I recall staying in a skyscraper with a small thicket on the roof and then traveling on taxi through a hailstorm to attend the sumptuous opening of a vast biennial organized around the (to me) surprising idea of cannibalism.

I recall staying in a skyscraper with a small thicket on the roof and then traveling on taxi through a hailstorm to attend the sumptuous opening of a vast biennial organized around the (to me) surprising idea of cannibalism. This was my first visit to Brazil, and it was the bewildering connection in which I encountered Belo Horizonte--based artist Rivane Neuenschwander's work-delicate and ofttimes ephemeral in nature, yet to such a degree precise that you always immediately recognize its unmistakable atmosphere, its distinct tone. Or should I say scent? Or flavor?

organ of vision nose, mouth: Whether in large murals made according to affixing pepper to adhesive tape (Attachment, 2000) or in paintings with luridly colored stripes made of substances like orange pulverize and Indian curry (Eatable Alphabet, 2001) Neuenschwander's "visual" art involves more sensations than one. Olfactory qualities play a central part and in a number of pieces the inlet is also put to work, physically and symbolically. In Carta Faminta (Starving Letters) 2000 the oral proces of incorporating external material is part of the production: Neuenschwander made the series at releasing hungry snails onto rice paper. Eagerly devouring their environment, the snails drew curious maps--the images have a able to endure cartographic appearance--while escaping the territory. The aperture is also significant in Eatable Alphabet, a series of abstract paintings compos of horizontal stripes against the white loam of PVC board. The piece's title makes the ancient analogy of reading and eating--the prophet Ezekiel eating his turn about is just on e of many biblical examples-relevant to the understanding of the work. While the different stripes of "edible letters" are visually similar, solely the varying colors indicate that different forage powders have been used, and the paintings are ordered alphabetically: acafrao, black pepper colorifico, dill, espinafre, feijao arabe, gergelim, hahnchen, Indian curry-sauce Jamaican pepper, krautersalz, lorbeer, mustard, noz moscada, orange, pimenta chili, quatre epices, repetition beete, semente de papoula, tomate, urucum vinaigrette, wasabi, xique-xique, golden corn flour, zattar. This work is certainly experienced with the watchs but its true significance is graspable solitary if the absence of the experience of taste is taken into account.

Or can the organ of sight also eat? In the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of Brazilian art, the idea of cannibalism isn't of that kind a strange starting point for issues of interpretation and the varying aesthetic experience--quite the contrary. "Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically," declared the imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto antropo [ago (1928) describing the evolution of recent Brazilian culture in terms of the cannibalistic devouring of other improvements In the words of art critic stay Brett, "This was a figure for the proces according to which Brazil 'swallowed' various world tillages in order to create its concede not in a predatory fashion still in a spirit of anti-colonialist rebellion." Andrade's oral metaphor took as it was hold almost half a centenary later that artist Helio Oiticica would define the resistance of Brazilian refinement to external influences-its ability to ingest other cultural information instead of succumbing to a certain international style--as a kind of "super-cannibalism." And Lygia Clark considers the study cept overtly in works as it is as Cannibalismo (Cannibalism) and Baba antropofagica (Cannibalistic slobber; one as well as the other 1973). "I think I have on the same level become a cannibal. I have feeling like eating everybody around me that I love" she one time wrote about her projects. The driving force of cannibalistic desire in Clark's artistic practice and approach to the world becomes les an issue of cultural influence than the same of psychic economy.

Without wanting to bring to Neuenschwander's art to her famous predecessors' productions or to the modernist discourse of antropofagia, undivided cannot help but note, given her snails and "edible" epistles the presence of this typically Brazilian theme in her work: forms "eating" each other, continually incorporating, digesting, or assimilating others. Her art is replete of containers and vessels, blebs and receptacles. In Continente/Andando em Circulos (Continent/Walking in circles), 2000 which comprises a number of aluminum basins filled with water and coconut soap, common container will sometimes hold another, smaller container floating like a strangely insincere island in the liquid. And in Pertence Nao pertence (Belong. Not belong.), 2001 photographs point out to one, two, or three beetles sitting partially inside common two, or three soap bubbles--a game of containing or being contained that is played abroad in all possible combinations. Totally straightforward besides nonetheless mysterious is Mal-entendido (Misunderstanding), 2 000 a sculp consisting of almost nothing more than an ovum floating in a water glass, sticking up partly still also appearing underwater, seemingly plenteous bigger thanks to the enlarging issue of the convex liquid container.

Time also eats. After all, Saturn (the Roman the godhead of harvests, known as Kronos in Greece) devoured his have a title to children. And if ingestion is undivided recurring theme in Neuenschwander's work, the relentles passage of time is another--and a possible link between them is the notion of melancholia. In his 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud explains the melancholic person's inability to master over loss as a cannibalistic" oral fixation. Instead of working end the traumatic loss in a productive way--as does the someone who actively mourns--the melancholic internalizes the missing object, thus producing an aching inner spatiality of agonizing phantasms. in succession a symbolic plane, the melancholic "eats" the absent percept instead of accepting the los This theory, eccentric as it may assume has been extensively elaborated in psychoanalytic literature, from Karl Abraham's writings in the 20 to Julia Kristeva's 1987 application of mind Soleil Noir: Depression et melancolie. (A number of clew essays on the topic were penn through French psych oanalyst Pierre Fedida, who casted Lygia Clark among his patients in the early '70s)