Antropofagia and Constructive Universalism: A Diptych

This study proposes a rethinking of the word-image relation through an examination of Joaquin Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism (ca.1934-1949) and the Brazilian Modernist movement of Antropofagia (1928-ca.1934). By placing both in the close relation of a ‘diptych,’ I argue for a new reading of Torres-García’s visual work as well as a different understanding of Antropofagia. In the first part of this work, I argue, through a close reading and viewing of Torres-García’s work, that the constitutive instability between word/image has been overlooked in favour of, on the one hand, an appropriation in terms of a ‘deviation’ from the canon of Geometric Abstraction and on the other hand as a paradigm of Pre-Columbian, Inca abstraction. Both discursive gestures repress the matter of visual aesthesis. Against this strategy of legibility, I propose a counter-reading through the concepts of ‘graphism’ (Leroi-Gourhan), ‘manuscription’ (Sarabia), the ‘sensory field’ (Lyotard) and the hypericon. These concepts allow contingency to find its way back into Torres-García’s oeuvre in opposition to neo-Classicist misappropriations. Throughout my argument, it will become evident that Torres-García’s paintings bespeak an irrepressible mestizaje, an intertwining of the figural with the abstract. It is this tension animating Torres-García’s work that has been neglected by the disciplining of discourse’s ‘logic of illustration.’ In the second part of the study, I take Antropofagia not so much as a historically determinate period in the narrative of Brazilian Modernism, but as a heuristic for the thinking through of the ‘inconstancy’ of the relation between word and image in its New World Baroque vertigo. This vertigo is politically charged, and amounts to a ‘counter-Conquest’ (Lezama Lima) of the clear and distinct distribution of legibility and visibility inherited through coloniality. The metaphoric economy of cannibalism in Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) in conjunction with the visual work of Tarsila do Amaral and the ‘re-discovery’ of Barroco Mineiro by the Brazilian avant-garde deconstructs the narrative of rupture so as to engage in a complex ‘route to roots’ highlighting the artifice of origin. This same artifice marks Torres-García’s oeuvre, and by ‘closing’ the diptych, I show how abstraction folds back into a Baroque superimposition

Allegories of Graphiation: Alberto Breccia’s Counter-Censorial Versions of E. A. Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar.

peer reviewe

The Art of Joaquin Torres-García: Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction

Intertwining art history, aesthetic theory, and Latin American studies, Aarnoud Rommens challenges contemporary Eurocentric revisions of the history of abstraction through this study of the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García. After studying and painting (for decades) in Europe, Torres-García returned in 1934 to his native home, Montevideo, with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: "Abstract Spirit." Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the painter's aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-García's theories as self-contradictory, Rommens seeks to recover their creative potential as well as their role in tracing the transatlantic routes of the avant-garde. Through the highly original method of reading Torres-García's artworks as a critique on the artist's own writings, Rommens reveals how Torres-García appropriates the colonial language of primitivism to construct the artificial image of "pure" pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-García thereby inverts the history of art: this book teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today

“Deep” Time in Times of Precarity. Comics and Anthropocene Poetics

This essay focuses on comics that show a sensitivity to “deep time” and the conception of our current epoch as the so-called “Anthropocene”. Through comics by Diniz Conefrey, Alberto Breccia and the WREK collective, this text explores how the bodily temporality of reading and drawing stands in productive counterpoint to some of the themes of these comics. These thematic layers are informed by the interpretive horizon of geological time and pose a politics of form to negotiate this contradiction.Cet article met l’accent sur des bandes dessinées de Diniz Conefrey, d’Alberto Breccia et du collectif WREK qui montrent une sensibilité au « temps profond » et à notre époque actuelle comme soi-disant « Anthropocène ». Il s’agit d’examiner comment la temporalité corporelle de la lecture et du dessin est en opposition productive avec certains thèmes, qui s’inspirent de l’horizon interprétatif du temps géologique, et posent une politique de la forme pour négocier cette contradiction

Alberto Breccia: Memoirs of Resistance and the Ethos of Reading

peer reviewedThis article intends to nuance the view that there is a clear break in the work of graphic novelist Alberto Breccia between work made during the Argentine military junta (1976-83) and his post-dictatorship work. I argue that there is both a break and continuity: there is a break in terms of a certain aggressiveness that comes to the surface and which is barely contained by the architecture of the comics page. On the other hand, there is also a continuous working through of a poetics of radicalness, but radicalness by other means: it is a paradoxical radicalness that hinges on indirection. I will show how the latter was already evident in Breccia’s work published during the junta, but which, paradoxically, continued even after its collapse. I will show how he used literary adaptation as a critical tool against censorship and how it would live on in his later work, even after the restitution of democracy in Argentina. More specifically, I will demonstrate how his adaptation of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' can be read as the continuation of this counter-censorial tactic

Reinstating the ‘Laws of Chance’: Breccia’s Throw of the Dice with Ernesto Sabato’s Informe sobre ciegos

peer reviewedIn 1993, the year of his death, Alberto Breccia’s retelling of Ernesto Sabato’s Report on the Blind was finally published (first in Spain by Ediciones B and for the first time in Argentina by Editorial Colihue in 2007). Indeed, finally is the most fitting word to invoke its convoluted publication history: after an agonizing wait lasting over fifteen years – turning out to be a productive incubation period – Sabato eventually granted Breccia permission to re-create and publish the comic version of his literary work. One could say that Breccia’s Report on the Blind is not a single work but is embedded within the dense accumulation of his other visual-verbal experimentations with literary texts, those by H. P. Lovecraft in particular. This article explores the always-controversial relationship between comics and literature and the various aspects of cultural exchange that defy the language of both comics and literary texts. We argue that this exchange turns creates borderline zones that provide new ways to see, read and understand the literary text and its comics adaptation, revealing both their limits and possibilities

Poetics of digital comics

This special collection follows up on the transdisciplinary conference Poetics of the Algorithm held at the University of Liège (Belgium) in June 2016. Narrative today is undergoing a radical change in its ‘source code’ as new technologies are changing the way texts are produced, distributed, viewed and read. Even though comics have originally been resistant to a sweeping digital translation, weary of a technological utopianism that did not bode well for its own specificities, cartoonists have increasingly adapted to this new media ecology, using it to reinvent their approach to comics making. A poetics of digital comics would aim at mapping out how comics respond to the deep technological change of the digital in complex ways, avoiding the pitfall of a new vs. old dichotomy and thus accounting for both its innovative forays into digital creation as well as its paradoxes, resistances, residues and returns. By bringing Francophone voices into English, this collection, under the editorial direction of Benoît Crucifix, Björn-Olav Dozo, Aarnoud Rommens and Ernesto Priego for The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, seeks to encourage international scholarship spanning from the cutting-edge of a ‘French comics theory’ that, in recent years, has paid increasing attention to digital comics

Abstraction and comics = Bande dessinée et abstraction

This is not a book about abstract comics. Instead, it combines original, new comics and multiple texts to explore what abstraction can offer to comics, and what comics can do for abstraction. By doing so, Comics and Abstraction occasions a critical engagement with issues such as ‘high’ versus ‘low’ art; art history and comics studies; literature, poetry, drawing and writing; highbrow, lowbrow, nobrow, and so on. Comics and Abstraction generates a space of contradiction where the essays and images stand in a relation of tension. Some of the included texts are more historically-oriented, some take a decidedly semiotic approach, while others are more concerned with formal features. This multiplicity is echoed by the markedly different aesthetics of the comics, which do not necessarily ‘illustrate’ the theoretical frames of the essays. It is ultimately up to the reader to create the meaningful paths that connect abstraction and comics.Ceci n’est pas un livre sur la bande dessinée abstraite. Il s’agit plutôt de combiner images et textes multiples qui explorent ce que l’abstraction peut offrir à la bande dessinée, et ce que la bande dessinée peut faire pour l’abstraction. Bande dessinée et abstraction propose une confrontation critique des questions de statut culturel, entre histoire de l’art et recherche en bande dessinée ; littérature, poésie, dessin et écriture ; highbrow, lowbrow ou nobrow. Bande dessinée et abstraction génère un espace de contradiction où texte et image sont mis en tension. Certains textes proposent des approches historiques, d’autres plutôt sémiotiques, d’autres encore explorent des caractéristiques formelles. Cette multiplicité trouve écho dans les contrastes esthétiques entre les différentes bandes dessinées, qui n’illustrent pas nécessairement les cadres théoriques des essais. Il reviendra au lecteur à tracer des chemins pertinents reliant abstraction et bande dessinée