the widespread conflict known as la violencia in Colombia added a carefully articulated semiotics of torture.22 Those techniques compelled both speech and silence: speech by those tortured as they produced names and silence rather than vocal opposition by the population at large.23 The Chilean artist and writer Diamela Eltit analyzes two autobiographies to understand how torture makes people speak and the character of the words they produce. The authors originally were part of the Chilean resistance against the Pinochet dictatorship but were tortured into submission and eventually incorporated into the regime itself. Eltit asks the same question of the torture sessions as of the autobiographies published after the restoration of democracy: “what is to be done in the face of speech pro-

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voked under these conditions?”24 The story told under torture, which she calls “the expropriation of the speaking body,”25 is not the information alone but the brutal destruction of the subject him or herself. The subject—in the Chilean context, one deprived of the right of habeas corpus—is reduced to pure flesh. Eltit argues that the bodies of these tortured women “are nothing more than spaces through which power passes, crazily transforming in the manner of chameleons.”26 Through their autobiographies as much as their collaboration with the regime, the women are reinstalled at the very center of brutal power. Eltit considers the autobiographies a form of ongoing torture that the women enact on themselves, in part by reproducing masculinist discursive formulations. The reinstatement of habeas corpus as much as its suspension transforms the body into flesh made meat: forever vacated of its subjectivity by the experience of torture. There is no haven granted by habeas corpus to these bodies: neither in its ongoing history of collaboration with the modern-colonial state nor when the regime returned some of its protections. Eltit’s strongly critical reading of the political prisoners’ autobiographies points to the possibility that the solution to this bind may lie not in documentary practices but rather in fictional ones. She explains that once made subjectless, the tortured body produces a narrative beyond the determination of truth or lies. Moacir dos Anjos similarly notes that Barrio’s work broadly rejects the symbolic order of metaphor and the rationality of facts and deeds.27 Rather than “represent” torture, his fleshy book ignites the imagination to challenge the legitimacy of torture as a source of knowledge and to confront the authoritarian regimes of knowledge that employ it. Here again it matters that the Livro de carne is read primarily through senses other than sight. If the sensorial experience of the book embeds the visual in the olfactory and the tactile, the optical does not maintain its modern privileged status as true evidence of the real. João Fernandes writes that, for Barrio, “the question of representation in art is of no interest . . . aware as he is of its manipulation by the codes of discursive power within the context of the presentation of his projects. Contact with reality is, in Artur Barrio’s work, a refutation of the social evidence of this same reality and of its structures of signification, through the proposition of experiences in which the sensorial awakens from its rational slumber.”28 As grim as the comparison may be, the story told by the book of meat has no more connection to truth than the compelled confession under torture. Livro de carne: Book of Cuts We must attend now to the fact that Barrio gives us not just a lump of meat, but meat sliced into pages. That cut is the form that negation takes in this

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chapter: a negation of the silence around violence and torture as much as of its representation. The cut says no to the integrity projected onto a national body—the carne de boi as national symbol—as it draws together the variety of strangers who occupy its space. The cutting motion of the butcher’s knife constitutes and reveals this limit zone and fits into a genealogy of artworks that employ the cut as their defining gesture. Since Clark’s Caminhando, the cut has haunted experimental art in Brazil. Clark writes that the act of cutting “is only a potentiality. You and it will form a unique, total, existential reality. No separation between subject-object. It is a body-to-body affair, a fusion.”29 The “quasi corpus” dwells in the simultaneous identity and difference of the sliced object: in that process by which one becomes more than one but still clings to a sense of materiality and unity. The touch of fingers on flesh of Barrio’s book is just such a body-to-body affair. As sliced carne, moreover, Barrio adds to Eltit’s study of torture to reveal the degree to which we are further folded into violence when we seek to diminish it by degrees—to parse its harm—rather than abolish the totality of its damage.30 The legal history of habeas corpus, prior to and including the neoliberal military regimes in the Americas, in fact produced just such a cut and vulnerable body. During the years that Barrio made Livro de carne and a companion piece, Rodapés de carne (Meat Skirting Boards, 1978–1979), Ernesto Geisel rose to presidential power (1974) and drew new lines between repressive violence and increased democracy. Geisel was credited with restoring habeas corpus in 1978; it had been suspended with the Institutional Act No. 5 a decade earlier. As a Time magazine article at the time put it, “Geisel, who described his country as a ‘relative democracy,’ ended newspaper censorship, limited the arrest and torture of dissidents, and permitted the formation of opposition.”31 Under his leadership, the military proudly publicized its “restrained” use of torture and put “limits” on its dictatorship. Since it took power in 1964, the military dictatorship had always promised a future democracy, to be achieved through its “wise” development of certain sectors of Brazilian society. Cooperating with techno-bureaucrats and representatives of big capital, in the late 1970s these groups sought vigorously to maintain their control through Geisel’s careful dissection of the limits of violence.32 The human rights scholar Cecília Maria Bouças Coimbra points out that even years after the end of the regime, Geisel and other military officers continued to defend select circumstances in which torture was necessary to “avoid a greater evil.”33 It is crucial to note, then, that Barrio made Livro de carne just after the reinstatement of habeas corpus limited dictatorial power and restrained its use of torture. As if complying with the right of habeas, the artist literally returns the body. He provides the presence of the flesh and blood of those at the mercy of a “restrained” dictatorship even as he foregrounds its cutting nature.

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As noted briefly earlier, if habeas corpus grounds liberal democracy’s claim to protect individual freedoms, its protections always have been partial. The British code that underwrites the legal system of the United States enacted a limited purview of habeas corpus from the outset, for it was a right denied to hundreds of thousands of enslaved people of African descent. One such man, Joseph Somerset, achieved his freedom in 1772 by making a claim of habeas corpus, but he won the legal case not because slavery was found to be in violation of his rights as a citizen. Somerset won his freedom because of “how strongly habeas corpus spoke to liberal notions of the constitution of personhood through property . . . wherein individuals were constituted as such through their right to property over themselves.”34 Somerset was freed when it was determined that he had the right to own himself. Beyond this foundational case, major moments in the legal history of habeas corpus in the Americas coincided with the most egregious violations of its basic principle.35 If the right was formally introduced in the Brazilian Código de Procedimento Criminal in 1832, those laws excluded enslaved people of African descent from that concept of rights by declaring them property rather than people. Brian Farrell describes the “right to a judicial determination of the legality of a person’s detention, commonly known as habeas corpus” as “a cornerstone of international human rights law,” yet he goes on to chart a history of negotiations over that right that began with a Panamanian proposal at the Ninth International Conference of American States in Bogotá in April 1948, the very month and year infamous as the beginning of la violencia in that country.36 The so-called American Declaration containing habeas corpus was adopted only as a nonbinding declaration at that time. The paradox of habeas corpus in the Americas continued two decades later, when the Colombian proposal culminated in an accord in Rio de Janeiro in 1965, under the increasingly repressive regime of the military dictatorship. That limited, parsed, and partial habeas corpus took on a particularly sharp focus when neoliberal capitalism expanded under authoritarian regimes. In a landmark study that traces the roots of twenty-first-century US global counterinsurgency strategies and policies in its early interventions in Central America, Greg Grandin notes this paradox: “Human rights provided the idiom through which to gauge the correct degree of violence to be applied, as US military preceptors schooled their Salvadoran charges in counterinsurgency to avoid . . . ‘indiscriminate acts of violence.’”37 Torture manuals distributed by the US military among Central and South American security forces in the 1970s and 1980s on “interrogation techniques” that described both physical and psychological torture, “parse the difference between ‘pain’ and ‘severe pain,’ and ‘psychological harm’ and ‘lasting psy-

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chological harm.’”38 The violent cutting of degrees of rights and the limits on habeas corpus continued into the twenty-first century, when “compromises” were reached between the US Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush over the “definition of torture,” the strategic redefinition of “unlawful enemy combatant,” and a resulting ban on habeas corpus petitions for those combatants.39 The debates over habeas corpus did not end with the change of political party in control of the White House: in 2009, Barack Obama’s Department of Justice sought to maintain the same extrajudicial status for Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan that the prison in Guantánamo, Cuba, had lost in cases decided by the Supreme Court.40 The parsed body of rights is fundamentally American, encompassing the entire continent and its strained and violent relations from north to south, from the rehearsal of neoliberalism under dictatorship through its achievement under Republican and Democratic administrations in the aughts. The cutting motion of Barrio’s non-literary fiction makes tangible that spliced and apportioned character of habeas corpus and of representational democracy in the context of neoliberalism. The cut pages and parsed violence of Livro de carne take the “body-tobody affair” deeper than any encounter with just a lump of meat by enacting an activity akin to reading. The caress that constitutes reading this book emphasizes intimacy, one that I argue is similar to the unique access that novels grant to their invented characters. The cuts that form and constitute the “first reading” foreground not just the horror of distinguishing between bad and worse torture but also the simultaneous complicity and involvement of all of us as “readers” when such modified violence becomes common parlance. As Pedrosa argued, the Livro de carne summons our most sordid cravings and deepest emotional connections; it elicits the sense of “blood brothers” in English, and carnal in Mexican and borderlands Spanish, a word that men call each another to articulate the bonds that join them in community.41 When we set aside habitual questions of the verisimilitude of fiction, its truth or lies in regard to real-world models or referents, we see that literary theorists from Antonio Candido to Dorrit Cohn underline fiction’s unique capacity to create intimacy. Candido notes that fiction makes accessible the interiority of characters, creating a closeness impossible in “real” human relationships.42 Cohn clarifies further that the penetration of the consciousness of characters in the novel creates “this phenomenal phenomenological ‘otherness’ of fiction.”43 Indeed, if the touch of Barrio’s Livro de carne enacts the intimate caress of hand on flesh, the smell of the rotten meat would certainly push the reader’s hand away. In contrast to documentary’s claims to truth in representation, which reestablish an objective distance between the viewer or reader and that

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object, the cutting intimacy of the book of meat grabs hold of the hand of its “reader.” As Eltit signaled, even autobiography risks vacating anew the subjectivity of the victim of torture, dissociating the viewer from that empty center. Livro de carne shows that the creation of the corpus of nonliterary fiction entails the suture as much as the cut. Even as the shock of reducing carne as flesh to carne as meat summons feelings of mortality and precarity, the touch that allows one to “read” the book draws all viewers into those deeply felt fears. The story it compels her to read cannot and will not represent violence; it cuts back, protesting the damage done by the relativizing of democracy and the dissection of degrees of torture even as it reveals her hand in the matter. The cut of Barrio’s compelling book has a special capacity to articulate a strong alternative not just to violence itself but to dissections of violence, and thus to create intimacy between readers and unknown others. That fictional closeness and the closeness of fiction are deeply political under the surveillance regimes that were installed under neoliberal dictatorships, which asked neighbors to inform on neighbors, and continue in neoliberal democracies as technologies of tracking citizenconsumers multiply. If Barrio’s Livro de carne enacts an intimacy as much like torture as fiction, the temporality constituted in the companion piece, Rodapés de carne, draws the viewer even further into fiction (fig. 4.3). Like Clark’s Caminhando, Rodapés is based in a set of instructions: just go to the neighborhood butcher to buy strips of meat, with which you line the baseboards of an enclosed space. More like a mass-produced book than a work of fine art, the viewer can reenact the operation. Inasmuch as it also relies on the decomposition that produced the “otherness” of fiction in Livro de carne, the two works are similarly ephemeral and repeatable. Rodapés, however, focused further on what Cristina Freire calls a “poetics of transformation.”44 Barrio’s instructions stated: “The place of exhibition/action must close its doors from the 10th of February until 5:00 pm on the 25th of March. Inside the exhibition a 200-watt bulb will remain on the whole time. This text must be stuck between the two doors, like a stamp, to stop them from opening. After March 25th, the ‘Meat Skirting Boards’ projects will be presented at ‘Garage 103’ in Nice, in the form of a book.”45 The gallery book is made into a time machine of sorts: the work hastens the decomposition of the meat with the high-wattage bulb and uses the enclosure of the gallery as another accelerant. Barrio materializes the hermeticism of the art world, and so demonstrates that its claims to protect the permanence of masterpieces is in fact a destructive force. Just the opposite of a science-fiction or utopian future, Rodapés accelerates decay, and the destruction—that rotting— constitutes the work itself.

Plate 1 Lourdes Grobet, Tigres, Zitlala, Guerrero (Tigers, Zitlala, Guerrero), 1981. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 2 Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square: Less and More, 1969. Oil on Masonite, 24 × 24 in. (60.9 × 60.9 cm). © 2022 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 3 Alejandro Puente, Trama, color y luz (Weft, Color, and Light), 1969. Graphite and acrylic on paper, 16⅞ × 25½ in. (42.86 × 64.77 cm). Photo: Arturo Sánchez. Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist, and Henrique Faria, New York.

Plate 4 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Byron, Lisa, and Emmitt (from The Garden of Delights), 1998. Archival pigment print. Triptych: 154.5 × 60.5 × 4.5 cm, each panel; overall: 154.5 × 192 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 5 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Color Field 5 (with Casta Painting), 2003. Formica panel with casta painting, De castiza y mestizo, morio . . . (Anonymous, Mexican school, eighteenth century). Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 6 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Guerrero Negro (Black Warrior), 2008. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 7 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Phantom Truck, 2007. Real scale reproduction of a mobile biological weapons lab. Installed at documenta 12, Kassel, 2007. Photo: Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty Images, and courtesy of the artist.

Plate 8 Cildo Meireles, Desvio para o vermelho: Impregnação; Entorno; Desvio (Deviation into Red: Impregnation; Surroundings; Deviation), 1967–1984. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Installation view: Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 2006. Photo: Pedro Motta © Cildo Meireles. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.

Plate 9 Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968. Photograph. 102 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the Nicolás García Uriburu Foundation.

Plate 10 Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968. Photograph. 70 × 103 cm. Courtesy of the Nicolás García Uriburu Foundation.

Plate 11 Chemi Rosado Seijo, El Cerro (The Hill), detail, 2003. From the series El Cerro, 2002–ongoing. Photo: Edwin Medina. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 12 Chemi Rosado Seijo, Carta de colores (Color Chart), 2012. From the series El Cerro, 2002–ongoing. Collage. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4.3 Artur Barrio, Rodapés de carne (Meat skirting boards), 1978–1979. Courtesy of the artist.

Barrio thus composes an experience of what literary theorists call the impossible temporality of fiction. Anatol Rosenfeld writes that only in fiction is it possible to state, “Amanhã era Natal” (tomorrow was Christmas); that is, only fictions can logically speak about the future in the past tense.46 The eternal present of a narrative voice can speak from a time in which the future was past, but that abuse of tenses would have to be resolved in both colloquial and historical speech or narration. I can say without contradiction “tomorrow is Christmas” or “yesterday was Christmas,” but the moment I say “tomorrow was Christmas,” I have initiated a fictive temporality. Barrio’s prospective rotten meat creates a similar temporal problem, a space of an accelerated past, without recourse to narrative. The attraction and

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repulsion of Barrio’s decomposing futures recalls Meireles’s rejection of narrative time, and his observation that as a result “you have to be seduced and involved in” the visual or plastic artwork.47 Rodapés and Livro de carne lure the viewer into a non-narrative but fictive time in an intimate and repellent encounter with everyday slices of meat. The Invented Body Many artists from the subsequent generation have continued Barrio’s use of organic materials, including meat and even human remains, and so continue to work with the corpus of non-literary fiction. The Mexican Teresa Margolles (b. 1963) is renowned for working, individually and with the collective SEMEFO—named after the Servicio Médico Forense (Forensic Medical Service)—with the corpses she encountered in her job at the central morgue in Mexico City beginning in the 1990s. Abraham Cruzvillegas also incorporated meat and other organic materials into his installations, emerging like Margolles in the context of Salinas de Gortari’s fraudulent election and the country’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement. Even as the work of these artists takes up the materiality and temporality of Barrio’s corpus, it is the work of the Argentine Amalia Pica that I turn to now, as it expands the quasi corpus into other materials and sensibilities and creates fictions that offer a politics of art under the expansion of neoliberalism. In Argentina, successive dictatorships combined economic, juridical, and social forms of violence with the disappearances that Feitlowitz described so powerfully. Early denationalization of publicly held entities began under the Onganía regime (1966–1970); that process increased under Jorge Rafael Videla (1976–1981) and his economic minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, who was also a member of the advisory board of Chase Manhattan Bank. They changed civil and commercial codes to permit foreign legal suits to be tried outside the Argentine judicial system, just one of many measures that paved the way for transnational corporations.48 Raised in a postdictatorship Argentina shaped by these juridical betrayals, Pica recalls that “the most important legal resource during that time for people who were looking for their loved ones was habeas corpus, which is the legal right to know where somebody’s body is.”49 Pica created a series of works that imagine a body that has survived the encounter that habeas both promises and threatens. Her sculptures and installations explore language, and specifically the word desaparecido, not as a euphemism but as a form of linguistic torture. As such, Pica’s work confronts the dilemma that began this chapter: how to materialize the figure in a demand for justice, and yet not re-present the

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bodies of the disappeared for identification by the state or profit by the very people who abused them. Fiction plays a central role in her resulting corpus. Pica’s work on the body emerged out of a broad investigation into how accepted truths and everyday concepts hide pernicious ideologies. For Hora cátedra (School Period, 2002), Pica projected yellow light onto the white Casa de la Independencia in Buenos Aires for forty minutes, the length of a school period. The work presented the historical building in the sepia tones that appeared in photographs in textbooks. Pica thus “corrected” the real house to match the fiction of national history produced by the school system. Expressing her disappointment that science-fiction writers only rarely “have tried to imagine a different world that is more abstract,” Pica asserts, “Only through making something into something different, through conscious ethical decisions, do we shape the world into something new and considered.”50 That shaping involves the production of a fiction—a yellow house—to correct everyday, ideological misrepresentations that enjoy the status of truth. Pica employed a similar strategy in a series of anthropomorphic sculptures made of misattributed features. If Barrio’s Livro de carne invented a fictive, booklike corpus out of the dead material of flesh and meat, her Catachresis series (2011–present) composes that corpus out of common turns of phrase. The works present “found objects that play with catachresis, or the application of terms that apply to things that don’t have their own word, for example the teeth of a comb, leg of a chair, tongue of a shoe or elbow of a pipe.”51 Pica further explains that “they are figures of speech that no longer trigger images and so no longer ‘figure.’”52 They operate as communication but avoid representation, and properly they belong neither to word, object, nor image. Inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives (1998), itself a fictive exploration of the relationship between the social histories of the 1970s and the 1990s, the Catachresis series was first shown at an exhibition curated by Abraham Cruzvillegas.53 The sculptures based on these failed linguistic tropes look like animate creatures, and the artist adds that she is interested in “the possibility that it is pure magic that these sculptures look like giraffes or elephants or people when they are just a bunch of things assembled together.”54 These invented bodies come to be through the misattribution of a word to another word (a tooth to a comb) and imagine bringing those inanimate objects to life. Yet the word catachresis signifies the “misuse” of language in ancient Greek and has even been translated as “abuse.”55 There is an underlying threat to these bodies, as beautiful and magical as they may appear. Catachresis #63 (tongues of the shoes, legs of the chair, legs of the table, teeth of the fork and arm of the chair) suggests the vulnerable position of a body reclined

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Figure 4.4 Amalia Pica, Catachresis #63 (tongues of the shoes, legs of the chair, legs of the table, teeth of the fork and arm of the chair), 2016. Sculpture, found materials. 100 × 78 × 103 cm (39.4 × 30.7 × 40.6 in.). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy of the artist and Herald St., London.

with legs apart and high heeled shoes, figured like a woman undergoing a gynecological exam (fig. 4.4). The sculpture echoes torture techniques directed against women and the Argentine military’s practice of stealing newborn infants from pregnant political prisoners for secret adoption by families friendly to the regime. The vulnerability of the body appears in

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Pica’s repeated use of certain catachrestic phrases for different sculptures, especially the “teeth of the saw” and “legs of a chair” and table. Catachresis #11 (teeth of the saw, leg of the table, elbow of the pipe), in the shape of a scythe, makes explicit the connection between these linguistic misassemblages and the cuts that shaped Barrio’s book of meat and added volume to Clark’s Caminhando (fig. 4.5). It is a figure composed out of implied instruments of torture, which cuts words from their meanings, slices speaker from

Figure 4.5 Amalia Pica, Catachresis #11 (teeth of the saw, leg of the table, elbow of the pipe), 2011. Sculpture, found materials. 100 × 78 × 103 cm (39.4 × 30.7 × 40.6 in.). Courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx, LA.

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listener, and injures the social function of language itself. Like the compelled stories that Eltit examined, these assembled figures present a corpus that seems partially enlivened and yet fearsomely vacated of subjectivity. It is a sculpture composed of those cuts, featuring a single, curved base of a rocking chair that cannot rock, and containing only legs and no arms to hold missing infants. Pica creates a fictive corpus of sculpture in those absences and negations, one that embodies the paradoxical harm of desaparecido as a euphemism and the demand for a body that the neologism constituted. Pica’s abused figures of speech configure once again the relative and partial distribution of rights as habeas corpus was reintroduced during the postdictatorship period in Argentina. Just prior to beginning the Catachresis series, the artist made Reconstruction of an Antenna (as Seen on TV) (2010), a sculpture inspired by the homemade television antenna made by a fan of the reality show Afghan Star (fig. 4.6). The singing competition for Afghan television premiered in 2005 and allowed fans to vote for their favorite competitor via cellular phone. Pica explains she was interested in the show because, “for many, this was the first time they were asked to express a preference in a public forum.”56 While this twenty-first-century war in South Asia seems far away from postdictatorial Argentina, Pica again inserted her work into a contest of fictions, after what appeared at the time to be the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban had made news in the West for banning musical instruments, and ethnomusicologist John Baily explains: “This was the era of broken music cassettes nailed to wooden posts and pyres of musical instruments destroyed in public. But clearly a good deal of clandestine musical activity was taking place.”57 Pica neither accepted the mediatic image of a country without music, nor dismissed the repressive regime’s impact on the cultural life of Afghan society. Her elevation of the ad hoc antenna to the status of sculpture in the art gallery evidences a deep admiration for the making do of its original authors, who had fashioned theirs out of the basic materials at hand. The sculpture functions as a monument to the antennas that made possible communication across the isolation of repressive regimes and beyond closed national borders, an experience much like the one the Argentine mail artist described in his letter to Ulises Carrión. However, that Pica selected an expression of preference so evidently staged within the fiction of reality television invites skepticism about the liberation of “voting” itself and about the West’s self-proclamation as the bearer of freedom by way of the expansion of representational democracy.58 Indeed, the battle for the right of habeas corpus continued after the fall of the Taliban, not within Afghanistan or in Argentina but in the United States. The lawsuits against the Bush and Obama administrations on behalf of prisoners from that war held in Guantánamo, Cuba, again staged the painful partition of rights and attempts to limit its application.

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Figure 4.6 Amalia Pica, Reconstruction of an Antenna (as Seen on TV), 2010. Found materials, metal, wood, wire, cable, cement. 243.8 × 162.6 × 104.1 cm (96 × 64 × 41 in.). Courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx, LA.

The Concept of the Corpus: Addressing the Living and the Dead Pica’s catachrestic sculptures and Barrio’s meat book do not evoke just human bodies. Their figures are not clearly human or animal, not fully alive or dead. They conjure a general, animate being and the horror of its disappearance and death. If Barrio’s Livro de carne constituted an intimate version of the encounter with dead flesh, the artist’s landmark series of interventions including “Situação T/T” (Situation T/T 1, 2 parts, 1970) and “Defl . . . . . .

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Situação . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Ruas . . . . . . . Abril . . . . . .” (Defl . . . . . . Situation . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Streets . . . . . . . April . . . . . ., 1970), introduced a broader social dimension of that confrontation with the dead (figs. 4.7 and 4.8). Enacted after the suspension of habeas corpus, the artist anonymously placed blood-soaked packages of nails, saliva, hair, urine, feces, bones, bread, newspaper, rope, and meat in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and along a small riverbank in Belo Horizonte. In these situations, which came to be known collectively as trouxas ensanguentadas, or “bloody bundles,” Barrio not only observed the reactions of passersby but also named the participation of five thousand people and even the policemen and firemen as part of

Figure 4.7 Artur Barrio, Situação T/T/, 1 (segunda parte) (Situation T/T 1, [Second Part]), 1970. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.8 Artur Barrio, Defl . . . . . . Situação . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Ruas . . . . . . . Abril. . . . . . (Defl . . . . . . Situation . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Streets . . . . . . . April . . . . . .), Rio de Janeiro, first half of April, 1970. Courtesy of the artist.

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the work.59 We still need a concept for those bodies at the horizon of life in order to fully grasp the imagined intimacy and impossible temporality of the corpus of non-literary fiction. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s influential writings help to articulate the concept of corpus in these artworks and to further define “concept” itself as it has been used in this study. As noted briefly in the introduction, before setting out on his first major ethnographic fieldwork, Viveiros de Castro collaborated and socialized with the first generation of Brazilian artists that has populated this study. Responding to a retrospective exhibition of his photographs curated by Eduardo Sterzi and Veronica Stigger, the anthropologist noted the relationship between his landmark contribution of “perspectivism,” its implicit relationship to visual arts, and what he described three decades later as thinking “meta-theoretically.”60 Sterzi emphasizes the connection between an “image-based reflection on the body” in his photographs and ethnography, and Viveiros de Castro himself explains, “The establishment of a dialogue between non-canonical regimes of corporeality that exist in indigenous worlds and those that were elaborated by Brazilian avant-garde art, especially by artists like Hélio Oiticica, had enormous importance in my intellectual formation on an extra-academic side.”61 Participation with this circle of artists constituted the body in ways that Viveiros de Castro would need later for his ethnographic research. Taking that mutual constitution of thought between the anthropologist and the Amerindian societies he studied seriously, in turn, helps to elaborate the idea of corpus as fiction here. It helps to speak about encounters between human and non-human persons, and to differentiate them from encounters between the living and the dead. It offers a concept for the equally longedfor and feared encounter with the desaparecidos made flesh, for living humans converted into potential corpses, and corpses transformed into people who might speak. Viveiros de Castro understands his photographs as an image world neither defined by an artistic practice nor representative of the indigenous communities in which he worked. Sterzi notes that he repeatedly denies that he is a photographer but rather has been involved in an activity that echoes the kind of not doing and not making that Francis Alÿs imagined. The images possess a “‘collective,’ transindividual unconscious . . . [that] organizes the invisible intermediate space.”62 That image space provided a kind of attention to the body during his early photographic practice with experimental artists and led to his flight away from the Brazil of its urban centers into the interior, away from the violence of the period of military dictatorship known as the “years of lead.” Viveiros de Castro notes that while many of the photographs of Oiticica were taken while Ivan Cardoso

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Figure 4.9 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Nildo vestindo um parangolé de Hélio Oiticica no Viaduto da Mangueira (Nildo on the Mangueira Viaduct wearing a parangolé by Hélio Oiticica), 1978. Still photograph taken on the set of the film H.O., directed by Ivan Cardoso, 1979. Courtesy of the artist.

filmed the artist and his collaborators for his avant-garde cinema, they “do not always reflect the actual frames and plans” (fig. 4.9); similarly, the photographs he took throughout his ethnographic travels were not part of the research but “taken in times when I paused.”63 Neither art film nor visual ethnography, his photographs create a particular image space that contains a bodily encounter with another knowing body. In the introductory chapter, we saw that Viveiros de Castro admitted that Amerindian “images of thought” were not visible from within his own world of concepts and were perceivable or sensible only through equivocation. More than different objects of study, or even ideas of radical alterity to the modern-colonial genealogy dominant in Brazil, the anthropologist insists that the outcome of this photographic encounter is only and importantly relational: it is never free of his (limited) capacity to engage and perceive those concepts, but that very relationality produces a significant change in anthropological and philosophical definitions of thought itself. The anthropologist ascribes that defining shift from “conception” to “concept” to his earliest research among the Araweté, people who live in the Igarapé Ipixuna basin along the Middle Xingu River, and where he took a great many of the photographs exhibited.64 That shift was possible thanks to his decision to do fieldwork among a Tupi-Guarani people rather than

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one of the Tupinamba groups favored by Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structuralist anthropology he helped found in Brazil in the late 1930s. Viveiros de Castro describes the Araweté as “little institutionalized and little ritualized,” a society in which casual humor and indifference to convention were the only conventions.65 The modes of life and thought of the Araweté required a capacity to imagine other means of developing, articulating, and engaging ideas. It needed an understanding of concept, which “implies an image of thought as something other than cognition or a system of representations . . . the ideas and problems of indigenous ‘reason,’ rather than indigenous categories of ‘understanding.’”66 With the Araweté, the anthropologist found himself among a people whose concepts were invisible to philosophies of representation. The encounter with Araweté reason was fundamental to Viveiros de Castro’s influential articulation of what we can now call a concept of perspectivism: “one single ‘culture,’ multiple ‘natures’—perspectivism is multinaturalist, for a perspective is not a representation.”67 His departure from the genealogy founded by structuralism may explain frequent misunderstandings of perspectivism, the too-common confusion between “perspective” and the visual metaphors that habitually accompany its critique of representation. Yet midway through the essay that introduced perspectivism, the anthropologist attatches a crucial adjective to the term—“somatic perspectivism”—to emphasize the concept of the body in its totality, not just the sense of sight. Amerindian concepts of body form the basis of a form of reason in which representation is not of primary concern: “A perspective is not a representation because representations are a property of the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body. . . . What I call ‘body’ is not a synonym for distinctive substance or fixed shape; it is an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus. Between the formal subjectivity of souls and the substantial materiality of organisms there is an intermediate plane which is occupied by the body as a bundle of affects and capacities and which is the origin of perspective.”68 Note that Viveiros de Castro describes perspectivism as “not a plurality of views on a single world, but a single view of different worlds.”69 The camera’s stubbornly monocular technology provides a bodily experience of that single view of perspectivism. That “view” is not just optical but also includes the bodily sense of standing, instrument in hand, holding his breath to not shake a single-lens reflex camera in unstable light conditions, measuring the space between self and entities to be pictured. The photographer’s body, on a break from work as an anthropologist, pauses in the presence of other ways of being. Decades later, Viveiros de Castro will precisely name the role that the image space of photography played in the emergence of perspectivism: “Let’s say that these

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photographs can be read as transformations, in the structuralist meaning of the term, of a perspective on perspective.”70 The camera does not offer him insight into the thought of the Araweté, nor did he turn the camera back on himself for a kind of avant-garde self-reflection in their presence. The anthropologist’s photographic habit creates an image space and a bodily encounter through somatic perspectivism, which establish the possibility of worlds organized through different concepts of the body. As noted briefly in in the introduction, in order to elaborate the somatic experience of perspectivism and the multiple worlds that lie beyond the visual horizon of representation, the Brazilian anthropologist turns to fiction. This does not mean that the knowledge of the Araweté and other Amazonian groups is fiction compared to the science of the West, or that his anthropological texts should be considered untrue or invented. It means that the multiple worlds that contain these concepts are conceivable only with the help of fiction and, in this anthropologist’s case, the non-literary fictions that photography can produce. The camera offered a somatic experience of the single view, in full knowledge that those multiple worlds exist but can be conceived of only as what both he and theorists of fiction call “possible worlds.” That philosophical concept, Lubomír Doležel explains, was taken up by literary theorists of fiction “not [as] imitations or representations of the actual world (realia) but sovereign realms of possibilia,” which were constituted by texts and free of any judgment of truth or falsehood.71 Narrative fiction as the invention of possible worlds, he argues, constitutes an autonomous textual sphere ontologically distinct from historical narrative. Again, the challenge faced here is to conceive of such possible worlds as Viveiros de Castro encountered them: not on the page but in and of the body. The anthropologist describes a fundamental distinction between Amerindian investigations into the character of the bodies of the European invaders, in contrast to colonial Europeans’ preoccupation with whether Indians possessed souls. He notes that Western thought imposes a differentiation between the bodies of humans and animals, bodies that many Amerindian societies group together as “persons.” Western thought perceives a continuity among the bodies of animals, but a continuity in spirit among sentient (human) beings. For the Amerindian groups he studied, the body is neither a mask nor a disguise of a fundamental nature lodged within, like a soul or spirit; nor is the body itself the essential substance of being. The body is a material in a constant process of self-invention: through the performance of character, as seen in many Amerindian creation stories about animal persons, and through the creation of relations of kinship and difference among human persons. Somatic perspectivism allows for the coexistence of these different worlds of bodies and persons, mostly imperceptible to one another.

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While many South American cosmologies sustain that shared personhood of humans and animals, in them the dead and the living are divided by what Viveiros de Castro calls a “bodily catastrophe”: “if animism affirms a subjective and social continuity between humans and animals, its somatic complement, perspectivism, establishes an objective discontinuity, equally social, between live humans and dead humans.”72 The bodies of the dead are Other to the living. If the anthropologist invited us to conceive of living animals as persons in bodies of other shapes, here we must conjure up an encounter between the dead and the living from both sides of that catastrophe. Viveiros de Castro may as well be describing Barrio’s bloody bundles. The artist secretly documented small groups of people as they paused to look at the bundles, capturing the “electric continuities” they sparked. As has been widely observed in the literature on this work, the very public suggestion of disappeared and tortured bodies—at a time when the military regime was hiding them from sight—caused shock and confusion for the individuals who encountered the bags in shared social spaces.73 The concept of the body that Viveiros de Castro describes, however, signals that there is more: the bundles imagined the terrible possibility that those gathered to stare at them joined a social world that included the dead. The anthropologist shapes that relationship of dead with the living as an addition to linguist Émile Benveniste’s grammar, and an ontological addition to Western epistemologies of relation. In this expanded syntax, the reflexive “I” of (European) culture and the impersonal “he” ascribed to nature must make space for a “you”: “the second person, or the other taken as other subject, whose point of view is the latent echo of that of the ‘I.’”74 As the dead stare at us, they address us in the second person: These encounters [with the dead] can be lethal for the interlocutor, who overpowered by the non-human subjectivity, passes over to its side, transforming himself into a being of the same species as the speaker: dead, spirit or animal. . . . He who responds to a “you” spoken by a non-human accepts the condition of being its “second person,” and when assuming in his turn the position of “I” does so already as a non-human. . . . Only shamans, multinatural beings by definition and office, are always capable of transiting the various perspectives, calling and being called “you” by the animal subjectivities and spirits without losing their condition as human subjects.75

Stigger provides a compelling analysis of another photograph that Viveiros de Castro took of Oiticica, in which the artist lies on the ground with a parangolé draped like a shroud mostly obscuring his face. She stresses the col-

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lectivity of the group of people pictured watching the scene, and even notes formal resonances in the framing of this image of a potential cadaver and his later photographs of Araweté shamans.76 Rather than consider Oiticica or Barrio as a shaman who can survive that encounter, I am interested in how the electric continuities of Barrio’s work thrust unsuspecting pedestrians into a possible world in which the bloody bundles regard them and address them as “you.” The question remains: Does Barrio’s work with flesh constitute that mythic space Viveiros de Castro describes, which “speaks of a state of being where bodies and names, souls and affects, the I and the Other interpenetrate”?77 Does the radical continuity with the dead imagine a society and subjects that can pass to and from across the different possible worlds? Or does it once again just subject the pedestrian captured by those electric continuities to the partial protections of habeas corpus? The cut is the only answer to those questions, for it creates the intimate relationship between meat and flesh and between living and dead, and is intensely fictive. The corpus of non-literary fiction attempts to, as Viveiros de Castro suggested earlier, “tak[e] indigenous ideas as concepts, and follow[] through on the consequences of such a decision.”78 Amerindian concepts of the body divert this story from a European genealogy that has its own history of understanding the text as a body but, as we have seen, erased other forms of books and knowledge, and cast certain bodies as soulless and subjectless. Until the fourteenth century, in English “corpus” referred both to a corpse and to a body, not differentiating between the living and the dead or the human and the animal. By the eighteenth century, though, when Ephraim Chambers defined a “corpus” as a body of intellectual work that constituted a coherent set of ideas and laid the ground for scholarly expertise, the difference between the living and dead corpus had been firmly established.79 Counter to the Christian theological tradition as much as to the scientific discourse of the eighteenth century, then, these artworks require a concept of corpus that is not the word made flesh, or a mystical body, or the resurrected body.80 Note that the intimacy with the dead created by Barrio and Pica—the caress of the book of flesh, a gathering together in the street, an assemblage out of everyday objects and language—does not repeat any of the mythic structures or fears of the living dead that pervade colonial and postcolonial societies. The bloody bundles are not zombies, those roving bodies of the soulless dead that Europeans imagined stalking the slave societies of the Caribbean. Nor are they ghosts, immaterial spirits that haunt homes and cemeteries. Barrio’s bloody bundles defy what Ranjana Khanna identifies in Freud as the impossibility for the modern, living subject to properly imagine her own death, since even that imagination retains her vital presence as an observer.81 The corpus of non-literary fiction draws the

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dead close—they call out to us, address us—and so provides an intimacy run through with the risk of violence. That body of knowledge, like Hartman’s intense fictions of African American history, may be sliced and partial but nevertheless is material and sensual. This corpus offers an alternative to the violent imposition of desaparecido, that word invented for bodies that were neither dead nor alive. The fictive encounters with these bodies are horrible and even dangerous, but at least they are not euphemisms. These non-literary fictions contrast sharply with the documentarian impulse in literature and art, which has sought to reproduce tactics used by the political movement of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. The mothers famously used state identification photographs of their disappeared children to demand their return, a demand that engaged habeas corpus within the regime of representation and that sadly still subjected them to the power of the state. Recall that the partiality, cutting, slicing nature of habeas corpus was founded in its exclusion of Black and indigenous bodies from those “modern” rights. These fictions have shown that any demand grounded exclusively in habeas corpus can never make a claim for all the disappeared peoples of the Americas, neither those thrown out of airplanes by the military dictatorship nor those thrown out of ships during the Middle Passage. Unlike the photographs of the desaparecidos, Barrio’s blurred and anonymous photographs of the bloody bundles do not re-present or restore the lost bodies. The photographs show the bundles as agents that interrupt the everyday passage of the living people through the city. They are a trace of an operation that appears to have summoned viewers to socialize with the dead. In creating that encounter, Barrio embraced the power of saying “you”—among the dead and the living—within a neoliberal society in which “I” is the preferred pronoun. The resulting “electric continuities” sparked intimacy, if only for a fictive duration like that produced by accelerated decomposition in Rodapés de carne. The fictive corpus, however, does not resolve the paradox of desaparecido, correct the lies told under torture, or represent the missing. The possible worlds invented by this corpus sustain continuity across diverse persons with bodies and discontinuous points of view, an equivocal encounter that Barrio stages as a kind of fictive address from the incomprehensible and electric other side of bodily perspective. The anthropologist Michael Taussig mulls over the persistent and brutal incoherence of these forms of colonial violence across the Americas: “Defended as a means to elicit information, torture depends on the beyond of language. To get people to talk, the unsayable is brought to bear, an unsayable that currently exhibits a curious connection to color. What this connection with color means, what this implies for our understanding of torture and our ability to confront its

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unspeakability, I do not know.”82 Like Pica’s catachrestic sculptures, that phrase—“to bring to bear”—articulates the painful transfer from the realm of language onto the body. Artist and theorist test the limits of the relationship between figure of speech and bodily figure. Even as he proclaims ignorance about that connection, Taussig signals that to answer Saidiya Hartman’s demand to address the unsayable through fiction, it is necessary to picture that painful figuration in and as color. That is the topic of the next and final chapter.

* Chapter five *

Color: Taken In by Realism

A cor aqui . . . vivenciada Color here . . . lived H é l io Oi t ic ic a , “S obr e o P roj e t o C ã e s de C aç a” (A b ou t  t h e H u n t i n g D o g s P roj e c t), 19 61

At last it is possible to return to the fundamental question posed at the outset about the tenacity with which realist novels continue to hold onto the concept of fiction. After years of talking about fiction in the visual arts with scholars, students, and everyday readers and art viewers, and of studying old and new theories of fiction, I have come to accept that it remains entrenched in expectations of the novel. The nineteenth-century genre still holds sway, inextricably tethering it to attributes of realism and the emergence of modern capitalism. The previous chapters delineated modes of making (up) fictions in contemporary art of the Americas that worked free of the ordering function that narrative—even the most experimental narrative—enacts. What remains to be examined is the status of the powerful relationship between fiction and the novel’s realism once it is similarly dissociated from narrative and what that means for the political promise of non-literary fiction. Rather than argue against that habitual association of fiction with the realist novel to identify fiction in visual arts, this chapter sets out how nonliterary fictions invent the sense of verisimilitude they share. Verisimilitude is the very powerful sensation that has been called fiction’s “as if.”1 It is the illusion that paradoxically makes literary realism seem real, even as readers do not confuse the novel or short story with documentary or historical texts. Raúl Antelo named the “f(r)icciones” of contemporary Latin American art

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as a system grounded in verisimilitude rather than verification. Gabriel Pérez Barreiro’s earlier description of Caldas’s Velázquez book helps to more precisely identify verisimilitude amid broader and more familiar concepts in visual art such as mimetic representation and figuration. He writes that when Caldas reproduces photographic reproductions of Velázquez’s paintings: “plates that traditionally seem so real are fictions because of their verisimilitude.”2 The contemporary artist transforms the baroque painter’s precise mimesis into an observable effect of verisimilitude. This difficult-to-parse difference—between figurative realism and an observable realist effect— helps to identify the profound challenge that this central component of literary fiction presents to visual art. Realist literature produces the effect of verisimilitude via sumptuous, ekphrastic description, and as I detail in this chapter, color dominates those depictions. Because those literary “images” are created and appreciated absent a concrete image or object, color in novels need not differ in tone, hue, or intensity from visible colors, in order to maintain verisimilitude’s defining tension between imaginary and real, its “as if.” The evident distinction between fictional, textual description and extant, optical color threatens to disappear, however, in the plastic arts. Recall that Caldas blurred the photographic image slightly to differentiate his realist fiction from Velázquez’s mimesis. Against the death and violence of the corpus, in this chapter artists work with enlivened color to constitute an effect of verisimilitude in visual fictions. The sources for the concepts of that lifelike color again are artists’ writings, Amerindian thought, and strategies of making do. Brazilian artists of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s continue to guide this study: Hélio Oiticica pursued the liveliness of color throughout his short life, and Cildo Meireles immersed viewers in color such that it became an animated rather than inert substance. Latinx artists of the following generation, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. 1961) and Chemi Rosado Seijo, continued that pursuit of the liveliness of color even as they reveal the vulnerability that life imbues. Recall that Meireles warned in 1977 that the vitality of art suffered more in an uncontrolled free market than under military repression, and he observed affinities among artists across the American continent as they sought to make work within increasingly neoliberal societies. Like Jaar’s Logo for America, which brought Andean and Caribbean negation to the heart of neoliberalism, here Latinx artists working in US territories reveal the political promise and the risks of animate color. In their enlivened color, these non-literary fictions are at odds with Lambert-Beatty’s parafictions described in the introduction, which frame fiction in visual art as works that trick the viewer with a “‘gotcha’ moment of being fooled.” Even her later reformulation describes “the embarrassing, slightly furtive nature of

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parafictional spectatorship . . . it is humiliating.”3 While Lambert-Beatty briefly considers the possibility of dignifying that position, the predominantly punishing and ironic attitude to the viewer is as different from nonliterary fiction as Boal’s gesture of commonality was from Brecht’s distancing Gest. In parafiction, the viewer is taken in and duped. The enlivened color that creates the verisimilitude of non-literary fiction instead invents the possibility of taking her in and sheltering her. Realist Fiction More than a century since avant-garde literary experiments with narrative form pretended to break permanently with the illusion of coherence offered by the novel, it may seem anachronistic to think about realist fiction. Nonetheless, for Bill Brown, “One of the great mysteries of literary history (literary history tout court) is why, almost three hundred years later, most novels still assume this burden of rendering the force and feel of the material and phenomenal world.”4 That great mystery engenders another: the realist novel becomes a stand-in for fiction as a whole, the primary example in theories of fiction and considered applicable to short and long form texts, as well as visual artworks. Perhaps the primary reason for this openness is that literary theorists of fiction long have connected verisimilitude, visuality, and the politics of fiction. Foundational scholarship by Peter Brooks grounds an overarching theory of fiction as verisimilitude in the privilege awarded to sight above other senses in realist literature. He writes that “‘realist’ art and literature” create a reduced, miniature scale of the world that encourages an activity of making up that he likens to children’s play.5 That experience is produced by the inclusion of an excess of descriptive details, particularly of those things that clutter modern life. Ordinary objects register the banality and ugliness of daily life, shape the characters that fill these miniature worlds, and crucially drive their plot more than events do. Brooks calls novelistic verisimilitude: “thing-ism . . . in the context of the world looked at.”6 Description drives the plot of realist novels through painterly language, and the canonical works he examines employ color extensively to picture imaginary scenes and construct symbolic worlds. Brooks compares Gustave Flaubert’s invention of Emma in Madame Bovary (1856) to the prodigious details in Édouard Manet’s painting Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882), in which the canvas and the mirror it represents multiply ornate pictorial pleasures. Rancière’s more recent reflections continue to foreground the visual force of Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimental (1869) as the starting point for what he calls the “democracy of modern fiction.” He details complaints of

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nineteenth-century critics about these novels as mere series of tableaux, their rejection of the “blended fabric of perceptions and thoughts, or sensations and acts,” and the resulting “indistinction” of class hierarchies.7 Both Brooks and Rancière, however, collapse the (modern) thing and the image of it, perhaps because in literature both are accessed via textual description. That indistinction appears again as Brooks extends realist verisimilitude to include the presentation of quotidian objects in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, as if they were images of the same character as oil paintings.8 Surprisingly, literary critics have paid relatively little attention to how color appears, even as they assert the fundamental role of visuality in textual verisimilitude.9 When they address color, it remains attached to the objects in the way that color adheres to objects in the real world—a green tree or a blue sky—and thus retain a descriptive grammar of color. Yet the same works to which literary studies has so frequently recurred for its theories of fiction invite a freer imagination of color, one in which the thing and its color are proximate but not identical. Note the imagery and the grammar of the closing passage of Flaubert’s short story “Un coeur simple”: “This mass of dazzling colors descended in a sloping line from the table to the carpet, trailing on the paving-stones; and rare objects drew the eye. A gilt sugar bowl had a crown of violets, earrings in Alencon quartz gleamed in the moss, two Chinese screens displayed their landscapes. Loulou [the parrot], hidden under the roses, only showed his blue front like a sheet of lapis-lazuli. . . . An azure vapor rose into Felicity’s room. She distended her nostrils, scenting it with a mystic sensuality: then she shut her eyes.”10 Colors pervade the description but often are grammatically and visually detached from the objects they modify. An undefined collection of colors dazzles without any concrete referent. “Violet” names the color itself and the flowers it describes. The French phrase sucrier de vermeil includes the word vermeil (red) but names a silver sugar bowl. A pervasive blue floats between nebulous air, a bird’s bright chest, and the hard surface of a polished stone. These wandering chromatic details play a crucial role in the verisimilitude of Flaubert’s famous story—its realism rather than its documentary reality—and offer insight into how color in visual arts also can be perceived as verisimilar rather than real. Flaubert’s blues and reds help to envision how artists pry color away from its referent even as they emphasize its materiality and why the result of that process must be understood as a type of realist fiction. Artists belonging to both generations examined here used saturated palettes, the monochrome, and color theory to constitute color as a verisimilar effect: they are neither a document of the real nor pure abstraction. It is as if the artists subjected color to a second-order passage through a prism, one that

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does not just split white light into the individual colors of the spectrum but also expands the singularity of each color as a subject in its own right. These second-order colors are inserted into our sense of the real as particular sorts of new objects: color is an entity or “thing” that enjoys an enlivened sensibility.11 That sense of “color” persists in current English usage of the word as a verb, “to color,” which includes “to enliven” as a synonym. Amerindian knowledge about the material of color provides more than just inspiration for the artists that follow; it contains the concepts needed here to understand non-literary fiction’s verisimilitude in these things. As Jessica L. Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo eloquently assert, indigenous concepts of enlivened materiality and non-human agency—here specifically the life of color—belie the truth of the claims of novelty of the “new materialisms” of critical theory.12 The expansive power of color in Mesoamerican and Andean textiles, objects, and painting, offers a theoretical vocabulary about materiality, and a set of practices that help to articulate how non-literary fictions transform the colors we see from image to object and finally into enlivened being. Careful attention to these concepts contests the Eurocentrism of critical theory and contemporary art and registers the history of violence embedded in them, even as it accrues yet more debt to the peoples who invented them. Enlivened and enlivening color—alongside and yet not identical to everyday colors—create the verisimilitude of non-literary fiction. The enduring presence of realism as fiction is a crucial component of well-recognized returns to figuration that swept across visual art in the 1960s and 1970s: pop art and new figuration reexamined the image, and new objectivity reassessed the object specifically as the kind of “thing” that Brooks described above.13 In 1965, the Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro published “Realism: Muse of Vengeance and Sadness,” calling these investigations into object and image an original phenomenon that required a fundamentally new form of critique. Cordeiro explicitly grounds his work within a genealogy of realisms, and lists pop, nouveau realisme, and his own “Popcretos,” one of which illustrated the essay (fig. 5.1). The photograph of “Uma cadeira é uma cadeira” (A Chair Is a Chair, 1964) shows a chair cut in half vertically and attached to a wooden plank and a mirror. Within the realism of the new object, Cordeiro writes, “emerges therefore a new idea of thingness [coisicidade].”14 The title of the work engages the redundancy of Joseph Kosuth’s better-known “One and Three Chairs” (1965). Made one year after Cordeiro’s, Kosuth’s work included a painted dictionary definition, a photograph of a chair, and a chair on the floor. Cordeiro had published an earlier essay in the journal Invenção in which he explains the relationship between the object and the definition: “The object (ready-made) is

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Figure 5.1 Waldemar Cordeiro, Uma cadeira é uma cadeira (A Chair Is a Chair), 1964 (destroyed). Chair on wood with mirror and collage. 80 × 110 cm. Courtesy of Analívia Cordeiro.

constructed and constructs a space that is no longer a physical space. The disintegration of the space of the physical object is also the semantic disintegration, destruction of conventions, and in another parameter, a semantic construction, the construction of a new meaning.”15 The thingness of the cut chair, paired with a mirror that reflected its missing half, produces a verisimilar realism: it provides the effect of a chair even as it includes an actual chair. Oiticica’s landmark exhibition and text just three years later, “General

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Schema of the New Objectivity” (1967), emphasized the objecthood at the heart of these new realisms and referenced Cordeiro’s Popcretos directly. As we will see, Oiticica’s lifelong and influential focus on color is crucial to comprehend this “thingness,” how it comes to life in color, and how the two create the verisimilitude of non-literary, realist fictions. Pause—Red Red must drive this chapter. The current edition of the Real Academia Española’s dictionary bears out the centrality of red for any broad discussion of color. The dictionary lists four definitions of colorado/a, or “colored.”16 The first definition is an adjective, rojo (red). To be colored means to be red. The state of Colorado in the western United States bears this name because of its arid landscape. Red paints the American continent that has been a privileged site for the invention of non-literary fictions as it endured the rehearsal and achievement of the neoliberal experiment. The second definition emphasizes the separation between the adjectival and nominal: “Dicho de una cosa” (said of a thing). This definition establishes the color red as an entity distinct from the object that bears it. That definition continues with a modification: the color of that red thing “se funda en alguna apariencia de razón o de justicia” (is founded in some appearance of reason or justice). The founding concept of color therefore connects to the legal, the political, and the philosophical. The third definition, attributed to the Dominican Republic, is “tostado por el sol” (toasted by the sun). While the dictionary remains silent as to what is toasted, even before the violent imposition of Spanish in the Caribbean, colorado carried with it the European body, burned red under a strong sun as early as La Celestina (1490).17 The fleshy and vulnerable body that was the subject of the previous chapter reappears as enlivened color in the pages to come. Viveiros de Castro marvels at the power of red among the Araweté. In reflecting on his years of visits with the group, he recalls: Red is everywhere. Red obtained from the annatto (from the deep red of the fresh annatto to the yellowish brown of the paint faded by use) applied to bodies, objects, traditional feminine clothing. Red is used to mark everything that is Araweté. It is the color that earned them their name among the Xikrin, their neighboring linguistic group, as kuben-kamrek-ti, meaning “very red enemies.” The first time the Araweté asked me to show them a color photo I had brought them from an earlier trip, instead of the [black-and-white] series I was showing them, they said, “We want to see a red photo.” Red—the color of color, set against a background composed of

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the green of the forest, the white of dry straw, the gray-brown of clay and earth, the black of water and stones of the Ipixuna River.18

Red is crucial to their ongoing survival, what he prefers to call “reexisting,” in the face of the violence of the Brazilian state and the ecological disaster it continues to impose on Amerindian lands and peoples. In fact, the fourth and final definition of the Real Academia, generally out of use but still present in certain expressions, defines colorado not as red but as green. The same word occupies opposite positions on the color wheel, and both chromatic extremes connote carnal desire. The red of passion and shame meets the description of a dirty old man as a viejo verde (literally, “green old man”).19 The capacity of colorado to span internal oppositions culminates in the concluding section of this chapter and the book, in which the red claimed by utopian avant-gardes is transformed into the green of environmental art. In the realist, non-literary fictions that follow, viewers are enveloped in enlivened colors that include the blood of bodies and encompass the breath of the natural world. Inventing Enlivened Color Mari Carmen Ramírez’s exhibition and catalog Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (2007) set out the fundamental contributions of the Brazilian artist’s conceptualization of color. She traced his trajectory from the painted monochrome to ambient installation and performance, from concretism to neo-concretism, and into collective actions. For our concerns here, it is a trajectory that reveals color as crucial to the new realist image-objects of contemporary art. Ramírez offers a concise summary of that arc: “From the very beginning, Hélio considered color to be a fully autonomous system that had remained far too long subordinated to the pictorial support. As such, color had its own spatial and temporal dimension that could only be appreciated when released from the plane. Liberated into space, color took on a ‘body.’”20 Ramírez asserts that Oiticica’s investigations into color were “close indeed to the end of representation.”21 Although this phrase—“the end of representation”—has been a leitmotif throughout this book, color presents new challenges to understanding that abandonment: it is equally difficult to envision color devoid of metaphor and other tropic operations as it is to describe color free of the object to which it adheres. As the scholarship on Oiticica is broad and deep, I focus exclusively on how the relationship he develops between color and invention adds to the verisimilitude of color. Two concepts were fundamental to his reconstitution of color: invenção, echoing the concrete poets, and vivência, which signifies lived experience.22

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Oiticica’s evolving understanding of color rejected standardized perceptual systems of color and the universality of color and offers new life to the sense of “local color,” an important subgenre of realist literature. Through color, I argue, he envisioned how non-objectualism produced verisimilitude beyond the pictorial frame, and so reveals how to inhabit enlivened color as a fictive invention. Oiticica’s early series Invenções (Inventions, 1959–1962), titled in numerical order, is dominated by variations on red. Composed of thirty-inchsquare wood fiberboard painted with resin and oil mixtures, these works perform what Oiticica later called the “arrival at a single color.”23 Irene Small emphasizes that in this first stage, invention referred to the material of color, to the physical properties of the pigments (distinct from paint) that he made in his studio, as well as the “phenomenological intensity of color.”24 Her detailed research into Oiticica’s attention to that material emphasizes the facture, the making, of color: working on Inventions, Oiticica struggled against the habit of “the color ‘of ’ something and ‘for’ some aim.”25 Ramírez similarly understands his early decision to use the word “invention” as a technical process related to scientific experimentation with pigments and minerals. As we saw in chapter 1, there was more to that word within the Brazilian artistic and literary world of the time. Celso Favaretto stresses the artist’s own understanding of the path from the early Invenções (in the plural) to his 1978 series Invenção da cor (Invention of Color—in the singular). Favaretto identifies the trajectory as the transformation of color into its own, lifelike material, which is a non-object.26 In 1970, Oiticica reflected on the Inventions as the first step in the path, in which “everything that before was background, or also support for the act and the structure of the painting, transforms into a living element. Color wants to manifest itself integral and absolute.”27 In my terms, he sought to liberate color from its secondary grammatical status as description of a substance in order to fabricate an independent and enlivened material. In the early 1960s, Oiticica began to conceive of an enlivened experience of color as a mode of invention that projected what he called “color-time” onto real space, fantasy into the material of life.28 Color-time was a “nãotempo” (non-time), an “organic” temporality of the making or fabrication of the work, which embeds it in lived experience. “Vivenciada,” the work takes off. Not the dreary day-to-day of experience, Oiticica presented that experience of life by way of a fantastic image: “it is as if man were to put on wings and fly.”29 He related invention to the transformation of the world outside the artwork: “to give time, an aesthetic lived experience [vivência estética], to a real space, thus approaching [the invention of] magic, such is its vital character.”30 Color’s intense livedness is simultaneously organic,

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fabricated, and otherworldly. The invention that color made possible was part and parcel of the non-object’s rupture of the frame, although it took some time for that lifelike color to fully realize its potential. In the last years of his life, after decades of work with living color, Oiticica arrived at that singular concept in Invenção da cor. Enlivened, autonomous color entered real space as a magical invention. Oiticica’s enlivened experiential color emerged in the context of a rich continental discussion about color theory, which intersected with but was not constrained by mainstream modernist concepts of abstraction. The touring exhibition of Josef Albers’s canonical Homage to the Square in 1964, sponsored by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, placed the material, optical, and relational operations of color at the center of the politicized sphere of hemispheric art criticism (see plate 2).31 The tour included thirty-six paintings selected by Kynaston McShine and launched on March 8, 1964, in Caracas; it traveled to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, among other cities, and culminated in Mexico City later that year.32 Albers had been shown in Brazil in the fourth São Paulo Biennial in 1957 and would be again in its tenth edition in 1969.33 During the years Oiticica worked on Invenções and soon thereafter (1961 and 1963), he occasionally wrote about Albers: his use of borderlines surrounding color and his reference to the square of the painting’s frame.34 Like the Bauhaus teacher, Oiticica wished “to bestow a sense of light upon pigmentary color, in itself material and opaque” to create a bridge between optical and material considerations of color.35 Still the foundation of art instruction on color internationally, Albers’s pedagogy emphasized the relationality of color. Oiticica, however, felt that Albers’s squares overemphasized the optical aspect of that relation. Yet it was not only the Homage to the Square series that traveled across the continent. Josef and Anni Albers made fourteen trips to Mexico alone, beginning in 1935, and to Chile, Cuba, and Peru, where Josef taught during extended residencies. Their study of contemporary Amerindian art practices and preconquest art and architecture only recently has achieved broader scholarly attention. While the Museum of Modern Art catalog for the tour describes Albers’s influence on Latin America, the profound impact of these epistemologies, ontologies, and aesthetics on his understanding of the operation of color was apparent to his Latin American colleagues at the time.36 The year after the publication of The Interaction of Color (1963), and following the exhibition’s stop in Peru, the critic Juan Acha wrote a complex review: Color is a difficult, if not impossible, element to specify. It inherently carries an entire whirlwind of spiritual resonances. It is especially difficult in the

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face of a work of a classical spirit that places an intellectual and constructivist intent on color. . . . In all, what is the spiritual tenor of Albers’ chromatic accords? As a first intention, the artistic world of Tiahuanaco comes to mind, where color is also intellectual, symbolic, and constructivist. It doesn’t surprise us, in our ancient art—as [Johannes] Itten, color theorist, has noted—human multiplicity and complexity is also given. Paracas employs color in its expressive and emotive dimension, and Chimú in its impressionist or sensorial. If we hang 30 Tiahuanacan cloths in these two galleries we will have the same effect of repetition, of monotony, that is attributed to Albers.37

Looking at the paintings through Acha’s eyes, Albers’s saturated red squares echo the chromatic scheme of woven cloths from Paracas and across the Andes, as well as ponchos still worn today in the region.38 Golden mustard yellow and deep purply brown echo weavings from coastal Chimú (inhabited 900–1430), and forest-green variants resemble archaeological finds from Tiahuanaco (now Tiwanaku, inhabited 650–1100). While expressing frustration with his degree of rationalism and formalism, Acha admits that the German émigré includes the concept of a “reaction to life” in his colors. He cites Albers, translating from German into Spanish: “to see implies a Weltanschauung (worldview) and is united with fantasy, with imagination.”39 The Peruvian critic describes this play of colors as “los imprevistos de la imaginación” (the surprises of the imagination) and argues that they are much more important for the Latin American eye. We can say, then, that Acha reads Albers through the lens of the Amerindian color theory and practice that deeply influenced him and as a form of critical thought about contemporary art. Albers seen through Acha proffers a color theory that emphasizes optics and haptics, and considers the visual field open to all kinds of imaginative possibilities. Intellect, spirit, and imagination converge in the chromatic expression of the entire continent. These Amerindian aesthetic philosophies in mind, Acha stresses Albers’s “colorist dialectic,” which establishes the balance and independence of colors, and most of all the activity of color. Albers’s iconic squares are not forms but create an activity of ordering “chromatic intersections.” Albers described his experiments with “the plastic action of color” in 1951, a premise that emerged in Variant / Adobe’s (1947) references to vernacular Mexican architecture, in To Monte Albán’s inspiration in Oaxacan weaving, and was a founding concept of Homage to the Square.40 That action of color almost becomes embodied, as Albers elaborates: “I prefer to think of the square as a stage on which colors play as actors influencing each other—a visual excitement called interaction.”41 Colors are lively protagonists of a drama, and they change their visual values through imaginative dialogical

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encounters with other colors as much as with the art viewer. Color takes over the dynamic power of line, and chromatic actors constitute shapes of their own volition. To fully understand how color acts as this sort of enlivened protagonist in non-literary fiction, it is necessary to expand upon several concepts of color found in the artistic philosophies that Acha cites and that influenced many American artists of this generation as much as Albers. Oiticica was far from alone in his focus on the materiality of color— its thingness—as a form of vitality rather than as the modification of an object, and many other artists bridged painterly abstraction with non-object art and emerging conceptual practices. The Argentine Alejandro Puente offers a prime example of the influence of Amerindian concepts of color on the convergence of abstraction and conceptualism, which produced an understanding of the substance of enlivened color. Trama, color y luz (Weft, Color, and Light, 1969) attends to color as the kind of lively encounter Albers described (see plate 3).42 The titular trama means both “plot” and “weft” in Spanish, and is the third-person singular of the verb tramar (to weave). The work enlivens color through its implication of a drama of some kind, and its reference to Amerindian weaving practices and concepts of color. Like his friend and fellow Argentine exile César Paternosto, Puente emphasized the preconquest history of abstraction in the Americas as a major influence, and his trip to New York City in 1967 presented key opportunities to reflect upon that Americanity. First, Puente discovered a dominant form of modernist art criticism dominated by Clement Greenberg, which he described as “formalist, direct, chauvinist.”43 Second, he encountered the emerging New York group of conceptualists, including Lucy Lippard and curator Kynaston McShine, who had selected the Albers works for the traveling Homage to the Square and eventually included Puente in the historic Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.44 Finally, and most strongly, Puente found a “legitimation” of abstraction grounded in his own new recognition of Amerindian formal strategies of “two dimensionality and horizontality” as an autochthonous and autonomous genealogy of modernism to that traced by Greenberg.45 He recognized symbolic language from Amerindian art in his own, and saturated colors similar not just in appearance but in liveliness to Andean ponchos and blankets. Puente’s work over the following decades continued to explore Amerindian material cultures and the concepts they articulate, from Quipu (1971) to work based on feather art (arte plumario) in the 1980s. The key work of color for Puente, therefore, was not abstraction in its difference from figuration or as a measure of avant-garde innovation but as a means to embrace the materiality of an American mode of invention in color.

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While still burdened with colonial language of old and new worlds, and discovery rather than conquest, Puente’s narrative identifies rather than erases Amerindian philosophies of matter and highlights their relevance to contemporary art. He explains: “Matter and meaning fused. Stone is not only stone, idea and meaning transform into it. A logic of forms, volumes, lines and colors. A conception of space and time, different from Europe’s.”46 The concept of stone as the materialization of idea and sensibility draws on the vitality of matter in Inkan thought and offers a crucial source for what, with Oiticica, I have been calling the liveliness of color. Carolyn Dean emphasizes “the potential animacy of rock” among the Inka, in carved and also untouched stone, in architecture, engineering, and craftsmanship, and also in the unshaped landscape they inhabited.47 These stones do not represent; they make present missing bodies and memories. They enliven that which is absent. In Quechua, these stones are called huaca: entities in which “humans encountered and interacted with powerful numina.”48 That some of these huacas were simply the mountain itself, rather than carved as sculpture, was terrifying to the Spanish, for it frustrated their desire to either destroy them or replace them with a Catholic sacred site. Much as Puente explored in his work with color, Dean explains, “from an Inka perspective, what the eye perceives (a thing’s surface appearance) was important, but nearly always less significant than what the mind conceives (a thing’s substance or essence). As a corollary, process—an emphasis on working with the substance of a thing—was often valued over the end product, its ‘finished’ appearance. For the Inka, sacredness was embedded in the material of the thing rather than in its form.”49 Color itself is one such sacred, enlivened material or site, a huaca that could be worked or untouched, shaped or found. Gabriela Siracusano’s detailed study of color in the Andean world sets out the range and power of this material, and as does Dean, she emphasizes the liveliness of materials considered inanimate in Western philosophies. Siracusano explains that well into the colonial period, “color functioned as a vital category in the construction of a world in which the power of the sacred was not beyond the object represented, but lay within the object itself . . . the link between polychromy, sacrality and power is almost inescapable.”50 Color penetrated all life and was enlivened itself; in medicines, ritual, and everyday matter, color was both curative and destructive. Siracusano describes the omnipresence of color “as a mediating chromatic presence for seeing (as in the colors of natural phenomena), or as a participant in the form of objects to be worn . . . [as] a structuring element in the fabric of the relationship between human bodies and beliefs in Andean societies.”51 Color mediated the entire social world of the Andes through the animacy of the stones, fauna, and flora that provided its substance.

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Returning now to Oiticica’s trajectory toward a singular Invenção da cor, we can see it took place in the context of these investigations into color theory, in and beyond European aesthetics. Oiticica would have been aware of diverse source materials for color. He was educated by his mother and his grandfather, José Oiticica, an anarchist and philologist who published a long comparative study of the methods of studying Amerindian languages for the Museu Nacional in 1933. Between 1961 and 1964, Oiticica worked at the same museum with his father, a leading entomologist. That museum, affiliated with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, held some of the world’s most important collections of natural history and anthropology, combining the two in ways that problematically collapsed Amerindian peoples and “the natural,” and subjected them to Enlightenment impulses of collection and categorization. Beatriz Scigliano Carneiro provides a specific link between José Oiticica Filho’s entomological research and Oiticica’s concept of invention, citing the younger artist’s description of his father’s work: “of the interior necessity to discover new worlds, new realities of the marvelous world of insects.”52 Those new worlds were, certainly for Oiticica’s grandfather, connected with extensive research on Amerindian languages and cultures, which he proposed was crucial for (South) America more broadly.53 Scigliano Carneiro explains that the youngest Oiticica’s concept of invention drew upon the materialism of the scientific inquiry he encountered in the Museu Nacional, even as he abandoned its empiricism. Those foundations ground Oiticica’s continued investigation of color in the series of bólides (1963–1967), comprised of painted wooden boxes and glass jars, some filled with organic materials of a specific color including pigment, gravel, shells, and charcoal. The objects invited manipulation by the viewer, and for the artist the haptic and the optical experiences of color in them were the opening to what he called “pure productive imagination in action.”54 He incorporated sand and crushed brick into the pigment and oil of his handmade paint, such that rock joins rock in its elemental and worked state. In B7 bólide vidro 1 (1963), a glass jar of vermilion pigment inside a larger jar filled with smashed brick or red earth, for the first time Oiticica used what Small calls “pigment unbound from paint”: raw pigment containing iron-oxide pigments became sculpture instead of painting (fig. 5.2).55 Here, as Siracusano describes in Andean thought, “pigments were rather more than mere powders ground in a mortar.”56 The vermilion pigment and red earth of B7 bólide vidro 1 places red again at the heart of the precise, elaborate, and ongoing significance of the pigments that invent color in the Americas. In the Andean region, three red dyes dominated: achiote, dragon’s blood, and brazilwood. In Mesoamerica, as Diana Magaloni Kerpel demonstrates, layers of reds composed by

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Figure 5.2 Hélio Oiticica with B7 bólide vidro 1, 1963. Photo: Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of the Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

different types of dyes reveal the “extraordinary concept and technique of color literally being endowed with the luminous energy of the paintings.”57 These reds were achieved by different processes: the transparent tones of dyes were obtained from plants, flowers, and insects, and mineral pigments were used on saturated surfaces. Their force, their liveliness, their function as red, were not limited to the symbolic operation of optical chromatic recognition but related to “their materiality and provenance . . . colors had a specific significance based on their raw material and their natural state.”58 That is, Albers, Puente, and Oiticica learned that the sacred and lively power of the different reds had to do with the specific materials from which they were fabricated. The historical importance of cochineal red—made from a small insect— makes it quite likely that Oiticica would have known of this living source of red dye. The founding documents of the Jardim Botânico (Botanical Garden), which had become part of the Museu Nacional by the time Oiticica

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worked there, mention cochineal.59 Small draws connections between the kind of glass jars his entomologist father used to kill insects, red pigment in Oiticica Filho’s studio, and the bólides.60 Writing in 1965, Mário Pedrosa compared the character of color in Oiticica with his friend Lygia Clark’s work, beginning when color left the painted canvas and hung as large geometric shapes hung in three dimensions for the viewer to inhabit in his Penetrable series in the early 1960s: “One was invaded by color, felt the physical contact of color, pondered color, touched, stepped, breathed color. Like the experience of the bichos of Clark, the viewer abandoned passive contemplation.”61 Translations of bicho—the planar, hinged sculptures brought to life in the hands of participant viewers—into English have settled on “critter,” but “insect” or “bug” is also correct. Pedrosa’s prose as much as his pairing of these works vividly picture creeping, crawling, living red—like the cochineal insects that can be the organic material of that color—overrunning the viewer with its invasive power.62 Invented color is enlivened, as Oiticica desired, in animated materials and their embrace of a spectator that Clark and Oiticica both called a participador, or participator, a neologism that substitutes the Portuguese participante (participant) with a more active, agentive subject. It remains to be shown how this living color maintains its inventive, imaginative, fictive character as it reaches out to embrace the “participator,” and finally, the risks it confronts in the world. Local Color Red pigment appears again in a bólide that marked a crucial transition to the influential series that Oiticica baptized as parangolés (1964–1979), the colored capes, banners, and cloths seen in Viveiros de Castro’s photograph of Nildo draped in red and gold (see fig. 4.9). If the bólides were meant to be touched and shaped by viewers, the parangolés made that participation even more central, as the works came to life when worn. Used in everyday dancing, as much as in samba during the spectacular upside-down world of Carnival, the layered, sewn, translucent, or painted cloth structures of the parangolés concentrated the liveliness of color on the human body. Oiticica described them as a “crucial point” that “define a specific position in the theoretical development of all of my experience of color-structure in space.”63 Ramírez emphasizes the active and total experience of color that conjoins the participator and the parangolé, which often came to life when placed on a person of color.64 That fusion of color and body presents crucial questions, as with these works Oiticica himself began crossing the segregated color boundaries that divided Rio de Janeiro along class hierarchies and the racial inequities that mirrored them. The transition toward embodiment in

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the parangolés centers the political and, as Oiticica himself wrote, ethical character of enlivened, verisimilar color. Perhaps more surprisingly, these questions place the parangolés directly within the genealogy of realist fiction, particularly the subgenre of “local color.” The vermilion B33 bólide caixa 18 “Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo” caixapoema 2 (Bólide Box 18 “Homage to Cara de Cavalo” Box-Poem 2, 1966) is a tribute to the “outlaw” known as Cara de Cavalo, an acquaintance of the artist’s whose violent murder by the police was featured in newspapers.65 That friendship was possible only after Oiticica began to visit the favela Mangueira regularly in 1964.66 “Favela” names the poorest neighborhoods in the Brazilian urban landscape, which are socially marginal but in Rio de Janeiro are interspersed among wealthier, central neighborhoods. The occupation of valuable real estate by people identified as Black—preto, pardo, and negro are three words used in Portuguese to name the people of color who built and occupy the favelas—was used as a rationale by the military dictatorship as it sought to appropriate their land. It bears emphasizing that the presence of Amerindians among Black Brazilians in favelas long has been made invisible by their association with a rural past and their rigorous exclusion from images of modern, urban Brazil.67 Most important here is the contrast between Oiticica’s predominantly Euro-descendant world of art and literature and how the parangolés came to life in the multiracial community of Mangueira. Two dominant but competing interpretations of the parangolés rely on the same premise: that they approached “the real.” When Ramírez describes these works as the full embodiment of color, she elaborates that they are “the final move away from the avant-garde aestheticism of the Spatial Reliefs, Nuclei and Bólides to the realm of real life enticed by the contact with the visceral characters of Mangueira. These were centers of real action represented by living matter.” She cites Pedrosa’s canonical view of Oiticica’s emergence from the ivory tower into an “impoverished Mangueira Hill— the reality of the matter in the north sector of the city,” which Ramírez associates with “samba’s underworld.”68 In contrast, Gonzalo Aguilar describes this same move by Oiticica within a broad cross section of Brazilian art and letters, including the concrete poets, who perform what he terms the “chic populism of the avant-garde.” Aguilar notes that Glauber Rocha attacked Oiticica’s parangolés as early as 1972, when he declared that the artist “should be accused of sexual exploitation of the favela residents.”69 The specific tenor of Rocha’s accusation is not accidental: Oiticica’s homosexuality was no secret, and as I discuss later, denunciations of people for their sexuality was a strategy of both left- and right-wing politics at the time. Even so, the debate over the ethical and political status of the real in the enlivened color of the

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parangolé demands that we address the very same questions at the heart of realist fiction since it emerged in the nineteenth century: coloniality, exoticism, race, and sexuality. The “real” as used by Pedrosa and Ramírez recalls the history of “local color” in painting and fiction in Europe and the Americas. Yet literary scholars who have returned to local color reject the self-fashioning of this subset of realism as styleless and anti-literary. Jonathan Schroeder argues that “local color [is] the aesthetic mode by which realism constituted its truth effects.”70 Local color is the subgenre that perhaps best reflects the increasing privilege of what Jonathan Crary famously called the “techniques of the observer,” with prose that consistently highlights the particular qualities of a place captured by a powerful, seeing eye. Rather than a record of the real, though, these visual traces were the minutiae that invented the effect of realism as verisimilitude. They did so by “stag[ing] local color as an encounter between trained observers and naive populations,” and so were a key mode of shaping the conception of the human.71 As much as these realist narratives provide a seemingly explosive excess of details, including, but not limited to, chromatic descriptions, they model how civilized viewers maintain control over those elements. Changing that relation of power with the viewer is crucial to the politics of verisimilar color in non-literary fiction. The nineteenth-century European narrator often expresses disappointment with the vitality of the local color. When too vibrant, local color becomes savagery and the literary text loses status. If not brilliant enough, local color risks the loss of authenticity, and the text does not offer the titillating images that define it. These characteristic tensions between excess and control, local and cosmopolitan, purity and hybridity are crucial to how local color “straddles the divide between fiction and reality.”72 The debates over Oiticica’s parangolés mirror this back-and-forth, and thus at the very least require an analysis of them as at this borderland between the two, as fictional as much as “real.” Beatriz Jaguaribe traces related manifestations of local color in treatments of the favela in realist art, film, and literature, and neither celebrates some as authentic expressions of the favela nor condemns others as exploitative. Jaguaribe concludes only, and importantly, that “the aesthetics of realism both forms part of the culture of the spectacle and yet it politicizes representation.”73 If, as I have been suggesting, the vitality of color in these declaredly non-representational artworks offers a means to envision verisimilar color, the question remains what kind of politics that realist effect produces. Oiticica was aware that his step toward the parangolé raised these questions. In a 1964 essay, the artist explicitly denied any residue of folkloric

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tint and asserted that, unlike local color, these works transformed “colorstructure” into a “trans-object.”74 While never fully defining that term, his central concern was their social nature, and some months later he wrote of “the perceptive establishment of relations between the Parangolé structure, experienced by the participator, and other characteristic structures of the world around, [in which] emerges what I call the ‘total-experience Parangolé,’ and it is always actioned by the participation of the subject in the works.”75 Rather than a politics of representation, the non- and transobjects made of color required that lived experience emerge not just from the bodies that bear the parangolés but also from the colors themselves. The difficulty of that proposal was evident at the time. For the first public performance with them in Opinião 65, the exhibition inspired by Boal’s play Opinião discussed earlier, Oiticica had planned for dancers from Mangueira wearing the artworks to enter the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. Famously, they were not permitted to join the artist inside the museum.76 Small argues that their exclusion was, if not predicted, then the logical result of Oiticica’s “[break] with the fiction of the aesthetic, political, economic neutrality of the subject.”77 The art historian’s turn of phrase is not random: the neutrality of the (white) subject is grounded in foundational fictions about color and race that govern Brazil’s social hierarchies. The crucial role of local color in realist fiction reveals that this is not just an everyday use of the word to mean unsubstantiated or untrue. The fiction of race as color is both untrue and deceptive, and part and parcel of literary and artistic realism. Enlivened color thus confronts those fictions about race in Brazil on that same terrain of realist fiction. The experience of color—color as lived experience—was born among the social exchanges of Mangueira and crucial to Oiticica’s argument about the parangolé and the inventive power of art in constituting social relations. Writing about dance in 1965, Oiticica imagines, “The felling of social prejudices, the barriers between groups, classes, etc. would be inevitable and essential in the realization of this vital experience.”78 That lively experience emerges from his own experience of “marginalization, since it exists naturally in an artist, [which] became fundamental for me—it would be a total ‘lack of social place’ at the same time the discovery of my ‘individual place’ as a total man in the world, as a ‘social being’ in the total sense and not included in a certain class or ‘elite.’”79 This claim from the son of a prominent family of upper-class intellectuals, who grew up in the bourgeois southern reaches of the city, seems to rather carelessly equate his own experience with the precarious lives of his new neighbors in the favela. Michael Asbury has called for greater focus on Oiticica’s non-belonging to the favela for a more accurate account of the impact of his experiences there on his prac-

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tice.80 Certainly it is unsettling that, when describing the parangolés in an interview with Carla Stellweg in 1978, the artist describes the favelados in his original English text as “street people,” as if they were homeless.81 The difference is striking: the word favelado in Portuguese emphasizes the subject’s belonging to a built, if unplanned, community; “street people” deprives them of the very structures they built. Yet when Oiticica wrote these words to Stellweg, he had spent much of the previous decade living in New York as a queer Brazilian. Far from his family’s wealth and prestige, he had a view onto his homeland’s military dictatorship, which explicitly condemned homosexuality and proclaimed it legible on certain bodies in signs such as long hair, dress, and gesture. Repressive regimes on the political left and right across the Americas— from Onganía in Argentina earlier in the decade to Castro in Cuba in the 1970s—affirmed their moral legitimacy by criminalizing homosexuality.82 Oiticica would have been sensitive to the vulnerability of certain bodies made simultaneously visible and criminal. The Brazilian regime particularly worried about samba in Carnival, which combined what it perceived as extravagant and erotic performances with powerful Afro-Brazilian traditions and the occupation of highly symbolic public spaces. With his parangolés, Oiticica took up these forms of cultural expression, and his friendships with residents of color in Mangueira and the Bronx formed deep affective relationships across the rigid racial divides that still characterize two of the hemisphere’s largest, formerly slaveholding countries. Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz identifies Oiticica’s term “tropicamp,” a fusion of tropical and camp, as an articulation of the minoritarian political and social position the artist developed during his years in New York: “Not constituted in clean-cut contrasts such as straight versus queer or north versus south. . . . Due to this role he was involved with a system of underground coalitions for which both the liberal and fascist mainstreams, in the US and in Brazil, were agents of repressive systems.”83 As a form of camp, Oiticica’s chromatic realism was performative and inventive, embodied and alive, and vulnerable to the homophobic regimes in power. It was during these same years that Oiticica developed the não-narrações (non-narratives) described in the introduction, the inventions outside of narrative time that included “non-discourse,” “non-audiovisual,” and “non-artistic photography.” Even so, Oiticica’s liberation of color from the object did not fully comprehend the vulnerability of the marginal bodies that suffered the fictions of color, and it comes uncomfortably close to the European spectacle of local color. The broader ramifications of that blind spot become clear even as the philosopher and curator Luiz Camillo Osorio proposes a cross-class alliance in Oiticica’s evolving materialization of color. Osorio understands

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color-time as the concretization of the temporality of Brazil’s peripheral modernity: “our delayed and incomplete modernization . . . [which] brings with it beyond all the known problems, a horizon of common inventiveness in which precarity and power become brothers.”84 The inventiveness of enlivened color as it develops from Invenções to bólides to parangolés clearly draws on that precarity. However, it is less clear that Oiticica fully appreciated the violence when the fiction of color coincided with the bodies of color that surrounded him. In his notes for the interview with Stellweg, Oiticica quoted—or better, misquoted—Mário Pedrosa’s famous phrase that Brazilians were “condemned to be modern” (condenados ao moderno), a key referent for Osorio’s later conclusions.85 In the handwritten document in English, though, Oiticica crossed out “condemned” and wrote “committed” over it, to support his broader proposal in the interview that Brazilian artists must look to the future rather than the past.86 Oiticica’s enlivened material of color bridges the line between fiction and reality, and—paraphrasing Jaguaribe—politicizes art after representation. His attachment to modernist futurity remains somewhat trapped, however, in what Ariella Azoulay describes as a fundamentally colonial narrative of progress. The color-time of his non-literary fictions reveals the vitality of color and its autonomy from description, making it possible to invent realist verisimilitude in his não-narrações. However, his claims for those inventions tend to fall back into the progressive narrative time of modernity. For non-literary fictions that take that enlivened substance of color to uncompromisingly confront the fiction of its supposed neutrality, and which employ verisimilar color to invent other fiction-times under the modern regime of neoliberalism, I turn to Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. The Rendition of Color The son of a Colombian mother and Spanish father, Manglano-Ovalle spent his youth in the United States and studied Latin American literature as a college student. Beginning in the 1990s, he scrutinized and detailed a trajectory of color that began with oil painting in the Spanish empire, continued in high modernism and the “pure” abstraction of US postwar power in the mid-twentieth century, and culminated in digital visualization technologies in the transition to the fully neoliberal twenty-first century. His powerful meditations on race and color reveal that making autonomous color—prying it apart from its secondary, descriptive role and projecting it out into the world—is both a powerful form of invention and constitutes a great peril. Or we can say, he reveals what Oiticica could not: that once color is enlivened, it can be banished, incarcerated, and killed. Manglano-

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Ovalle comes to call this the rendition of color, which I propose contains two meanings of “render” and “rendition” that encapsulate the relationship of invention, violence, and color.87 Rendering condenses military surrender, judicial action, linguistic translation, and artistic production. In creating digital files, we wait for computers to render their colors; in the new wars of the twenty-first century, “rendition” names the extrajudicial transport and imprisonment of combatants. In rendering color, Manglano-Ovalle creates realism’s defining sense of verisimilitude outside the novel’s familiar pages. Recall that Michael Taussig observed that the unspeakability of torture shares a connection to color. While he proclaimed ignorance as to the nature of that relation—perhaps in a refusal of the knowledge produced by the “beyond of language”—elsewhere Taussig traces the violent history of color in the modern-colonial world. He reminds us of the history recorded by Jean-Baptiste Labat: color was the material and symbolic substance of the Atlantic slave trade (fig. 5.3). Indigo, not sugar, was the primary export of Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century, and “in the mid-19th century, the colonial world was an emporium of color to be shipped to Europe.”88 The color “itself ” that Oiticica sought rises brightly to the surface in circumstances of extreme violence, and the realist novel is a privileged bearer of this message. Taussig notes that color appears as color in the Ur-colonial novel, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1899), when words fail the narrator, “what fills the space, what ends the sentence . . . is color. Not just color filling already prepared forms. Not painting by numbers. Not color as a ‘secondary quality.’ But raging, ripping, tearing color, diaphanous and ephemeral in an impossible mix of fire and water.”89 Conrad’s novel recalls the hovering and material indigo blue of Flaubert, its roots in colonial violence revealed even as the economic and political situation that generated it shifted. Taussig notes that a significant transformation took place in the mid-nineteenth century, as artificial color replaced enlivened, “colonial color”—those minerals and insects described above—and the “homogeneity of their substance replaced the heterogeneity of the earlier colors, with dire consequences for our relationship to and understanding of color.”90 Modern capitalism transformed color into a tertiary attribute of things, not even a secondary, deadened substance but one that had never been alive. Taussig concludes that the precarity and sensibility of color—highlighted in its transit across the seas of the Middle Passage—form a material that retains an inventive capacity also beyond that of language. Despite its lethal insertion in the modern-colonial and capitalist system, because of the difficulty of separating the sight of color from the enlivened being of color, it remains a “magical polymorphous substance.”91 Chameleonic and involving all of the senses, color contains both the promise and the vulnerability of life.

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Figure 5.3 Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (New Voyage to the Islands of America), vol. 1. Paris, 1742. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

Manglano-Ovalle first focused on that enduring and painful substance of color in two series that combined a genre of Spanish colonial art known as casta painting and US color field abstraction of the mid-twentieth century. The Garden of Delights (1998) and Color Field, Numbers 1–5 (2003) returned to the eighteenth-century genre that pictured the contact between European, African, and Amerindian populations in taxonomies according to phenotype, skin color, hair texture, and what was called calidad (quality), a social designation. Primarily made in Mexico and Peru, these works categorized variations of skin tones and organized shifting social orders. The tripartite classifications of familial combinations began with español (Spanish), indio (Indian), and negro (Black), whose children were identified as mulato (Black and Spanish), mestizo (Indian and Spanish), lobo (Black and Amerindian), and further down the generations to name castizo (mestizo and Spanish), and so forth. Ilona Katzew’s foundational exhibition and catalog established the degree to which the paintings themselves betrayed the “racial indeterminacy of specific mixtures” such as tente en el aire, which she

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translates as “hold-yourself-suspended-in-midair,” and the remarkable note-entiendo (I-don’t-understand-you).92 Some mestizos could “repair” the taint of Amerindian parentage, while others were portrayed as salta atrás (a jump backward). Black subjects were consistently and violently debased. The complexity of the eighteenth-century representations of something like, but not exactly, what we call “race” is beyond the scope of this study, but the contemporary artist’s reframing makes evident that these paintings projected as much as recorded that phenomenon in their use of color. Both series by Manglano-Ovalle mimic the gridlike composition and tripartite structure of casta paintings even as they destabilize their attempted imposition of rigidity. Manglano-Ovalle takes up their verisimilar color to invent different realist fictions. In Garden of Delights, Manglano-Ovalle invited self-designated family groups of three people to submit their DNA, along with the primary color of their choice. Working with a genetics lab, the artist produced autoradiographs based on the subjects’ favorite colors, which were printed as photographs. The images of the magnified strands of DNA were titled with the first names of the donors of the genetic material and grouped in triads like the casta compositions. He worked with the geneticist to visualize a strand of genetic code that would bear the least-identifying information possible. Borrowing its title almost exactly from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1501–1515), the artist placed the work in the long trajectory of the portrayal of bodies of color prior to the (pseudo)scientific discourses on race that emerged in nineteenth century.93 More than an investigation into science, the artist describes the project as a meditation on the concept of “DNA expression” and embedded in cultural debates in the years after the murder trial of O. J. Simpson brought the topic to popular consciousness. Manglano-Ovalle’s work is about the invention of color, not its scientific register, and destabilizes the viewer’s habits of visual recognition of race through color.94 The exhibition that debuted the Garden of Delights included a preliminary work, which fused realist fiction with a wariness of its grounding in local color. The Patron, His Wife, His Barber, and the Artist (1997) combines a digital visualization of a strand of DNA with a short story about the wife of an art patron who commissions a genetic portrait out of a strand of his hair.95 Whether true or false, the prose is that of a storyteller whose account includes one relevant detail: to surprise her husband with the portrait, the collector’s wife covertly took his hair. The romantic tale introduces the threat of genetic surveillance, a concern that shaped the artist’s selection of strands of DNA that contained no identifying information. ManglanoOvalle’s early awareness of the dangers of surveillance emerged out of earlier

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collaborative art projects in Black and Latinx neighborhoods in Chicago. When the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) invited him to create the exhibition that featured the Garden of Delights, the artist was known for his collaborations with two groups, Culture in Action and Street Level Video, in the early 1990s. During his first site visit to North Carolina, the museum took him to meet members of the rapidly growing Latinx population, assuming he would work with what the art world calls “the community.” He collaborated instead with the geneticist.96 Having observed that predominantly white art institutions subjected these community projects to racialized fantasies, Manglano-Ovalle recalls, “We said, ‘I’m not going to be just a body on display for you.’”97 The SECCA curator Ron Platt attributes Garden of Delights to the rejection of institutional initiatives that pretended to promote inclusion as they “maintained a position of power which allowed them to designate ‘the other’ by color, while remaining pigmentless themselves.”98 Manglano-Ovalle contested the fiction of the neutral subject we saw staged in Oiticica’s participatory work, using real genetic-imaging technologies to create verisimilar color.99 That genetic expression harnessed the power of realist fiction even as it contested the dominant fiction of the neutral art viewer. By employing photography, Manglano-Ovalle selected a medium that was crucial to the nineteenth-century invention of race as much as the modern subject.100 Color in these photographs, however, presents individuals and their families without reproducing the bourgeois portraits and ethnographic subjects that dominate that history (see plate 4). Bearing the first names of their subjects as titles, the digital visualizations of genetic “identity” glow with colors that reference the cool abstraction and softened borders of color field painting. The patterned, rhythmic prints are scaled to the human body, yet provide neither the figure of the subjects portrayed nor full confidence in the relationship between the genetic material and the photographic image. These “families” were composed of voluntary social relationships grounded in affection and the color preferences of the represented subjects, rather than in compulsory affiliations designated by shared DNA, legal unions legitimated by the state, or racist histories of skin color. Viewers have no idea what the people look like, even as the groupings invite them to imagine a family. Ultimately, the artist clarified, “I want people to come in and be embraced by a huge amount of color filled portraits—sort of an abstract representation of color theory—and then find out that there are individual signatures behind this.”101 Color in Garden of Delights produces an effect of the real, invents a sense of relation, and provides shelter from surveillance. Color Field (Numbers 1–5) even more explicitly confronts the visual and

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social violence of casta painting, and abstraction’s often unrecognized continuation of it through color (see plate 5). This installation was presented only at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, because the artist was offered a unique opportunity to borrow casta paintings from a private collection. He placed them on top of acrylic panels painted in the style of the midcentury color field movement, such that they drew out individual colors in the historical paintings. The colored panels echo the “realist” representation of skin tone in the bodies of the casta paintings, as well as other signifiers of calidad registered in the domestic spaces and landscapes that site the figures. The red pants and the blue sky in the historical work repeat in the new vertical panels behind, drawing together the two very different flat surfaces of color. They open the viewer’s eye to the distinct functions of verisimilar and descriptive color: the latter reaffirms knowledge about the character of bodies of a certain color, while the former frees itself from a secondary grammatical function to invent that character as fiction. Cuauhtémoc Medina’s analysis of this work overflows with fictive and imaginary language: they are “objects of imagination: poetic inventions,” a “precise fantasy where critical elements do not take away from its imaginary nature”; through “rules of invention,” the artist “proposes a dense and seductive fiction.”102 In his fictions, Manglano-Ovalle makes the acrylic panels of seemingly pure color amplify the fictional mechanism of race as color—like Caldas blurring Velázquez—and the casta paintings literally embed politics within abstraction. That politics includes the struggles of “people of color” for rights and concretely references political movements. The panels repeat the colors of flags of what the artist calls “failed Utopias”: the red, blue, and yellow of Gran Colombia—the goal of Simón Bolívar’s independence struggle across South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century—and the purple, red, and yellow of Republican leftists in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).103 These verisimilar colors transform those failed utopias into non-literary fictions. Twenty years after The Garden of Delights, Manglano-Ovalle’s video Guerrero Negro (Black Warrior, 2008) brings these questions to the digital rendering of color (see plate 6). Recall that Taussig traced how commercial color—unlike colonial color, never alive—threatens to be handed over like a prisoner or modern-day slave to representation. The silent, one-minute loop of a 16 mm film transferred to HD video delves into the material of color across the history of analog film and photography, and the commercial color of digital art. The standard color-rendition chart used in both film and video, the Macbeth ColorChecker, centers a series of not-quite-still images of hands and arms holding its grid of colors against a backdrop of sky and

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salt. The video was shot in the white expanse of salt flats in the Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in Baja California. While named after the largest town in that municipality, the title of the work literally means “Black Warrior,” a detail significant to the artist. At first, the images seem entirely straightforward, not altered or manipulated at all. Yet as the video cuts from one take to another, with different color contrasts, light conditions, and backdrops, the viewer becomes increasingly uncertain if the hands holding the color-rendition chart belong to the same person. The stability of individual identity based on (skin) color and the rendition of color by the camera at large become phantasmagoric. The relation between colors becomes the central topic of the video, which layers the formal color theory of Albers’s Homage to the Square onto the social relations embodied in Oiticica’s invention of color. A standard technical article on the featured color-rendition chart explains: “Photography, color printing, and television do not truly reproduce all colors. The nature of the rendition may be described in the ways the colors in the image differ from those in the object.”104 The authors add that it is “well known” that “human skin, the blue sky, and foliage” are particularly difficult to approximate. The top row of the Macbeth ColorChecker begins with what appear to be references to objects in the world. Blocks 1 and 2 name skin tone presented as a dark-brown square and a light-pink square. The designers admit the invention of chromatic associations with racial categories even as they imagine they can capture them: “The lightest human skin presented to the camera is practically white, talcum powder being commonly used. The darkest human skin is practically black. . . . The characteristic spectral distribution is more fully developed for skin somewhat darker than the lightest or lighter than the darkest.”105 The chart only pretends to be an approximation of an idea of skin color, a median range calculated on the basis of two extremes that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen on a human body. Manglano-Ovalle films the chart precisely amid these most challenging objects: held by hands and arms that appear differently colored, the sky looks variably gray and white but rarely blue. When the chart is held at the horizon of the white sands of the salt desert, the sky looks almost black, as do the hands cradling it. James Yood writes that “Manglano-Ovalle zeroes in on the human need to impose frameworks onto nature, and reminds us that photographs are not faithful renderings but manipulated constructions.”106 Yet that manipulation already was admitted in the design of the chart, and it is part and parcel of the method of observing color on skin and sky and foliage. The technical article acknowledges that “on photographs of real and simulated light skin illuminated by a cool-white fluorescent lamp, the real skin looked slightly greener than the simulation.”107 Unless filming

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Martians, then, the simulated color of skin looks more “realistic” than real bodies. The designers move on from the problem of skin to the challenge of the sky, which they explain looks blue on film only as a simulation created by the proper artificial-lighting conditions. In the most technical of color theory, fictional color gives the most realistic impression; the altered image most resembles our lived experience. Manglano-Ovalle again sets out the problem of ideology that Meireles named: How can an artist make a fiction to compete with these dominant ones? How can verisimilar color invent another time among the apparent truths of race and modernity as they continue into the digital age? Non-literary Color-Time Manglano-Ovalle has described his video work as fundamentally about sound more than image, but Guerrero negro is surprisingly silent. The digital video made from the transfer of 16 mm film takes as its subject the synchronization of sound with image. Indeed, the handheld color chart echoes the universal film leader—that countdown at the beginning of movies—that performs that synchronization. The video’s pervasive silence contributes to the penetrating impact of the regular-sized blocks of color on the eye of the viewer, so much so that while the color chart is at the center of each shot, it is difficult to look directly at it.108 The takes that include some movement of water and wind in the background, in addition to the color chart in the foreground, provide a glimpse of narrative time and so offer relief from the intense time of the silent color squares. Manglano-Ovalle invents his own color-time through deafening silence and blinding visual contrasts around systematic color, a time neither synchronized to sound nor part of the narrative time of film. That fictional color-time appears in other works from the same period, particularly in a series of installations that included a transparent red foil on the glass windows of galleries, bathing all objects within and their viewers in crimson. Manglano-Ovalle’s exhibition Krefeld Suite (2005) included a room with those red filters amid inkjet watercolor prints and sculptures made with a digital prototype technology, all of which presented icebergs as simultaneously slow and fast-moving measures of global warning. In a largely digital project, the prints bathed in red recall the lights used in darkrooms for printing analog photographs. They produce color as what Taussig called a “magical polymorphous substance,” between substance and light, analog and digital, enduring and ephemeral. Manglano-Ovalle’s paired installations shown at Documenta 12 (2007), The Radio (2007) and Phantom Truck (2003–2007), included the same red foil and made the fic-

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tive character of color-time explicit. The first installation, The Radio, included the foil on the window of a small room, which served as a kind of antechamber that contained a shortwave radio placed on the floor. The second, larger room was completely without light, its interior so dark that viewers debated the physical presence of the sculpture it contained: a truck designed according to the schematics of a chemical weapon, provided as supporting evidence for the US invasion of Iraq by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council in 2003. Those who argued that the shadowy mobile biological weapons lab they saw was a hologram, or a projection, were right in a sense. The artist has called the sculpture “a fabrication of a fabrication,”109 and like Carrión’s Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, Manglano-Ovalle and friends spread a rumor that there was in fact no sculpture in the darkened gallery.110 The truck was a real object fashioned out of falsified evidence and made by the artist to reveal the fiction of his own account. This layering of invention carries over to the photographs that represent Phantom Truck (see plate 7). The human eye, digital, and analog cameras process the lack of light within the gallery differently, although each compensates with an adaptive projection or visualization. Manglano-Ovalle explains that the red truck as seen in this photograph did not look red to the viewer present in the installation but is an artifact of the digital camera as it responds to the darkness of the space. That projected red nevertheless echoes the provocation of Manglano-Ovalle’s titular reference to the Greek root phan-, echoing “phantasm” and signifying both a merely superficial appearance and “to make visible.”111 The ghostliness of the phantom truck carries over into photographic representations of the work, which are inadequate to contain the experience but nevertheless engage viewers in the processes of visualization and projection at its core. A similar spillover from The Radio into Phantom Truck was integral to Manglano-Ovalle’s plan for the two rooms. Sound, noise, and sonic intervals again play a role. Hidden speakers in The Radio played two sounds: prerecorded shortwave transmissions of mostly static from Central Asia (including Iraq and Afghanistan) and pink noise. If white noise equally buffers all sounds, then pink noise filters certain sounds, in this case the hubbub of the enormous exhibition space. The almost-imperceptible sound thus constituted a kind of protected sonic space for the artist’s two connected installations, both concerned with the war in Afghanistan. While a full discussion of what John Mowitt calls the “color of noise” is beyond our scope here, the spillover of this somatic and synesthetic experience structures the temporality of these fabrications of fabrications.112 That experience extended beyond these installations as viewers exited

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the space. To be clear, not a lot of red light permeated Phantom Truck from The Radio. However, the physiological response in the viewer’s eyes carried over into each viewer’s visualization of the truck. Similarly, viewers’ eyes bathed in red in Krefeld Suite projected a greenish effect onto a brighter, non-red world outside the exhibition. Like the verisimilar color of Color Field (Numbers 1–5), the works insert viewers in a non-narrative, fictional time and into the struggles over and in fiction that have defined the neoliberal phase of modernity. To fully comprehend the temporality of this verisimilar red-green, we must return to a foundational installation with red color-time by Cildo Meireles, whose comments about fiction began this book. Desvio para o vermelho: Impregnação; Entorno; Desvio (Deviation into Red: Impregnation, Surroundings, Deviation, 1967–1984) was conceived during the early years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, but realized in physical form only as it crumbled (see plate 8). The work bridges the truncated, repressive regime and the ongoing neoliberal society it installed. Desvio is composed of three spaces: a room of found red objects (a red sofa, red books, red carpet, red painting), a passageway with glossy red paint spilled across the floor, and a small room with a crooked sink with red liquid rushing out of the faucet. Like Flaubert’s “mass of dazzling colors,” the surplus of red commodities produces the effect of color as a substance itself. Meireles emphasizes the “chromo-poetics” of the installation, a term that fuses the visual, the literary, and the sonic, even as he plays down political allegories of the color red.113 Red is not representational but immersive and substantial, and so productive of the invention of verisimilar colortime. That chromo-poetics contributes to an unfolding temporality that is not fully durational. Meireles has stated that the title refers to physics: “To the detour of red waves, that is, to the pattern of detour; red is chosen in this case because it deviates very little. Its waves are those that least deviate or dislocate through space.”114 Even as red carries the viewer through the tripartite installation, Meireles notes that “redshift” “compresses” all the elements of the installation.115 In astronomy, “redshift” refers to the change in the color of light as it moves away from the viewer; it is a phenomenon used to measure the rate of expansion of the universe. That is, it is a chromatic register of the theory of relativity of time and space. The comparison frequently used to explain this visual effect to non-specialists is the changing sound of a siren as a police car approaches and passes a stationary subject. Much like that sound changes in tone, the color of light shifts from blue to red as it moves further away from the observer. A similar effect happens as the viewer leaves these installations: her eyes, accustomed to so much red, see green. This immersive experience recalls Oiticica’s parangolés but is even more intimately and sensorially felt than his draped cloaks. When the red

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body leaves the red light of Manglano-Ovalle’s filters behind, the radical separation of color from object separates substance from substance and becomes the violent experience of color in itself. The shock of the green is a shock of the rediscovery of one’s own body as not red, then tinted green, then back to whatever “color” that body was prior to the experience. This effect can be experienced regardless of the skin tone of the individual art viewer, though obviously differs from body to body. We might say, then, that Meireles and Manglano-Ovalle invent a noncolor, much as the non-object is still an object.116 As Gullar asserted in the opening pages of this study, the negative prefix does not erase the materiality of the work but engages presentation rather than representation. Red negated into green is still a color; it is a verisimilar color projected by the viewer like a phantom, which counters the violent ideologies contained in secondary, descriptive color. Compressed in time-space like a redshift, and carried along on bodies of color, the works enact a gerundial “negating” into green of the kind that Kusch and Acha identified as the philosophical cornerstone of American negation. Conclusions: Non-red, or Green In this concluding section, green maintains that status as non-red: as a momentary projection of color onto the time-space on the margins of art and a substantial materialization of that negation into a fictive non-object. The artists who work with green (as not red) also make it object, protest, but more importantly, carve out that time and space of negation despite neoliberalism’s claims that there is no other option. To be sure, green has its own world of political allegories within the logic of representation: desire and envy, and more recently, ecology and political parties. But note that the colors do not match; they do not describe the political objection. While the viewer’s eyes were still taking in the red of Meireles’s Desvio, a sound of running water permeated the three stages of the installation and referenced the three major rivers in Brazil—the Amazon, the São Francisco, and the Prata—in a protest over environmental destruction.117 This dissonance would occur before the viewers’ eyes converted the red of revolution into its chromatic opposite, the green of environmentalism. Similarly, the Vizcaíno reserve where Manglano-Ovalle filmed Guerrero negro is both the largest protected natural region in Mexico—it is “green”—and also a site of industrial-scale extractive salt mining. The repetitive, non-narrative video breaks green from “green,” much as it repurposes the “Black warrior” of the nearby town and the colored squares of the Macbeth ColorChecker.118 During the decades of the rehearsal of neoliberalism in the Americas, green

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began to take its place in the history of environmentalism, and it can be seen as a political companion to utopian red. The artists involved in this history invent a verisimilar rather than a descriptive or metaphorical green that takes in the spectator-participator: into an enlivened and vulnerable world of environmental precarity, and once again into relations among human and non-human persons. One year after Meireles included the sound of Brazil’s major rivers in Desvio, the Argentine artist Nicolás García Uriburu also turned red into green. For the 1968 Venice Biennial, he dyed the canals with fluorescein, a non-toxic, synthetic dye that is blood red in its initial state and turns bright green in contact with water and sunlight. This intervention sought to turn the world’s attention to the problem of pollution in the world’s waterways and the importance of the natural resources of South America. García Uriburu brought environmentalism to a biennial already filled with protests met with police actions, boycotts, and closed pavilions. While neglected on the international scene for decades, the artist was an integral part of a small group of “earthworks” artists including Christo, Walter de Maria, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson, the early proponents of ecological art.119 He was arrested for his intervention, though soon released as no harm was done to the water. The action in Venice inaugurated a series García Uriburu named Colorations, which included iterations over many years in rivers and fountains around the world, as well as prints, paintings, drawings, manifestos, videos, and even postcards (see plates 9 and 10).120 Sodium fluorescein embodies the contradictions of modern color that carried across these different works: its non-toxic red-green is synthesized from two elements of petroleum, the liquid that fuels massive environmental degradation and the global economy.121 While certainly a landmark intervention in environmental art, the Venice Colorations also formed part of García Uriburu’s long engagement with the debates about realism described at the outset of this chapter. The French critic and prominent promoter of the artists of nouveau realisme, Pierre Restany, asserted that the Argentine sought to make art real through the act of coloration: by dyeing the water, he painted on the world itself and so gave new meaning to color in realist art.122 That same green already pervaded the diverse mediums with which the artist worked before and following Colorations. From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, García Uriburu participated in what Restany termed “pop lunfardo,” an engagement with the visual language of pop art in Buenos Aires vernacular. His brightly colored, figurative paintings referenced mass media and popular culture, as well as animals, rivers, and the natural environment of the American continent.123 Green pervaded landscape paintings that featured ombu trees and

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the Amazon River. The Argentine critic Jorge Glusberg noted the centrality of color in his paintings and an early environmental installation, Los jardines artificiales (Artificial Gardens, 1967), at the famed Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. Made of large acrylic objects, smells, and sounds, and featuring a fashion show, Glusberg asserted: “Although basically environmental, his starting point in that show were purely pictorial phenomena, since color—though placed on acrylic sheets—enjoyed the entire range it would have had in his painting, full and vigorous.”124 Prior to Colorations, then, verisimilar color had moved off the canvas and away from the optical to the fully sensorial. Green was already the protagonist in a variety of visual, non-narrative mediums. Glusberg also perceived a rather surprising combination of two influential realist movements in the Americas in García Uriburu’s work. He compared the scale of Los jardines artificiales with Mexican muralism’s occupation of vast public spaces, and its imagery with US pop art. In part, pop images and objects were the logical outcome of García Uriburu’s need to sell work. His correspondence with his gallerist, Clert, is full of anxious questions about collectors, the cost of supporting his newborn daughter, and expressions of joy and thanks at having received a payment. The relation between gallerist and artist suffered typical tensions over money, but more surprisingly, García Uriburu’s later correspondence reveals that Clert always hated his now-iconic gesture of dyeing the canals, and the color green more generally.125 Against these pressures of the market, the artist remained dedicated to green and continued its characteristic presence in his figurative paintings as well as in Colorations that followed Venice. Green drew realist verisimilitude across the illusory rectangles of painted canvases, printed conceptual manifestos, and through interventions in urban rivers and public fountains. The two realist movements Glusberg rightly identified as referents were, however, political opposites: muralism’s explicit Marxist sympathies, which extended into the mid-twentieth century, were at odds with pop art’s capitalist veneer. García Uriburu’s green defied extant Cold War oppositions between left and right, and instead took on an emergent neoliberalism. In the first years of Colorations, Argentina suffered under the military dictatorship of General Onganía, which had come to power in the self-proclaimed “Revolución Argentina” of 1966. Despite its reputation as more moderate than the later Videla military dictatorship, the Onganía regime violently repressed the famed Cordobazo uprising of students and workers in 1969. It was exemplary of the early rehearsals of neoliberalism on the continent, promoting a liberal, developmentalist discourse of free trade, denationalization of industry, and a moralizing, religious, anti-communism as the

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antidote to Peronist populism. The regime promoted a corporatist discourse of community even as its violent repression destroyed social relations.126 Despite his residence in Paris at the time, García Uriburu remained involved in Argentine political issues. In 1972, he met with Onganía opponent and longtime unionist political leader Juan Domingo Perón, along with fellow artists Antonio Seguí and Julio LeParc.127 His Colorations imagined a relationship with the environment precisely as neoliberal policies leading to ever greater environmental devastation began to be rehearsed. While García Uriburu expanded the Colorations series from Venice to include New York, Paris, and his hometown of Buenos Aires in a Cuadrilátero conceptual planetario (Four-sided Conceptual Planetary Ring, 1970), his return to Buenos Aires came with a resolve never to live outside South America.128 Green became a metonym for the (South) American continent itself in the figurative paintings he continued to make, as well as in subsequent Colorations and other conceptual and performance-based practices.129 The artist recalled, though, that at the time of his initial coloration, the color green did not yet signify so clearly a politics of environmental action, and “green” political parties did not yet exist. García Uriburu’s American green grounds artistic and political responses to a now-global, social, and ecological crisis. Amerindian aesthetic philosophies were crucial to García Uriburu’s verisimilar green, and so to the new realisms of object and image. His ecological project sought to include what Viveiros de Castro came to call nonhuman persons: animals, plants, water, and stone. In 1973, the artist wrote: “I denounce with my art the antagonism between Nature and Civilization. It is for that reason that I color my body, my sex, and the waters of the world. The most advanced countries are destroying the water, the earth, the air, the reserves of the future in Latin American countries.”130 García Uriburu has been compared to Rodolfo Kusch for his “complex aesthetic concept, different from those that had hitherto run through the history of Western art, a concept developed through the course of millennia by the societies that populated these southern lands.”131 The artist began to collect Amerindian art during a trip to Peru in 1961, and thereafter collaborated with specialists to collect ceramics, textiles, feather art, masks, stoneware, carved wooden implements, and a library of reference books from across the American continent.132 He celebrated what he referred to as “las culturas verdes” (green cultures) in an exhibition of feather work from his preColumbian and contemporary Amerindian collections. That vast collection filled the three-story building housing his studio, such that the artist created his own works while surrounded by these objects and books.133 García Uriburu saw the collection as inseparable from his own artistic legacy, and he integrated pre-Columbian and contemporary Amerindian art alongside

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works by Alberto Greco, Tom Wesselmann, and Gyula Kosice. He even conceptualized a fascinating exchange of value, remarking that with each sale of his own art, “that money [plata—literally silver] in turn goes to the pre-Columbian collection. I believe I will double the collection between now and my death, and I am happy to leave behind a fabulous museum.”134 After his death, many of the pre-Columbian works were donated by his daughter to the Museo Histórico Nacional in Buenos Aires, to be studied by archaeologists for their deep relevance to Andean thought.135 They are installed in galleries and vitrines painted entirely in García Uriburu’s green. García Uriburu’s verisimilar green was enlivened like Oiticica’s red and confronts the same ethical challenges in the face of those vulnerable lives. The green that surprised residents in their cities’ canals, fountains, and rivers counted on a social encounter, yet a similar encounter with living Andean and Amazonian peoples was generally absent. Green was enlivened thanks to Amerindian aesthetic philosophies, but his collection extracted important works from the communities that made them. Despite certain efforts by the artist—such as his organization of an exhibition that paid homage to the Brazilian Kayapó leader and environmental activist Raoni in 1980—Amerindian peoples were rarely present as artists.136 Verisimilar green enlivened bodies of color but left them vulnerable within the colonialmodern institutions that continue to structure contemporary art. It is no surprise, then, that Chemi Rosado Seijo, the artist from the eternal colony of Puerto Rico who gave us Tapando para ver (Blacking Out to See) in the introduction, recuperated verisimilar green from this dilemma through an inventive form of negation. Some thirty years after García Uriburu’s first Colorations, Rosado Seijo explored what he called the “exigencia del color” (demand of color) as a demand for and by green.137 In El Cerro (The Hill, 2001–present), Rosado Seijo offered to help paint the mostly gray, cement-block houses of residents of the small town of Naranjito with green paint (see plate 11). The artist describes the hillside town as “el margen del margen” (the margin of the margin): the margins of a marginal city, located in a non-state, on the margins of a global modernizing project, vacated of representation in both aesthetic and political senses of the words. Even on the island, he notes, the residents of Naranjito are referred to in disparaging terms as “esa gente” (those people).138 Rosado Seijo invited each household who expressed interest in painting their home to mix and adapt the green to the hue they preferred, gradually transforming the town into shades of lime, forest, emerald, and pine green. The view from outside, though, was different. As more houses were painted, the town on the hillside gradually disappeared into the verdant landscape. Like the threatened waters that García Uriburu dyed green, the town and its residents had already been

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invisible: from the city of San Juan, and even more so from Washington, DC. Rosado Seijo redoubles that invisibility as a tactic in the sociability of negation. As much as the green of El Cerro celebrates the natural beauty in which Naranjito is embedded, it says no, substantively, to commercial representations of a pleasure-filled Puerto Rico whose natural attractions are offered for the consumption of mainland and European tourists. The greenbacks produced by tourism never landed in the hands of the residents of Naranjito, who, like all Puerto Ricans, also receive few benefits of their partial US citizenship. Rosado Seijo’s green alters the verisimilitude that defined realist fiction—the power relations between observer and observed in the genre of “local color”—as well as the novel’s historically bourgeois values of domesticity, individualism, and private property. Each homeowner, who may or may not have legal papers to the terrain, painted her home within a network of adjoining houses. Rosado Seijo thus multiplied the inventive building process of Abraham Cruzvillegas’s familial autoconstrucción (self-construction) to sustain social collaboration among neighbors and to build his own long-standing and close relationships with them. Painting El Cerro also expanded to include other “green” cultures, such as communitytaught workshops on medicinal plants and small-scale agriculture. Neither a beautification process nor the display of brown bodies for a “neutral” art viewer, its verisimilar green animates and is animated by relations among the people Oiticica would have called “participators.” Mixing paint and painting walls, green took in Rosado Seijo and the residents as friends, and with a sleight of hand simultaneously magnified the verdant beauty of the hill and made it disappear from view. Even that negation, a kind of blacking out from view by using green, drew in the opposite side of the color wheel. While the project began mixing shades of green, Naranjito translates as “little orange tree,” a paradox as striking as Manglano-Ovalle’s “Black Warrior.” Furthermore, as the project grew, some residents of Naranjito opted to paint their homes orange, red, yellow, and even purple. Their rejection of green was grounded in both aesthetic and political preferences: some residents requested alternatives because green is associated with the Puerto Rican pro-independence party, while most of them supported statehood, which is represented by blue.139 The non-red of green was negated again, becoming non-green, a non-object that objected to the erasure of Naranjito by making the verdant place substantial. Non-red and non-green invent margins that do not demarcate a peripheral site but rather help create the social environment of “esa gente.” This chapter began with a statement about the challenge that visual art faces in distinguishing between verisimilar and descriptive color. El Cerro,

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far from the white walls of art galleries and museums, is most at risk of its green being reduced to descriptive and decorative roles, secondary to the cinderblock walls to which it adheres. The artist’s studio in San Juan, however, contains dried-out brushes with hardened green paint, the two glued together into a chromatic fossil that materializes the color itself. A painted and collaged sketch of Naranjito by Rosado Seijo further distills the character of color in El Cerro (see plate 12). Combining industrial paint samples with a painted green sky and mountain, the sketch condenses debates that have framed the history of art in Puerto Rico. It echoes the layering of color by the cubist painter Paul Cézanne and his friend, the Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller (1833–1917), a founding figure known for landscape paintings that inverted the colors of land and sky. Oller referenced a range of international realist schools in his early work, including plein air painting, impressionism, classicism, naturalism, and even the Spanish baroque.140 Two of his landscape paintings housed in the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña in San Juan are almost entirely green, from hilly earth to a treefilled sky. In a symptomatic essay on Courbet and Oller, the British art historian Linda Nochlin struggles between her expressed desire to overturn Eurocentric designations of center and periphery, universal and local, and the engrained formalist training that accompanies her defense of Parisian modernity and modernism as the source for liberation as much as domination. She describes Oller’s work as an attempt to “convey a sense of both his native region and . . . a sense of himself as a Puerto-Rican artist—not just someone who comes to Puerto Rico to paint local color”; and she asserts his dedication to “universality” as a synonym for “high quality.”141 Nochlin offers yet another example of the ongoing frustration local color causes critics from the center for being either too extravagant or not authentic enough. Rosado Seijo’s collage and the enlivened color that filled Naranjito’s land, houses, and sky places El Cerro at the heart of this debate, adding a new chapter to the history of realist art and literature. Even though it was applied with paint rollers onto cinderblock, the green of El Cerro is simultaneously substantial and free of any object. Enlivened in its creation of social relations, it embraced residents in color without attaching those bodies to color. Naranjito is the site of the invention of an enlivened color that takes us into what the artist describes as “un espacio creativo” (a creative space).142 Recall Suely Rolnik’s distinction between creation as a micropolitical act of making and creativity as a conservative form that promotes the coloniality of contemporary, neoliberal capitalism.143 Still marginal as it simultaneously disappears and coheres, the green space of creation in Naranjito is alive and full of inventive people. The political impact of El Cerro under the all-encompassing regime of

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neoliberalism is minor. What possible force can a place on the hillside of an island, one still bound by imperialist structures of the sixteenth century, have against ever-increasing neoliberal inequities in the twenty-first? The impact on an individual level, too, is muted. When I spent a day with the artist visiting Naranjito, things were quiet. Hues of green, orange, and yellow were visible as we wound our way up the hilly terrain and in and out of houses, and we chatted on patios with the women with whom Rosado Seijo had worked for more than a decade. Absent the heroic narrative of Mexican murals, without the pervasive advertisements for Coca-Cola and the proclamations of political party slogans painted on walls across the Caribbean and continental America, you could almost miss El Cerro. But there were still houses in the process of being painted by a few adolescents standing around with paint buckets. Returning now to founding theories of literary fiction, we see that Brooks wonders—parenthetically—if the invention of realist fiction might be understood as part of a much broader demand of modern life: “(Mimesis itself, we can surmise, is a tool for survival: the principal way human infants learn to cope with the world, for instance.)”144 Realist fiction in art and literature endures as a survival strategy under a broadly defined modern regime. Brooks’s tender and quotidian vision of fiction as child’s play, as making up, is also a form of making do. Verisimilar colors play a crucial role in what Nicholas Mirzoeff similarly identifies as a series of “different realism[s]” that survived the different epochs of colonial modernity.145 The verisimilitude of green in El Cerro, and of color in nonliterary fictions more broadly, presents a crucial way of making without affirming, of making do and making up, which take you in without duping or punishing you. In extensive research into the material of color in Andean communities, Gabriela Siracusano shows that it similarly offered respite from the violent erasure of Amerindian memories, knowledge, and institutions. Color was “the residue of a visual memory that was not so easily extirpated.”146 Neither European colonizers nor subsequent criollo nation-states were able to subsume or kill enlivened color, just as they were unable to identify and destroy all of the sacred huacas disguised in the landscape Europeans saw. The survival of enlivened color tells a different history than the dominant focus on the syncretism of symbolic languages and religious icons. Syncretism, often celebrated as the mode by which native belief systems managed to survive complete devastation, was also a convenient tool of Catholic missionary expansion. In contrast, Siracusano explains, the power of color as such, as a huaca, evaded the politics and cultural praxis of representation, what she calls European heuristics “based on mimesis or the substance/accident binomial.”147 Color was not an accidental or secondary attribute added to the sacred object; color was the sacred thing, in itself and alive, visible and

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yet inscrutable to the eyes of Spanish invaders. Siracusano quotes from a 1649 letter from the Jesuit Francisco Patiño expressing his defeat in the face of the challenge from a native leader from Guamanga: “Father, why do you tire yourself with taking our idols from us? Take that hill if you can, for that is the God I worship.”148 Rosado Seijo’s El Cerro—another hillside—echoes that enduring social relation in the material of color. Like the other artists who invent enlivened colors, Rosado Seijo’s green provides crucial insight into literary as well as non-literary theories of fiction. Verisimilar green reveals that the colors that fill the pages of realist novels are more than just adjectives with the same value as those in a brochure selling house paint. These works help to respond to a crucial question in literary studies: whether the meaning of color remains consistent across non-fiction and fiction, between what the field calls “serious” and fictional discourse. For J. O. Cofré, color poses the central challenge to understanding the nature and referentiality of (literary) fiction. He states, as if it were unquestionable, that the “red” of Little Red Riding Hood’s cape does not differ from the “red” that describes a university hall.149 Because there is no difference between those words (“red” and “red”), Cofré seeks other sources of its fictiveness: readers capable of recognizing a text, “a time, a space and some entities of fiction which belong to that fictional time and space,” and the “invention of possible worlds.”150 However, his invented worlds still obey the tropic operation of representation, just with fictitious references, and explicitly and exclusively rely on narration and plot. For Cofré himself, the presumed referentiality of color sets limits on fiction’s critical and conceptual capacity: “Fictional discourse cannot be abstract in the sense that philosophical discourse is because its objective is to create or invent a world.”151 The artists in this chapter, however, made a “red” for Little Red Riding Hood that was, indeed, distinct from everyday red, and—like the non-literary fictions throughout the book—simultaneously abstract, concrete, and inventive. The residents of Naranjito painted their houses green because that was the color at hand, and in the process they invented an enlivened substance of color that sheltered them all. Verisimilar color, along with the lines, motifs, gestures, and bodies before it, show that non-literary fictions are truly fabrications. They combine invention with tangible but small-scale intervention, and they overcome doubts about the relevance of fiction without capitulating to demands for documentary truth. The concept of non-literary fiction comprehends how artists create something out of nothing and made of negation, works that exist only and importantly for the imaginary time of non-narrative, in selferasing lines of connection, repeated motifs, open gestures, and color-times. They offer to take us into the life of fiction, even as they expose us to the risk of speaking with the dead.

Epilogue: A Refuge

Here, this is not a book, but a form dissimulating as a book. And of course, this is not blue. This is not yellow. This is not black. Wa l i d R a a d , Wa l k t h rou g h

In the early stages of researching and writing this book, I was fortunate enough to attend a tour led by Walid Raad (b. 1967) of an exhibition from his series Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World at Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London. Raad, long based in New York City, is perhaps best known for his invention of an art collective called the Atlas Group (1989–2004) in his birth country of Lebanon. Employing the archive as a compositional structure, the series includes photographs, news clippings, drawings, video, and narrative. Raad’s artist talks about the group played a key role in its invention and laid the groundwork for performances such as the one I attended in London that he calls “walkthroughs.” Many excellent publications have analyzed what Raad reveals about history in his creation of the Atlas Group, and in subsequent series including Scratching on Things I Could Disavow. What concerns me more is what he reveals about fiction. Raad summarizes the latter series as it “chronicles some of the encounters that drove me to engage with the history of art in the ‘Arab world’ in the first place: an invitation to join the Dubai branch of the Artist Pension Trust; the development of Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi; the opening of the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, and the subsequent shrinking of my works; my ‘communication’ with artists from the future; artworks that have lost their reflections and shadows; and the effects

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of the wars in Lebanon on colors, lines, and forms.”1 The project connects the global economy, art history, the art market, war, and the basic, formal elements of visual art that here have contributed to the invention and analysis of non-literary fictions. For one final time in this study, I turn to an artist as theorist of the broader relevance of formal and even technical inquiries into fiction, and its role in life under a fully realized, global neoliberalism. Negation was a crucial operation during the first minutes of Raad’s walk-through of the London exhibition, and it remains so in subsequently published scripts of the performances associated with Scratching on Things I Could Disavow. He set the stage with a description of the booming art market in the petroleum rich Gulf States, and his reluctance to participate in new, white-box gallery shows in the region. When invited to exhibit the Atlas Group in the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, he recalled: “For some reason this offer perturbed me, and I refused. In 2006, I was asked again. I refused again. In 2007, I was asked again. I refused again.”2 While he eventually consented, that negation was the kernel of the first significant irregularity in Raad’s presentation: the moment when its fictional character began to reveal itself. When he finally agreed to an exhibition in 2008, the artist told us, upon arrival he discovered that all of the shipped works had shrunk to one-hundredth of their original size. In the gallery in London, we encountered an appropriately scaled, literal white box of a gallery, which contained tiny versions of Raad’s works. That contraction occurred in inverse relationship to the expansion of art from its long-standing role in the luxury market of objects and into the world of financial instruments. Across the Gulf region, Raad reveals in Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, sheiks and sheikas pour millions of dollars of proceeds from oil into private collections and architecture, in the style of the robber barons who later came to found the Metropolitan and the Whitney museums in New York. Ultimately these stories present what he describes as obvious connections between “cultural, financial, and military spheres.”3 In the published scripts in Walk-through, Raad also explores newer economic forces, which I suggest contributed to the radical diminution of his work. He narrates the story of the Artist Pension Trust (APT), a company founded by the Israeli businessman Moti Shniberg in 2004 and funded by anonymous investors, perhaps those very sheiks and sheikas, although we will never know. The business model of APT relied upon pooling artists’ works for sale, which the company would store and market in exchange for a share of the proceeds. The remainder was to be invested and function as a retirement fund for all contributors.4 That conversion of one’s own art into a financial investment takes the artist’s familiar, if uncomfortable, negotiation with the art market into the even more ob-

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scure terrain of financialization. A later development made possible by the global expansion of neoliberal tactics of privatization, deregulation, and a reigning free market, Aeron Davis and Catherine Walsh explain financialization as the “rapid growth of financial markets relative to both the state and material, productive economy of goods and services.”5 Their study turns to the British case, specifically to Margaret Thatcher, for an account of its overlaps with and distinction from neoliberalism, particularly emphasizing her appointment of experts from the financial sector in key positions of government. Raad’s Walk-through treads similar terrain. His rehearsal of repeated negation—saying no the exhibition—that nevertheless becomes a yes returns us to Thatcher as TINA: there is no alternative to neoliberal society. Even so, Raad’s works hide out in miniature and in the fiction of their origin in an invented artist’s collective. As distant as the American continent that has anchored this study may be from the sheiks and sheikas of the Persian Gulf, it plays an important role in Raad’s fictions. Although the artist resides in New York, it is not just North America that is a protagonist in the story. A video belonging to the Atlas Group series Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) presents the apparent testimony of Souheil Bachar, a Lebanese man purportedly held with five American and British citizens during what was known as the Western hostage crisis of the 1980s. The video briefly overlays photographs of the six men against the backdrop of footage of Ronald Reagan testifying on the Iran-Contra affair.6 That image condenses the intimate, violent, and arbitrary ties the United States forged between Central America and the Middle East through the Iran-Contra affair; backroom dealings that involved Nicaragua and Iran, as well as Costa Rica, Israel, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia; millions of stolen dollars; and redirected military equipment—far too complex to narrate in full here. Fundamentally, Raad directs our eyes to Central America as a tiny but important axis in the global proxy wars of the 1980s and to the cast of characters whose activities Greg Grandin traced from Central America in the 1980s to the war on terror in the new millennium. Raad’s works are set at the intersection of Cold War maneuvering and neoliberal rehearsals that Norman A. Bailey described in the case study of Latin America examined in the introduction. In line with the artists studied here, Raad’s fictions create neither revolutionary leftist utopias nor neoliberalism’s (unnamed) utopia of markets free of regulation that benefit from the power of the state. To the contrary, they are murky and troubled. Bachar recounts for the camera his confusion about the combination of sexual desire and physical repulsion the Western captives felt for him as much as for their shared captors. Raad’s narrated encounter with Shniberg of the Artist Pension Trust redoubles that intense

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attraction and loathing. Despite knowing Shniberg’s shady connections with surveillance companies and military intelligence across Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Raad finds him irresistible. He admires Shniberg’s good looks and smooth presentation of the evident logic of art as a financial instrument, declaredly for the benefit of artists themselves. Moreover, when he discovers that the parent company of APT is MutualArt.com, he remarks at how useful the website is to keep up with artists that interest him. Its excellent algorithms introduce him to compelling artists even as they track market trends, and he admits: “MutualArt has answered these questions [about the art world], and the result is an instrument, a financial product that MutualArt will soon be selling to institutional investors.”7 But Raad finds that he is neither upset nor surprised and can only admire Shniberg’s business acumen. If negation triggered the explicit shift to fiction in by-now-familiar ways, Raad’s work shares other founding components of non-literary fiction. The Atlas Group video of the fictional Bachar overlays still photograph onto the moving televised image of Iran-Contra testimony, creating a temporal and spatial collapse of oil-rich Gulf states onto the impoverished, narrow strip of land between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. More even than the complex historical time of this invented archive, the walkthroughs employ the impossible grammatical tenses of fiction that have appeared throughout these chapters in lines, gesture, motif, body, and color. In the script titled “Index XXVI: RED,” Raad tells of static-ridden visual and aural messages he received from Lebanese artists in the future, who explain that colors have disappeared in their time and they need him to send more. While Raad does not explicitly diagnose the cause of the disappearance, the series contains echoes of the rendition of color in Manglano-Ovalle’s work. In “Pension Arts in Dubai, Part II,” Shniberg describes one of MutualArt’s financial instruments, which evaluates the value of color.8 It calculates, for instance, what proportion of blue promises the highest return on the sale of a Picasso. Color “itself ” again suffers rendition through global economies and armies, even if now in the form of financial products and security firms. Suely Rolnik’s warnings about neoliberalism’s defining embrace of creativity are magnified in this era of financialization. That violence resides within Raad’s own art. In Walk-through he admits that he realized only after the fact that the Atlas Group was composed of “artworks made possible by the Lebanese wars of the past few decades”: “These wars also affected colors, lines, shapes, and forms. . . . And yet other colors, lines, shapes, and forms, sensing the forthcoming danger, have deployed defensive measures: they hide, take refuge, hibernate, camouflage, and/or dissimulate  .  .  . [not in artworks but] in circles, rectangles, and

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squares; in yellow, blue and green. They dissimulated as fonts, covers, titles, and indices; as the graphic lines and footnotes of books; they camouflaged themselves as letters, price lists, dissertations, and catalogues; as diagrams and budgets. They hibernated not in but around artworks.”9 The lines of drawing hide out in the numbers of budgets, compose forms in the logos of sponsors of exhibitions, and take sculptural shapes in museum condition reports. Given the conversion of art into financial instrument, color and its collaborators must seek refuge elsewhere. In that fugitive status, line, color, and in his very performance of the walkthroughs, gesture, operate as the kind of fictive invention that this study has found among the artists and theorists from across the Americas. Looking back now, I may have been drawn to Raad’s fictions because they encounter color sheltering not just in the texts and graphic marks that surround artworks, but specifically in “academic dissertations, especially the ones written by foreigners on a native culture and in a foreign language. They love these. And by the way, this is the cover page of one of the first dissertations written in English on Lebanese modernism by an American anthropologist at an American University. Colors came here.”10 As in the epigraph of these closing pages, Raad here offers the possibility that this “form dissimulating as a book” that you hold in your hands, at thirty to forty centimeters away, as Caldas would say, may hold those colors in reserve for a future that has none. Hiding here, they are still at risk of the exoticism and frustration of the “local color” that haunts realist fiction. If this study traced affinities that echoed across the Americas under the rehearsal and achievement of neoliberalism, rather than affirm the logics of national history or area studies, Raad helps to amplify those echoes to reach the Persian Gulf and what Mirzoeff might call a different realist fiction. The question of how to render those colors here provided the kernel of this book. That question seemed quite straightforward, if not easy to answer: how are works of art fictions? My central task has been to seriously consider fiction with no words, no narrative, none of the unfolding events or descriptive pleasure associated with that word. To answer how to make rather than write fiction, I found I had to invite artists and their works to cross the boundary that typically divides work of fiction from theory of fiction. Once that border is no longer policed, Raad signals that such texts may open their arms to the refugee materials of art under neoliberalism. I hope that some measure of invention might reside in these pages, just enough for color, line, gesture, motif, and, most of all, corpus to find sanctuary here. Even if we writers and scholars attempt to provide refuge for colors and forms in our work, to contribute to what Carrión called the new art of making books, in these closing pages I have mostly addressed Raad’s narratives

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rather than the installations, drawings, maps, prints, and photographs they engage. In fact, the “book” Walk-through is a small box that contains a booklet with his scripts and folded posters with photographs of the related artworks. One of these posters unfolds horizontally into a long strip of eleven rectangular color photographs of the interior space of an empty museum. Some photographs show monochrome painted walls, others picture colored light projections on walls, and still others display their own digital manipulation of the photographic image in colored walls or color shapes that create impossible, invented spaces within the empty galleries. The enlivened color that Oiticica pursued appears in the “picture gallery red” in several photographs, along with white, beige, and gray. Color appears both attached to and prying itself free from museum walls decorated with wood molding. The performance script that accompanies these images does not explain them, although it warns again of the precarity of color itself: the material of color, squirming, wriggling, enlivened color that breathes on its own. Instead, the script tells of a local resident expelled from the opening celebration for a Guggenheim Museum somewhere in the “Arab world,” after he shouts warnings to the other attendees that they will literally hit a wall if they enter the museum. It is unclear if the paint on the wall or “picture gallery red” in the photographs blocks his entry or offers an escape. Nevertheless, the performance from 2007 and the script published in 2014 again compose the impossible time of fiction. They begin with a prediction that the confrontation will happen in some future time between 2017 and 2024, and conclude with a promise that the event has already occurred. The fictive skirmish at the Guggenheim is not illustrated by the color photographs, and they do not elaborate the spoken narrative or the printed text contained in the book box. Raad’s fiction instead resides in that verisimilar color akin to a huaca, an enlivened material of color fleeing the violence that covets its power. Color, freed from secondary grammatical status as description, takes shelter in its stalkers’ failure to recognize it when not shaped or molded into objects for the market or, now, converted by an algorithm into a financial product. The impossible time of fiction invents a refuge for enlivened color. Texts do have a role to play in this story, as we have seen in the connections with literature that helped to define fiction throughout the preceding chapters. What I failed to recognize until now, though, is that these printed words in your hands also have a role to play. A statement appears at the bottom of the last page of Raad’s published script of Walk-through in all capital letters, in a smaller font, and placed too close to the inside margin, in the margin of the margin: this work is, in part, a work of fiction.

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have sustained me over the gestation and writing of this book, and I cannot hope to properly thank all of them here. I must begin with the artists who shared their process and work with me: those whose names appear in these pages and others who have invited me into their studios, on walks, to eat a meal, to parties, to the beach, and to spend time with their families. Years ago, I asked a core group of artists if a book that explored the concept and materiality of fiction—outside its familiar structures of narrative—made sense for the work they make. Their enthusiasm that this study promised to be generative for their practice has sustained me, although it turned out to be a far more complex proposal than I understood at the time. As a result, I am certain it took me longer to complete than they expected. I thank them for their patience and hope that this book fulfills some of the potential they imagined. For those early inquiries and conversations along the way, I thank Francis Alÿs, Artur Barrio, Waltércio Caldas, Antonio Caro, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Felipe Ehrenberg, Carlos Garaicoa, Lourdes Grobet, Michel Groisman, Pablo Helguera, Ana Linnemann, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Amalia Pica, Mónica Mayer, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Ernesto Neto, Chemi Rosado Seijo, and Javier Téllez. I extend my deepest appreciation to the institutions that have aided in the research published here: Ariel Aisiks and his wonderful team at the Institute for the Study of Latin American Art; the Projeto Hélio Oiticica; Ricardo Ocampo Feris of the Archive of Ulises Carrión; Jeannette Redenesk of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; the Instituto Caro y Cuervo; the Fundación Nicolás García Uriburu; and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. My thanks to the following galleries for their assistance: Henrique Faria Fine Art, Galería Casas Riegner, and Galerie Lelong & Co. I particularly thank the Department of Romance

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Studies and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke for support that made the color plates possible. Some years ago, the inspired vision of Claire Fox led to the creation of an informal, interdisciplinary network of scholars of Latin American and Latinx visual cultures that has become the kind of sustaining intellectual community one dreams about. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to this group, who have shared their questions, bibliographies, enthusiasm, and doubts: Beatriz Balanta, Natalia Brizuela, Mary Coffey, Sergio Delgado Moya, George Flaherty, Adriana Johnson, China Medel, Adele Nelson, Natalia de la Rosa, Fernando Rosenberg, Roberto Tejada, Camilo Trumper, and Alejandra Uslenghi. Many other colleagues and friends helped me to find my way. In Mexico, Deborah Dorotinsky, Pilar García, Laura González Flores, Renato González Mello, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Jay Oles, and Osvaldo Sánchez Crespo. In Chile, Soledad García and Cristián Gómez. In Argentina, Florencia Garramuño, Andrea Giunta, Luz Horne, Florencia Malbrán, Laura Malosetti, and Verónica Tell. In Brazil, Roberto Conduru, Tânia Dias, André Mesquita, Luiz Camillo Osorio, Adriano Pedrosa, Suely Rolnik, and Vera Beatriz Siquiera. In Peru, Gustavo Buntinx and Miguel López. In Colombia, Andrés Jurado and José Roca. In the United States, Anna Indych-López and Lynda Klitch have sustained me with sharp insights, and good food and humor. Leonard Folgarait, Lúcia Sá, and Gordon Brotherson offered early responses to chapter 1. From a bit farther north, Candice Hopkins’s research and her response to a portion of this project were essential. For their sustained guidance, my deepest appreciation to Chon Noriega, Mary Louise Pratt, Edward Sullivan, and Diana Taylor. Thanks also to Alex Alberro, Ericka Beckman, Karen Benezra, Kaira Cabañas, Claudia Calirman, Chris Dunn, Zanna Gilbert, Marcial Godoy, Jennifer Josten, Agnes Lugo Ortiz, Irene Small, and Adriana Zavala. Still closer to home, friends at Duke have supported me at crucial moments of this project: Roberto Dainotto, Martin Eisner, Christine Folch, John French, Gustavo Furtado, Paul Jaskot, Deborah Jenson, Ranjana Khanna, Louise Meintjes, Rick Powell, Miguel Rojas Sotelo, Richard Rosa, Kristine Stiles, Walter Mignolo, Diane Nelson, Priscilla Wald, Gennifer Weisenfeld, and Annabel Wharton. My current and former graduate students have been essential interlocutors and collaborators, especially Kency Cornejo, Ian Erickson-Kery, Samuel Hunnicut, Jasmine Magaña, and Rosalía Romero. In addition to our conversations, Camila Maroja and Marcelo Nogueira helped with research, and Ninel Valderrama Negrón and Serda Yalkin provided crucial support with the manuscript and production. My research for this book benefited enormously from invitations to deliver lectures and hear incisive questions at various universities and muse-

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s * 231

ums. I thank my colleagues and friends at Columbia University; the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Northwestern University; University of Chicago; University of Florida, Gainesville; Princeton University; Haus der Kunst (Munich); and Universidad de San Martín in Buenos Aires. Early versions of small portions of the introduction and chapter 3 were published in e-misférica and the Journal of Propaganda and Decorative Arts. My editor at University at Chicago Press, Susan Bielstein, supported this book with enthusiasm and patience, and I extend my profound thanks to her and her entire team. In this year (and more) of loss and isolation, family and friends that are like family have sustained me more than ever. My love and gratitude to my parents, Uliana and Vlodek Gabara, my first and current neighbors, and Rachel Gabara, sister and adviser extraordinaire; los Lasch y los Brindis, por siempre hacerme sentir en casa; and Susan Kelly and Alia HasanKhan, for doodles and jokes. For making possible a few hours of work when our school buildings closed, thanks to my neighbors turned pandemicparenting-cooperative in Carrboro. This book, as always, is for Pedro and Eva, whose imagination far exceeds mine.

Notes

Introduction 1. Farmer and Meireles, “Through the Labyrinth,” 35. 2. On the publication history of War of the Worlds and the lead-up to the Spanish American War, see Steven Mollmann, “The War of the Worlds in the Boston Post and the Rise of American Imperialism: ‘Let Mars Fire,’” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 53, no. 4 (2010): 387–412. The full bibliographic information of works cited only once in this study, such as this article, is included only here in the notes in order to streamline the bibliography. 3. José Roberto Teixeira Leite wrote about Alvim Corrêa in 1965, and Pietro Maria Bardi organized the first exhibition of his work in 1972 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; another exhibition was presented in the Museu de Arte Moderno in Rio de Janeiro in 1973. Bardi invited Waltércio Caldas to participate in an unrealized exhibition with Alvim Corrêa’s drawings in Belgium in 1975. See research on Alvim Corrêa by the Centro de Documentação Cultural Alexandre Eulálio, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem, Universidade de Campinas, at http://www3.iel.unicamp.br/cedae/Exposicoes/Expo-Alvim-Correa/index1.html. Caldas’s now-defunct website described his invited participation. 4. The leading Chicago economist’s interest in South America preceded his well-known travels to Chile to consult with the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In fact, except for a brief visit to Venezuela in 1969, Friedman’s first visit to the region was to Brazil in 1973. See Mauro Boianovsky, “The Brazilian Connection in Milton Friedman’s 1967 Presidential Address and 1976 Nobel Lecture,” History of Political Economy 52, no. 2 (2020): 367–96. 5. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” 533. The philosopher María Lugones later elaborated the similar role that gender played in coloniality. See Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”; Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (Spring 2008): 1–17. 6. The current Zapatista movement, which named itself after the historical revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919), erupted with the famous Primera Declaración de la Selva Lacandona (First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle) on January 1, 1994. A declaredly antineoliberal, indigenous movement from the outset, based in the southern state of Chiapas, the Zapatistas have continued to impact Mexican politics and pan-American indigenous action since that time. The longevity of the movement is unsurprising, as Chiapas has been the site of regular indigenous uprisings since the Spanish conquest. 7. Choi, “On Past and Present,” 17. 8. When describing artists of Latin American descent in the United States, I respect the artists’ own self-denomination and the terminology appropriate to their historical moment.

234 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 5–7 Therefore, most artists in this study will be “Latino” or “Latina,” “Chicano” or “Chicana,” rather than “Latinx.” However, when explaining how the field has influenced my understanding of contemporary art of the Americas, I use “Latinx,” as the increasingly preferred term in that field at the time of writing. 9. Philomena Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press and Dia Center for the Arts, 1991, 55, 80–93. 10. Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe” (2012), 135. Glenn D. Lowry’s essay also mentions colonialism, describing the Middle East as “determined to be part of the future yet not fully formed in the present, with a past haunted by colonial and postcolonial decisions that make little sense today yet that still reverberate in unexpected ways.” See Lowry, in Elizabeth Armstrong, ed., More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness (Munich: Prestel; New York: DelMonico Books; Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2012), 158. 11. The artist Pedro Lasch (Mexico and United States) argues for a much longer periodization of these kinds of culture-jamming activities, beginning with Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1730), which he embeds in the history of colonialism and contemporary coloniality. See Pedro Lasch, Grand Gestures and (Im)modest Proposals, A Project for Document 13, And And And (Kassel, Germany: Document 13, And And And, XCO Press, 2012). 12. For a discussion of the interdisciplinary structure of visual studies in the Latin American academy, specifically the relationship between the humanities and social sciences, see Gabara, “Gestures, Practices, and Projects: [Latin] American Re-visions of Visual Culture and Performance Studies,” e-misférica 7, no. 1 (2010): http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/ en/e-misferica-71. 13. Testimonio names a form of narrative autobiography, often of a marginalized subject mediated through a collaborator with a high level of formal, Euro-American education. Canonical examples include I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman of Guatemala (1983), with Elizabeth Burgos, and Biografía de un cimarrón (1966), by Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet. 14. The Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer’s important study Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation is exemplary of the association between the idea of Latin American art and this understanding of politics. For a full discussion of this genealogy, see Camila Maroja, Framing Latin American Art: Artists, Critics, Institutions and the Configuration of a Regional Identity (PhD diss., Duke University, 2015), https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10514. 15. Brooks, Realist Vision, 6. 16. Brooks, 2. 17. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliot (New York: Verso Books, 2014), 3. 18. See “Genres of Neoliberalism,” a 2013 special issue of Social Text (vol. 31, no. 2) edited by Jane Elliott and Gillian Harkins. 19. Any strictly delimited periodization of neoliberalism is debated by the geographer Jamie Peck: “Neoliberalism was a mix of prejudice, practice and principle from the get-go. It did not rest on a set of immutable laws, but a matrix of overlapping convictions, orientations and aversions, draped in the unifying rhetoric of market liberalism. The project was regularly self-styled as neoliberal from the late 1930s through the early 1950s (Friedman 1951), after which it was prosecuted through a more euphemistic lexicon—of freedom, competition, liberty and markets. The misrepresentation and misreading of neoliberalism therefore each have long and tangled histories, reaching back more than half a century.” Peck, “Remaking Laissez-Faire,” 6. 20. Bailey names Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, and Jacques Rueff as the luminaries of neoliberalism. See Bailey, “Colombian ‘Black Hand.’” There is ample scholarly literature on Latin America as a laboratory for neoliberalism; for useful sum-

N o t e s t o Pag e s 7 – 8 * 235 maries in English of the Southern Cone cases, see Walescka Pino-Ojeda, “Ethics of Responsibility or Ethics of Principle? Trauma and Neoliberalism in Latin America: The ‘Periphery’ Gone Global,” Borderlands e-Journal 14, no. 2 (2015): 1–27; and Alejandro Grimson, On Argentina and the Southern Cone: Neoliberalism and National Imaginations (New York: Routledge, 2005). 21. See Bailey, “Colombian ‘Black Hand,’” 444, 445. Bailey notes the contributions of a “faintly mysterious civilian organization called IPES (Instituto de Pesquisas de Estudos Sociais) [Social Studies Research Institute]” in Brazil. We must think about emergent neoliberalism even at the height of the Cold War. By the mid-1960s, even as the competition with communism and the influence of the Cuban Revolutionary example continued to hold sway across the continent, the historian Greg Grandin traces the diminished development aid the United States had offered just a few years earlier in the Alliance for Progress; in Empire’s Workshop, he describes a “brutal new economy” that by the 1970s had become “a militarized and moralized version that under the banner of free trade, free markets, and free enterprise often makes its money through naked dispossession” (160, 162). Furthermore, as the Cuban Revolution turned toward the founding of the Communist Party on the island in 1965 and continued to play a crucial role as the other hemispheric option to the United States, the political utopianism of the initial years after 1959 gave way to intense debates over the Castro regime. 22. The Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s narrative film No (2012) is exemplary of this argument moderating the “freedom” of the return to (neoliberal) democracy. Larraín took liberties with the historical record and footage he used rather than make a documentary film. His embrace of fiction to tell a history that has been intensely connected to calls for memory, document, and truth engages central questions of this study. 23. “Época de economias multinacionais, de empresas transideológicas, é preciso rever a própria noção de ideologia.” Scovino, Cildo Meireles, 47 (interview with Frederico Morais, first published in O Globo, March 16, 1977). All translations from Spanish and Portuguese are my own unless otherwise indicated. 24. Meireles suggests that Colombia was as crucial to understanding the full shape of neoliberal repression as Brazil’s military dictatorship. The connections were equally clear to Bailey in 1965: his article about Colombia begins with a satisfied mention of “commentators puzzling over the question of whether the Brazilian insurrection of March–April 1964 was a revolution or simply a coup-d’état.” Bailey, “Colombian ‘Black Hand,’” 445. During the 2016 putsch of Brazil’s democratically elected president Dilma Rousseff, right-wing opponents revived the presentation of the military coup as a “revolution.” Susana Draper tracks the conversion of repressive spaces of dictatorship into commercial centers in Afterlives of Confinement. Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). 25. Bailey called for a visual sphere to rival the Cuban-allied left’s gloriously designed posters, brilliantly directed cinema, and sharp photographs of the Tricontinental alliance. Bailey, “Colombian ‘Black Hand,’” 448. On the art of Cuban-led Tricontinental, see my edited volume and introduction to Pop América, 1965–1975 (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum at Duke University and McNay Museum of Art, 2018). In her contribution to that volume, Jennifer Josten traces the visual echoes between posters made in support of the communist government and pop art in the United States, and reveals the independent artistic spirit of communist Cuba as it distanced itself from Soviet socialist realism. 26. Peck, “Remaking Laissez-Faire,” 4–5. Peck also calls for attention to the “winding path of neoliberalism from crank science to common sense,” an uneven, spotty history of the negotiation of the space between state and market in which media was a crucial strategy (31). 27. Rolnik, “The Knowing-Body Compass,” 128.

236 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 9 –1 1 28. Gullar’s publications marked a shift from the modernizing celebrations of Brazilian concretism to the phenomenological explorations of neo-concretism. On Gullar, see Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, esp. pp. 5–6 and chap. 2. Sérgio Martins notes that Gullar’s text does not seek to determine adherence to the differing agendas of the concretists or neo-concretists and argues for its relevance—along with Michael Asbury—to art history and art theory broadly; however, he finds Gullar’s theory of negation lacking. Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde, 41, 46. On Acha, see López and Tarazona, La persistencia de lo efímero; and Acha, “Teoría y práctica,” 221. The Mexican artist Maris Bustamante vaguely recalls a conversation in which Acha ascribed his appropriation of the word from German aesthetic philosophy. See Raquel Tibol, “Juan Acha at the Austin Symposium,” and Maris Bustamante, “Art Critique and Nonobjectuality in Juan Acha’s Work,” both in Juan Acha: Despertar revolucionario/Revolutionary Awakening, ed. Joaquín Barriendos (Mexico City: MUAC/UNAM, 2017), 239, 255. 29. Eder, “Presentación,” 13–14. 30. “Aspectos do não-objetualismo no Brasil,” May 1981, Typed manuscript. Personal archives of Aracy A. Amaral, São Paulo, Brazil, https://icaa.mfah.org. I thank Camila Maroja for her help with Acha’s connections with Brazil. A growing body of research carried out by Joaquín Barriendos, Natalia de la Rosa, Miguel López, and Emilio Tarazona has brought to light Acha’s participation in art criticism in Lima in the mid-1960s. 31. Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 3. 32. For a demythologizing account of the non-object, see Martins, Constructing an AvantGarde, 19–20. 33. Gullar, Experiência neo concreta, 145. Gullar then makes a contrast between the object, which is a “hybrid of name and thing,” and the non-object, which “is one, whole, frank [franco]” (146). 34. Gullar, 146. 35. “Los no-objetualistas eran tan radicales en su opción que decían cosas como: ‘En Latinoamérica pensamos de otra forma. En Latinoamérica estamos haciendo esto o aquello y no vamos a colgar un cuadro en este museo, no vamos a fetichizar el objeto, lo que ustedes están haciendo, y vamos a ver que la gente va a pensar de otra manera.’ Fue un momento crítico, una situación convulsiva y agresiva, que se sitúa en un contexto de fuertes dictaduras latinoamericanas, como queda documentado en la instalación del brasileiro Cildo Meireles.” Sierra Maya, Memorias, 16. While noting the temptation to think that Gullar’s non-object was the source of Acha’s term, del Valle finds he cannot do so. Del Valle, “La fiesta del no-objetualismo,” 63. In the same publication, the Peruvian critic and writer Mirko Lauer, in “Notas para un prólogo,” first states the Brazilian theoretical debates were absent in Medellín in 1981 but does note Acha’s important role in the 1978 Latin American Biennial with Mário Pedrosa in Brazil, discussed later. Isobel Whitelegg notes that these terms appear to have been coined entirely independently. Isobel Whitelegg, “Brazil, Latin America: The World,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (2012): 131–40. 36. See Bustamante, “Non-objectual Arts in Mexico.” 37. Miguel López describes a poetic genealogy of “deterritorialization” closer to the Mexican Octavio Paz than to performance art in the US context. See Miguel A. López, “Cecilia Vicuña: A Retrospective for Eyes That Do Not See,” in Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure (Rotterdam: Witte de With Publishers, 2019), 26, 300–301. 38. Oiticica’s notes to his projects are available at Programa Hélio Oiticica (https://legacy -ssl.icnetworks.org/extranet/enciclopedia//ho/home/dsp_home.cfm). The first reference to não-narração is in his text for Neyrótica (April–May 1973); the second, in Mangue Bangue, March 9, 1973. 39. On Asco, see Rita González and Ondine Chavoya, eds., Asco: Elite of the Obscure,

N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 1–1 8 * 237 exhibition catalog (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011); and Chon Noriega, “Your Art Disgusts Me: Early Asco 1971–75,” Afterall 19 (Autumn–Winter 2008): https://eastofborneo .org/articles/your-art-disgusts-me-early-asco-1971-75/. 40. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for University of Chicago Press who helped me to clarify this important point. 41. “Essa moldura era o meio-termo entre a ficção e a realidade, ponte e amurada que, protegendo o quadro, o espaço fictício, ao mesmo tempo fazia-o comunicar-se sem choques, com o espaço exterior, real.” Gullar, Experiência neo concreta, 92, 143 (emphasis added). 42. Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 3. Amor’s study reviews the vast scholarship that understands the frame as a metaphor of the relationship between art and life. 43. Gullar, Experiência neo concreta, 147–48. 44. “Não me interessa mais a obra de um artista, preocupo-me com o processo, com a invenção.” Jacob Klintowitz and Silvia Ambrosini, interview with Juan Acha, “Mitos e magia: O desafio da bienal,” Jornal da Tarde, March 2, 1978. 45. Del Valle, “La fiesta del no-objetualismo,” 13. 46. Rancière, Lost Thread, xxxiii (emphasis added). 47. Del Valle, “La fiesta del no-objetualismo,” 34. 48. Dismissing calls for public housing for homeless families, Thatcher spoke to Woman’s Own magazine on September 23, 1987: “ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbor.” See the full interview at the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation (https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689). In the British Daily Telegraph, on May 22, 1980, Thatcher wrote: “There’s no easy popularity in what we are proposing, but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there is no real alternative.” She was so known for this phrase that she returned to it in an article for the same newspaper in 1997: “The only real choice at the next general election is between Conservative policies and soft socialist policies. And the only way to be sure of getting Conservative policies is to vote Conservative. To coin a phrase, ‘There Is No Alternative.’” Daily Telegraph, April 1, 1997 (available at the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation: https://www.margaretthatcher .org/document/108369). 49. Bui, Ashton, and Levi Strauss, “Alfredo Jaar.” Here Jaar refers to his internationally influential series on genocide, The Rwanda Project (1994–1998). It is striking that the extensive critical bibliography dedicated to Jaar often ignores the impact of his formative years in Martinique, an erasure resembling the media blackout of the Rwandan genocide that caused his outrage. 50. In the second plebiscite, yes and blank votes totaled 67 percent in support of Pinochet and no votes, 30 percent; the remaining 3 percent of votes were defaced. US Embassy, Chile, 28. 51. US Embassy, Chile, 8–9. 52. Recent evidence shows that Pinochet sought to put down the results of the 1988 plebiscite by vote nullification and by violence and was prevented only by his own military leadership, which realized that the international tide had turned against them. Peter Kornbluh, ed., National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 413, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB413/. The importance of emotion in the campaign was featured in Larraín’s 2012 film. 53. Jaar and Valdés, ¿Es Ud. feliz?. 54. Thayer’s critique echoes classic positions established in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the

238 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 8 – 2 0 Avant-Garde and Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle (1967). See Thayer’s “Vanguardia, dictadura, globalización,” in Pensar en/la Postdictadura, ed. Nelly Richard and Alberto Moreiras (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000), 239–60; and “El golpe como consumación de la vanguardia,” Revista Extremo Occidente 2 (2002): 54–58. 55. Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 2, 7. 56. Giunta, 15; Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 27. Certainly, the status of the avant-garde in Latin America was an issue of great importance at the time. Acha published “Vanguardia y subdesarrollo” in Mundo Nuevo: Revista de América Latina in March 1968, and Ferreira Gullar published Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento in 1969. 57. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 27. 58. Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 16. Giunta’s concluding words are revelatory, as she too demonstrates frustration with the unachievable demands of vanguardism: “Above all, what I have tried to do is to avoid an approach that might view the avant-garde in essential or absolute terms, falling back on preestablished definitions to which the objects would have to conform in order to be considered ‘avant-garde’ or not. On the contrary, my intention was to consider the way in which the various actors positioned themselves historically with respect to the avant-garde, considering it, above all, a problem to be resolved” (285). 59. “Aspectos do não-objetualismo no Brasil,” May 1981, typed manuscript, 18, personal archives of Aracy A. Amaral, São Paulo, Brazil, https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/1111221#?c=& m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-11162C02C39302C2199. 60. Jaar and Valdés, ¿Es Ud. feliz?. 61. That politics was more apparent in Acha’s no-objetualismo than in that of Gullar, who famously moved to Brasília and abandoned art, poetry, and criticism. Even so, I would argue that Gullar’s understanding of (non-)art as presentation rather than representation may be considered the basis for his later work with popular culture and education following that move. For a fuller account of Gullar’s transformation from concretism to popular culture, see Marcelo Mari, “Ferreira Gullar e a crise da vanguarda brasileira—Artes visuais, imperialismo e periferia capitalista (1962–1969),” Artelogie 8, 2016, http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/ 479DOI:10.4000/artelogie.479. See also Irene Small, “Exit and Impasse: Ferreira Gullar and the ‘New History’ of the Last Avant-Garde,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (2012): 91–101. We can relate this aspect of the non-object with Gullar’s later rejection of the concept of the avant-garde in Brazil—neither formalist experiments with mixed media and word-image collage or the avant-garde as truly political—in Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento. 62. López, “How Do We Know,” 12. 63. See Juan Acha, Las culturas estéticas de América Latina (1994; Mexico City: Trillas, 2008), 21–22. 64. On that relationship of “popular culture,” the middle class, and higher education, see my Errant Modernism, chaps. 3 and 4. Acha’s biennial ultimately was a failed experiment in continental unity, as it was terribly unpopular and ravaged by the critics. 65. Quijano and Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept,” 549. 66. There is an important Anglophone genealogy as well, led by scholars including Linda Tuhiwai Smith (New Zealand) and Leanne Simpson (Canada). 67. The curator Julieta González has signaled this crucial line of research into Amerindian arts during the 1960s and 1970s. See Julieta González, Sharon Lerner, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, and Andrea Giunta, Memories of Underdevelopment: Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960–1985 (San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2018). 68. Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 6. See Walter Mignolo’s introduction to the translation of El pensamiento indígena y popular en América: Rodolfo Kusch, Indigenous

N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 0 – 23 * 239 and Popular Thinking in América (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). I thank Walter Mignolo for our conversations about Kusch. 69. “Fue así que optamos por un expediente drástico: la negación. Sólo negando todo, habríamos de captar un elemento común que sirviera para los dos aspectos, por una parte ese punto donde logremos nuestra real universalidad, y por la otra aquél en el que simultáneamente alcancemos el verdadero margen de universalidad del indígena.” Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 59. 70. Juan Perón shaped Argentine politics in the twentieth century, serving three terms as president: 1946–1952, 1952–1955, and 1973–1974. He founded Peronism, a broadly populist political ideology that defied oppositions between left and right, capitalism and communism, that frequently organize that historical period globally. 71. In Argentina, unlike in many Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas, criollo is a near synonym for “popular” and hints at some indigenous parentage. In Mexico, criollos bear no such mixture; instead, the term refers to Spanish families born in the Americas; during the colonial period, those Spaniards were prevented from reaching the highest levels of political power, which contributed to their role in the independence movements. 72. Kusch explains further: “Requerimos [sic] otra lógica que toma en cuenta la negación y que, en cambio, relativiza todo lo referente a la afirmación” (we require another logic that takes account of negation and that, instead, relativizes any reference to affirmation). Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 33. 73. “Las cosas llevan un no colgado al cuello, y no se sabe muy bien en ese ámbito, si la cosa podrá ser usada o no.” Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 39. 74. “Un aforismo, un proverbio o un cuento.” Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 12. 75. “El estar es la condición, por su negatividad, de la posibilidad de ser.” Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 69. 76. “La distancia entre Occidente y América es la que media entre el pensar culto y el popular. Aquél, al contrario de éste, no se previene tanto de un ver visual sino del modo de concebir lo abstracto. Ha cancelado el aspecto concreto y físico de la cosa.” Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 29. 77. See Mónica Amor’s analysis of this cartoon, which drew it to my attention. Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 6. 78. Sérgio Bruno Martins even describes Gullar “objecting” to Mário Pedrosa’s attempt to designate the work of art by Lygia Clark that inspired the term não-objeto. Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde, 19. What the cartoon gets wrong is the question of who can make a nonobject. All the artists represented are men, and in the top corner of the same frame with the objecting painter is a heterosexual couple, and as the mustachioed man whispers in her ear, the woman responds, “Não objeto.” Despite Lygia Clark’s foundational role in the emergence of the não-objeto, women are still reduced to the position of simpering sexual objects. 79. “Acha, não lhe parece que você está usando gerúndio exageradamente: tateando, buscando, procurando.” Klintowitz and Ambrosini, “Mitos e magia” (emphasis added). Acha’s response is equally annoyed, “What do you want? That’s the situation . . . a question is just beginning to be asked . . . if we were to begin a discursive Biennial, a fair of symposia and debates about the meaning of Latin American art, about what to do, perhaps we would never arrive at a conclusion. You know, symposia . . .” My thanks to Camila Maroja for sharing this interview with me. 80. OED Online s.v. “-ism, suffix,” September 2019, https://www-oed-com.proxy.lib.duke .edu/view/Entry/100006?rskey=nniuzc&result=2. Gullar insists, too, that the primary outcome

240 * No t e s t o Pag e s 23 – 27 of the negation of the non-object was the “move from contemplation to action.” Gullar, Experiência neo concreta, 150. Luis Camnitzer, in Conceptualism in Latin American Art, emphasizes the distinction between “conceptual art” and “conceptualism” as the difference between a European and US project and the political tenor of Latin American art. 81. “Materia prima de [su] trabajo [es] la carencia del todo” (interview with the author, May 31, 2019). 82. “Generar un espacio negativo para hacer arte . . . Acudir a todo lo que no es la obra para configurar la obra” (interview with the author, May 31, 2019). 83. Mestizaje is not correctly translated as “miscegenation,” which always has a negative connotation in English. Much as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui decries in the popular term “hybridity,” mestizaje nonetheless retains the charge of a biological or genetic mixture. See Rivera Cusicanqui, “Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa,” 105. 84. Cruzvillegas participated in Gabriel Orozco’s informal gatherings in the 1990s, known as El Taller de los Viernes, which spawned a young generation in Mexico City that would make their mark on global contemporary art: Damián Ortega, Gabriel and José Kuri, and Jerónimo López (aka Doctor Lakra), and the curator Guillermo Santamarina. Debroise, La era de la discrepancia, 332. 85. Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7, n.p. He answers: “Yes, from Ajusco [a southern neighborhood in Mexico City], but my mother is from El Chorrito [in Tamaulipas] and my father is from Michoacán.” 86. Frantz Fanon’s canonical encounter with a white child in Paris who points and tells his mother, “Look, a Negro!” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), has been written on extensively in postcolonial and Black Atlantic studies. 87. Cruzvillegas, “Poverino,” 165. 88. “Esto de ser las raíces de México es despolitizarnos, usarnos para justificar algo en lo que nunca participamos, es decir, crear el Estado. Por eso somos una negación.” Aguilar (A. Gil), “La sangre,” n.p.). 89. Aguilar (A. Gil), “La sangre,” n.p. 90. “Los pueblos indígenas no somos la raíz de México, somos su negación constante.” Aguilar (A. Gil) and Ferri, “Entrevista,” n.p. 91. The authors and curators of Sakahàn do not explain Cruzvillegas’s neologism. For more on urban Indians, see Gabara, “Fighting It Out.” 92. “Con la negación abro referencia a lo que está y que no afirmo.” Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 76. 93. “Nos dimos cuenta de que la resistencia era una narrativa que configuraba de raíz nuestra experiencia de habitar el mundo como pueblos indígenas y que, de resistir una y otra vez, los escenarios radicalmente utópicos habían abandonado nuestra imaginación. Mis utopías se hallaban configuradas casi siempre dentro de los límites que implica tener en cuenta la existencia omnipresente de los sistemas de opresión: fantaseaba con cambios legales, radicales si se quiere, pero siempre inscritos dentro del marco del Estado, por citar un ejemplo. Me pareció entonces un ejercicio urgente reconquistarle a la tierra de la utopía un valle de posibilidades inefables hasta ahora. Sin embargo, paradójicamente, tratar de imaginar esos escenarios radicales se convirtió en otra especie de resistencia narrativa. Parecía atrapada. Necesitaba imaginar mundos radicalmente distintos porque incluso las narraciones que me atraviesan funcionaban para evitarlo. Resistía imaginando no resistir, imaginando no tener que resistir.” Aguilar Gil, “Resistencia,” 20 (emphasis added). 94. Aguilar Gil, 23. 95. “En un mundo ideal la resistencia no existe porque no existen las opresiones que la

N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 7 – 3 2 * 241 motiven. En un mundo ideal nunca existieron. Tratamos de imaginarlo, detalladamente. Y eso también es resistencia.” Aguilar Gil, 27 (emphasis added). 96. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo, exhibition catalog (Phoenix, AZ: Movimiento Artístico del Rio Salado, 1989, 5). My appreciation to the anonymous reader for University of Chicago Press for directing me back to Ybarra-Frausto’s phrase. 97. “[Una] red de prácticas y saberes . . . que funciona como motor de una poderosa economía popular que mixtura saberes comunitarios autogestivos e intimidad con el saber-hacer en la crisis como tecnología de una autoempresarialidad de masas”; “formas de invención no reducibles, aunque tampoco del todo incompatibles, con el diagrama neoliberal.” Gago, La razón neoliberal, 12, 14. 98. Gago, 39. 99. “Conjunto de modos entreverados de hacer, pensar, percibir, pelear y laborar.” Gago, 20. 100. “Las premisas que me interesan tienen que ver con la posibilidad de entender (o inventar) la realidad a partir de dimensionar cada sitio donde uno se encuentre como una posible plataforma de creación a partir de la recuperación de los materiales a la mano.” Cruzvillegas, Autoconstrucción, 12 (emphasis added). 101. See XII Censo General de Población y Vivienda, La población indígena en México (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, 2004); and Julie Siebens and Tiffany Julian, “Native North American Languages Spoken at Home in the United States and Puerto Rico: 2006–2010,” American Community Survey Briefs, US Census Bureau (December 2011). The US count excluded what we might call “indigenous migrants”—an apparent oxymoron that reflects the violent separation of native peoples by national borders—the thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America who speak Amerindian languages. 102. Saldaña-Portillo, “Reading a Silence,” 306. 103. Peck, “Remaking Laissez-Faire,” 25. 104. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa,” 101. 105. See Carrillo Rowe, “Settler Xicana.” 106. Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” 484. 107. Viveiros de Castro, 475. Important corrections have addressed the broad strokes by which Viveiros de Castro encompasses large swaths of Amerindian peoples within his ontological anthropology and the concepts of perspectivism and multinaturalism. See the dossier dedicated to the impact of that ontological approach in anthropology and new materialisms in Indiana 29 (2012): http://dx.doi.org/10.18441/ind.v29i0. 108. Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” 51–52. 109. Viveiros de Castro, 478. 110. Viveiros de Castro, 483–84. 111. Goldfeder, “Entrevista,” 25. 112. Librandi-Rocha, “Becoming Natives,” 180. 113. Costa Lima named Lévi-Strauss as one of the thinkers who most influenced him. See Natalia López Rico, “Teorizar en un país periférico: Entrevista a Luiz Costa Lima,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 88 (2014): 319–34. 114. See Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology.” I am indebted to Camila Maroja’s reading of Viveiros de Castro in her 2019 article, “The Persistence of Primitivism,” on the work of the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. 115. For more on error, see Gabara, Errant Modernism. 116. Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology,” 18 (emphasis added).

242 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 3 3 – 3 6 117. “La anti-narración es la que precisamente contribuye, con sus simultaneidades y sus rarificaciones de información, a que las obras no-objetualistas sean abiertas o pansémicas, a fuerza de tedio.” Acha, “Teoría y práctica,” 233. Pamela Lee also locates the question of time at the heart of mainstream art of the 1960s. The short essay by the pre-Columbian specialist George Kubler, “The Shape of Time” (1962), is fundamental to the “chronophobia” she finds among New York and Los Angeles artists and critics. Lee, in her 2004 Chronophobia, notes that Robert Smithson especially appreciated that “[the essay] demands reflection on “the ‘static’ arts’ relationship to temporality” (54); it contributed to Smithson’s work on something like non-narrative time. A full discussion of how to understand Kubler’s impact on contemporary artists is beyond my scope here. However, while Lee is certainly right that the essay preceded Smithson’s travels in Mexico, the art historian’s reflections on time were fundamentally shaped by defining questions in preColumbian and Latin American studies: colonial violence, its impact on Amerindian cultures, and debates over questions of continuity and survival. See Mary Miller, “Shaped Time,” Art Journal 68, no. 4 (2009): 71–77, and the other essays in that special issue on Kubler. 118. Acha, “Teoría y práctica,” 233. 119. Mosquera, “Interview with Cildo Meireles,” 19. On Lembra and Gullar’s other spatial poems, see Mariola V. Alvarez, “The Anti-dictionary: Ferreira Gullar’s Non-object Poems,” non-site 9, April 30, 2013, https://nonsite.org/the-anti-dictionary-ferreira-gullars-non-object -poems/. 120. Acha, “Teoría y práctica,” 233, 236. 121. Lamarque and Nash, “Narrative and Invention,” 132. 122. Narratologists have searched for linguistic formulations that distinguish literary fiction from non-fiction texts and everyday speech. Culler follows Mary Louise Pratt’s Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1981) as a key study to understand the concept of fiction but misses that her fundamental concern is not fiction but literariness. See Culler, “Problems in the Theory of Fiction.” 123. Culler, 3. 124. Rancière, Lost Thread, xxxi (emphasis added). 125. While Rancière foregrounds the analyses of what he calls both “episodes” and “scenes” in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013), his Lost Thread enacts a similar methodology of exploration of philosophical concepts. 126. Schiwy, “Todos somos presidentes,” 732. 127. Schiwy, in “Todos somos presidentes,” refers to an interview in which Rancière is asked to address “postcolonial theory” specifically. His brief response maneuvers around the real problem at hand, displacing the absence of coloniality in his work onto the French academy at large, and then reducing postcolonial (and colonial) studies to “identity politics” based in “the constitution of the subject” and therefore distinct from the “processes of subjectification” that interest him. See S. Dasgupta, “Art Is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It. An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Krisis Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 1 (2008): 74–75. 128. Azoulay suggests offering historians materials such as pens, colors, and erasers to have them make new histories, but her primary examples of possible histories are narrative and photographic. Azoulay, Potential History, 236–40, 378. 129. For Rancière, Broodthaers frees the poem-made-object from conversion into a commodity by maintaining an unresolved tension between image and word. He argues that when words and images, both made of lines, are made homogeneous, they sustain rather than interrupt capitalism. See Rancière, “The Space of Words.” See chapter 1 for a different conceptualization of that relationship. Mallarmé’s poem was also an important referent for Brazilian concrete poets.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 3 6 – 39 * 243 130. For these works by Broodthaers, see the catalog for the comprehensive retrospective exhibition. Borja-Villel and Cherix, Marcel Broodthaers. In the catalog, Doris Krystof emphasizes the artist’s employment of “fiction and the imagination” in contrast to his influential German contemporary Joseph Beuys (218). On the media representations of the Congo leading up to and following independence to which Broodthaers refers in his collage, see Matthew G. Stanard, “Revisiting Bula Matari and the Congo Crisis: Successes and Anxieties in Belgium’s Late Colonial State,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46, no. 1 (2018): 144–68. 131. Rancière, Flesh of Words, 41. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. 132. See Costa Lima, Frestas. 133. The existing theories of fiction in contemporary art predominantly rely upon the concept of heterotopia. The artists David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan cite Foucault for their concept of fictioning in contemporary art, which helpfully employs the gerund to emphasize the fusion of theory and practice. However, despite a wish to “decolonize” their study, it relies on the implicit futurity of science fiction and builds toward technologies of digital media and artificial intelligence as the pinnacle of “fictioning.” Philippe Dubois elaborates a theory of the photographic “fiction-image” by constituting the same progressive trajectory toward the digital. Remarkably, race and colonial history are entirely absent from his vision of a photography that races toward fiction. Dubois, “Trace-Image to Fiction-Image,” 166. Other attempts to transfer fiction to the realm of visual arts rely on more common-sense definitions of fiction. Anne Cauquelin proposes to understand displacement in art, including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, as “in the terrain of fiction” for disappearing and reappearing. She proposes something like two parallel worlds of our reality and fiction. See Anne Cauquelin, Frequentar os incorporais: Contribuição a uma teoria da arte contemporânea (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2008), 71, 188. The new media artist Antoinette LaFarge writes and works with “fictive art” influenced by Wolfgang Iser’s The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993). For her, the digital at large is a form of fiction in quite general terms: a dream, the imagination of something that is not present. See Antoinette LaFarge, “Eisbergfreistadt: The Fictive and the Sublime,” Visual Communication Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2009): 210–41. 134. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 135. See Felski, Limits of Critique. Many reviewers rightly note that Felski is clearer in her critique of critique than in any proposal for the character and methods of what she terms “postcritique.” Diana Fuss proposes instead to reread canonical works of critique, such as Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” to find instances of the kind of relational (post) critique that Felski seeks. Fuss, “But What about Love?,” 354. 136. See Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Doris Sommer and Pier Luigi Sacco, “Optimism of the Will: Antonio Gramsci Takes in Max Weber,” Sustainability 11, no. 688 (2019): https:// doi.org/10.3390/su11030688. 137. Stiles, introduction to Raphael Montañez Ortiz, 8, 32; see also Kristine Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art,” Discourse 14, no. 2 (1992): 74–102. 138. Noriega, “Emptiness Is Fullness,” 83. On Latinx visceral art, see Chon A. Noriega, “Art between Viscera and Vomit.” 139. Ed Morales, “The Puerto Rico Plebiscite That Wasn’t,” ABC News, November 8, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Opinion/puerto-rico-status-plebiscite/story?id= 17674719. For a full elaboration of neoliberal coloniality in Puerto Rico, see Rocío Zambrana, Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

244 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 4 0 –4 8 140. See Roca, Define Context. 141. Arlene Dávila, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 5. 142. Amy Kaplan analyzes the 1901 Supreme Court case regarding the taxation of products imported from San Juan, which casts the island as “foreign in a domestic sense.” Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 3. 143. See my “El laberinto de la hermandad: Me-Xicano Photography and Protest,” in LA RAZA, ed. Colin Gunckel (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of the American West, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Getty Foundation, and University of Washington Press, 2020), 84–96. 144. In the installation of Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (2017) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the inclusion of photographs from his time spent in the South Bronx offered a glimpse into those relationships. 145. On the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s acquiring a print from Couple in a Cage on February 22, 2021, Coco Fusco posted this comment on her personal Facebook page. 146. Costa Lima, “On Mimesis,” 154, 156. 147. Programa Hélio Oiticica, Itaú Cultural, #0091/79—7/7, “Respostas ao Questionário de Carla Stellweg,” Revista Artes Visuales México–New York. 148. “Surge de una no menor preocupación por el puro hecho de vivir.” Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular, 34.

Chapter One 1. “Uma folha em branco não é espaço ainda; passa a ser quando uma linha a atravessa. Uma linha bem-sucedida nunca reduz o papel à condição de suporte.” Honório, “Meio-Ato,” 32. 2. Rincón, “Las imágenes en el texto,” 9. 3. “Se trata en general de algo muy distinto a las tradiciones de prohibición de la imagen en otras culturas del globo, y de la iconofobia que caracteriza tantos discursos críticos en Occidente.” Rincón, “Texto-imagen,” 22. W. J. T. Mitchell writes about the “otherness” between literature and visual art in the West in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 4. Rincón, “Las imágenes en el texto,” 12. For the relationship between photography and text in Carpentier’s first novel, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! Novela afrocubana (1933), see my “Photography, Avant-Garde, Modernity,” in A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Megan A. Sullivan (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 67–80. 5. The “conjunto de contrahumanismos,” no-objetualismo in particular, which “subvierte, pues, los ideales renacentistas y los de su estética.” Acha, “Teoría y práctica,” 232. See also Natalia de la Rosa, “Pop Writing in América: Between Art Criticism and Theory,” in Gabara, Pop América, 158–71. 6. “Desenhar seria uma extensão do escrever. Ou vice-versa. . . . Em princípio, tudo é desenho”; this interview took place in 2005. Scovino, Cildo Meireles, 196. 7. Cummins, “Los Qyilcakmayoq,” 189. See also Urton, Inka History in Knots. 8. “Menor unidade de pensamento. Sem os ‘quipos,’ o inominável teria se perdido na poeira do tempo” (quoted in Scovino, Cildo Meireles, 196–97). Meireles also sees the khipus as anticipating the binary language of computers. Cildo Meireles and Frederico Morais, El final del eclipse: El arte de América Latina en la transición al siglo XXI (Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, 2001). 9. Hyland notes: “Although Spanish witnesses claimed that Inka-era (1400–1532 CE)

N o t e s t o Pag e s 4 8 – 5 2 * 245 khipus—twisted and knotted cords—encoded historical narratives, biographies, and epistles . . . no specific khipu has ever been reliably identified as a narrative text.” Hyland, “Writing with Twisted Cords,” 412. She argues that the complexity of khipus she examined in Collata leaves no doubt that the knotted objects were used for communication beyond calculations, including letters and historical information. See also Urton, Inka History in Knots. 10. Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City, 21. 11. Ingold, Lines, 2. 12. Boone, “Introduction,” 3. 13. Boone, 4. 14. See Mignolo, Darker Side of the Renaissance, chap. 2. 15. A facsimile of the entire chronicle and scholarly materials is available online (http:// www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/titlepage/es/text/?open=idm45821230787600). Since Rolena Adorno’s landmark work with the manuscript, debate emerged over Guaman Poma’s full authorship of the text. As Mignolo, and Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn (2003) note, scholars working with a private Italian collection suggested that the Jesuit friar Blas Valera either collaborated with Guaman Poma or authored the work under his pseudonym. See Walter D. Mignolo, “Response: Las Meninas: A Decolonial Response,” Art Bulletin 92 (2010): 46n5; Carolyn Dean and Dana Liebsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 32n20. Early on, Adorno strongly rejected Valera’s authorship. See Rolena Adorno, “Contenidos y contradicciones: La obra de Felipe Guaman Poma y las aseveraciones acerca de Blas Valera,” Ciberletras 1, no. 2 (2000): http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v01n02/Adorno.htm. Subsequent research by Ivan Boserup and Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer confirmed Guaman Poma’s authorship: “The Illustrated Contract between Guaman Poma and the Friends of Blas Valera: A Key Miccinelli Manuscript Discovered in 1998,” in Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds of Guaman Poma and His Nueva corónica, ed. Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup (Copenhagen: Royal Library and Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015), 19–64. 16. Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City, 16. 17. Carrión was gay, which likely played a role in his departure from Mexico. He fell victim to HIV/AIDS in 1989. For more on Carrión’s wide-ranging practice and biography, see Schraenen and Carrión, Ulises Carrión; and Hellion, Ulises Carrión. 18. Ehrenberg and Hellion went into exile in Devon, England, following their involvement in the student movement leading up to the Olympic Games in Mexico City in 1968. 19. The journal Ephemera was consulted in the collection in the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, in Bremen. Javier Maderuelo emphasizes Carrión’s relationship with concrete poets, more for the structure of the work around a specific “pauta o principio rector” (guideline or governing principle) than the visual design itself. Maderuelo, Ulises Carrión, 47. Beyond the concrete poets, Carrión collaborated with Claudio Goulart, born in Porto Alegre, in Other Books and So, and his archive contains works by Leticia Parente and Anna Bella Geiger, both leaders in experimental media arts in Brazil. See Fernanda Soares da Rosa, “A Man Can Hide Another: Entre a poética e a arte política de Claudio Goulart,” Anais do III Encontro de Pesquisas Históricas (Porto Alegre, Brazil: PPGH/PUCRS, 2016), 392–405, https://iiiephispucrs.files .wordpress.com/2017/01/77-stjp06-07-rosa-fernanda-soares.pdf. 20. Amaral, “Tentativa de cronologia,” 389–90. 21. “Poesia concreta: tensão de palavras-coisas no espaço-tempo,” in Campos, Pignatari, and Campos, Teoria da poesia concreta, 156 (first published in noigandres in 1958). Carrión later observed that conceptual artists’ exploration of the form of the book is much less interesting and suggestive than the contributions of the concrete poets. See Ulises Carrión, “Bookworks

246 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 5 2 – 55 Revisited,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 11, no. 1 (1980): 6–9. Gullar narrates his relationship with the concrete poetry movement and subsequent participation in neo-concretism in an interview with Antonio Henrique Amaral, Marilia Krauz, Carla Stellweg, Teresa Aragao, and Eli Bartra, published in Artes Visuales (Mexico) soon after the Latin American Biennial and the counterexhibition Mitos vadios (São Paulo, 1978). He accepted their invitation despite the differences between his bawdy and carnivalesque poetry and their clean, modern aesthetic, because they seemed to offer something new to the Brazilian literary establishment. See Amaral and Gullar, “Entrevista con Ferreira Gullar.” 22. Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasileira, 25. 23. The international impact of the Brazilian concrete poets cannot be overstated. When Pamela Lee describes Robert Smithson’s essay “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space” (1966), she describes it as concrete poetry. She also notes its inclusion of a quote by the scholar of Mesoamerica George Kubler. Lee, Chronophobia, 221. 24. A collaboration between the São Paulo–based group Noigandres and a group from Minas Gerais, Tendência, Pignatari headed the journal’s editorial committee, which included Augusto and Haroldo de Campos among other leading figures in the movement, such as Cassiano Ricardo, Edgard Braga, José Lino Grünewald, Mário da Silva Brito, Pedro Xisto, and Ronaldo Azerdo. 25. Pignatari, “Agora tal vez nunca.” 26. While completed in 1976, Galáxias appeared episodically in portions until its first publication as a book in 1984. See Adam Joseph Shellhorse, “Formas de Fome: Anti-literature and the Politics of Representation in Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias (1963–76),” CR: The New Centennial Review 14, no. 3 (2014): 219–54. 27. Campos, “Dois dedos,” 112. 28. “Aceitação do conceito de ficção como central para sua poética.” Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasileira, 315 (emphasis added). Realist fiction is discussed in depth in chapter 5. 29. “A escritura, à medida que ocupa seu espaço na página branca, reflete sobre sua aparição (as condições de sua aparição). Esse processo é o tema dominante dos poemas que formam as Galáxias e é condensado pelo poeta com um conceito de linhagem mallarmeana: a ficção. Como se lê na epígrafe do livro: ‘La fiction affleurera et se dissipera, vite, d’après la mobilité de l’écrit.’ . . . Para Mallarmé, todo método é uma ficção, cujo instrumento é a linguagem, e vem ocupar o lugar de ligação (em substituição à religião) para a comunidade do fim-do-século. . . . A aceitação do conceito de ficção como central para sua poética implica um deslocamento de Haroldo de Campos em relação à ortodoxia concreta.” Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasileira, 315. 30. “Poesia Referencial—O têrmo referencial, aqui tomado para explicar a poesia de Carta do solo, não traduz propósito de subordiná-la à tutela de qualquer imposição extra-estética, seja à política, à sociologia ao folclore. É ela referencial por ser uma criação, uma fundação, uma invenção.” Avila, “Carta do solo,” 60. 31. Schraenen and Carrión, Ulises Carrión, 21. Not coincidentally, the title of Carrión’s manifesto references the poem by Lope de Vega, “El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo,” written as an address to the Academy of Madrid in 1609. Frequently translated as “The New Art of Making Plays in Our Time,” the baroque Spanish playwright used the word “comedies” in the title and argues for the importance of popular appreciation of theater. Just a few years earlier, Lope de Vega had written El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (El Nuevo Mundo) (The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus, ca. 1598–1603), known as the first play about the Americas. See John Brotherton, “Lope de Vega’s El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón: Convention and Ideology,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 46, no. 1 (1994): 33–47.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 55– 5 8 * 247 32. “Passa a ser um objeto útil, comsumível, como um objeto plástico.” Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasileira, 77. 33. Fernandes, “Art as Subversion,” 41. “Uma fabulação sem fábula.” Haroldo de Campos, “Livro de ensaios: Galáxias,” Revista Iberoamericana 68, no. 200 (2002): 697. 34. “Un libro es una secuencia de espacios. / Cada uno de esos espacios es percibido en un momento diferente: un libro es también una secuencia de momentos. / Un libro no es un estuche de palabras, un saco de palabras, un soporte de palabras . . . / El que un texto esté contenido en un libro se debe únicamente a la dimensión de dicho texto; o, tratándose de varios textos cortos (poemas por ejemplo) al número de ellos.” Carrión, “El arte nuevo de hacer libros,” 33. 35. “Una realidad autónoma.” Carrión, 33. 36. “La poesía concreta representa una alternativa a la poesía. / El libro, considerado como una secuencia espacio-temporal autónoma, ofrece una alternativa a todos los géneros literarios existentes.” Carrión, 35. 37. Recorded on the cassette The Poet’s Tongue (1977), available on the CD included in Dear Reader, Don’t Read (2015). 38. “No es discursivo, al contrario de la literatura (incluyendo a la poesía). Pero también al contrario del lenguaje que muchos artistas usan como elemento en sus obras. En mi trabajo el lenguaje es reducido a estructuras simplísimas, lineales, unidimensionales, ya que las palabras son despojadas de todo carácter emotivo intencional. Pierden, pues, volumen, peso. Pero esta pérdida tiene como ganancia el que quedan al desnudo diversos sistemas y sub-sistemas que subyacen al lenguaje verbal y que lo emparentan a lenguajes de signos de diferentes naturalezas. O sea, para que el lenguaje pueda llegar a la altura del arte, debe dejar de ser lenguaje literario.” Carrión, Permanencia voluntaria. 39. Johanna Drucker, “Project Statement: For Fans and Scholars Alike,” Artist’s Books Online, http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/fans.xml (emphasis added). 40. See Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City. 41. Cummins, “Los Qyilcakmayoq,” 211. 42. Cummins, 197. Cummins also draws attention to the representation of communication through gesture, noting the case of a traditional exchange of cups which represents the subordination of Indian to the corregidor (204). The significance of gesture is examined in chapter 3. 43. Cummins, 212. 44. Amatl is a type of bark paper produced by Nahua peoples. See the timeline in Felipe Ehrenberg: Pretérito imperfecto/Preterite Imperfect (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Arte Moderno, 1993), 76. 45. Barriendos, Juan Acha, 214. 46. Vicuña, Saboramí. Vicuña’s book describes a revolution that would combine “the wisdom of the American Indian woman” with socialism to create a utopian Chile, and Saboramí registers the tensions of that combination. It recalls a time when the author knew only foreign names—“when I was colonized”—and promises: “the Araucanos are going to rise up. They are waiting to begin to conquer their own way of existing.” Even as that other “existing” resonates with recent decolonial thought, Vicuña names the Amerindian peoples of Chile with a word— Araucano—used by Spanish colonizers but rejected by the Mapuche themselves. See Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Mnemonics: Beyond Modernity’s Violence,” Memory Studies 8, no. 1 (2015): 75–85. Vicuña’s Chilean utopia is based on a series of acts of substitution. Some promise the restoration of forms of knowledge that at this early moment fundamentally decenter the European history of the book with lines in stone. Some, however, imagine a troubling replacement of Mapuche residents with mestizo intellectuals.

248 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 59 – 61 47. Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City, 21. 48. Yépez, “Ulises Carrión’s Mexican Discontinuities,” 54. Certainly, the relationship between mentor and mentee foundered over time, yet it is not clear that Paz would have been so dismissive of Carrión’s experiments, especially given their shared admiration of Brazilian concrete poets. Despite one line of scholarship that asserts that for Paz poetry was “essentially discursive,” as Marjorie Perloff does, he shared a warm correspondence with the de Campos brothers and created the graphic Topoemas at a crucial art-historical and political juncture in 1968. See Perloff, “Refiguring the Poundian Ideogram,” 41; and Rodríguez, “Transdisciplinas.” Sergio Delgado Moya’s examination of concrete poetry does much to expand the critical literature on Paz; see his Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). 49. Carrión, “Ulises Carrión más allá,” 12. 50. Carrión, Second Thoughts, 14–15. In marginalia added to explain the context of publication in Second Thoughts, Carrión writes that the essay originally was written in Spanish; after its first publication in Plural, a shortened English version appeared in Kontexts 6–7 (1975) in Amsterdam and was used for all subsequent publications, except for minor corrections in Second Thoughts. He writes: “I’ve used this text as a basis for lectures in the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), Buenos Aires, and in the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, 1978” (6). 51. Archive Weserburg, Artist file, Ulises Carrión, Centre for Artists’ Publications, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany. For more on the relationship between Beau Geste Press and Ulises Carrión’s mail works, see the important research by Zanna Gilbert: “Via Postal: Networked Publications in and out of Latin America,” in International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms, ed. Meghan Forbes (London: Routledge, 2019), 105–32; and “‘Something Unnameable in Common’: Translocal Collaboration at the Beau Geste Press,” ARTMargins 1, nos. 2–3 (2012): 45–72. 52. Gabriel Wolfson, “Platillo inmenso,” Confabulario: El Universal, December 2014, https:// confabulario.eluniversal.com.mx/platillo-inmenso/. 53. Guerra, “Gender Policing.” 54. Carrión, Second Thoughts, 15. 55. See Iglesias Lukin, “King Kong Archives.” 56. Fernandes, “Art as Subversion,” 44. 57. An unusual figure—a poet and essayist dedicated to economic analyses—Zaid graduated from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey with a thesis about the book industry. Zaid famously protects his personal details, even suing a photographer for having taken and published his photograph. For a brief biography, see the Colegio Nacional website: http://colnal.mx/members/gabriel-zaid. 58. “Desgraciadamente, estos aumentos de productividad material han creado la ilusión de un progreso infinito, del cual los límites físicos no empiezan a despertar. Pero hay algo peor, en el caso de la atención personal: no tiene a su favor la multiplicación virtual que tiene la atención dedicada a la producción material de volúmenes cada vez mayores.” Zaid, “Límites al consumo,” 67 (emphasis added). 59. “Ciertas formas antiguas de atención, que eran muy efi cientes, se han perdido. . . . Dividir y especializar la producción y el consumo de atención personal, lleva a una atención cada vez más lujosa, no más abundante y barata.” Zaid, 67. 60. “La impersonalidad de la vida moderna (la desatención típica de la burocracia tradicional, la amabilidad de plástico de la burocracia que ya aprendió relaciones públicas, la falta de tiempo que tenemos todos en la ciudad para atendernos como personas) tiene como origen la misma atención dividida, especializada y costosa que produce plásticos baratos o personas desatendidas.” Zaid, 67.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 61– 6 9 * 249 61. On that certainty of the word, see Rolena Adorno, “Contenidos y contradicciones.” 62. Schraenen, Ulises Carrión: “We Have Won!” 63. My thanks to Theus Zwakhals at LIMA, which preserves, distributes, and researches media art (http://www.li-ma.nl/). The quoted texts that follow are from the narrative in that video. 64. These materials are held in the Archivo Lafuente; my thanks to Ricardo Ocampo of the Estate of Ulises Carrión for his aid with these documents. 65. Augusto Vinicius Marquet Colmenares (b. 1981), a digital storyteller and designer who divides his time between Mexico and Holland, created a work that proposed that Carrión’s death was “another one of [his] fictions.” See BUCLE: Archivo de ficciones (2017), at http://vision .centroculturadigital.mx/media/done/bucle20-20vinicius20marquet.pdf. 66. Carrión selects the scene from Shakespeare’s Othello in which the king is told his “fair daughter” is making the “beast with two backs” with “the lascivious Moor,” thus bringing to the foreground colonial violence and racism. Literary references abound in this project: particularly Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), itself an inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest (1895). The lineage with queer and later feminist appreciations of the power of gossip is a crucial component of Carrión’s work and merits further research. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985); and John M. Picker, “Disturbing Surfaces: Representations of the Fragment in the School for Scandal,” ELH 65 (1998): 637–52. 67. “Uma revista sobre a política das artes,” Malasartes no. 1, 1975, 4. The editors were Bernardo de Vilhena, Carlos Vergara, Carloz Zilio, Cildo Meireles, José Resende, Luiz Paulo Baravelli, Ronaldo Brito, Rubens Gerchman, and Caldas. Salzstein and Venosa, Fronteiras, 225. 68. Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde, 31. The same issue of Malasartes reprinted Gullar’s “Theory of the Non-object,” emphasizing its ongoing relevance, and included nowcanonical works by Cildo Meireles, Artur Barrio, Rubens Gerchman, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica. As Sérgio Martins notes, Gullar first defined the não-objeto while he was working between poetry and the visual arts, at a time when some exhibitions in Brazil combined the two. 69. Malasartes, no. 1 (1975): 11. Originally published in English in Studio International, October 1969, quoted here from the Portuguese translation in Malasartes. 70. See chapter 5 for further discussion of Kosuth in relationship to Waldemar Cordeiro’s work, Uma cadeira é uma cadeira (A Chair Is a Chair, 1964). 71. The exhibition Livros (2002) at the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul in Belo Horizonte and the Pinacoteca in São Paulo surveyed thirty-five years of books by the artist. On concrete poetry as the culmination of a baroque modernism grounded in the coloniality of life and art in Brazil since the conquest, see Campos, “Rule of Anthropophagy.” 72. See Montejo Navas, “Entrevista.” See Sergio Delgado Moya in Gabara, Pop América, on the Colombian artist Beatriz González’s response to the widespread experience of art history via reproduced images. 73. Caldas and Pérez Barreiro, Waltércio Caldas, 4–6. The scholarship on Caldas stresses the difficulty of speaking and writing about these works. Guy Brett points out that it “runs away from description, which seems to be most interested in that moment of feeling before description can begin.” Brett, “Let Us Therefore,” n.p. 74. Waltércio Caldas in conversation with Luiz Camillo Osorio, March 2012, Revista Serrote http://www.revistaserrote.com.br/2012/03/Waltercio-caldas-fala-sobre-seu-ensaio-visual -ficcao-nas-coisas-no-lancamento-da-revista-serrote-10/. 75. Pimentel, El espacio en la ficción, 170; Honório, “Meio-Ato,” n. 13.

250 * No t e s t o Pag e s 70 –7 8 76. Honório, “Meio-Ato,” 31. 77. Ramírez, Re-Aligning Vision, 132. 78. Quoted in Brett, “Let Us Therefore.” 79. “Em vez de assinalar ‘você está aqui,’ o local informa: ‘você agora está onde não sabe.’” Salzstein and Venosa, Fronteiras, 217. 80. Caldas’s negation here recalls Haroldo de Campos’s protagonist of Brazilian history: a baroque cannibal with a “non-origin” in “non-infancy” that offered “a critical view of History as a negative function.” Campos, “Rule of Anthropophagy,” 44, 47. 81. Quoted in Salzstein and Venosa, Fronteiras, 225. 82. Quoted in Salzstein and Venosa, 225. The full measure of Caldas’s comment on an invented blue made flesh is examined in the upcoming chapters dedicated to body and color. 83. These observations by Caldas are from his conversation with Luis Camillo Osorio in March 2012, Revista Serrote, http://www.revistaserrote.com.br/2012/03/Waltercio-caldas-fala -sobre-seu-ensaio-visual-ficcao-nas-coisas-no-lancamento-da-revista-serrote-10/. 84. Honório, “Meio-Ato,”, 28. 85. “A linguagem corre atrás da poesia.” For both quotes, see the Caldas and Osorio conversation in Revista Serrote, at http://www.revistaserrote.com.br/2012/03/Waltercio-caldas-fala -sobre-seu-ensaio-visual-ficcao-nas-coisas-no-lancamento-da-revista-serrote-10/. 86. Salzstein and Venosa, Fronteiras, 217. 87. “Vi a escultura de aço em um espaço não mensurável, estranhamente ligado ao todo, mas circunscrito por linhas imaginárias—estar em um determinado ponto da fronteira é, de certo modo, estar em toda a linha de fronteira do país.” Salzstein and Venosa, 224. 88. “O horizonte é um elemento fundamental em meu trabalho. Primeiro, porque é um lugar que não existe, sobretudo evocativo. Está sempre lá, mais adiante, qual uma miragem, ou um abismo. Segundo, porque o horizonte configura uma linha da qual não se sabe ao certo se é curva ou reta. . . . Este lugar, o horizonte, apenas sugerido pelos olhos, mas inexistente, me lembra o destino da arte.” Honório, “Meio-Ato,” 32. 89. “Sua definição cada vez mais se dá pelo negativo. Não é isso, não é aquilo. Tal vez não queira ser, porque sua existência é quase não ser. Não é a palavra do trabalho.” Venancio Filho, “Não.” 90. Alejandro Grimson and Gabriel Kessler, On Argentina and the Southern Cone: Neoliberalism and National Imaginations (London: Routledge, 2005), 32, 35. 91. Galeano, Las venas abiertas, 15. 92. The broadsheet provides two titles: one in Spanish (“deshaciendo el nudo”) and the other for English speakers (“in situ”). There is no direct English translation of the Spanish phrase in the publication. 93. Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7. 94. An edited version of Carot’s study is included in Cruzvillegas’s broadsheet; the complete publication is “Otra visión de la historia purépecha,” Estudios Jaliscienses 71 (February 2008) 26–38. 95. See Leonardo Manrique Castañeda, “Lingüística histórica,” in Historia antigua de México, ed. Linda Manzanilla and Leonardo López Luján (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, and Porrúa, 2000), 1:53–93. Carot does state that archaeological studies support connections between Purépecha and Native American groups of the US Southwest. 96. Conversation with the author, May 28–29, 2019. 97. “Maestra de cómo ser y cómo existir—kashúmbikua, las maneras, los modos.” Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 7 8 – 8 5 * 251 98. Abraham Cruzvillegas and Gabriela Jáuregui, in a conversation for the EZLN meeting on April 23, 2018, Radio Zapatista, https://radiozapatista.org/?cat=1&paged=6&lang=en. 99. “Cardar lana, a hilar y a tejer gabanes en un telar de pedales, herencia de su abuelo.” Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7. 100. Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7. 101. Anni Albers quoted in Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, “A Modern Life for an Ancient Object: Josef and Anni Albers’s Collection of Pre-Columbian Art,” A Beautiful Confluence. Anni and Josef Albers and the Latin American World (Milan: Museo delle Culture, Mila and Josef and Anni Albers Collection, 2015), 34. Reynolds-Kaye notes the importance of one ceramic sculpture the Albers identified as “Tarascan,” which she explains would today be identified as from Colima or Michoacán, the region of the Purépecha (42n2). 102. “Representará la destrucción de cualquier intención comunicativa, nudo por nudo.” Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucción 7. 103. See Gary Urton, “Rolled-Up Seriated Khipu,” in Written in Knots: Undeciphered Accounts of Andean Life (exhibition pamphlet), ed. Juan Antonio Murro and Jeffrey C. Slitstoser (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017). 104. Carrión, XVI Bienal de São Paulo, 15. 105. Abraham Cruzvillegas and Gabriela Jáuregui, in a conversation for the EZLN meeting on April 23, 2018, Radio Zapatista, https://radiozapatista.org/?cat=1&paged=6&lang=en.

Chapter Two 1. Smitten and Daghistany, Spatial Form in Narrative, 25. 2. Ivo Vidan, “Time Sequence in Spatial Fiction,” in Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Ann Daghistany and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 131–60, at 155, 157. 3. Ronald Foust, “Spatial Form,” in Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Ann Daghistany and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 179–201. 4. The word began to be used in reference to visual art and literature contemporaneously, in the mid-nineteenth century. See OED Online, s.v. “motif, n.,” March 2020, https://www.oed .com/view/Entry/122686. 5. Coromines and Pascual, Diccionario crítico, 166–71. 6. “[La] palabra en todos sus matices”; “[un] ‘dicho satírico o criticante’”; “‘sentencia breve, lema,’ especialmente el de carácter caballeresco . . . c. ‘breve composición musical, motete’”; “[un] defecto muy ligero”; “revoltoso, rebelión, movimiento.” Coromines and Pascual, Diccionario crítico, 168–69. 7. Irene Small begins her analysis of Hélio Oiticica’s work with the folds in Clark’s work and concrete poetry. For Small, the fold is “a free-floating notch seemingly displaced from a plane, a temporal twisting, a hinge between world and work” as well as “the consequences of a plane submitted to time and weight.” Small, Hélio Oiticica, 19. Oiticica’s work with color is examined in depth in chapter 5. 8. Francis Alÿs, email to author, September 23, 2014; also Medina, Francis Alÿs, 150. 9. I do not address the European bibliography regarding the flâneur, which has dominated most studies of walking in contemporary art. Certainly, the artists studied here were aware of that tradition, and there are many other studies that do. For an excellent recent treatment of that genealogy of walking, see Lori Waxman, Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 10. Dezeuze, “How to Live Precariously,” 236.

252 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 8 6 – 9 0 11. Clark, Lygia Clark, 151. Various versions of instructions for Caminhando exist. See Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 264n152. I am quoting the text written for the artist’s book Livro-obra, which was created in 1964 but published in a small edition organized by Luciano Figueiredo and Ana Maria Araújo in 1983. On the Livro-obra, see Suely Roelnik, “Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark,” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999) 79, 106n32. The quoted text in English was published in the major traveling retrospective organized by Manuel Borja-Villel at the Fundació Antoni Tàpis in Barcelona in 1997. 12. The famous series of photographs was taken in 1980; see Dezeuze, “How to Live Precariously,” 228. 13. The article is cited in Dezeuze, 228, though with errors; the correct citation is Walmir Ayala, “Vamos fazer um ‘Caminhando’?” Tribuna da Imprensa (Rio de Janeiro), January 6, 1964. 14. Clark, Lygia Clark, 151. 15. Clark, 160 (emphasis added). 16. In 1966, just a few years after Caminhando, Clark is explicit about this matter, writing: “We reject duration as a method of expression”; curator Paulo Herkenhoff understands this to constitute an immanent time, “an experience of the forthcoming.” Paulo Herkenhoff, “Lygia Clark,” in Lygia Clark (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Marseille: MAC, Galeries contemporaines des Musées de Marseille; Oporto: Fundação de Serralves; Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1997), 46. 17. Clark, Lygia Clark, 151. 18. Quintín Lame was from Cauca, a department of Colombia that extends from the Andes into the Pacific Ocean. La Rosca was a collective of activist scholars. McDaniel Tarver, “Art Does Not Fit Here,” 740. 19. McDaniel Tarver, “Antonio Caro,” 26–27. 20. See Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art. 21. Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” 338. 22. “Una afortunadísima aproximación sin teorías y en el estricto sentido metodológico, sin prejuicios previos. . . . Me toca decir que siempre mis cosas han sido encuentros.” Rodríguez, 342. 23. “Yo siempre he dicho que Quintín Lame es una obra muy buena no tanto por mí, sino por el mismo Quintín Lame.” Rodríguez, 342. 24. Rappaport, “Manuel Quintín Lame hoy,” 37–38. 25. Quintín Lame, in En defensa de mi raza, deployed the phrase “mi raza indígena colombiana” (143) in his unique text as a strategy to counter colonial displacement from native lands: “servirá de horizonte en medio de la oscuridad para las generaciones indígenas que duermen en esos inmensos campos que tiene la Naturaleza Divina” (it will serve as a horizon in the midst of darkness for the generations of indigenous people who sleep in these immense countrysides that Divine Nature has). Immediately thereafter he details the continuity between colonial and capitalist (national era) displacements of indigenous peoples. 26. The changes in land ownership policies in Colombia from the mid-twentieth century until the rehearsal of neoliberalism in the 1970s are beyond the scope of this book. However, the economic and historical literature on market-led agrarian reform under neoliberalism has cast significant doubts on the ultimate benefits bestowed upon the communities that Quintín Lame sought to represent. That is to say, while these reforms claimed to return property rights to small land owners, they did not substantially improve the economic conditions of indigenous and Afro-descent communities in Colombia, nor have they taken into account the broader

N o t e s t o Pag e s 9 0 – 9 3 * 253 cultural, historical, and spiritual significance of land as a communally held entity within those communities. See Marcela Velasco Jaramillo, “The Territorialization of Ethnopolitical Reforms in Colombia: Chocó as a Case Study,” Latin American Research Review 49, no. 3 (2014): 126–52, 289, 294; and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, “Land, Markets and Neoliberal Enclosure: An Agrarian Political Economy Perspective,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 8 (2007): 1437–56. 27. Romero Loaiza, Manuel Quintín Lame Chantre, 312. 28. Susan Webster traces the history of the signature of the Ecuadoran painter Sánchez Gallque on paintings and contracts in the 1590s; most important here, at this early moment in the colonial history of Latin America, the (non-European) artist’s signature fused image and word and made economic and legal claims to authorship. Webster notes that Sánchez Gallque was identified as an “yndio pintor” (Indian painter) and elsewhere as an “yndio ladino” (ladino Indian), meaning he had greater familiarity with the Castilian language and their social norms than most indigenous Andeans. Even more compelling, Sánchez Gallque’s signature is found on a promissory note for money he owed Don Carlos Atahualpa, the great-grandson of the last emperor of the Inka, Atahualpa, for land in the center of Quito. Thus, even in the colonial period, indigenous signatures—or those of ladino Indians—were used to purchase and own land. Webster notes however that in Quito, literacy was not required to enter into a contract, and that notaries and representatives could sign for those who were not able. Painters frequently signed their names on contracts. In stark contrast to Sánchez Gallque, Quintín Lame did not come from an Andean elite family. See Susan V. Webster, “Of Signatures and Status: Andrés Sánchez Gallque and Contemporary Painters in Early Colonial Quito,” Americas 70, no. 4 (April 2014): 603–44. 29. See Michael Taussig, Defacement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 30. See Rappaport 2006, 37; Castillo Cárdenas, Liberation Theology from Below, 61. Rappaport even proposes using Dick Hebdige’s idea of “cut n mix” or “cut and dub,” grounded in Anglophone Caribbean musics, to describe Quintín Lame’s appropriation and quoting—with no original and no copy—of indigenous belief systems (Rappaport 2006, 52). 31. On the legal and cultural formulations that perpetuate innate indigenous belonging to land (and “Nature”) while depriving them of political and economic rights, see Diana Bocarejo, “Legal Typologies and Topologies: The Construction of Indigenous Alterity and Its Spatialization within the Colombian Constitutional Court,” Law & Social Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2014): 334–60. 32. “Como soy medio bruto me baja una idea por año y esa misma la machaco hasta cansar a la gente.” Quoted in Gómez, “Todo está muy caro,” 175. 33. Romero Loaiza, Manuel Quintín Lame Chantre, 305–6. 34. “Debe el maestro vigilar constantemente esta clase para que los niños no adquieran hábitos viciosos en la manera de tomar la pluma.” Quoted in Romero Loaiza, 285, 286. 35. “Sin faltar un solo detalle en todas sus cartas, memoriales, peticiones y aún recibos que escribió durante más de 60 años.” Quintín Lame, En defensa de mi raza, 5. 36. The famed landscape painter Dr. Atl (1875–1964) was born Gerardo Murrillo; his contemporary Nahui Olín (1894–1978) was a poet, painter, and muse, born María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca. Both took Nahuatl words as artistic names for their activities in the Mexican avant-gardes in the first decades of the twentieth century. 37. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). That oral culture is a key source of motif in these fictions comes as no surprise, for literary motifs also emerged out of those same traditions, in which singers used repetition as both mnemonic device and poetic flourish. 38. Roca, Define Context, n.p.

254 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 9 5–10 0 39. Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island, 10, 11. 40. Benítez Rojo, 22. 41. Benítez Rojo, 23. 42. Quoted in Alberto Anaut, ed., Carlos Garaicoa: La fotografía como invención (Madrid: La Fábrica Editorial, 2012), 77. 43. Julienne López Hernández, “Sobre las peripecias de un ‘hacedor de ruinas,’” Boletín Hispánico Helvético, 27 (2016): 181–210. 44. These details about Homenaje al 6 appear in Roca, “Conversación con Carlos Garaicoa.” 45. Accounts differ on whether Garaicoa painted the second 6 or found two already painted and then created the plaque. Iris Candela asserts the former, and José Roca the latter, both in Vicente Todolí, Carlos Garaicoa: Orden aparente (Santander, Spain: Fundación Botín, 2015). 46. Valdés Figueroa, “El espejo del deseo,” 20–21. 47. Roca, “Del sueño al hambre.” 48. Garaicoa, Continuity of Someone’s Architecture, 8. 49. Pedroso, “La Habana, entre rótulos y numeraciones,” n.p. 50. Álvaro Barrios, “Conversación con Antonio Caro,” Orígenes del arte conceptual en Colombia (1968–1978) (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2000), 126–27. 51. Imelda Ramírez González, “Antonio José Caro Lopera también es paisa,” and Gina McDaniel Tarver, “Cronología,” both in Antonio Caro: La obra inacabada (Medellín: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, 2015), 68, 75–77. 52. “Hasta el ’98 el taller fue algo secundario, desde el 98 se volvió mi obra y ahora, más modestamente, digo que es mi actividad.” Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” 351. 53. Rappaport 2006, 37. 54. Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe, “Quintín Lame: Resistencia y liberación,” Tabula Rasa 9 (July–December 2008): 371–83. 55. “Lame anduvo por Totoró, Inzá, Silvia y Belalcázar ‘conferenciando’ con los indígenas a través de las ‘mingas adoctrinadoras,’ en las que defendía el derecho de los indios a la posesión y usufructo de la tierra de sus ancestros. Con Lame a la cabeza, el grupo de secretarios, señoras y seguidores entraba a los pueblos en medio de la música de las chirimías y el bullicio de los cohetones. En sus discursos, Lame sostenía que la Independencia había sido una traición porque las tierras de los indios nunca les habían sido devueltas. . . . Luego de estos discursos, los reunidos comían y se daban a la redacción de memoriales.” Espinosa Arango, La civilización montés, 27. See also Rappaport 2006, 37. 56. Miguel Rojas Sotelo confirmed that walking was a constant practice for Caro since his early MQL works (personal communication with the author). Rojas Sotelo also pointed out that as this kind of copy of a minga, Proyecto 500 was a “proyecto de vida” (life project) that produces social and political change. I thank him for sharing his insights into Caro’s practice. 57. The event at the border was covered by Felipe Sánchez Villarreal for Vice Colombia. The journalist describes Caro’s project La Gran Colombia—imagining Bolívar’s shared continent anew—as a “ficción cartográfica” (cartographic fiction). See “Un día con Antonio Caro y Boaventura de Sousa en la frontera colombo-venezolana,” Vice Colombia, December 11, 2017. 58. “Lame ocupó una posición de borde dentro de estas comunidades y sectores . . . no fue un indio de resguardo sino un terrazguero sin tierra, y esto incidió en su visión política y en sus opciones prácticas de lucha.” Espinosa Arango, La civilización montés, 73. 59. Espinosa Arango, 74. 60. Alÿs left Belgium to avoid obligatory military service. At the time he worked as an architect for rebuilding projects after the devastating 1985 earthquake. He began making art in the midst of a flourishing, artist-run scene in Mexico City in the 1990s. For more, see Patricia

N o t e s t o Pag e s 10 0 –10 7 * 255 Sloane and Kurt Hollander, eds., Grupos y espacios en México: Arte contemporáneo de los 90 / Groups and Spaces in Mexico: Contemporary Art of the 90s (Mexico City: Ediciones MP, 2017). 61. Gili, “Francis Alÿs,” 96. 62. Alÿs was aware of Clark’s foundational work as he set out to take these walks (interview with the author, September 2014). 63. Among works with the motif of Alÿs as a foreigner, in El gringo (2003) the camera captures a small pack of dogs attacking and jiggling the hands of the unseen videographer as he attempts to walk through a small town in Hidalgo, Mexico. 64. Planned to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the beating of Rodney King, the artist’s notes reveal that the theme of the painting is “accross [sic] South Los Angeles, blacks, whites, [L]atinos and [A]sians are meeting in violent confrontations. The popular myth that Los Angeles was transforming itself into an harmonious multiethnic model city seems to waft away in the smoke billowing over the city.” Alÿs and Lampert, El profeta y la mosca, 95, 99. These observations resonate with the disruption of the Colombian national narrative of mestizo resolution caused by Caro’s motifs. 65. Ferguson, Francis Alÿs, 11 (emphasis added). 66. Carlos Basualdo compares Alÿs’s paseos to fables, “a curious mix of reality and fiction, a truth half told in a world of half truths, that questions the truthfulness of reality itself,” and notes that while the flâneur is an antecedent, he describes Alÿs’s walks as simultaneously “more cynical and incredulous.” Carlos Basualdo, “Head to Toes: Francis Alÿs’s Paths of Resistance,” Artforum International (April 1999): 104–7. 67. Ferguson, Francis Alÿs, 35. 68. Illustration of this work in Ferguson, Francis Alÿs, 63. This piece apparently hung in the artist’s studio for a long period as he worked on these walks. 69. Medina, Francis Alÿs, 150 (emphasis added). Note the echoes of the fictional lines drawn in the previous chapter. 70. Medina, Diserens, and Alÿs, Diez cuadras, 20. Medina emphasizes that fictional sense, but presumes its narrative form; he calls “Cuentos patrióticos” (Patriotic Tales, 1997) an “action and fiction” (54). 71. Medina, Diserens, and Alÿs, 2 (emphasis added). 72. Since the 1990s, massive gentrification has transformed swaths of the Centro Histórico. 73. Javier Castellanos Martínez, “Los críticos de la literatura indígena,” La Jornada: Ojarasca 190 (February 2013). The Historic Centre of Mexico City was made in collaboration with Carlos Monsiváis (London: Turner, 2006). 74. See Medina, Diserens, and Alÿs, Diez cuadras, 25. 75. Francis Alÿs, telephone interview with author, September 2014. 76. America north of the Río Grande was also affected by this movement. The Los Angeles Times covered the marches in some detail. See Luis Hernández Navarro, “The Zapatistas Are On the March again—This Time to Mexico City,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1997. On the Zapatistas’ use of silence in meetings and protests, see Saldaña-Portillo, “Reading a Silence,” 2002. 77. Francis Alÿs, telephone interview with author, September 2014. Since the heyday of national and global attention to the EZLN’s Zapatismo (or neo-Zapatismo) in the 1990s, an important debate has taken place over the relationship between urban intellectuals, artists, and activists and the Mayan peoples of southern Mexico who led the struggle. An outsider himself, Marcos went by subcomandante rather comandante to indicate his subservience to the primarily Tzotzil Zapatistas. In May 2014, the EZLN published a communiqué that told the history of the construction of a character named “Marcos,” who since had become a distraction from

256 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 10 7 –1 1 2 the cause. They announced his “death” and the arrival in his place of Subcomandante Galeano, named for a fallen Zapatista who himself had taken the name of the Uruguayan revolutionary thinker Eduardo Galeano as his nom de guerre. Alÿs’s caution with regard to his work that explicitly addressed Zapatismo may be understood in the context of that debate over intellectuals and revolutionaries, which nevertheless reveals the centrality of fiction in the Zapatista movement and among the artists who followed it closely. As this chapter addresses texts written when “Subcomandante Marcos” was still active, I refer to him by that name. 78. Dezeuze, “Walking the Line,” 1. 79. Dezeuze, 1–2. 80. “Y, desde entonces, así aprendieron los hombres y mujeres verdaderos que las preguntas sirven para caminar, no para quedarse parados así nomás. Y, desde entonces los hombres y mujeres verdaderos para caminar preguntan, para llegar se despiden y para irse saludan.” Marcos, “La historia de las preguntas,” 59. 81. “Saluda al llegar con un ‘adiós’ y se despide alzando la mano y alejándose con un ‘ya vengo.’” Marcos, “La historia de las preguntas,” 61. 82. “No te canses preguntando cuándo acabará tu camino. Ahí donde el mañana y el ayer se unen, ahí acabará.” Marcos, “La historia de las preguntas,” 101. 83. Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, “Diez años de lucha y resistencia zapatista, 2002–2003 (quinta y última parte),” Rebeldía (2003): 4, http://revistarebeldia.org. 84. “Durante varias horas, estos seres de corazón moreno han trazado, con sus ideas, un gran caracol. Partiendo de lo internacional, su mirada y su pensamiento han ido, adentrando, pasando sucesivamente por lo nacional, lo regional y lo local, hasta llegar a lo que ellos llaman ‘El Votán. El guardián y corazón del pueblo,’ los pueblos zapatistas. Así desde la curva más externa del caracol se piensan palabras como ‘globalización,’ ‘guerra de dominación,’ ‘resistencia,’ ‘economía,’ ‘ciudad,’ ‘campo,’ ‘situación política,’ y otras que el borrador va eliminando después de la pregunta de rigor ‘¿Está claro o hay pregunta?.’ Al final del camino de afuera hacia dentro, en el centro del caracol, sólo quedan unas siglas: “EZLN.” Después hay propuestas y se dibujan, en el pensamiento y el corazón ventanas y puertas que sólo ellos ven (entre otras cosas, porque aún no existen). La palabra dispar y dispersa empieza a hacer camino común y colectivo. Alguien pregunta ¿Hay acuerdo? ‘Hay,’ responde afirmando la voz colectiva. De nuevo se traza el caracol, pero ahora en camino inverso, de dentro hacia afuera. El borrador sigue también su camino inverso hasta que sólo queda, llenando el viejo pizarrón, una frase que para muchos es delirio, pero que para estos hombres y mujeres es una razón de luchar: ‘un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.’ Más despuesito, una decisión se toma.” Quoted in Rabasa, “Espiritualidades revolucionarias,” 277. 85. Saldaña-Portillo, “Reading a Silence,” 306. 86. Ferguson, Francis Alÿs, 44. 87. Medina, 20 Million Mexicans, 6. The New York Times review of Alÿs’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art fundamentally misunderstands his political and historical analysis of Latin America’s long modernity-coloniality and the brutal productivity demanded by American neoliberalism: “Paradoxes abound in Mr. Alÿs’s world—by design. One of his principles is ‘maximum effort, minimal result,’ and many of his elaborate video works seem to wonder aloud if lasting social progress is really possible in Latin America.” Ted Loos, “Shifting Sands of Societies and Politics,” New York Times, April 27, 2011. Loos cannot imagine that “progress” is precisely the temporality that Alÿs interrupts. 88. Medina, 6. 89. Clark, Lygia Clark, 157. 90. Alÿs and Lampert, El profeta y la mosca, 29.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 1 2 –1 2 1 * 257 91. See Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” 251. 92. See McDaniel Tarver, “Antonio Caro,” 14–15. 93. “Ante el rechazo de la ortodoxia política de izquierda y ante la asimilación de la derecha.” Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Antonio Caro,” 342. 94. “La caída de la utopía socialista en 1989.” See Roca, “Del sueño al hambre.” 95. Carlos Garaicoa, “Línea rota de horizonte,” Proyectos 2014 (Bogotá: NC-Arte, 2014), 93, https://issuu.com/nc-arte/docs/af_nc-arte_web_dobles. 96. “De alguna manera mis obras apuestan tanto contra la idea de la sensualidad pura, como contra la idea de un debate sobre la utopía exclusivamente intelectual. La palabra utopía encierra muchas más facetas, pero yo creo que el excesivo uso de ella la ha llevado a convertirse en una palabra vacía, que simplemente se utiliza para denominar modos de enfrentarse a la construcción de ciudades, de espacios ideales. Es decir, es como que adquiere un dejo algo peyorativo, invalidando así el posterior debate intelectual, conceptual, histórico, político, de un objeto.” Loeb and Garaicoa, “Mi mirada,” n.p. 97. Palomar, “From Idyllic Ruin to Architectural Utopia,” 30 (emphasis added). 98. “Un canto a la imaginación, no obstante es esa imaginación convertida en un objeto real, útil.” Loeb and Garaicoa, “Mi mirada,” n.p. 99. Freedman, “Literary Motif,” 308–9.

Chapter Three 1. Matamoros, “Arquitectura de la enmienda,” 85. 2. Cullen, “Arte ≠ Vida,” n.p. 3. Adam Kendon, “An Agenda for Gesture Studies,” Semiotic Review of Books 7, no. 3 (1996): 7. 4. Clark, Lygia Clark, 157. 5. Clark, 157. 6. Clark, 161. 7. Quoted in Culler, “Problems in the Theory of Fiction,” 6. 8. Clark, Lygia Clark, 158. 9. Clark, 122. 10. “O gesto humano que a atualize.” Gullar, Experiência neo concreta, 143, 150. 11. Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho, in “Opinião,” cites twenty-five thousand people in Rio de Janeiro (74). The back of the album’s sleeve claims one hundred thousand. 12. The Opinião 65 exhibition is famous for the chaotic presentation of Oiticica’s parangolés discussed in the final chapter. 13. Honório, “Meio-Ato,” 26. 14. Amaral and Gullar, “Entrevista con Ferreira Gullar,” 14. See also Max Perlingeiro and Camila Perlingeiro, eds., Opinião 65: 50 anos depois (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Pinakotheke, 2015). 15. Schwarz, “Culture and Politics,” 298 (emphasis in original). I follow Brecht translator John Willet’s use of the obsolete English word “gest” to approximate the complex of meanings in gestisch and gestus. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (1964; New York: Hill and Wang; London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), 42n. 16. Boal, Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, 145–47. 17. Boal, 148, 103. Boal imagined “something beyond Brecht, who only asked the spectator to think with his head” (200). 18. Boal, 205. 19. Boal, 122. 20. As a result of health problems, Suzana de Moraes replaced Nara Leão just six weeks

258 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 2 1–1 2 6 after the show opened. Some accounts claim that the stress of her intense performance led to her health crisis. Suzana was replaced soon thereafter by Maria Bethânia, Caetano Veloso’s sister. The difference between the two is frequently noted, with emphasis placed on Nara’s less formally trained performance style. See, e.g., Carvalho, “Opinião.” 21. Nicholas Brown, “Kurt Weill, Caetano Veloso, White Stripes” non-site 10 (2013): http:// nonsite.org/article/kurt-weill-caetano-veloso-white-stripes#foot_src_62-6266. 22. Boal, Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, 122–42. 23. The hatched lines of the plus sign painted on the highway of A Thousand Crosses has become so iconic of political art in Latin America that Jill Lane and Marcial Godoy-Anativia see it in the title of the Museo del Barrio’s landmark exhibition Arte ≠ Vida (2008), which included Rosenfeld. Lane and Godoy-Anativia, “Performance [Not Equal to] Life,” n.p. 24. Thanks to Natalia Brizuela for her clarification on the procedure Rosenfeld used to perform this work (personal communication with the author). While most scholarship assumes the artist painted the lines, Brizuela’s important research corrects that she used wheat paste to adhere the lines to the road. There is an echo of political posters in this material, which also use wheat paste to affix images to city walls. 25. Zegers, Desacato, 7. 26. Eltit, Emergencias, 13. 27. “No hay diálogo con estas señales. No se discute con estos signos.” Eltit, 11–12. 28. In Elena Poniatowska’s famous testimony of the student movement, La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), she quotes students chanting, “Di-á-lo-go” (dialogue) in the streets. 29. “El corte, el fragmento y la interrupción, para enfatizar la violenta ruptura de los códigos con que la dictadura militar trastocó los universos de sentido de la sociedad chilena.” Richard and Casabán, Lo político y lo crítico, 39. 30. Richard and Casabán, 49. 31. “‘Arte’ y ‘mujer’ infringieron las reglas de los tráficos masculinos del intercambio económico violando su lógica capitalista, haciendo saltar sus intercambios pactados en torno al valor y a la plusvalía, desde el estallido de un gesto +, es decir, de un gesto de más, que lleva lo sobrante a desafiar el utilitarismo del Sistema.” Richard and Casabán, 49–50. 32. Natalia Brizuela has examined this piece in detail, and remains uncertain how the artist was able to insert the screens in the stock market (personal communication with the author). See the epilogue for further discussion of financialization. 33. The casta paintings are perhaps the clearest historical example of how colonial semiotics of race and gender submit certain bodies to violence. See chapter 5 for a discussion of these taxonomic paintings. See Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Esther Gabara, “Gestures, Practices, and Projects: [Latin] American Re-visions of Visual Culture and Performance Studies,” e-misférica 7, no. 1 (2010): https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-71/7-1-essays/gestures-practices-and-projects -latin-american-re-visions-of-visual-culture-and-pe.html. 34. On gesture studies, see the website and journal for the society founded in 2002 (http:// www.gesturestudies.com). Although the mission statement includes the humanities and arts as well as social sciences, the executive board of the society comprises exclusively linguists, psycholinguists, and psychologists. 35. Efron, Gesture and Environment, 1. 36. Efron quotes the Nazi social scientist L. F. Clauss: “In each bodily motion there is an ‘expressive material’ and an ‘expressive style,’ both of which are racially determined. Each ‘race has its characteristic body and soul, and each racial body-soul its typical mode of expressive movement” (4).

N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 2 6 –139 * 259 37. Efron, 42–43 (emphasis added). 38. Efron, 137. 39. Efron, 134. 40. “Casi un millar de gestos representativos (simbólicos e icásticos) y contextuales (expresivo-apelativos, pragmáticos e indicativos).” Some of the dictionary entries come with a vocabulary lesson as well as the description and photograph of the gesture. The entries for “sexual [órgano . . . femenino] (Sexo, vulva y sim.)” [sexual (organ . . . female)] and “sexual [órgano . . . masculino] (pene, miembro, falo y sim.)” [sexual [organ . . . male] (penis, member, phallus, and similar)] have lists of synonymous slang from different hispanophone countries. Meo Zilio and Mejía, Diccionario de gestos, 2:153. 41. Jorge Manuel Pardo, Comunicación no verbal: Gesto e imagen (Bogotá: Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, 2003), 168. 42. Meo Zilio and Mejía, Diccionario de gestos, 2:51. 43. “El predominio de modelos masculinos está en consonancia, por otra parte, con los códigos comportamentales de la expresividad corporal regidos, en las comunidades hispánicas, por un machismo que el propio discurso descriptivo de los gestos pone en evidencia.” Gastón Gainza, “Cinésica y lingüística: Un diccionario de gestos,” Escena: Revista de las Artes 13, no. 1 (1985): 19–20. 44. Meo Zilio and Mejía, Diccionario de gestos, 2:30–34. 45. “La cifra perfecta.” Meo Zilio and Mejía, Diccionario de gestos, 1:157–58. 46. Marta Traba, Art of Latin America, 1900–1980 (Baltimore: Distributed by the Johns Hopkins Press for the Inter-American Development Bank, 1994), 156. Meo Zilio and Mejía married, although I have not been able to ascertain whether they were married when they created the dictionary. 47. This group show was organized by the concrete poet, artist, and sociologist Mirella Bentivoglio, and shown at the Center for Italian Studies at Columbia University (November 1979), and the Fourth Bienal de Arte in Medellín, Colombia (March 15–July 4, 1981). Carrión’s Other Books and So published the book Stamp-Poems by the same curator, further revealing the connections among experimental arts, concretism and neo-concretism, and the emergence of gesture studies. 48. Ortiz Torres, “La hija del Santo,” 54. 49. Debroise, La era de la discrepancia, 220. 50. See Angélica Abelleyra, “Una vida sin máscaras: Entrevista con Lourdes Grobet,” in Lourdes Grobet (Mexico City: Turner Publications, 2005), 500; Carlos Arias, Maris Bustamante, Mónica Castillo, Lourdes Grobet, Magali Lara, Mónica Mayer, and Lorena Wolffer, “¿Arte feminista?” Debate Feminista 23 (April 2001), 290. 51. Ortiz Torres, “La hija del Santo,” 55. 52. Lourdes Grobet et al., Espectacular de lucha libre (Mexico City: Trilce Ediciones, 2005), 312; and interview with the author, July 10, 2007. 53. Grobet, “Imágenes de miseria,” 81. 54. Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 15. 55. Noland, 17. 56. Two powerful television stations, Televisa and TV Azteca, control the media landscape in Mexico. Their power lies in the large percentage of advertising revenue they earn from the Mexican government, as well as their expansion across the Americas, including the Spanishlanguage network Univision in the United States. For a succinct and frequently updated summary of this issue, see the website of the nonprofit media watch group Media Ownership Monitor (https://www.mom-rsf.org/en/countries/mexico/).

260 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 4 0 –1 43 57. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), chap. 1. 58. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 48. 59. Citton, “Reading Literature,” 288. 60. Citton is working with Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s concept, which he describes as follows: “As capitalism, in its richest countries, moved from its industrial form towards an economy of services, communication, and entertainment, more and more feedback loops could be observed between the signs used as means of production and the signs used to mobilize the desires of the collaborating/consuming populations.” Citton, 291. See also Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (London: Minor Composition, 2009). 61. Citton, “Reading Literature,” 291. 62. Citton, 295. 63. Citton, 293. 64. Agamben, Means without End, 49. 65. Agamben, 54, 55. On evidence of Spain’s colonial project in Las Meninas, see Gabara, “The Bermuda Triangle of Madrid’s Museums: The Prado, the Museum of the Americas and the National Museum of Anthropology,” Art in Translation 12, no. 2 (2020): 128–49, a translated and updated version of the 2013 article “El triángulo museológico de las Bermudas: El Prado, el Museo de América y el Museo Nacional de Antropología.” 66. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 8 (emphasis added). 67. Glissant, 123 (emphasis added). 68. Glissant, 26. Glissant also makes a direct connection between the lettered tradition and the commerce in slaves: “the only written thing on slave ships was the account book listing the exchange value of slaves” (5). 69. Glissant, 35. 70. Flusser, Vilém Flusser, 91. Kimberly Cleveland misrepresents Flusser’s perspective on Black art in the context of the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1966. Flusser did not argue that “‘black art’ simply did not exist in their country.” Kimberly Cleveland, “AfroBrazilian Art as a Prism: A Socio-Political History of Brazil’s Artistic, Diplomatic and Economic Confluences in the Twentieth Century,” Luso-Brazilian Review 49, no. 2 (2012): 107. In the essay Cleveland cites, “O problema do negro: Da Negritude,” Flusser makes an argument against biological definitions of blackness—which he links to the Nazi race theory that drove him to Brazil—and against the use of Western conceptions of art that do not account for the varied expressive cultures of Africa. He criticizes the organizers of the festival as “enganados pelo modêlo biologizante Occidental” (deceived by the biologizing Occidental model) and praises the Brazilian artists representing the country in the festival for offering an alternative to a Western model that he says threatens all of humanity. One can and should debate Flusser’s place in telling Black artists whether they can resignify the word. He questions the liberatory potential in reclaiming Black as a fixed identity but does not deny their existence or the value of their work. See Vilém Flusser, “O problema do negro: Da Negritude,” Cadernos Brasileiros 8 (1966): 29–35. I thank Roberto Tejada for his early and important questions about Flusser. 71. Flusser, Gestures, 24; this essay was published originally in English in 1991. 72. Flusser, 65. Flusser, like Clark and Schendel, advocates for a critical practice that dispels distinctions “between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in the analysis of gestures” (66). Gesture converts the body into a kind of Möbius strip. 73. Quoted in Cauê Alves, “Mira Schendel em diálogo com Vilém Flusser: Língua e realidade,” in Mira Schendel, ed. Ivo Mesquita and Suzanne Cotter, 35–44 (São Paulo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo; London: Tate Modern, 2013), 160–61 (in English version).

N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 43 –15 8 * 261 74. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 175. 75. Quoted in McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 46. 76. Núñez and Sweetser, “With the Future behind Them,” 402. 77. Núñez and Sweetser, 439. 78. Flusser, Gestures, 32, 43, 45. Flusser encounters that same Platonic prejudice even in Marxism’s “materialistic dialectic’” (43). 79. Núñez and Sweetser, “With the Future behind Them,” 440. 80. Núñez and Sweetser, 421. 81. A video of Groisman performing Door of Hands—“Michel Groisman Showcase,” September 21–25, 2011—is available at https://performancespacenewyork.org/michel_groisman/. The artist posted a 2012 enactment of Sirva-se at PS122 in New York at https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=KnpFgF2_VRo. 82. Flusser, “Da ficção,” n.p. 83. “A sensação do fictício de tudo que nos cerca, e do fingir como clima da nossa vida, é o tema da atualidade.” Flusser, “Da ficção,” n.p. 84. Flusser, “Da ficção,” n.p. 85. Murphy, “Collaborative Imagining,” 118. 86. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 154. 87. Flusser, Gestures, 70 (emphasis added). 88. See Milton Friedman, “The Fragility of Freedom,” BYU Studies Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1976): 563, http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol16/iss4/12. 89. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 174. 90. J. Teixeira Coelho Netto, Ficções: Regina Silveira: Exposição 27 de julho a 27 de setembro de 2007 (Vila Velha, Brazil: Museu Vale do Rio Doce, 2007), 369. 91. For Noland that means anything that “exert[s] itself despite the enormous pressure of social conditioning.” Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 1.

Chapter Four 1. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 9. 2. “1. adj. Dicho de una persona: Que se halla en paradero desconocido, sin que sepa si vive. 2. adj. eufem. muerto (ǁ que está sin vida). Apl. a pers,” See Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, http://dle.rae.es/?id=CRW5lsR. 3. Quoted in Jens Andermann, “Placing Latin American Memory: Sites and the Politics of Mourning,” Memory Studies 8, no. 1 (2015): 4. 4. Barrio, Regist(r)os, 166. 5. For more on Barrio’s Livro de carne, see Calirman, Brazilian Art. Moacir dos Anjos understands Barrio’s work with these low materials as a form of abjection or formlessness that disorders the divisions that structure everyday life. Dos Anjos, “The Sea as Model,” 32. 6. Herkenhoff, “Barrio,” 26. 7. My thanks to Lúcia Sá for her personal recollections about the value of meat during this era. 8. Basbaum, “Situations/Freedom/Sensations,” 33. 9. Basbaum, 34. 10. Gullar, Experiência neo concreta, 159. Calirman cites Barrio’s description of this distance as based in his interest in the full sensoriality of the body, compared to neoconcretism’s more limited understanding of the participation of the spectator. Calirman, Brazilian Art, 111. 11. Clark, Lygia Clark, 139–40. 12. Rolnik, “The Knowing-Body Compass,” 124.

262 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 15 8 –16 4 13. See dos Anjos, “The Sea as Model.” The Brazilian modernist movement of the 1920s famously motivated the trope of the cannibal: Oswald de Andrade through his “Anthropophagous Manifesto,” Tarsila do Amaral in her portrait “Abaporú,” and Mário de Andrade in his famous novel, Macunaíma (all 1928); see also Gabara, Errant Modernism. 14. See Anna Katherine Brodbeck, “The Salão da Bússola (1969) and Do corpo à terra (1970): Parallel Developments in Brazilian and International Art,” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 38, no. 2 (2013): 109–23. 15. Here Morais clearly refers to Rubens Gerchman’s sculptures Terra (Earth, 1967) and LUTE (Fight, 1968), both large-scale works made to be installed outside. Morais, “Manifesto do corpo à terra,” n.p. For more on Gerchman, see Gabara, Pop América. 16. “O objeto corresponde a uma nova situação existencial do homem, a um novo humanismo.” Here Morais also refers to the French art critic Pierre Restany’s writings on pop and new figuration in the 1960s. 17. “A energia do corpo humano contra as máquinas da repressão.” Morais, “Contra a arte afluente,” 59. 18. “Não há porque chorar o glorioso cadaver.” Morais, 53. Morais provides an incorrect date for Pignatari’s essay, which was published in Correio da Manhã on June 4, 1967. The book of information theory Informação, linguagem, comunicação was first published by Pignatari in 1968. 19. Quoted in Basbaum, “Situations/Freedom/Sensations,” 35–36. 20. Chon Noriega’s study of visceral Latinx art by Montañez Ortiz and ASCO again echoes this trajectory of Brazilian non-objectualism. See Noriega, “Art between Viscera and Vomit.” 21. Duffy, “Among Other Things,” 140. 22. For an overview in English of the literature on the semiotics of the corpse in Colombia, see Cristina Rojas and Daniel Tubb, “La Violencia in Colombia, through Stories of the Body,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 32, no. S1 (2013): 126–50. On the images that circulated in media, see D. V. Olaya, “Las imágenes de las víctimas del conflicto armado en la revista Semana: Políticas, significados culturales y visibilización,” Palabra Clave 23, no. 1 (2020): e2316. 23. For a history of that training, see Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 24. “¿Qué hacer frente un habla provocada bajo esas condiciones?” Eltit, Emergencias, 63. 25. “La expropiación de su cuerpo parlante.” Eltit, 68. 26. “No son sino espacios por los que el poder transita locamente mutando a la manera de los cameleones.” Eltit, 73. 27. dos Anjos, “The Sea as Model,” 34. 28. Fernandes, “Artur Barrio,” 17. 29. Clark, Lygia Clark, 151. 30. On the reproduction of violence in its visualization, see Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003). 31. “Slow, Gradual,” Time, October 30, 1978 (emphasis added). 32. See Rezende, A ditadura militar no Brasil, 217–18. 33. Cecilia Maria Bouças Coimbra, “Tortura ontem e hoje: Resgatando uma certa historia,” Psicologia em Estudo 6, no. 2 (2001): 15. 34. Deanna P. Koretsky, “Habeas Corpus and the Politics of Freedom: Slavery and Romantic Suicide,” Essays in Romanticism 22, no. 1 (2015): 22, 30. 35. Habeas corpus exists alongside the writ of amparo in much of Latin America. Amparo is a premise of rights based in Mexican jurisprudence and the Spanish legal tradition that later spread across Latin America. If the writ of amparo offers a means to contest judicial decisions and to protect property rights—interestingly, those of indigenous peoples, such as the com-

N o t e s t o Pag e s 16 4 –17 5 * 263 munal ejidos in Mexico against colonial appropriation—here I am interested in the history of habeas corpus with regard to human rights. See Héctor Fix Zamudio, “The Writ of Amparo in Latin America,” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 13, no. 3 (1981): 364–65. 36. Farrell, “Right to Habeas Corpus,” n.p. See also Monica Ovinski de Camargo, “O habeas corpus no Brasil Imperio: Liberalismo e escravidão,” Seqüencia (Brazil) 49 (2004): 71–94. 37. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 106–7 (emphasis added). 38. Grandin, 107–8. 39. See, e.g., Scott Shane and Adam Liptak, “Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President,” New York Times, September 30, 2006. 40. In the 2008 case of Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled that the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantánamo detainees was unconstitutional. While Boumediene himself eventually was released to France with other habeas cases moving through the courts, the Obama administration quickly appealed. “Obama to Appeal Detainee Ruling,” New York Times, April 10, 2009. In 2012, efforts again increased to limit the reach of habeas corpus to Guantánamo. See Baher Azmy, “Obama Turns Back the Clock on Guantanamo,” Washington Post, August 16, 2012. 41. See José Limón, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in MexicanAmerican South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 42. See Candido, “A personagem do romance”; Rosenfeld, “Literatura e personagem”; Cohn, Distinction of Fiction. 43. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 24. 44. Freire, Poéticas do processo, 127. 45. Barrio 2000, 161. 46. Rosenfeld, “Literatura e personagem,” 30. 47. Mosquera, “Interview with Cildo Meireles,” 19. 48. See Themis Chronopoulos, “Neoliberalism in the Southern Cone,” Latin American Perspectives 35, no. 6 (2008): 174–78. 49. Pica and Viola, “A (Performative) Conversation,” 58. For a detailed history of habeas corpus in Argentina, see John P. Mandler, “Habeas Corpus and the Protection of Human Rights in Argentina,” Yale Journal of International Law 16: 1 (1991) 1–72. Note that Mandler states that while reforms to habeas corpus were introduced after the dictatorship, they did not significantly address the failures under the regime. 50. Pica, please listen hurry, 116. 51. Ruby Beesley, “Amalia Pica,” Aesthetica 52 (2013): http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/ amalia-pica/. 52. Pica, Ribas, and Widholm, “Who’s Afraid of a Vector?,” 20. 53. Interview with the author, June 1, 2019. 54. Pica, Ribas, and Widholm, “Who’s Afraid of a Vector?,” 20. 55. In the ArtSpace.com entry on Amalia Pica, the word is defined as “abuse.” See http:// www.artspace.com/amalia_pica/. 56. Pica, Ribas, and Widholm, “Who’s Afraid of a Vector?,” 60. 57. John Baily, “Two Different Worlds: Afghan Music for Afghanistanis and Kharejis,” Ethnomusicology Forum 19, no. 1 (2010): 76. 58. The show was broadcast following the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and United Kingdom in 2001; in August 2003, NATO took command of the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force. 59. Barrio, Regist(R)os, 102; Calirman, Brazilian Art, chap. 3. For a detailed reading of Barrio’s “bloody bundles” as a response to the open secret of torture, see André Mesquita, Esperar não

264 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 17 5–1 8 0 é saber: Arte entre o silêncio e a evidência (São Paulo: Funarte, Ministério da Cultura, 2015). In Mesquita’s interview with Barrio, the artist resists any direct ascription of the bloody bundles to a political project and emphasizes their production of a shock between imagination and reality. 60. Quoted in Martin Holbraad, “Turning a Corner: Preamble for ‘the Relative Native’ by Eduardo Viveiros De Castro,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3 (2013): 469. Later works have added nuance and challenges to Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism. For an overview of these reconsiderations, see the special issue of Indiana 29 (2012), especially Laura Rival, “The Materiality of Life: Revisiting the Anthropology of Nature in Amazonia,” and Ernst Halbmayer, “Debating Animism, Perspectivism and the Construction of Ontologies.” 61. Sterzi and Stigger, Variações do corpo selvagem, 217. “O establecimento de um diálogo entre os regimes não canônicos de corporalidade que existem nos mundos indígenas e aqueles que se foram elaborando pela arte de vanguarda brasileira, especialmente por artistas como Hélio Oiticica, que teve enorme importância em minha formação intelectual pelo lado extraacadêmico.” Goldfeder, “Entrevista com Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” 25. In addition to Sterzi and Stigger’s catalog, the relationship between Viveiros de Castro and the artists Oiticica, Ivan Cardoso, and Carlos Vergara is described briefly in Irene V. Small, “Introduction to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ‘The Equal and the Different,’” ArtMargins 7, no. 3 (2018): 104–8. It is treated in depth in the dissertation by Flávia Letícia Biff Cera, “Arte-vida-corpo-mundo, segundo Hélio Oiticica” (Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-graduação em Literatura, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2012). 62. Sterzi and Stigger, Variações do corpo selvagem, 218. 63. Sterzi and Stigger, 218. 64. Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” 483. 65. Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View, 10. Viveiros de Castro notes the disappearance of these other groups from the anthropological literature in the 1960s and 1970s, despite new “contact” during the expansion of Trans-Amazonian Highway into southern Pará (1976–1980). Increasingly bad relations between the Fundação Nacional do Índio and the anthropological community during the dictatorship hampered his own initial field work among the Araweté in the early 1980s (7–8). 66. Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” 485. 67. Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis,” 478 (emphasis added). 68. Viveiros de Castro, 478. 69. Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” 58. 70. “Digamos que se podem ler essas fotos como transformacões, no sentido estruturalista do termo, de uma perspectiva sobre a perspectiva.” Quoted in Goldfeder, “Entrevista com Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” 25. 71. Doležel, “Possible Worlds,” 788, 790. 72. Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis,” 483. 73. Basbaum, “Situations/Freedom/Sensations,” 51, 87. Barrio’s cultural strategy also resembles Carrión’s manipulation of gossip and rumors discussed in chapter 1. 74. Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis,” 483. 75. Viveiros de Castro, 483. Viveiros de Castro briefly notes that in many Amerindian cosmologies those exchanges and crossings across and between different bodies and spirits take place without harm. 76. Sterzi and Stigger, Variações do corpo selvagem, 225–26. 77. Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis,” 483. 78. Viveiros de Castro, “The Relative Native,” 483–84. 79. The Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers, which was titled in part “an universal diction-

N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 8 0 –1 8 7 * 265 ary of arts and science,” is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first instance of the word “corpus” used to refer to “a body or complete collection of writings or the like; the whole body of literature on any subject.” See OED Online, s.v. “corpus, n.,” December 2019. 80. See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 81. On Freud’s account of death, see Ranjana Khanna, “Speculation; or, Living in the Face of the Intolerable,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (2018): 113. Khanna goes on to analyze an installation by the Chilean poet and artist Raúl Zurita as a form of speculative conjuring of life in the face of global death. 82. Taussig, “Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism,” S101.

Chapter Five 1. For an overview of the theory of “as if ” in narrative fiction, see Klaus W. Hempfer, “Some Problems Concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality),” Style 38, no. 3 (2004): 302–23. 2. Antelo, “La fricción,” 219; Caldas and Pérez Barreiro, Waltércio Caldas, 4–6 (emphasis added). 3. Lambert-Beatty 2009, 56; Lambert-Beatty 2012, 141. 4. Brown, “Object Relations,” 91. 5. Brooks, Realist Vision, 2. 6. Brooks, 16. 7. Rancière, Lost Thread, 17. 8. Brooks, Realist Vision, 179, 68. 9. Brooks’s elision of color may be the result of a pattern of relegating color to impressionist realism in literary and art-historical studies, and diminishing its importance in realism’s other modes. When Rancière analyzes Breton’s reading of Dostoevsky, he paints the nineteenthcentury realist novel’s inclusion of the visual as realist for its inclusion of countless details, but he names it impressionist for its rich palette of colors. See Jacques Rancière, “O efeito de realidade e a política da ficção,” Novos Estudos 86 (March 2010): 75. An exception to the avoidance of color in literary studies is Sabine Doran’s The Culture of Yellow or The Visual Politics of Late Modernity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), which was praised highly for initiating a new mode of literary criticism of color. 10. “Ce monceau de couleurs éclatantes descendait obliquement, du premier étage jusqu’au tapis se prolongeant sur les pavés; et des choses rares tiraient les yeux. Un sucrier de vermeil avait une couronne de violettes, des pendeloques en pierres d’Alençon brillaient sur de la mousse, deux écrans chinois montraient leurs paysages. Loulou, caché sous des roses, ne laissait voir que son front bleu, pareil à une plaque de lapis. . . . Une vapeur d’azur monta dans la chambre de Félicité. Elle avança les narines, en la humant avec une sensualité mystique; puis ferma les paupières.” Gustave Flaubert, “Un coeur simple,” 1877 (1910 ed.), Project Gutenberg, e-book 26812, October 7, 2008. 11. Here I use “insertion” in reference to Cildo Meireles’s series Insertions in Ideological Circuits (1970), in which the artist screen-printed covert messages on actual Coca-Cola bottles and bills of Brazilian currency, the real. The soda company was emblematic not only of US cultural and economic influence in the region but also of US support for Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship (1964–1985). Phrases in English (“Yankees go home”) and instructions in Portuguese (“print critical opinions on bottles and return them into circulation”) matched the company’s own white ink and curvilinear script. Meireles took advantage of how recycling worked at the time: after drinking a Coke, the consumer returned the bottle to the store, which

266 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 1 8 7 –191 then sent it back to the factory. Once washed and refilled, the bottle was sent out for sale again. The oppositional messages in white were invisible when the empty bottles arrived at the factory and emerged only when they were refilled with the brown liquid. These “insertions in ideological circuits”—like Meireles’s bills of money in Zero cruzeiro (Cero cruceiro)—cleverly piggybacked on the consumer objects and political and economic systems they criticized. 12. Horton and Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror.” 13. As I have written elsewhere, the mid-1960s in the American continent saw an explosion of experiments with realism. See Gabara, “Contesting Freedom.” 14. “Surge então uma nova idéia de coisicidade.” Cordeiro, “Realismo,” 48. 15. “O objeto (ready-made) é construído e constrói um espaço que não é mais o espaço físico. A desintegração do espaço do objeto físico é também a desintegração semântica, destruição de convencionalidades, e, por outro parâmetro, construção semântica, construção de um novo significado.” Cordeiro, “Arte concreta semântica,” 108. 16. See Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., https://dle .rae.es. 17. Coromines and Pascual, Diccionario crítico, 144. 18. In Sterzi and Stigger, Variações do corpo selvagem, 219. 19. The gender of “color” even alternated between masculine and feminine in its early uses by Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Coromines and Pascual, Diccionario crítico, 144. 20. Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 20. To trace this transformation, Ramírez begins with the artist’s early study of abstraction with master painter Ivan Serpa (1953) and his participation in the Grupo Frente (1955–1956), during which he produced abstract paintings he called Seços and MetaEsquemas. Oiticica then moved on to an investigation of “color-time” (côr-tempo) in spatial reliefs created with a spray gun, and then his painterly Inventions (1959–1963) applied with visible, vertical brushstrokes. Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 52. With the visitor’s physically entry in color structures called Nuclei (1960–1963), the artist declared he could “liberate painting into space” (260). The Bólides (1963–1967), containers filled with powdery pigment, mark the achievement of what he calls painting as presentation rather representation, and his Parangolés (1964–1968), capes of colors brought to life through performance, attach color to the bodies we saw in the previous chapter. The Topological Ready-Made Landscapes (1978–1979) mark Oiticica’s return to the Invention of Color, at which point Ramírez argues that he has achieved “suspended color.” 21. Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 40. 22. Ramírez offers a more emphatic translation of vivência as “full blast lived experience” in order to describe Oiticica’s post-1965 “antiart” posture (18). On Oiticica as a writer and his interest in the “invention” of concrete poetry, see Frederico Coelho, “Subterranean Tropicália Projets → Newyorkaises → Conglomerado: The Infinite Book of Hélio Oiticica,” Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, ed. Lynne Zelevansky (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Museum of Art and DelMonico Books, 2016), 198–210. Coelho calls his “Conglomerado” a “nonbook,” “a radical and conceptual space occupied by texts,” and he cites a 1978 interview with artist, in which he calls “Conglomerado” “a book that is not a book” (208–9). 23. Quoted in Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 224. 24. Small, Hélio Oiticica, 142. 25. Small, 144. 26. Favaretto, A invenção de Hélio Oiticica, 58–59. 27. “Tudo o que era antes fundo, ou também suporte para o ato e a estrutura da pintura, transforma-se em elemento vivo; a cor quer manifestar-se integra e absoluta.” Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 50 (emphasis added to “vivo”). Mónica Amor located the original publication of this essay in Habitat, no. 70, 1962.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 191–19 3 * 267 28. Ramírez, in Hélio Oiticica, writes extensively and eloquently about Oiticica’s “colortime.” Furthermore, Favaretto reveals that in Neyrótica (1973), Oiticica rejects naturalist cinematic montage and linear time for what the artist terms não-narracão (non-narration). His short poetic text ends with a celebration of play-invenção (play-invention). Favaretto, A invenção de Hélio Oiticica, 212. The invention of color-time pervaded the artist’s practice and theory. 29. “É como se o homem possuísse asas e voasse.” Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 22 (original September 4, 1960). 30. “Dar ao espaço real um tempo, uma vivência estética, aproximando-se assim do mágico, tal o seu caráter vital.” Oiticica, 29 (emphasis added). 31. Josef and Anni Albers were key participants in the Bauhaus school, and left Germany for the United States in 1933. They were active at Black Mountain College, the experimental art school in North Carolina, until 1950, and then moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef taught at Yale. For a detailed account of the politics of hemispheric art criticism and exhibitions, see Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 32. The full tour included Caracas, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Guayaquil and Quito, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City. The tour was sponsored in large part by David Rockefeller, chairman of the Inter-American Sponsoring Committee at the Museum of Modern Art. On Rockefeller’s political and cultural activities in Latin America, see Gabara, “Contesting Freedom.” 33. Brenda Danilowitz, “Josef Albers and Brazil,” in Josef Albers: Cor e luz, homenagem ao quadrado (São Paulo: Instituto Tomie Ohtake and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2009). 34. Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 34, 57. 35. Quoted in Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 205. 36. Anni Albers detailed Mesoamerican weaving techniques in her influential On Weaving (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965). On the impact of their multiple trips to Mexico and Amerindian aesthetic philosophies on Josef Albers, see Joaquín Barriendos, “Devouring Squares: Josef Albers in the Center of the Pyramid,” Albers in Mexico, ed. Lauren Hinson, exhibition catalog (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2017); Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liebrock, eds. Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys, exhibition catalog (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2017); Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, “Making Mesoamerica Modern: Anni and Josef Albers as Collectors of Ancient American Art,” Small Great Objects: Annie and Josef Albers in the Americas, exhibition catalog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 37. “El color es un elemento difícil, si no imposible, de precisar. Lleva inherente todo un remolino de resonancias espirituales. Especialmente difícil ante una obra de un espíritu clásico que pone al color una intención intelectual y constructivista . . . Con todo, ¿cuál es el tenor espiritual de los acordes cromáticos de Albers? De primera intención, se nos viene a la memoria el mundo artístico del Tiahuanaco, donde el color también es intelectual, simbólico y constructivista. No nos asombramos, en nuestro arte antiguo—como ha llamado la atención Itten, teórico del color—también se da la multiplicidad y complejidad humanas. Paracas emplea el color en su dimensión expresiva o emotiva y Chimú en la impresionista o sensorial. Si colgamos 30 telas del estilo Tiahuanaco en estas dos salas tendremos el mismo efecto de repetición, de monotonía que se le achaca a Albers.” Acha, “‘El homenaje al cuadrado de Josef Albers,” n.p. 38. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation does not hold a photograph of the painting from the 1964 tour that most explored red, although Jeannette Redenesk, director of the Albers catalogue raisonné project, confirms that the slightly later work reproduced here utilizes most of the same red paints (conversation with the author, July 14, 2021). On the material and beauty

268 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 19 3 –19 5 of woven color in the Andean world, see Elena Phipps, “Woven Brilliance: Approaching Color in Andean Textile Traditions,” Textile Museum Journal 47 (2020): 28–53. 39. “Ver implica un Weltanschauung y está unido con la fantasía, con la imaginación.” Acha, “‘El homenaje al cuadrado de Josef Albers.” Joaquín Barriendos, in Juan Acha, affirms the influence on Albers’s aesthetic philosophy of the Nahua motif of xicalcoliuhqui, three steps connected to a spiral or hook form, which is associated with the spiritual truth of art revealed by the active role of negative space. 40. Quoted in Gilderhus, “Homage to the Pyramid,” 89. 41. Quoted in Gilderhus, 107. Both Albers and Oiticica used ready-made colors to push this kind of active and autonomous color to its limits. Albers wrote in 1947: “I’m especially proud when [I can make] colors lose their identity and become unrecognizable. Greens become blue, neutral grays become red-violet and so on. Dark colors become light and vice versa. And what is amazing about all this is that I use colors exactly as they come out of the tube.” Quoted in Gilderhus, “Homage to the Pyramid,” 93. Irene Small explains in detail the fundamental role of color in Oiticica’s Invenções as a fusion of the readymade, straight from the tube, with the handmade. Small, Hélio Oiticica, 52. 42. Iglesias Lukin notes Puentes’s dedication to “materiality” in contrast to the dematerialization of art and the use of industrial materials common in his generation of artists in New York, where he enjoyed a Guggenheim fellowship in 1967. Iglesias Lukin, “Alejandro Puente.” Puente did exercises in color in courses with Héctor Cartier, some of his few formal art classes, in which color was examined in classic senses of dye, value, and saturation, but also in connection with temperature (warm or cold) and relation: “its psychological and empathetic charge with the viewer and with all that surrounded him.” He was part of the Grupo Sí in 1960, which began with the idea of calling itself “No,” although Rafael Squirru’s suggestion of “Sí” won out for its “positive attitude.” Etcheverry, “Alejandro Puente,” 13–14. 43. “Formalista, directa, chauvenista.” Perazzo and Puente, “Arte prehispánico,” 202. 44. The groundbreaking Information exhibition (1970) is known for having brought conceptual art to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For more on the Latin American participation in the exhibition, see Gabara, “Perspectives on Scale: From the Atomic to the Universal,” in Art and Globalization, ed. James Elkins, Alice Kim, and Zhivka Valiavicharska (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010), 200–204. 45. Perazzo and Puente, “Arte prehispánico,” 202–3. While Puente occasionally uses the phrase “Latin American” and Perazzo refers to arte precolombino (pre-Columbian art), the repeated word in the interview is americano. César Paternosto published two important studies of Amerindian abstraction: The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) and an essay in Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm (Brussels: Société des expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 2001). 46. “Se fusionaban la materia y el sentido. La piedra no es solamente piedra, la idea y el sentido se convierten en ella. Lógica de las formas, los volúmenes, las líneas y los colores. Una concepción del espacio y el tiempo, diferente de la europea.” Quoted in Etcheverry, “Alejandro Puente,” 25. The artist understood the materiality of color in Andean art better than his own critic, Etcheverry, who characterizes it as “predominantly symbolic” rather than enlivened. 47. Dean, A Culture of Stone, 16. 48. Dean, 2. It is crucial to note that huaca are not substitutions for oral histories; they cannot be “read” (38–39). They are not narrative like storytelling. In emphasizing their particular concept of enlivened color, I do not wish to undermine the importance of storytelling as a cultural practice. 49. Dean, 4.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 19 5–19 8 * 269 50. Siracusano, Pigments and Power, 140. 51. Siracusano, 116. 52. “Da necessidade interior de descobrir novos mundos, novas realidades no mundo maravilhoso dos insetos.” Scigliano Carneiro, “Uma inconsutil invenção,” 108. Small also writes extensively on the importance of Oiticica’s work in the Museu Nacional and the structures of categorization of his work. 53. See José Oiticica, “Do método no estudo das linguas sul-américanas,” Boletim do Museu Nacional 9 (1933): 41–81. Small draws a fascinating connection between a study for Cabeleiras Parangolé (March 1964) and a 1957 article about feather arts by Amerindian groups held in the collection of the Museu Nacional. 54. Quoted in Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 163. 55. Small, Hélio Oiticica, 144–45. Small helpfully differentiates the bólides from the French artist Yves Klein’s use of pigments, which were ultimately interested in “sensation” and therefore immateriality. Liveliness in Klein was ultimately converted into a commodity in the form of the copyrighted International Klein Blue (157, 160). 56. Siracusano, Pigments and Power, 151. 57. See Siracusano, 129; Magaloni Kerpel, Colors of the New World, 34. 58. Magaloni Kerpel, 34–35. 59. Scholars long have recognized the fundamental importance of cochineal to the history, culture, and economy of the American continent. For a map of its uses and cultivation prior to European colonization, and export following it, see R. A. Donkin, “Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67, no. 5 (1977): 1–84. Despite the title, Donkin describes a wild species of cochineal in Brazil. There is debate, however, whether Amerindian peoples in Brazil cultivated it or used it as a colorant. Warren Dean narrates an encounter on the border between Paraguay and Brazil, in which a Spaniard who had been in Mexico pointed out the cochineal to his Portuguese counterpart, Maurício da Costa, a member of Academia Fluviense. According to Dean, the Tupi were unaware of its uses, and this encounter of European soldiers led to the brief but enthusiastic cultivation of cochineal (as well as indigo) in the late eighteenth century. See Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, 132–33. On the presence of cochonilha (cochineal) in the founding years of the Jardim Botânico, see Ana Rosa de Oliveira, “Ordem e natureza: A construção da paisagem,” in Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro, 1808–2008 (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Pesquisas Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro, 2008), 81. 60. Small, Hélio Oiticica, 197. Waly Salomão, friend and collaborator of Oiticica’s, makes the connection between insects, color, the artist’s father’s work as an entomologist, and even the artist’s sexuality—butterflies as insects that emerge from wormlike cocoons—in his Qual é o parangolé? E outros escritos (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1996), 13, 95. 61. “Invadia-se de cor, sentia o contato físico da cor, ponderava a cor, tocava, pisava, respirava cor. Como na experiência dos bichos de Clark, o espectador deixava de ser um contemplador passivo.” Pedrosa, “Arte ambiental,” 11. Sérgio Martins analyzes how the materiality of color in Gullar, and Pedrosa’s reflections on that color, constitute the particular temporality of the non-object; furthermore, he argues that concept persists beyond Gullar’s renunciation of avant-garde art. Martins, “‘The Pulp of Color,’” 118. 62. Patrícia Corrêa draws correlations between Pedrosa’s project for modern art in Brazil and that generation of artists’ interest in Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian aesthetics. Examining the records of the participation of Pedrosa and famed scholar of pre-Columbian art, George Kubler, at the same conference in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1975, Corrêa proposes that together they contributed to the expansion of the field of art beyond oppositions of fine and popular, and

270 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 19 8 –19 9 against Occidental narratives of a single and progressive history. Corrêa draws an important distinction between Pedrosa’s incorporation of Amerindian cultures into his art theory and formalist appropriations of imagery or styles. See Patrícia Corrêa, “Formas e objetos primários: Mário Pedrosa e George Kubler,” Conexões: Ensaios em história da arte, ed. Maria Berbara, Roberto Conduru, and Vera Beatriz Siquiera (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UERJ, 2014), 189–203. Tracing this line throughout his oeuvre, in “Arte indígena e arte brasileira,” she makes a bold proposal: “Finally, would it be too much to imagine that the experimental exercise of freedom, with which we are accustomed to define the art that follows Neoconcretism in Brazil, would have its conceptual roots at least a mark of indigenous art?” (334). There are serious reasons Corrêa limits the scope of her claim, beginning with the fact that Pedrosa lumped Amerindian art together with art of the insane and of children. Furthermore, Pedrosa’s argument assumes that the material of Amerindian art remains reality itself. 63. “Ponto crucial e define uma posicião específica no desenvolvimento teórico de toda a minha experiência da estrutura-cor no espaço.” Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 65. Mónica Amor explains parangolé as slang that refers to “pointless conversations” or a “jumble of words”; she recounts a story told by the artist of having seen the word painted on the wall of a humble house, as he looked out of the window of the bus he rode on the way to his job at the Museu Nacional. Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 139. 64. Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 373. The double meaning exists in Portuguese but is less common: pessoa de cor. Laura Harris studies Oiticica alongside the Trinidadian author C. L. R. James, arguing that he contributes to the conceptualization of “blackness as that which designates irreducible difference, a mode of being that the modern bourgeois subject, conceived in and by European thought—the sovereign subject who is the model for both citizenship and aesthetic authorship—cannot accommodate.” Harris, Experiments in Exile, 2–3. For Harris and the expansive literature on the Black Atlantic that she engages, Blackness is not just borne by bodies of African descent. 65. Small, Hélio Oiticica, 176–80. This red also undoubtedly references the anarchist flag and the artist’s grandfather, José Oiticica. 66. See Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 373; Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 122. 67. While both cities underwent massive growth in the first half of the twentieth century, Rio de Janeiro grew primarily by migration from rural Brazil, whereas São Paulo received many more international immigrants. That influx into Rio grew even more during the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1955–1960) due to increased industrialization and decreased agriculture. According to the 1950 census, approximately 60 percent identified as Black or pardo (mixed race), with the growth of favelas bringing those populations in closer proximity to the concentrations of upper-class cariocas of European descent. See Julio Cesar Pino, “The Dark Mirror of Modernization: The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the Boom Years, 1948–1960,” Journal of Urban History 22, no. 4 (1996): 419–53. Although it became possible to identify as “indigenous” in the census in Brazil only in 1991, earlier census questions based on “color” rather than “race” included the option—almost unused—for favelados to identify as vermelha (red). Powell and Silva, “Technocrats’ Compromises,” 89n7, 101. Powell and Silva’s fascinating article emphasizes the struggles over color, race, and the favelas under the first years of the military dictatorship, when the informal settlements frustrated its desire to hide its economic failures from sight. The authors also note that even after the 1991 census, people of indigenous descent living in urban centers rather than rural territories were not accounted for within that new category. 68. Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica, 65. 69. “Populismo chic de vanguardia” “debe ser acusado de explotador sexual de los favelados.” Aguilar, “Hélio Oiticica,” n.p.

N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 0 0 – 2 0 4 * 271 70. Schroeder, “Painting of Modern Light,” 573. 71. Schroeder, 563. 72. Kapor, “Local Colour Revisited,” 54. Vladimir Kapor similarly analyzes the visual language of “local color” literature to “sketch a conceptual genealogy in which couleur locale appears as a branch of some importance in the more recent ramifications of a lineage as old as Aristotle, namely the family tree of discourses upon the legible codification of otherness” (40). 73. Jaguaribe, “Favelas and the Aesthetics of Realism,” 341. 74. Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 65. 75. “O establecimento perceptivo de relações entre a estrutura Parangolé, vivenciada pelo participador, e outras estruturas características do mundo ambiental, surge o que chamo de ‘vivência-total Parangolé,’ que é sempre acionada pela participação do sujeito nas obras.” Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 72 (emphasis added). 76. Although some individuals apparently did enter the museum. This story is featured widely in the Oiticica scholarship. See also Small, Hélio Oiticica, 186. 77. Small, 57–59 (emphasis added). 78. “A derrubada de preconceitos sociais, das barreiras de grupos, classes etc., seria inevitável e essencial na realização dessa experiência vital.” Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 73. 79. “A marginalização, já que existe no artista naturalmente, tornou-se fundamental para mim—seria a total ‘falta de lugar social,’ ao mesmo tempo que a descoberta do meu ‘lugar individual’ como homem total no mundo, como ‘ser social’ no seu sentido total e não incluído numa determinada camada ou ‘elite.’” Oiticica, 74. 80. Asbury emphasizes the importance of the concept of color in European philosophy for the artist prior to his “discovery” of Mangueira in 1964. For Asbury, Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions of samba and carnival were vehicles for that European sublime, and allowed him to avoid the political dilemma of the avant-garde announced by Gullar. Asbury, “O Hélio não tinha ginga.” 81. Programa Hélio Oiticica, Itaú Cultural, #0091/79—7/7, “Respostas ao Questionário de Carla Stellweg (Revista Artes Visuales México-New York).” According to the 1960 census, 70 percent of residences in favelas were privately owned. See Julio Cesar Pino, “Dark Mirror of Modernization: The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the Boom Years, 1948–1960,” Journal of Urban History 22, no. 4 (1996): 445. 82. James Green’s foundational scholarship on Brazil sets out both the right-wing military regime’s repression of homosexuality as a violation of “morals and public decency” and the discrimination within the leftist resistance against its own gay members. Green, “‘Who Is the Macho,’” 447. Green traces the emergence of new left social movements that united gay, feminist, and anti-racist concerns in the last years of 1970s, just as Oiticica returned to Brazil from New York, only to die from a stroke in 1980 (466). 83. Cruz, “Tropicamp,” 11. 84. Osorio, “As cores e os lugares,” 30. 85. Quoted in Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 188n98, 260. 86. Programa Hélio Oiticica, Itaú Cultural, #0091/79—7/7, “Respostas ao Questionário de Carla Stellweg” (Revista Artes Visuales México-New York). 87. Although the artist did not intend that double meaning of “rendition,” he was enthusiastic about its application to the trajectory of these works (interview with the author, November 8, 2019). 88. Taussig, “Redeeming Indigo,” 3. Brazil also participated in the tainted trade in indigo. See Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand. 89. Taussig, “Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism,” S102.

272 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 0 4 – 2 10 90. Taussig, “Redeeming Indigo,” 10. 91. Taussig, 4. 92. Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 44. 93. Bosch’s tryptic is famously difficult to decipher, but the figures in its foreground are not Black in the racial or ethnic sense used today. For a revealing analysis of Bosch’s mix of sexual desire and prohibition as set out by foundational art historian Erwin Panofsky, see Charles Dempsey, “Sicut in utrem aquas maris: Jerome Bosch’s Prolegomenon to the Garden of Earthly Delights,” MLN 119, no. 1 (2004): S247–S270. One analysis interprets the black figures as a play on words in ancient Greek. See Elena Calas, “Bosch’s Garden of Delights: A Theological Rebus,” Art Journal 29, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 185. Manglano-Ovalle’s turn to this artwork came just a few years after the public exchanges between John Berger and Subcomandante Marcos (see chapter 2), in which the visual culture scholar and the guerrilla fighter analyze Bosch’s painting. The artist vaguely recalls the exchange but does not cite it as direct inspiration for the work (interview with the author, November 8, 2019). 94. Interview with the author, November 8, 2019. 95. Platt, “Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” 10. 96. Interview with the author, November 8, 2019. 97. Manglano-Ovalle and Zorach, “Simply Agreeing to Appear Together,” 150. 98. Platt, “Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” 12. 99. Manglano-Ovalle has cited the influence of Oiticica and Clark’s work on the neighborhood projects. Vicente, “Formas exquisitas,” 56. 100. There is an extensive bibliography on photography, race, and modernity in the Americas. See my Errant Modernism. See also Deborah Poole and Gabriela Zamorano, De frente al perfil: Retratos raciales de Frederick Star (Zamora, Mexico: Colegio de Michoacán, 2012); Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Deborah Dorotinsky, “Fotografías e indígenas en la primera mitad del siglo XX: Imágenes desde la prensa,” in En busca de una nación liberal: Sociedad democracia y educación 1848–1940 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2010). 101. Yasmil Raymond in conversation with Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, “The Perfect Imperfect,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Blinking Out of Existence (Rochester, NY: Rochester Art Center, 2006) 62. Alys Eve Weinbaum concludes: “Manglano-Ovalle’s triptychs clear space for awareness of transformation of our mode of perception of race, of the existence of race as a spectral presence, and thus of the contradictory racial meanings that the new mode of biotechnological reproduction augurs.” Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Racial Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art in a Biotechnical Age,” Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (2007): 233. 102. Medina, “Overwhelming Desire for Order,” 115. 103. Interview with the author, November 8, 2019. Gran Colombia refers to the panAmerican dream of independence-era leader Simón Bolívar, meant to comprise Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, northern Peru, western Guyana, and northwestern Brazil. The national flags of Colombia and Venezuela are based on the Bolivarian flag. 104. McCamy, Marcos, and Davidson, “Color-Rendition Chart,” 95. 105. McCamy, Marcos, and Davidson, 96. 106. Yood, “Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” 197. 107. McCamy, Marcos, and Davidson, “Color-Rendition Chart,” 98 (emphasis added). 108. Asbury, in “O Hélio não tinha ginga,” notes a similar silence in Oiticica’s experiments with color, but he assumes that since “silence can only be perceived as time, the work of art became inescapably associated with duration” (30). Throughout the development of color-time

N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 1 1– 2 1 4 * 273 in Oiticica’s work, though, he struggled with that concept of duration. In 1960, he argued that Malevich’s abstraction still involved a metaphysics of representation; the non-object’s broken frame brought time into the question. That time “não era o tempo duração” (was not a time of duration) rather the temporality of the gerunds of the non-objectualism that Oiticica cites. Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 18. At this early moment in his demand that cor viva (color lives), time exists as a process of self-making: time makes time, the artist makes himself in the making of art. Oiticica writes: “Nada existe a priori; o tempo tudo inicia e tudo faz; até o próprio tempo se faz por si mesmo. Para o artista ‘o fazer-se,’ o profundo fazer-se que ultrapassa as condições do faciendi material, é que constitui a sua principal condição criativa. A criação se faz, nunca se deixa de fazer” (Nothing exists a priori; time begins all and makes everything; even time itself is made by itself. For the artist “to make himself,” the profound making that overcomes the condition of material faciendi, is what constitutes his principal creative condition. Creation makes itself, it never stops being made) (18). Later he associates white with durational, silent, color-time (45). 109. Iker Gil, “Information and the Reluctant Image: Interview with Iñigo ManglanoOvalle,” MAS Context 7 (2010): 93. 110. Telephone interview with the author, July 27 and 28, 2021; I thank the artist for clarifying these and the following details about the Documenta 12 installation. 111. “Phantom,” in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. T. F. Hoad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 112. John Mowitt, “The Color of Noise,” SubStance 49, no. 2 (2020): 133–49. 113. Camila Maroja, “Red Shift: Cildo Meireles and the Definition of the PoliticalConceptual,” ArtMargins 5, no. 1 (2016): 58. 114. “Ao desvio das ondas vermelhas, quer dizer, ao padrão de desvio; o vermelho é escolhido nesse caso porque desvia muito pouco. As suas ondas são as que menos desviam ou se deslocam pelo espaço.” Quoted in Scovino, Cildo Meireles, 274–75. 115. Revista Carbono 2013, n.p. In other interviews Meireles has noted that math and physics were favorite school subjects that he almost pursued rather than art. Mosquera, “Interview with Cildo Meireles,” 23. 116. In fact, a fascination with negation appears throughout Meireles’s oeuvre. The first of his widely influential series, Insertions in Ideological Circuits—best known for messages criticizing the dictatorship silkscreened onto Coca-Cola bottles that were sold and recycled—also included Inserções em jornais (Insertions in Newspapers, 1970). In this first iteration, the artist recalls “paying for a white space in an advertising section of newspaper classifieds.” Quoted in Fernandes, Cildo Meireles, 98. 117. Scovino, Cildo Meireles, 274. 118. Guerrero negro is a companion piece to the more prominent video Juggernaut (2008), which focuses on the industrial mining of the salt flats. 119. García Uriburu’s connection with this group of artists is described in “Pollution artistique,” Conaissance des Arts 226 (December 1970): 130–33, in Fond Iris Clert, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou. He would collaborate with Josef Beuys in coloring the Rhine River for Documenta 7 in 1981. 120. For a detailed account of García Uriburu’s different colorations, see Plante 2014. A postcard made of a photograph of the Venice Coloration in 1968 is in the Fond Iris Clert, Correspondance Ulbricht-Uriburu vues 6395–6464, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou. The artist was not the first to use fluorescein to dye an urban waterway. The city of Chicago has used the chemical to dye its polluted river green since 1962, as part of the intense development of the city’s downtown and for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. See Whet Moser, “Dyeing

274 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 1 4 – 2 17 the Chicago River Green: Its Origins in the Actual Greening of the River,” Chicago Magazine, March 16, 2012; Timothy J. Bennett, “Fundamentals of Fluorescein Angiography,” https://www .opsweb.org/page/FA. 121. Fluorescein is made primarily from two petroleum products, resorcinol and phthalic anhydride. See Jeff Jacobs, “Fluorescein Sodium What Is It?,” Journal of Ophthalmic Photography 14, no. 2 (1992): 62. 122. Restany, Uriburu, 43. 123. See Gabara, Pop América. 124. “Aunque básicamente ambientacional, su punto de partida en esa muestra fueron los fenómenos puramente pictóricos, ya que el color—aunque ubicado sobre planchas de acrílico—disfrutó de la totalidad de gamas que hubiera tenido en su pintura, plena y vigurosa.” Glusberg, “Coloraciones y sistemas,” 8, 18. 125. Letter dated July 1, 1980, Fond Iris Clert, Correspondance Ulbricht-Uriburu vues 6395– 6464, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou. In the same letter, García Uriburu flatters Clert for being as much an artist as gallerist, and credits her with giving Yves Klein the idea to use just one color in his monochromes. 126. On the Onganía regime and corporativism, see Valeria Galván y Florencia Osuna, eds., Política y cultura durante el “Onganiato”: Nuevas perspectivas para la investigación de la presidencia de Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970) (Rosario, Argentina: Prohistoria, 2014). The green colorations maintained a directly political valence after the end of the military dictatorship in 1982. The following year, Uriburu colored the fountains in the Plaza de los dos Congresos and the Monumento a los Españoles in Buenos Aires in a work he titled Homenaje a la democracia (Homage to Democracy). At the same time, he created a large program of tree planting on both banks of the Río de la Plata, along which the bodies of some of those murdered by the state had been found in the preceding years. For a compelling description of the bodies found along the Río de la Plata, see Edgardo Vannucchi, ed., Carta abierta de un escritor a la junta militar, Rodolfo Walsh, 24 de marzo de 1977: Propuestas para trabajar en el aula (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Justicia, Seguridad y Derechos Humanos de la Nación, 2010). 127. Plante, “La distancia y el lugar,” n.p. 128. Interview with the author, July 15, 2015. 129. Restany, Uriburu, 72. 130. Quoted in Restany, Uriburu, 70. “Yo denuncio con mi arte el antagonismo entre Naturaleza y Civilización. Es por eso que yo coloreo mi cuerpo, mi sexo y las aguas del mundo. Los países más evolucionados están destruyendo el agua, la tierra, el aire, reservas del futuro en los países latinoamericanos” (from November 1973 article in Le Journal de la Maison, Manifesto García Uriburu: El agua: del 11 de abril al 15 de mayo 2001 Fondo Nacional de las Artes). 131. Hochbaum, quoted in Fundación Nicolás García Uriburu, Las culturas verdes, 93. 132. Nora Hochbaum, director of the Centro Cultural Recoleta, makes this connection in her introduction to Molina and Mordo’s Las culturas verdes, 1, 93. 133. García Uriburu’s deep knowledge of and dedication to the Amerindian works was evident even in the last years of his life (interview with the author, July 15, 2015). See Molina and Mordo, Las culturas verdes. 134. “Esa plata enseguida va a la colección precolombina. Creo que voy a duplicar la colección de aquí a mi muerte y estoy muy contento de dejar un museo fabuloso.” Rizzo and Rosenberg, “Entrevista,” 19. 135. The website of the Museo Nacional explains in depth the epistemological as well as historical significance of the objects. 136. Molina and Mordo, Las culturas verdes, 7. The responsibilities of museums with col-

N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 17 – 2 2 4 * 275 lections of Amerindian works is a topic of great relevance and expanding bibliography, but beyond the framework of this study. See Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 465–86; Gustavo Buntinx, “Communities of Sense/Communities of Sentiment: Globalization and the Museum Void in an Extreme Periphery,” Museum Frictions Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 219–46; “Fair Trade Heads: A Conversation on Repatriation and Indigenous Peoples with Maria Thereza Alves, Candice Hopkins, and Jolene Rickard,” South as a State of Mind 2 (Kassel, Germany: Documenta 14, 2016). 137. Interview with author, June 9, 2015. In Spanish, the preposition de allows for a play between the demand of color and a demand for color. 138. Interview with author, June 9, 2015. 139. “Chemi Rosado Seijo,” 37–38. 140. See Edward J. Sullivan, From San Juan to Paris and Back. Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 50–54. 141. See Linda Nochlin, “Courbet, Oller and a Sense of Place: The Regional, the Provincial and the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century Art,” Horizontes 28, no. 56 (1985): 8, 11 (emphasis added). 142. Interview with author, June 9, 2015. 143. Rolnik, “The Knowing-Body Compass,” 128. 144. Brooks, Realist Vision, 212. 145. Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 6. For Mirzoeff, these other realisms constitute a countervisuality under the hegemonic, modern regime of European visuality. He identifies distinct periods of countervisuality against the hegemonic operation of Western modernity, spanning from revolutionary realism (ca. 1730–1838) to planetary visualization (1967–present) in the period under examination here. His narrative spans the realism of the right to the real, and highlights the “struggle for existence, meaning a genealogy of the claim of the right to existence, beginning with the enslaved, via the banners claiming the ‘right to life’ in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the “new humanism” of decolonization sought by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon” (26). 146. Siracusano, Pigments and Power, 116. Extirpation names the extensive search for and destruction of Amerindian belief systems by Catholic colonizers. 147. Siracusano, 139. 148. Quoted in Siracusano, 128. 149. Cofré, “A Theory of Fiction,” 129. Disagreeing with Searle, Cofré states: “I believe that fictionality-which is participation, construction and, essentially, responsibility on the part of the reader is the ontologically relevant factor that determines (although not by itself only) whether a work is literature or not. I do not propound-let it be understood-that it is the sufficient and necessary condition defining a literary text. I maintain that there are other necessary conditions (narrative structure, motif, etc.), but I do believe it is the fundamental condition” (12). 150. Cofré, 139. 151. Cofré, 145.

Epilogue 1. Respini, Walid Raad, 110. 2. Respini, 130. 3. Raad, Walid Raad, 4.

276 * N o t e s t o Pag e s 2 2 4 – 2 2 8 4. Raad, 1–4. Since Raad’s text was published, the APT made the news for complaints about attempts to charge for art storage, not responding to artist and curator inquiries about the work held, and lack of transparency about the location of their work. See Robin Pogrebin and Siddhartha Mitter, “They Pooled Their Art to Create a Nest Egg: They Say It Was a Mistake,” New York Times, July 27, 2021. 5. Davis and Walsh, “Distinguishing Financialization from Neoliberalism,” 30. See also Rob Aitken, “Financializing Security: Political Prediction Markets and the Commodification of Uncertainty,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2010): 123–41. Aitken notes too that the meaning of “financialization” varies but can be broadly understood as the increasing power of the world of finance in all economic and political activity, including in everyday activities and perceptions of the subject and citizen. 6. Respini, Walid Raad, 37. 7. Raad, Walid Raad, 4. 8. These scripts are published in Raad, Walid Raad: Walk-throughs. 9. Respini, Walid Raad, 130 (emphasis added), 141. 10. Raad, 8.

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Index

Page numbers in boldface refer to figures. Acha, Juan: Amerindian practices and concepts, study of, 19–20, 46; anti-humanist non-objectualism of, 71; anti-illusionism of, 46; artistic philosophies cited by, 192–94; Ehrenberg letter to, 58; gerundial fusion of noun and verb, dedication to, 22–23, 213; the non-object, theorist of, 9–11, 33; politics, non-objectualism and, 238n61; Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano del Arte No-objectual y Arte Urbano (First Latin American Colloquium of Non-objectual Art and Urban Art), 10; review of Albers, The Interaction of Color, 192–93; space/time, non-objectualism, and, 33 Achebe, Chinua, 19 Adorno, Rolena, 245n15 Afghanistan, 172 Agamben, Giorgio, 141–42, 161 Agius, Juan, 59 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 52–53, 199 Aguilar Gil, Yásnaya, 25–27, 29, 36–37 Aitken, Rob, 276n5 Albers, Anni, 80, 192 Albers, Josef: Homage to the Square, 192–94, 209, plate 2; The Interaction of Color, 192–93; making colors lose their identity, 268n41; sacred power of red linked to fabrication materials, 197 Allende, Salvador, 13, 150

Althusser, Louis, 243n135 Alvim Corrêa, Henrique, 2 Alÿs, Francis: Ambulantes (Walkers), 105, 106, 110–11; The Collector, 104; commercial success of, 114; Duet, 102; As Long as I am Walking, 103; motif as an element in art, potential of, 85; move from Belgium to Mexico by, 254n60; New York Times review of solo exhibition, 256n87; not doing/making imagined by, 175; Ojarasca, photograph in, 104–5, 110; Re-enactments, 101, 102; 61 out of 60, 107, 108; time of rehearsal for, 115, 121; Tornado, 103–4; Turista (Tourist), 101, 101; utopia, rejection of, 112; Walking a Painting, 102; walking as negation for, 100–104, 113; Zapatista rebellion, interest in, 107, 256n77 Amaral, Aracy, 9, 19, 51 Amaral, Tarsila do, 262n13 Ambrosini, Silvia, 19, 22–23 America: continental definition of, 16; estar en (being in) in Kusch, 21; US hegemony over, 17 Americanity, 20 Amerindian practices and philosophies: Albers, impact on, 192–93; Araweté reason/thought, Viveiros de Castro’s encounter with, 176–80, 189–90; Aymara, speakers of, 144–46; color and, 187, 189– 90, 194–95, 216–17, 220–21; contemporary

290 * i n de x Amerindian practices and philosophies (continued) art and, 28–33; khipus and the negative philosophy of, 46–48; the literacy of lines and, 58; non-Eurocentric negation and, 19–28; power of red among the Araweté, 189–90; Purépecha peoples, 78–80; usage of “indigenous” distinguished from, 26; writing systems and aesthetic philosophies, 48–49. See also Aguilar Gil, Yásnaya Amor, Mónica, 9, 11, 270n63 amparo, writ of, 262–63n35 Andrade, Mário de, 157, 262n13 Andrade, Oswald de, 31, 262n13 Antelo, Raúl, 183–84 anthropology: fiction and, 31–33; “native” and “anthropologist,” relationship of, 30–31 Antonio, El Viejo, 108–9 antropología filosófica americana, 20, 22, 32 Arango, Espinosa, 99–100 Arango, Gonzalo, 98 Argentina: habeas corpus in, 168; political consequences of mail art entering and leaving, 60; rehearsals of neoliberalism in, 215–16; violence and los desaparecidos (the disappeared) in, 154–55, 168 Argote, Iván, 3 Armstrong, Elizabeth, 5–6 art/arts: Amerindian practices/concepts and contemporary, 28–33; conceptual, 68, 90; drawing as the basic unit of, 46–48, 67 (see also drawing); fiction and, 19, 243n133; financialization of, 224–27; gesture and (see gesture); Latin American and Latinx, 40–42; “Latin Americanness” of contemporary, 6; neoliberalism and, 8; political, exhibitions of, 4–6; repression by government or the market, relative dangers of, 8 Artigas, Gustavo, 32 Artist Pension Trust (APT), 223–26, 276n4 Asbury, Michael, 201, 236n28, 271n80, 272–73n108 Asco (Nausea), 11 Atahualpa, Don Carlos, 253n28 Atl, Dr. (Gerardo Murillo), 93

Atlas Group: Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version), 225–26; invention of, 223; invitations to exhibit in the Sfeir-Semler Gallery, 224; violence and, 226–27. See also Raad, Walid avant-garde: American negation of representation contrasted with, 24; concept of in Latin America, 18–19; conflict between Paz and Carrión over the radicalism of, 59; second (1960s), 24 Ávila, Affonso, 53–55 Ayala, Walmir, 86 Aymara, speakers of, 144–46 Azerdo, Ronaldo, 246n24 Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha, 35, 203, 242n128 Bailey, Norman A., 7–8, 46, 85, 112–13, 225, 235nn24–25 Baily, John, 172 Balcells, Fernando, 15, 16 Baravelli, Luiz Paulo, 68 Bardi, Pietro Maria, 233n3 Barriendos, Joaquín, 236n30, 268n39 Barrio, Artur: “Aesthetic Manifesto of the Third World,” 156; bloody bundles by, 174, 179–81; CadernosLivros (WorkbookBooks), 157, 158; “Defl . . . . . . Situação . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Ryas . . . . . . . Abril . . . . . .” (Defl . . . . . . Situation  . . . . . . . +S+ . . . . . . Streets . . . . . . . April . . . . . .), 173–74, 174; fictional corpus of visual art created by, 155; intimacy with the dead created by, 180; Livro de carne (Book of Meat), 155–58, 156, 160, 162–63, 165–66, 168–69, 173; Malasartes, published in, 249n68; Rodapés de carne (Meat Skirting Boards), 163, 166–68, 167, 181; “Situação T/T” (Situation T/T), 173–74, 174 Basbaum, Ricardo, 157 Basualdo, Carlos, 255n66 Beau Geste Press, 50 Beneveniste, Émile, 179 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 94–95, 98, 103, 114 Benjamin, Walter, 104 Bentivoglio, Mirella, 259n47 Benton, Thomas Hart, 126 Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” 260n60

i n de x * 291 Berger, John, 107, 272n93 Berlo, Janet Catherine, 187 Bethânia, Maria, 258n20 Beuys, Joseph, 243n130, 273n119 Blum, Michael, 5 Boal, Augusto, 118–22, 147, 185 Boas, Franz, 126 Bolaño, Roberto, 169 Bolívar, Simón, 208 Bolsonaro, Jair, 44 book, the: for Caldas, 68–76; for Carrión, 55–56, 59, 62, 69; colonialism and, 49; lines and the reinvention of, 49, 55–59; mass circulation of and intimate relationship with, 157; of meat, Barrio’s Livro de carne as, 155–62, 165; violence against, 161 Boone, Elizabeth, 48, 56, 74 borders: in Caldas, 68, 74–77; in Carrión, 66; in Flusser, 144–45; lines and, 77; in Oiticica, 192 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1, 4 Bosch, Hieronymus, 206, 272n93 Boserup, Ivan, 245n15 Boumediene v. Bush, 263n40 Braga, Edgard, 246n24 Brazil: boi (ox) as a symbol of national identity, 157; concrete poets in, 51; favela neighborhoods of, 199; habeas corpus in, 156, 160–61, 163–64; journal about the politics of art in, 66–68; migratory patterns into Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 270n67; military dictatorship in, 1; neoliberalism, as exemplary of the path of, 46; theater of the oppressed in, 119–22 Brecht, Bertolt, 119–21, 185 Breton, André, 36 Brett, Guy, 249n73 Brizuela, Natalia, 258n32 Broodthaers, Marcel, 36, 38, 242–43nn129–130 Brooks, Peter, 6, 185–87, 220 Brown, Bill, 185 Bürger, Peter, 18, 140, 155 Burke, Edmund, 45 Burrows, David, 243n133 Bush, George H. W., 7 Bush, George W., 165

Bustamante, Maris, 10, 236n28 Butler, Octavia, 154 CADA. See Colectivo de Acciones de Arte Cage, John, 116, 118 Caldas, Waltércio: blinking glimpses, fiction and, 83; Escultura escultura (Sculpture Sculpture), 71, 72; Espelho para Velásquez (Mirror for Velázquez), 69–70, 70, 74; Ficção nas coisas (Fiction in Things), 67, 73–74, 81; “Frases sólidas” (Solid Sentences), 69; impact of opinião on the artwork of, 120; invitation to exhibit with Corrêa, 233n3; “Leitura silenciosa” (Silent Reading), 67, 67–68, 74; a line, on the impact of, 45; lines brought from paper to sculpture to politics, 49; Malasartes, coeditor of, 66–67; Momento de fronteira (Border Moment), 67, 72–77, 73, 75; Untitled, 70–71, 71; Velázquez, 68–69, 184, 208; Wells and Welles, influence of, 3 Calirman, Claudia, 261n10 Calzadilla, Juan, 88 Camnitzer, Luis, 88, 112, 234n14, 240n80 Campos, Augusto de, 51–52, 246n24 Campos, Haroldo de, 51–53, 55, 68, 246n24, 250n80 Candela, Iris, 254n45 Candido, Antonio, 165 Cardoso, Ivan, 175–76 Carillo Rowe, Aimee, 30 Caro, Antonio: “encounter,” motifs created through walking as an, 111; Homenaje a Manuel Quintín Lame (Homage to Manuel Quintín Lame), 89; Homenaje tardío de sus amigos y amigas de Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba (Belated Homage by Friends from Zipaquirá, Manaure, and Galerazamba), 112–13; Proyecto 500 (Project 500), 88, 98–100, 99, 113; Quintín Lame series, 46, 87–94, 98–100, 113; repeating numbers added to the practice of walking by, 85; utopia, rejection of, 112 Carot, Patricia, 78, 250n95 Carrión, Ulises: Big Monster, mail art and the book as guerrilla warfare against, 59– 62, 81, 172; “El arte nuevo de hacer libros”

292 * i n de x Carrión, Ulises (continued) (The New Art of Making Books), 55–56, 59, 87, 156, 227; Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, 62, 64–66, 65, 211; the line, concrete poetry and, 49, 55, 67; Looking for Poetry/Tras la poesía, 50–52, 51–52, 58, 78–79; The Poet’s Tongue, 56–57; sexual orientation and death of, 245n17; visual signs read as poetry by, 85 Cartier, Héctor, 268n42 Castillo, Juan, 14–15, 16 Castro, Sergio de, 150 Cauquelin, Anna, 243n133 Cavalo, Cara de, 199 Césaire, Aimé, 13 Cézanne, Paul, 219 Chambers, Ephraim, 180 Chile: coup against the Allende government, 58; democracy and dictatorship in, 12–13; Jaar’s fictional plebiscite for, 13, 14; neoliberal experiments in, 7; plebiscites held under the dictatorship, 13–16, 15; Rosenfeld’s Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on Pavement) and, 122–25; torture in, 161–62 Choi, Connie H., 4–5 Christo, 214 Citton, Yves, 140–42 Clark, Lygia: Bichos (Critters), 9, 86, 158, 198; Caminhando (Walking), 84–87, 100, 103, 111–13, 117–18, 123, 159, 163, 166, 171; color in the work of, 198; commercial success of, 114; Dialogue of Hands, 118, 145–46; Gullar and, 84; inclusion in art exhibition inspired by Opinião, 120; Malasartes, published in, 249n68; nãoobjeto, work inspiring the term, 239n78; Neo-Concrete Manifesto, signatory of, 157; Pollock’s egoistic gesture, distinction between her own appeal and, 144; “the action itself,” interest in, 121; walking as a motif, 88 Clauss, L. F., 258n36 Clert, Iris, 215, 274n125 Cleveland, Kimberly, 260n70 Coelho, Frederico, 266n22 Cofré, J. O., 221, 275n149 Cohn, Dorrit, 165

Coimbra, Cecília Maria Bouças, 163 Colbert, Stephen, 5 Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), 14–15, 16, 49 collaborative invention: as a core political function of non-literary fiction, 117, 151; in Opinião, 120–21 Colombia: as a conduit between the Caribbean and the Americas, 94; land ownership and agrarian reform in, 252–53n26; la violencia in, 161; neoliberalism, as fertile ground for, 46, 113, 235n24; Quintín Lame and conceptual art in, 90 colonialism: confronting the history of, 4–6; as imposing one kind of line on another, 48; violence of, 153, 161 coloniality: Americanity and, 20; as the Big Monster, 60–62; blindness to, 35–36; globalization and, 6; Latinx art and, 41; of modernity, 4; neoliberalism and, 4, 8; in Puerto Rico, 38; and the state, 35 color, 220–21; gender of, 266n19; green as non-red, 213–20; inventing enlivened, 190–98, 227–28; local, 198–203; nonliterary color-time, 210–13; realist fiction and, 185–89; red (see red); rendition of, 203–10, 227; value of, financialization and, 226; verisimilitude created by, 184– 85; violent history of, capitalism and, 204 Columbus, Christopher, 98 comprehension, 21 concrete poems/poetry: conceptual artists and, relative contributions of, 245n21; freedom of, 33, 35–36; Gullar and, 246n21; impact of Brazilian, 246n23; importance of for Caldas, 67–68; the line in, 50–55; poetic fictions of, 87; the reinvention of the book and, 55–56 Conner, Bruce, 37 Conrad, Joseph, 204 Cordeiro, Waldemar, 187–89; “Uma cadeira é uma cadeira” (A Chair is a Chair), 187, 188 Coromines, Joan, 84 corpus, 153–55, 180–82; book of cuts, Barrio’s Livro de carne as, 162–66; book of meat/ flesh, Barrio’s Livro de carne as, 155–62;

i n de x * 293 concept of, 173–80; Pica and the invented body, 168–73 Corrêa, Patrícia, 269–70n62 Cortázar, Julio, 1, 34 Costa, Maurício da, 269n59 Costa Lima, Luiz, 30–31, 36–37, 42, 241n113 Couple in a Cage (Fusco and Gómez-Peña), 5–6 Covarrubias, Miguel, 57 Crary, Jonathan, 200 Critical Fictions (Dia Center for the Arts), 5 critical theory, 6, 37, 187 Cruzvillegas, Abraham: Autoconstrucción (Self-Construction), 23–24, 24, 27–28, 218; Autodestrucción 7: Deshaciendo el nudo (Self-Destruction 7: Undoing the Knot), 77–78, 77–80; as curator exhibiting Pica’s Catachresis series, 169; meat/ organic materials incorporated into installations by, 168; performance at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, 81; personal background, 23; political line as a reinvented khipu, 49; question of indigeneity and, 24–26, 28–29 Cuauhtémoc, 161 Cuba: criminalization of homosexuality in, 60, 202; and the extended Caribbean, 94–95; Garaicoa in, 95–98; socialism and capitalism in, 113; tensions among authors and artists over, 60, 235n21; US military base in Guantánamo, 165, 172 Cullen, Deborah, 116–17 Culler, Jonathan, 34, 242n122 Cummins, Tom, 48–49, 57–59, 62 cut, the, 162–63, 180 Dardot, Pierre, 7 Dávila, Arlene, 41 da Vinci, Leonardo, 45 Davis, Aeron, 225 Dean, Carolyn, 195, 245n15 Dean, Warren, 269n59 de Certeau, Michel, 104 de la Rosa, Natalia, 236n30 Deleuze, Gilles, 104 Delgado Moya, Sergio, 248n48 del Valle, Augusto, 12, 46, 236n35

Derrida, Jacques, 48, 56–57 desaparecidos, los (the disappeared), 154–55, 160, 168–69, 172, 181 Dias, Antonio, 120 Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America; Meo Zilio and Mejía), 128–31 d’O, Honoré, 102 Doležel, Lubomir, 178 Domingo Perón, Juan, 216 Donkin, R. A., 269n59 dos Anjos, Moacir, 162, 261n5 Draper, Susana, 235n24 drawing: as the basic unit of art, 46–48, 67; the khipu and, 46–48, 47; writing and, 46, 57–58. See also line Drucker, Johanna, 57 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 157 Dubois, Philippe, 243n133 Duchamp, Marcel, 186 Duffy, Nikolai, 161 Eder, Rita, 9, 46 Edwards, Betty, 23, 78 Efron, David: generational shifts among his Jewish and Italian subjects, observations of, 144; Gesture and Environment, 125–27, 127, 132–33, 136; opposition of reason and emotion discarded by, 120 Ehrenberg, Felipe, 41, 58, 134, 150, 245n18 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación National (EZLN), 4. See also Zapatista movement Eltit, Diamela, 15, 16, 124–25, 161–63, 166, 172 Emilio Pacheco, José, 98 environmentalism, 213–18 equivocation, concept of, 30–32 Eurocentrism, 4, 37, 42 Fanon, Frantz, 13, 24, 156, 159–60, 240n86 Farrell, Brian, 164 Favaretto, Celso, 191, 267n28 Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 154–55, 168 Felski, Rita, 37 feminism: gestural representation of, 132; Grobet’s depiction of the women of lucha libre and, 134–35; “reparative” mode of reading and, 37

294 * i n de x Ferguson, Russell, 102, 104, 111 Fernandes, João, 55, 60, 162 fiction: anthropology and, 31–33; art and, 19, 243n133; basic questions about, 3; Boal’s theater of the oppressed and, 121; concrete poetry and the concept of, 53; corpus as, 155 (see also corpus); definitions of, 5–6, 18, 35; drawn line as the basic unit of, 45, 80–81 (see also line); equivocation and, 32–33; exhibiting, 3–6; gesture and, 118, 140–41 (see also gesture); intimacy, capacity to create, 165–66; lucha libre as, 135–36; making rather than writing, consideration of, 227–28; motif in, 83–84 (see also motifs); narrative and, 34 (see also narrative/nonnarrative); non-literary (see non-literary fiction); non-objectualism and, 11–12; non-utopian, 112–14; operations of, 12; as political art, 1–3, 12–19; Quintín Lame’s signature as a visual, 91; realist (see realist fiction); the realist novel as, 185; temporality of, 33, 166–68 Fictions (The Studio Museum in Harlem), 4–5 Finck, Carlos, 134 Flaubert, Gustave, 185–86, 204, 212 Flores, Salvador, 51 Flusser, Vilhelm (Vilém): Black art, perspective on, 260n70; “Da ficção” (On Fiction), 148–49; freedom, the gesture of painting as a form of, 150; gesture in Brazil, indigenous and African contributions to, 142–44; hands in motion, writings on, 144–45; hybrid genre of philosophy and media theory created by, 118–19 Foucault, Michel, 36, 161, 243n133 Frankfurt School, 37 Freedman, William, 114 freedom: gesture and, 149–51; neoliberal, 150 Freire, Cristina, 166 Freud, Sigmund, 180 F(r)icciones (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), 3–4 Friedman, Milton, 3, 7, 150, 233n4 Fusco, Coco, 5, 41–42 Fuss, Diana, 243n135

Gago, Verónica, 27–28 Gainza, Gastón, 130 Galeano, Eduardo, 76, 256 Galeano, Subcomandante, 256 Gallque, Sánchez, 253n28 Garaicoa, Carlos: Autoflagelación, subsistencia, insubordinación (Self-Flagellation, Subsistence, Insubordination), 113–14; commercial success of, 114; gesture, turn to, 115–16, 119, 142, 149; Homenaje al 6 (Homage to the 6), 95–98, 96–97, 100, 113, 115; Perseguido por la palabra, opto por el gesto (Pursued by the Word, I Opt for the Gesture), 115, 116; repeating numbers added to the practice of walking by, 85; time of rehearsal for, 121; Transformar la palabra política en hechos, finalmente (To Transform the Political Word into Deeds, Finally), 115; utopia, rejection of, 112–13 García Uriburu, Nicolás: Amerindian art, collection of, 216–17; Argentine politics, involvement in, 216; Colorations series, 214–17, 274n126, plates 9–10; Los jardines artificiales (Artificial Gardens), 215; tree planting program along the Río de la Plata, 274n126 Geiger, Anna Bella, 245n19 Geisel, Ernesto, 163 gender: imbalance of in representation of gestures, 129–31, 139 Gerchman, Rubens, 249n68, 262n15 gerunds: Clark’s Caminhando and, 86; as the grammatical form of negation, 45; mode of negation expressed by, 21–23 gesture, 115–19; in Boal’s Opinião, 119–22; commonality of, imagination of freedom and, 149–51; dialogue of, hands in motion as, 144–49; gesture studies, an American genealogy of, 125–33, 151; Mexican lucha libre as bodies in time, 134–40; nonWestern, time and, 140–44; performative, 139; pose and, distinction between, 116; transmission of signs through, 122–25 Gili, Jaime, 100 Giunta, Andrea, 18–19, 24, 238n58 Glissant, Édouard, 13, 141–43, 147, 149 globalization: coloniality and, 6; financialization and, 225

i n de x * 295 Glusberg, Jorge, 11–12, 215 Godoy-Anativia, Marcial, 258n23 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 5, 41 González, Julieta, 238n67 gossip, 62–66, 249n66 Goulart, Claudio, 245n19 Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 37 Grandin, Greg, 150, 164, 225, 235n21 Greco, Alberto, 217 Green, James, 271n82 Greenberg, Clement, 194 Grimson, Alejandro, 76 Grobet, Lourdes: Brazo de Plata con la máscara de la Migra, Toreo de Cuatro Caminos (Brazo de Plata Holding La Migra’s Mask, Cuatro Caminos Match), 136; gestural creative collaboration, use of, 119; La familia Solar (The Solar Family), 135; Luchadores Nezahualcóyotl (Nezahualcóyotl Wrestlers), 138; Mexican lucha libre as bodies in time, 133–41, 143; Portrait of Siglo XX (Twentieth Century), 137; Tigres, Zitlala, Guerrero (Tigers, Zitlala, Guerrero), plate 1 Groisman, Michel: gestural creative collaboration, use of, 119; gestures taken up by, 133; Porta das mãos (Door of Hands), 145–46, 146; Sirva-se (Help Yourself), 146–49, 147–48 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 20 Grünewald, José Lino, 246n24 Grupo Proceso Pentágono, 134 “Grupos, los,” 134 Grupo Sí, 268n42 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe: Nueva Corónica i buen gobierno (New Chronicle and Good Government), 49, 57–58, 61–62, 63 Guimarães Rosa, João, 1, 31 Gullar, Ferreira: Barrio, impact on, 156; Clark and, 84, 86; concrete poetry movement, relationship with, 246n21; “Dialogue on the Non-object,” 9–10; gerundial fusion of noun and verb, dedication to, 22–23; Lembra, 33; Não, 22, 33; Neo-Concrete Manifesto, signatory of, 157; the non-object, theorist of, 8–11, 118, 157, 213; object and non-object, contrast

of, 236n33; objection to recognition of work by Clark, 239n78; recollection of the impact of Opinião, 120; “Theory of the Non-object,” 8–9, 22, 249n68; transformation from concretism to popular culture, 238n61 habeas corpus: in Argentina, 168; Barrio’s Livro de carne and, 163; in Brazil, 156, 160–61, 163; in Chile, 162; founding of, 161; limits and violations of, 164, 181; paradoxical legal history of in the Americas, 164–65; reinvention of, the desaparecido and, 154–55; in the US, Guantánamo Bay detentions and, 165, 172 Harris, Laura, 270n64 Hartman, Saidiya, 154, 181–82 Hawley, Martha, 64 Hayek, Friedrich, 234n20 Hebdige, Dick, 253n30 Hellion, Martha, 150, 245n18 Herkenhoff, Paulo, 156, 252n16 Hernández Amezcua, José Antonio, 134 heterotopia, 36–37, 243n133 Hill, Greg, 26 Hinderer Cruz, Max Jorge, 202 Hoffman, Carlos, 138 Honório, Thiago, 69–70 Hopkins, Candice, 26 Horton, Jessica L., 187 Hyland, Sabina, 48, 244–45n9 Iglesias Lukin, Aimé, 60 image: word and, binding together, 48, 57– 58; word and, separation of, 45–46 imagination, gesture and, 149–51 indigeneity/indigenous movements: affirmation of, issues raised by, 24–26; Amerindian (see Amerindian practices and philosophies); “native” and “anthropologist,” relationship of, 30–31; nicknames meaning “indigenous,” 78; Ojarasca, photographs in, 104–5; Zapatista, 4, 29, 81, 100–101, 105–12 Ingold, Tim, 48 invention: centrality of for nonobjectualists, 11; in concrete poetry journal Invenção, 52–53; fiction as, 6, 32;

296 * i n de x invention (continued) in Oiticica, 190–92; Rancière, rejection by, 35 Iser, Wolfgang, 243n133 Jaar, Alfredo: art as an effort to create fiction, 19; doubts about the politics of no, 17–18; Estudios sobre la felicidad (Studies on Happiness), 13, 14; Gramsci, citation of, 17, 37; A Logo for America, 16–17, 17–18, 23, 38, 184; personal background, 12–13; The Rwanda Project, 237n49 Jaguaribe, Beatriz, 200, 203 James, C. L. R., 270n64 Jáuregui, Gabriela, 81 Josten, Jennifer, 235n25 Kaplan, Amy, 244n142 Kapor, Vladimir, 271n72 Katzew, Ilona, 205–6 Kendon, Adam, 117, 125, 138 Kerpel, Diana Magaloni, 196–97 Kessler, Gabriel, 76 Keti, Zé, 119, 122 Khanna, Ranjana, 180 khipus, 46–48, 47, 78–80, 161, 244–45nn8–9 King, Rodney, 255n64 Kissinger, Henry, 13 Klein, Yves, 269n55, 274n125 Klintowitz, Jacob, 22 knowledge: comprehension as a popular alternative to, 21; concept, definition of, 30, 175–77; shift in the character of, 30–31 Kosice, Gyula, 217 Kosuth, Joseph, 68, 187 Krystof, Doris, 243n130 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 270n67 Kubler, George, 242n117, 246n23, 269n62 Kuri, Gabriel, 240n84 Kuri, José, 240n84 Kusch, Rodolfo: distinct American logic sought with Quiroga, 44; García Uriburu, comparison to, 216; philosophical anthropology of, 143; popular negation, grammar/philosophy of, 20–22, 24–26, 32, 213; subjectivities other than the Western individual, recognition of the existence of, 31

Labat, Jean-Baptiste: Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (New Voyage to the Islands of America), 205 LaFarge, Antoinette, 243n133 Lalonde, Christine, 26 Lamarque, Peter, 34 Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, 5–6, 41, 184–85 Lampert, Catherine, 107 Lane, Jill, 258n23 Larraín, Pablo, 235n22 Lasch, Pedro, 234n11 Latin American Biennial (1978), 19, 22–23 Latinx as a project, 40–41, 184, 207 Lauer, Mirko, 236n35 Laval, Christian, 7 Leão, Nara, 119–21, 122, 148, 257–58n20 Lee, Pamela, 242n117, 246n23 Leibsohn, Dana, 245n15 Leite, José Roberto Teixeira, 233n3 LeParc, Julio, 216 Letelier, Orlando, 123 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 20, 30–31, 177, 241n113 Librandi-Rocha, Marília, 31–32 line(s), 45–50, 80–81; the Big Monster and, 59–66; in concrete poetry, 50–55; definition of a book and, 55–59; drawn, significance of, 46–48; fibrous, knots and, 77–80; negating by Caldas, 66–77; between repressive violence and democracy, 163 Lippard, Lucy, 194 Lispector, Clarice, 31 literature, 1–3, 5–6, 31, 33–34, 42, 83, 114, 118, 185–86, 249n66; Carrión in contrast with “las performances de lenguaje,” 57; Citton and the western canon of, 140–41; Clark’s Caminhando, in the sense of, 87, 117; local color as genre of, 200–201; as possible worlds, 178; realist fiction and, 185–87, 220–21, 265n9. See also narrative/ non-narrative Lleras Restrepo, Carlos, 112–13 Loaiza, Romero, 90 Lope de Vega, 246n31 López, Jerónimo, 240n84 López, Miguel, 19, 236n30, 236n37 López, Nacho, 161

i n de x * 297 Lowry, Glenn D., 234n10 lucha libre (professional wrestling) in Mexico, 119, 134–41 Lugones, María, 20 Lukin, Iglesias, 268n42 Maderuelo, Javier, 245n19 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, 181 mail art, 10, 50, 59–61 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 36 Mandler, John P., 263n49 Manet, Édouard, 185 Manglano-Ovalle, Iñigo: background of, scrutiny of the trajectory of color and, 203–4; color, pursuit of the liveliness of, 184; color, rendition of, 204–10; Color Field, Numbers 1–5, 205, 207–8, 212, plate 5; The Garden of Delights, 205–7, plate 4; Guerrero Negro (Black Warrior), 208–10, 213, 218, plate 6; Juggernaut, 273n118; Krefield Suite, 210, 212; The Patron, His Wife, His Barber, and the Artist, 206; Phantom Truck, 210–12, plate 7; The Radio, 210–12; violent racialization in the United States and Spanish colonialism, connection of, 41 Manrique Castañeda, Leonardo, 78 Marcos, Subcomandante, 107–10, 255– 56n77, 272n93 Marcuse, Herbert, 159 Margolles, Teresa, 168 Maria, Walter de, 214 Mariano de Carvalho, Vinicius, 257n11 Maroja, Camila, 234n14, 236n30, 239n79 Marquet Colmenares, Augusto Vinicius, 249n65 Martínez, Eniac, 105 Martínez de Hoz, José Alfredo, 168 Martins, Sérgio Bruno, 236n28, 239n78, 249n68 Matamoros, Corina, 115 Mayor, David, 50 McNeill, David, 143–44 McShine, Kynaston, 192, 194 Medina, Cuauhtémoc, 104, 111, 208, 255n70 Meireles, Cildo: Colombia as crucial to understanding neoliberal repression,

235n24; color, viewers immersed in, 184; concrete poetry, narrative time and the role of, 35–36; Desvio para o vermelho: Impregnação; Entorno; Desvio (Deviation into Red: Impregnation, Surroundings, Deviation), 212–14, plate 8; drawn line, significance of, 46–48, 67; fiction and non-literary fictions, interview centering on, 1–3, 12, 19, 210; impact of canonical Latin American writers on, 1; Insertions in Ideological Circuits, 265–66n11, 273n116; literature as slavery, description of, 33–34; Malasartes, published in, 249n68; math and physics as favorite school subjects of, 273n115; narrative control over time, avoidance of, 33, 168; neoliberalism and art, interview centering on, 7–8; work by Caro named as a foundational referent by, 87 Mejía, Silvia: Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America), 127–32, 128–31, 145; Parola, sostantivo femminile (Word, Feminine Noun), 133 Meo Zilio, Giovanni: Diccionario de gestos: España e Hispanoamérica (Dictionary of Gestures: Spain and Spanish America), 127–32, 128–31 Mercosur, 76, 81 Mesquita, Ivo, 4 Mexico: the Big Monster in, 60–61; Cuauhtémoc, monument to, 161; indigenous peoples in, 29–30; “los Grupos,” 134; lucha libre (professional wrestling) in, 134–41; media landscape in, 259n56; as a surrealist country, 36; wrestlers of lucha libre (see lucha libre) Meyer, Mette Kia Krabbe, 245n15 Mignolo, Walter, 20, 49, 141, 245n15 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 220, 227, 275n145 Mises, Ludwig von, 234n20 Mitchell, W. J. T., 244n3 modernism, 194, 203, 219 modernity: coloniality of, 4, 119; in the global South, 28, 100–101, 109, 137, 202–3; realism and, 275n145; Western logic of, 19, 35, 38, 113, 141–42 Molina, Estela, 139

298 * i n de x Montañez Ortiz, Raphael (Ralph), 37–38, 262n20 Moraes, Suzana de, 257–58n20 Morais, Frederico, 46, 159–60 More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness (Walker Art Center), 3–6 motif(s), 83–85, 114; Alÿs’s paseos as, 100– 107; Clark’s Caminhando and, 85–87, 100; copying and falsehoods in, 92–94; as a rehearsal, 111; repetition in, 87–91, 94–100; temporality of, 109; walking as, 88, 100–102, 110–12 (see also walking) Mowitt, John, 211 Muñoz, Victor, 134 Murphy, Keith, 149 MutualArt.com, 226 narrative/non-narrative: in exhibitions of fiction, 4–6; fiction and, 3, 12, 31–32, 34; motif and, 83; space and, 34–37; time and, 33–34 negation: the avant-garde and, 18–19; critical theory and, 37; the cut as, 162– 63; a grammar of non-Eurocentric, 19–28; hegemonic of neoliberalism, 12; Latin American critical genealogy of, 8–11; non-literary fiction and, 76; non-objectualism and the concept of (see non-objectualism); politics of, fiction and, 12–19, 26–27; in Raad’s Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, 224, 226; radical politics of, 37–40; use of green as, 218; walking as, 103–4 Neo-concrete Manifesto, 157 neoliberalism: art and, 7–8; from below, 27– 28; as the Big Monster, 60–62; democracy and, 7, 12–16, 28, 35, 150, 161–66, 274n126; fiction and, 3; financialization and, 225; freedom of, 150; gesture as a means to counter, 140–42; hegemonic negation of, 12; periodization of, 234n19; permeable borders of, 76; political violence of, 153–55 (see also corpus); repressive regimes and the core principles of, 6–7; the state and, 29; United States’ support for repressive regimes to promote, 1, 164–65; utopias to confront, rejection of,

112; Zapatista critique of, 110–11 (see also Zapatista movement) Netto, José Teizeira Coelho, 151 new materialisms, 187 New Objectivity (Nova Objetividade), 187–89 New York Times, 256n87 Nixon, Richard, 13 Nochlin, Linda, 219 “No-Grupo” (Non-Group), 10. See also “Grupos, los” Noland, Carrie, 138–39, 143, 151 non-literary fiction: Amerindian thought and, 19–28, 178; artistic vitalidade and, 8; borders in Caldas’s, 76; collaborative invention in, 117, 120–21, 151; color in, 220 (see also color); concept of, 3, 221; corpus of, 155, 180–81 (see also corpus); the drawn line and, 46 (see also line); founding components of, 226; gesture and, 145, 150–51 (see also gesture); motifs and, 83, 85–87, 114 (see also motifs); neoliberalism and, 8; photography, produced by, 178; political violence of neoliberalism and, 153 (see also corpus); theory of continuous across typical divides, 31; time/space and, 33–37; verisimilitude in (see verisimilitude) non-objectualism: Amerindian practices/ concepts and, 19–21; Barrio’s form of, 158–59; fiction and, 11–12, 33; gesture and, 117–18 (see also gesture); as making a thing out of negation, 22–23, 40; the non-object as a quasi-corpus, 157–58; postmodernism and, contrast of, 11–12; practices of artists associated with, 10–11; social potential of gesture and, 116 (see also gesture); theorists of, 8–10; time/ space and, 33; verisimilitude produced by, 191. See also negation Noriega, Chon, 37–38, 262n20 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 4, 23, 76, 85, 168 Novak, Lorie: Lento, pero avanzo (Slow, but I Advance), 111 Novo, Salvador, 139 Núñez, Rafael, 144, 146

i n de x * 299 Obama, Barack, 165 Oiticica, Hélio: on Albers, 192; bólides series, 196–98, 199, 266n20; on Clark’s Caminhando, 85; color and, 184, 189–92, 194–98, 201–3, 209, 228, 266n20; “General Schema of the New Objectivity,” 188–89; inclusion in art exhibition inspired by Opinião, 120; international art world, entry into, 41; Invenções (Inventions), 191–92, 196, 266n20, 268n41; Malasartes, published in, 249n68; não-narrações, invention of, 10, 202; parangolés series, 198–203, 212, 266n20; sacred power of red linked to fabrication materials, 197–98; sexual orientation of, 199, 202; “Sobre O Projeto Cães de Caça” (About the Hunting Dogs Project), 183; time as a process of selfmaking for, 273n108; Viveiros de Castro and, 175–76, 176, 179–80; voluminous writings of, 42 Oiticica, José, 196 Oiticica Filho, José, 196, 198 Olín, Nahui (MarÍa del Carmen Mondragón Valseca), 93 Oller, Francisco, 219 Onganía, Juan Carlos, 215–16 Operation Condor, 76 Oppenheim, Dennis, 214 Orellana, Francisco de, 92 Orozco, Gabriel, 240n84 Ortega, Damián, 240n84 Ortiz Torres, Rubén, 134–36 Osorio, Luiz Camillo, 202–3 O’Sullivan, Simon, 243n133 Other Books and So, 50, 59, 61–62, 245n19, 259n47 Palomar, Pepa, 113 Panofsky, Erwin, 272n93 parafiction, 5, 41, 184 Pardo, Jorge Manuel, 128 Parente, Leticia, 245n19 Paternosto, César, 194 Patiño, Francisco, 221 Paz, Octavio, 50, 55, 57, 59–60, 248n48 Peck, Jamie, 8, 29, 234n19, 235n26 Pedrosa, Adriano, 4, 160, 165

Pedrosa, Mário, 198–200, 203, 236n35, 239n78, 269–70n62 Pedroso, Arturo A., 96 Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel, 68–69, 184 Perloff, Marjorie, 248n48 Perón, Juan, 239n70 perspectivism, 43, 175–79 Peru, 77–80 Pica, Amalia: the body, habeas corpus, and “desaparecido” in the work of, 168–73; Catachresis series, 169–73, 170-171, 182; fictional corpus of visual art created by, 155; Hora cátedra (School Period), 169; intimacy with the dead created by, 180; Reconstruction of an Antenna (As Seen on TV), 172, 173 Pignatari, Décio: “Agora tal vez nunca” (Now Perhaps Never), 52–53, 54, 56, 71; Morais’s dedication to, 160; unmourned cadaver, death of art as an, 160 Pimental, Wanda, 69 Pinochet, Augusto, 7, 13–16, 122–24, 143, 237n52 Plato, 144 Platt, Ron, 207 poems/poetry: concrete (see concrete poems/poetry); spatial, 33 politics: Amerindian thought and, 28–29; art exhibitions and, 4–6; of fiction, temporality and, 33; “indigenous” as a political category, 25–26; of negation, fiction and, 12–19, 26–27; the theater and, 121–22 Pollock, Jackson, 118, 144 Poniatowska, Elena, 258n28 postmodernism, contrast of nonobjectualism and, 11–12 Powell, Breanna Marea, 270n67 Powell, Colin, 211 Pratt, Mary Louise, 242n122 Puente, Alejandro: Amerindian concepts of color, example of, 194–95; sacred power of red linked to fabrication materials, 197; Trama, color y luz (Weft, Color, and Light), 194, plate 3 Puerto Rico: art of negation and, 38; “not America,” centrality to, 41; statehood, plebiscites on, 38–39

300 * i n de x Quijano, Aníbal, 4, 20 Quintín Lame, Manuel: background on and life of, 90–91, 252n25; Caro’s mingas and, 98–100; signature of copied by Caro, 46, 87–94 Quiroga, Anastasio, 21–22, 31, 44 Raad, Walid: fictions of, 227–28; Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, 223–24; Walkthrough, 223–26, 228 race: casta paintings and, 205–6; color and, 198–99, 206; lucha libre and, 138–39; mestizaje and, 24–26, 29, 137, 206, 240n83; modernity-coloniality and, 4; Nazi theory of, gesture and, 126 Rafael Videla, Jorge, 168 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 70, 190–91, 198– 200, 266n22, 267n28 Ramona, Comandanta, 105–6 Rancière, Jacques, 12, 34–36, 185–86, 242n127, 242n129, 265n9 Rand, Ayn, 234n20 Raoni, 217 Rappaport, Joanne, 48–49, 58–59 rasquachismo (making do), 27–28 Reagan, Ronald, 7, 12, 143, 225 Real Academia Española (RAE), 154, 189–90 realist fiction: color and, 185–89 (see also color); entrenched in the novel, 183; the parangolés in the subgenre “local color” of, 199; substance of the lines in concrete poetry and, 55; as a survival strategy, 220; verisimilitude in (see verisimilitude) red: of Albers’s Homage to the Square, 192–93; Amerindian fabrication of from different materials, 196–98; definitions of “colorado,” 189–90; green as non-red, 213–20; of Little Red Riding Hood’s cape, 221; power of among the Araweté, 189– 90; red foil, use of, 210–12; redshift and red as non-color, 212–13 Redenesk, Jeannette, 267n38 representation: color and the abandonment of, 190; gesture and the abandonment of, 116; non-objectualism and the abandonment of, 9, 11, 116, 162; perspectivism and, 177

Restany, Pierre, 214, 262n16 Ricardo, Cassiano, 246n24 Richard, Nelly, 124–25 Rincón, Carlos, 45–46, 61 Ringle, Hallie, 4 Rivera, Diego, 93 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 20, 29, 240n83 Roca, José, 40, 93–94, 96, 100, 113, 254n45 Rocha, Glauber, 160, 199 Rockefeller, David, 267n32 Rojas Sotelo, Miguel, 254n56 Rolnik, Suely, 8, 158, 219, 226 Röpke, Wilhelm, 234n20 Rosado Seijo, Chemi: color, pursuit of the liveliness of, 184; El Cerro (The Hill), 39– 40, 217–21, plates 11–12; Tapando para ver (Blacking Out to See), 38–39, 39, 41, 217 Rosenfeld, Anatol, 167 Rosenfeld, Lotty: CADA, participation in, 14, 16, 49, 122; gestural creative collaboration, use of, 119; gestural intervention into signs, 130, 132; “No+,” 16, 16–17, 122; Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on Pavement), 15, 122–25, 123, 146, 151, 258nn23–24 Rousseff, Dilma, 235n24 Rozitchner, León, 155 Rueff, Jacques, 234n20 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, 29, 110 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 23, 29, 85, 107, 168 Salomão, Waly, 269n60 Salzstein, Sônia, 75 Sánchez Villarreal, Felipe, 254n57 Santamarina, Guillermo, 240n84 Sarduy, Sévero, 60 Schiwy, Freya, 35 Schraenen, Guy, 60 Schroeder, Jonathan, 200 Schwartz, Roberto, 120 Scigliano Carneiro, Beatriz, 196 Scilingo, Adolfo, 155 Scilingo moment, 155 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 37 Seguí, Antonio, 216 semiocapitalism, 140–41 Serpa, Ivan, 266n20

i n de x * 301 sexuality, representation of gestures and, 131 Shakespeare, William, 249n66 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 249n66 Shniberg, Moti, 224–26 Sierra Maya, Alberto, 10 Silva, Graziella Moraes, 270n67 Silva Brito, Mário da, 246n24 Simpson, Leanne, 238n66 Siracusano, Gabriela, 195–96, 220–21 Small, Irene, 191, 196, 251n7, 268n41, 269n53, 269n55 Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 118 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 238n66 Smithson, Robert, 214, 242n117, 243n133, 246n23 Somerset, Joseph, 164 Sommer, Doris, 37, 93 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 99 Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), 207 space: concrete poetry and, 52–53; narrative fiction as a, 34–37; non-utopian, 33–37 spatial poems, 33 Squirru, Rafael, 268n42 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 120 Stellweg, Carla, 202–3 Sterne, Laurence, 73 Sterzi, Eduardo, 175 Stigger, Veronica, 175, 179–80 Stiles, Kristine, 37–38 Sweetser, Eve, 144, 146 Swift, Jonathan, 234n11 Tama de Estrella, Juan, 91 Tarazona, Emilio, 236n30 Taussig, Michael, 181–82, 204, 208 Taylor, Diana, 125, 140–41 Thatcher, Margaret, 7, 12, 143, 225, 237n48 Thayer, Willie, 17–19 time/temporality: Aymara speakers and, 144; in Caldas, 73–74; Carríon on, 56; color-time, 203, 210–13; concrete poetry and, 52–53; fictions repeating in, 96; of gesture, 117, 143–44; impossible temporality of fiction, 166–68; non-utopian, 33–37; Pignatari “Agora tal vez nunca” (Now Perhaps Never), 52–55, 54; of repetition, 86–87, 100; shift from literary to non-

literary fiction and, 3, 33–34; walking and, 109–10 Traba, Marta, 132 “Tribu No” (No Tribe), 10 Trump, Donald, 44 United States: Iran-Contra affair, 225; Latinx art in, 40–41; neoliberalism and support for repressive regimes, 1, 164–65 (see also neoliberalism); racialization discourse and Amerindian dispossession in, 28–29 Urton, Gary, 48 utopia: Cuba and, 98; rejection of the concept of, non-literary fiction and, 26, 36– 37, 59, 112–14, 208, 225; the temporality of fiction and, 36–37; in Vicuña, 247n46. See also heterotopia Valdés Figueroa, Eugenio, 96 Valdez, Patssi, 37 Vale, João do, 119, 122 Valera, Blas, 245n15 van Barneveld, Aart, 51, 59 Van Veen, Stuyvesant, 126, 127 Vasco Uribe, Luis, 98 Velázquez, Diego, 141, 184 Venancio Filho, Paulo, 76 verisimilitude: in Caldas’s Vélazquez, 69, 184; color, created by, 184–85, 190–91 (see also color); green as a verisimilar color, 214–18, 221; in non-literary fiction, 183–84, 186–89, 200; realist fiction and, 185–89, 200 Vicuña, Cecilia, 10, 58, 247n46 violence: color and, 204; diminishing by degrees, problem of, 163; los desaparecidos (the disappeared), 154–55, 160, 168–69, 172, 181; of neoliberalism, 153, 164–65; semiotics of in the Americas, 161; torture, 161–62, 164–65 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo: Citton’s manifesto for fiction, contribution to, 142; corrections to, 241n107; equivocation, concept of, 30–32, 48; Nildo vestindo um parangolé de Hélio Oiticica no Viaduto da Mangueira (Nildo on the Mangueria Viaduct wearing a parangolé by Hélio Oiticica), 176, 179–80, 198; non-human

302 * i n de x Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (continued) persons, 216; perspectivism of, 43, 175–79; on the power of red among the Araweté, 189–90; shift from “conception” to “concept,” Amerindian concepts of the body and, 176–80 walking: by Alÿs (paseos), 100–107, 110–12; basic components of motif combined in, 84–85; in Caribbean performance, 95; by Caro, 88, 95, 98–100; in Clark’s Caminhando, 86–87, 111–12; by Garaicoa, 95–98; in mingas of Quintín Lame, 98–100; as a motif, 88, 100–102, 111–12; as negation, 100–104, 111; Raad’s “walk-throughs,” 223–24; as a social practice, 111–12; by Zapatistas, 105–12 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 20 Walsh, Catherine, 20, 225 War of the Worlds, The, 1–3, 5, 8 Webster, Susan, 253n28 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 272n101 Welles, Orson, 1–3, 5 Wells, H. G., 1–2 Wesselmann, Tom, 217

Whitelegg, Isobel, 236n35 Wilde, Oscar, 249n66 Wolfson, Gabriel, 60 women: reduction of role in nonobjectualism, 239n78; representation of gestures by, 129–31 word: binding together image and, 48; separation of image and, 45–46 writing, drawing and, 46, 57–58 Xisto, Pedro, 246n24 Yampolsky, Mariana, 105 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 27 Yépez, Heriberto, 59 Yood, James, 209 Zaid, Gabriel, 61, 66, 248n57 Zapata, Emiliano, 108, 233n6 Zapatista movement (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN]), 4, 29, 81, 100–101, 105–12 Zegers, Francisco, 124 Zurita, Raúl, 15, 16