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Natalia Brizuela
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A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.2
Even the most recent edition of Ana Cristina Cesar’s work – a Spanish-language
translation, Album de retazos, published in Argentina in July 2006 – includes, alongside
the poems (as its title, in this case, might suggest) a photographic album with portraits
of the Brazilian poet. Yet the title of the Spanish version does not in fact refer to the
photographs that it includes – it is not a photographic album, no, but rather an album
of snippets, of remnants, of remains, of leftovers – but is taken, as the editors explain,
from the title of one of the collections of unedited poems left by Ana Cristina (housed
now in the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro), itself thus a remnant, as the
editors say, ‘an album forever unfinished that collects texts and snippets of texts made,
in turn, of snippets of others’.3 An album: ‘from the Latin “albus”, “white”, used as a
noun meaning a blank tablet’.4 The central figure is the album, not the snippets, the
splinters, the pieces, for how, Ana Cristina’s poems repeatedly ask, does one both fill
the blank tablet and at the same time leave it blank? I will fill the album, her poetics
seem to suggest, but by filling it I will in fact be leaving it empty. To explore this
paradox is the purpose of this essay.
In the late 1970s Ana Cristina Cesar, a young aspiring writer and student of literature
and media in Rio de Janeiro, begins to explore, through visual experiments – shooting
portraits of herself, transforming clips from magazines and postcards into ready-mades,
using pictographic writing – a new material and methodology for her incipient poetic
practice. As Ana Cristina becomes in just a couple of years a central figure in the
Brazilian poetic avant-garde of that era, her writing is marked, as many critics have
emphasized, by forms and figures of the autobiographical. From the first small
independent editions of Cenas de abril (‘April Scenes’), Correspondência completa
(‘Complete Correspondence’) and Luvas de pelica (‘Leather Gloves’) between 1979 and
1980, to the 1982 book that would place Ana Cristina Cesar at the heart of the Brazilian
poetic avant-garde, A teus pés (‘At your feet’), it is the intersection of autobiography and
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 March 2007, pp. 27-44
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569320601156746
28 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES
these visual experiments – and in particular photography – that provides the way to
read the oeuvre.
If on the one hand, the poetic I articulated throughout her work will play with
forms of intimacy, with ‘truth’ and with autobiography, on the other hand, beginning
with its emergence in Cenas de Abril – a collection which takes the form of a diary – it
will also lay out a repudiation of truth, of reality of its uniqueness: ‘I no longer want the
rage of truth’, the I of ‘21 de fevereiro’ (February 21’) would state (‘Não quero mais a
fúria da verdade’).5 Yet if her poetry will seek to work with ‘autobiographical’ forms of
intimate writing and, at the same time, undermine not only referentiality and the
possibility of a unique subject but also ‘truth’, the question then becomes how to
navigate – but not resolve – in the praxis of writing, such a paradox. How, in other
words, could some forms be resignified? By searching for and insisting upon, the poems
seem to suggest, exits from truth. Ways out of the truth of narration of the I, for
example, by ‘dividing the body into heteronyms’ (‘dividir o corpo em heterônimos’).6
Or, as the same poetic I would indicate in ‘21 de fevereiro’, by searching for the truth
as though it were something to be purchased, consumed, chosen among merchandise:
‘I search the [shop] window for a brutal style’ (‘procuro na vitrina um modelo
brutal’).7 It is in this same sense that the photographic portraits in particular – as
staging and visualization of an I, divided up into heteronyms, displayed as an alluring
object of desire – and the visual experimentations more generally, would provide Ana
Cristina with a laboratory. As such, they would allow her to give shape to this central
paradox of her poetic corpus.
Snapshots
‘I felt like changing my approach or façade; I bought makeup, got hold of French
perfume, but the high boots crush my feet’, Ana Cristina would write to her friend Ana
Candida in a letter from 1979. (‘Me deram ganas de mudar o approach e a fachada,
comprei maquiagem, ganhei perfume francês, mas as altas botas me machucam os
pés’).13 In another letter, this one from 1980, she would complain about the city of
Portsmouth where she had just moved and about her new house there, where ‘not even
the scenery has glamour’ (‘nem a cenografia tem glamour’).14 This urge seems to be
the key element to deciphering two photographic portraits contemporaneous with this
correspondence – the period of the young poet’s residence in Europe, while she
completed her graduate work in translation in England – thereby suggesting that in
them Ana Cristina changes her façade, constituting scenes of glamour, visualizations of
her desire for change. In both photographs she appears lying down on a bed, in dresses
from another era. In one photograph she is sitting, reclining against the wall in a dark
dress; black lace covers her shoulders. In another, she is lying down on the bed –
a detail on the pillow suggests that it is probably within the same space as the other,
on the same bed – wearing another dress, this time a pale one. The same hairstyle,
the same makeup, the same body, the same scene, but different stagings, different
figurations, or defacements, of the subject: Ana Cristina poses. Changing the façade,
getting dressed, disguising oneself, living on a stage: constructing characters.
30 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES
(‘ancorar o navio no espaço’). In this way, upon fleeing from the you – the one who
observes, reads, asks; the interlocutor, the gaze – the I gains the freedom to disperse.
Because that which is exterior – the call of the other, the external voice and gaze,
the you, a certain extimacy, as Florencia Garramuño would define this exteriority at the
very heart of intimacy in Ana Cristina’s poetry17 – shapes and subjects the poetic I.
The you which the I will respond to in texts such as those in Correspondência completa, or
with which it will constantly engage in dialogue in the simulated diaries of Luvas de
Pelica. Or the you that is nothing more than the unfolding of the I – ‘And the other
one, who is me, / doesn’t want to know anything more / about the mirror before her’
in A teus pés (‘e mais não quer saber / a outra, que sou eu, / do espelho em frente’);18
which, in one of her last unpublished texts written days before her death, would be
stated as ‘Iyou’ (‘Euvocê’). It is also in this sense that, right before this photographic
series, Ana Cristina complains in a letter of the I’s different figurations – of the I as
many – that a certain daily existence at home would demand of her: ‘I switch to
professor, girl, student, pretty intellectual, ugly passenger on the bus, granddaughter,
“journalist”, poet, sister, desiring woman, frustrated woman, correspondent, all in
a single day’ (‘I switch para professora, filha, aluna, bela intelectual, feia passageira
de ônibus, neta, “jornalista”, poeta, irmã, mulher desejante, mulher frustrada,
correspondente . . . tudo num dia só’).19 The you, therefore, as external, but at the
same time Ana Cristina’s poetics will work upon the I as an exteriority of itself: in that
‘I wish I could split my body into heteronyms’,20 in that voice of the I that will answer
to and enter into dialogue with itself from one poem to the next, as Flora Süssekind
points out,21 or, as this reading would have it, in that I which is another of photography.
It is interesting that the complaints in the letter from 1977 – ‘life is asking me to
be many’ – and from 1980 – ‘I want to be others’ – seem to cancel each other out in
the contradiction that they trace. The difference in that relationship to decentring –
the external request for multiplicity, the internal desire to unfold into many – which in
some moments emerges as the weight of obligation and in others as the search for a
necessity, would seem to be set out by the distance between an I that is invented,
created as a purely theatrical character, and an I that is a response to the call of
the other. It is the letter I not will search, precisely, for a way of arriving at that I-en-
abyme, at that ‘Autobiography. No, biography. / Woman’ (‘Autobiografia. Não,
biografia. / Mulher’)22 that we read in the first lines of A teus pés.
It is in this same period – during the late 1970s and early 1980s – that Ana
Cristina would begin in her translation exercises, in the daily life of correspondence and
in her diary, as well as the works in which she would exchange written language for
visual language, exercising ‘pictography’ – through the ludic appropriation of post-
cards, magazine clippings, and photographic portraits as ready-mades – a search for a
methodology characterised by a ‘constant voluntary exile’23 from the poetic form and
materiality. And it is, as has been suggested, within this voluntary exile from poetry
as method for poetic composition that we should situate Ana Cristina’s use of
photography. Photography will function as rehearsal24 – and materialization – of that
‘Iyou’, of that ‘Autobiography. No, biography’, of that need to change the façade. This
is because the photographic portrait inaugurates a new modality of the I as other: the
photographic portrait is ‘the other which is I’ (‘a outra que sou eu’). Perhaps it is not a
coincidence, then, that these photographs of Ana Cristina – taken between 1976 and
1983 – visualize an exile of or from the I, strangely materialized in precisely that device
32 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES
that would appear, always, ‘to anchor . . . in space’, given that undoubtedly referential
character of the photograph. And the portraits do this by making evident that which
is true of all photography: its theatrical character, of mise-en-scène, of fabrication, of
conception of figures-en-abyme, of clippings of life, of extraction, of intent to give a
form to desire. A practice with respect to the subject itself, never as autobiography but
rather as biography, although always as an ‘imaginary biography, in fragments’
(‘biografia imaginária, em fragmentos’).25
The displacement and loss with which Ana Cristina’s first collection of poetry
opens – ‘it is always more difficult / to anchor a ship in space’ (‘é sempre mais difı́cil
/ ancorar um navio no espaço’) – would thus appear to be in tune with the practice
of the photographic pose, with the close relationship, as the poet would indicate in
some of her correspondence from the period, to the search for and need of ‘inventing
everyday things/spaces/situations’ in order not to remain anchored or fixed; and, in
this way, constantly shying away from a ‘total I’. In its place, the practice of the
errancy and drift of exile. Because the photographic portrait is always ‘a still’, that
fixity becomes, in its materialization of the I as other, the key to errancy, to
movement.
It would be, then, a question of beginning a double observation. On one hand, as
we have been doing, understanding the practice of the photographic pose as a method,
by way of a rehearsal of and for writing: photography as rehearsal and as materialization
of the ‘art of conversation’ that would articulate the diction in Ana Cristina’s poetry.26
Yet on the other hand we should notice the use of portraits of the poet in the
posthumous editions of her work: portraits included as part of an editorial project that
would appear to distance itself radically from certain editorial impulses in the 1970s in
Brazil – handmade, independent editions, with a limited circulation, practically
distributed door to door – within whose parameters Ana Cristina Cesar published her
first three books. ‘Spread the word’, Ana Cristina would write to Cecilia Fonseca from
England, in a postcard from 1980, ‘that I’m printing my new “novel”, called “Leather
gloves”. I’m doing it all: graphics, cover, paper’ (‘Divulga por aı́ que estou imprimindo
meu ‘romance’ novo que se chama “Luvas de Pelica”. Estou fazendo tudo, projeto
gráfico, capa, papel’).27 As Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda had already pointed out in 1976
in the Prologue to the famous 26 poetas hoje (‘26 poets today’), these editions would
bring with them ‘the novelty of a subversion of the traditional patterns of production,
edition, and distribution of literature’ (‘a novidade de uma subversão dos padrões
tradicionais de produção, edição e distribuição de literatura’28), which would establish,
especially in the 1970s and early ’80s, a proximity between author and reader. This
would impose the demand of a complicity that the poem should offer up. ‘If the author is
there, in front of us, it is not the poem that we should ask to corroborate its identity.
Now what has begun to be demanded of poems is complicity’ (‘Se o autor está logo ali,
na nossa frente, não é ao poema que se deve pedir comprovante de identidade. Agora o
que se passa a exigir dos poemas é cumplicidade’).29 The reader expects and is given that
complicity in the poetic form of the day-to-day, the intimate – the diary, the
correspondence, at times copied by hand, adding to that proximity with the very body of
the poet who circulates, a kind of travelling salesman of his or her strange, handmade
books – which poetry would take on after 1964 in Brazil. Yet, in Ana Cristina’s poetry,
the complicity would ultimately be, as Flora Süssekind has pointed out, only a postcard
– ‘intimacy is only a postcard’ (‘a intimidade é apenas um cartão-postal’).30 Mass
ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 33
produced, never singular, feigning intimacy – here, see where I have been and am, but
even more, here, see with me; be here/there with me – in an attempt to bridge
distance and the passing of time, the postcard also hides its truth as an object of
consumption. The postcard’s intimacy could thus be thought of as nothing other than the
ironic intimacy of the modern. The posthumous editions would reconfigure this ironic
intimacy at the heart of Ana Cristina’s poetry and methodology through their insertion
of albums of photographic portraits of the poet as ‘iconographic scripts’ (‘roteiros
iconográficos’)31 to cut across the writing, closing off – or attempting to – with
photographs, the I; assuring, in this way, the possibility of autobiographical
transparency.32
invent a literary day-to-day’ (‘no meu quarto invento um cotidiano literário’), she
would write, almost in a sort of echo of these photographs, in a letter years later. Or
her search for a contact-interlocution with a you, one of the key poetic methods of
her compositions – ‘(I whisper): Iyou’ (‘[Sussuro:] Euvocê’), the poetic I of ‘Eleven
hours’ (‘Onze horas’) states; ‘the interlocutor is fundamental. I write for you yes’
(‘o interlocutor é fundamental. Escrevo para você sim’),37 she would write in an
unpublished fragment days before her death. Or as rejection, as the other side of
the same need, in that tense relationship between subjectivization and desire, the
enunciation would become, as in Luvas de pelica, ‘I want you to get out of here’
(‘Eu quero que você saia daqui’).38 Yet, in the face of the drift of the poetic subject, of
the delirious (desvairada) enunciation of an I – whether in the poetic texts or in the
correspondence – an imposition, with the photographic chronology, of that image of
life, organizing the dispersion: to trace a destiny, to tie it there, to ‘anchor’ it.
It is perhaps in this sense that, once the album’s photographs are examined
attentively, and once the very short introduction by the edition’s coordinator,
Armando Freitas Filho, has been read, not only the eagerness to render the text
progressive but also the very inclusion of the photographs does not draw our attention.
For, according to the introduction, Ana Cristina’s sudden death left all that was related
to her and, first and foremost, the sentiments directed towards her, ‘in suspense’,
‘undefined’, ‘interrupted in a void’: ‘incomplete sensations’ (‘suspenso’, ‘indefini-
do[s]’, ‘interrompidos no vazio’: ‘[sensações] incompletas’). Considered from the
perspective of this series of adjectives it would become even more clear that the
photographs would attempt, we might suppose, to re-establish a logic, to include a
logic of the poet’s life – a method to ‘continue’, ‘define’, ‘complete’, and as such
reverse that which the editor had indicated in his introduction. A progression laid out
through this mechanism of writing that is photography: this type of graphy that literally
inscribes a remnant and on index of that which is photographed, for the privileged
place of photography in modern culture would be, and, in contrast to other systems of
representation, that the photographic image is produced through direct contact with
that which is represented. The camera, as Geoffrey Batchen has noted, ‘does more than
just look at the world; it is also touched by the world’. Light bounces off a body and
enters in through the aperture of the camera’s lens to touch a surface covered by an
emulsion sensitive to that light. From this encounter, understood as the product of the
reflection of a body, or as the product of light that carries with it the form of the body
because it could not penetrate the body, the photographic image is created. It is for this
reason that photography materializes the arrival of the I as other: I am an other39 is
what all portraits say. ‘It is as if those objects reached out and impressed themselves on
the surface of a photograph, leaving their visual imprint, as faithful to the contour of the
original object as a death mask is to the deceased. Photographs can thus claim to be a
kind of chemical fingerprint.’40 In this sense, the album’s photographs contain their
referent, this subject named Ana Cristina Cesar. A life whose logic, the editorial
perspective in which the photographs have been organized would have us read, follows
a single, straight line; a life whose logic can always already be seen, a future already
subjected and subjetivized, and thus naturalizing in this way, with a minimal gesture, as
much the album’s composition as the biographic subject as writer. It is the impression
of Ana Cristina, the presence in absence, the inscription of life, the breath of life
that would perhaps be able to recompose the life that her sudden death ‘interrupted’,
36 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES
left ‘in suspense, ‘undefined’. Defining and continuing a life. Correcting, in this way,
dispersion. Apprehending, with that gesture, the delirious (devairado) subject.
‘We are nostalgic’ (‘Temos saudade’),41 writes Armando Freitas Filho in his brief
introduction to this first posthumous edition and, upon turning the page this
melancholic movement through which the book is constituted is further underlined.
Under the weight of nostalgia/saudade, Ana Cristina appears: a close-up shot, in which
the face of the poet is the only thing clearly visible in the image. A face emerging from a
haziness, a face with a glimpse of a smile, eyes gazing fixedly at the camera, allowing
herself to be photographed, to be watched. Nothing surprising in the portrait –
nothing, that is, until it is considered retrospectively. After looking at the album in its
entirety, and upon returning to this first portrait, it is surprising how unposed the
photograph is, how unplayful it is. How it lacks those characteristics – that constant,
playful staging of an I – of the majority of the portraits from the same period – the
1980s – included in Inéditos e dispersos, in which Ana Cristina appears either in dark
glasses or visibly posing as a lady from another era, already laying out, in both cases, a
distance between subject and image, pointing out as well the separation between image
and representation/technical reproduction.
The pose – distance, errancy, detour – of the poet’s portraits is read not only in
the ocular barrier but also in the mode in which she wears her clothes, the mode
in which her face contorts with a certain expression, in that theatricality which appears
to drive the majority of the album’s images of an adult Ana Cristina. It is as if the
photographed subject wanted to guarantee that the portrait could not be read as
transparent, as referential, as document of or access to an interiority, as the sign of a
truth, as the revelation of an I. The first portrait, then, surprises exactly for the same
reasons that would seem to indicate its entirely unsurprising quality: that apparent trifle,
a portrait without a background, without a facial expression, without gesturality – even
the smile would seem to be unfulfilled – a portrait without theatre, a face with eyes,
eyes that look, eyes that can be seen, which do not hide, eyes which return the gaze.
Yet if intimacy is an optical illusion – a phrase taken from one of Flora Süssekind’s
readings of Ana Cristina’s work – this naked portrait, this portrait seemingly without a
pose, would be nothing more than the illusion of intimacy, the phantasmagoria of
intimacy.
The reader enters into the poems and the unedited texts, then, thanks to the
editorial selection, invited by that exposed gaze, that nakedness that would appear to
give off intimacy. And certainly, some of the lines, written between 1979 and 1982 and
included in Inéditos e dispersos, affirm that: ‘literature as clé, ciphered form to speak of
the passion that can’t/be named (as in a fluent and “objective” letter).// the key, the
origin of literature/ the unconfessable takes shape, desires to take shape, becomes
shape’ (‘a literatura como clé, forma cifrada de falar da paixão que não pode / ser
nomeada (como numa carta fluente e “objetiva”). // a chave, a origem da literatura / o
‘inconfessável toma forma, deseja tomar forma, vira forma.’) Yet, in the lines that
follow, the poetic I retraces and returns to literature’s ability to give shape to that
which cannot be named, that cannot confess itself because, it continues, ‘it happens
that this is also my sympton, “not being able to speak”/ not having a demarcated
position, ideas, opinions, delerious speech/ My speech is made up only of the unsaid,
of delicacies’ (‘acontece que este é também o meu sintoma, “não conseguir falar” / não
ter posição marcada, idéias, opiniões, fala desvairada. / Só de não ditos ou de
ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 37
delicadezas se faz minha conversa’).42 Not having a demarcated position: from this the
multiple poses in the photographs, the acting, the staging, the constant exile of the I.
‘Only of the unsaid’ (‘Só de não ditos’).
The poetic I of ‘Ulysses’, one of the unedited poems that would appear in this 1985
edition, would ask itself, ‘Who chose this face for me?’ (‘Quem escolheu este rosto
para mim?’), after having affirmed that ‘And he and the others see me’ (‘E ele e os
outros me vêem’). The poetic I of ‘Ulysses’ would ask, in another later poem – we
might imagine another poem as an answer given that peculiar constitution of Ana
Cristina’s poetic I as conversation, a conversation among voices, often from one poem
to another, a dialogue between poetic I and poetic I, as Flora Süssekind has pointed
out – almost shouting, ‘I don’t know me anymore, I’m losing me,/ I want them to
read my horoscope, to say “you are”/ like this’ (‘não me conheço mais, me perco, /
quero que façam meu horóscopo, que digam “você é / assim”.43 And thus the poetic I
will no longer ask itself which other, which exteriority, will have chosen for it a face
among many, in order to figure, to visualize the I – in this way, to frame it, to classify,
enclose, anchor it. Instead it will ask, desperately, that the other give the I a definition
of itself and, why not, a face. From the ‘not having a demarcated position . . . speaking
deliriously’ to the ‘I hope they tie me / to some piece of land (‘Espero que me liguem /
a algum pedaço de terra’): because, as the poetic I would say in another later poem,
‘I’m waiting as though I were in Lisbon/ and as though I were nostalgic for Lisbon’
(‘Espero como se estivesse em Lisboa / e sentisse saudades de Lisboa’); because, as she
will have stated at the beginning of the poem ‘I can’t find / in the midst of all those
stories / any which is mine’ (‘Nao encontro / no meio de todas essas histórias /
nenhuma que seja a minha’). And it is perhaps in that movement from one to the other
that we can begin to discern another relation within Ana Cristina’s poetics or, more
specifically, between the method with which the poetic I is conceived in the young
woman’s writings, and photography. It is in that relation, in principle strange and
sinister – as, literally, unheimlich – between the almost infinite appearance of editions
and posthumous texts of Ana Cristina and the explosion of the insertion of
photographic portraits of the writer in those editions that perhaps, while unheimlich,
other poetic strategies may be revealed.
‘The period covered is from 1976 to 1980’, we read on the back cover of the book
Correspondência incompleta, edited by Heloisa Buarque and Armando Freitas in 1999, of
the letters of the poet written to Heloisa Buarque, Cecilia Londres, Clara Alvim and
Ana Candida. A book which, as the back cover will go on to say, ‘reveals Ana C., in her
intimacy’.44 If ‘intimacy is an optical illusion’, perhaps it is therefore not a coincidence
that, even more than in the subsequent printings of A teus pés it is this book – a
collection of letters that are supposed to reveal to us Ana Cristina in her intimacy –
that exploits and exacerbates the inclusion of photographic images. The photographs
here are inserted throughout the book, rather than collected together at the beginning
in a closed album added to the collection of poems, as would be the case in the
posthumous reissue of A teus pés or in the edition of Inéditos e dispersos. In this sense,
they construct, along with the letters, a ‘guidebook’, ‘a script’, an almost cinemato-
graphic. This is not the pop serialization of the Ana Cristina-as-Marilyn-à-la-Warhol,
her eyes covered with those huge dark classes, superimposed with colours on an image
of London, as on the cover of Escritos na Inglaterra. Rather, it is a close-up that occupies
the entire cover of Correspondência incompleta, an image in which the observer is carried
38 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES
Notes
Note on the Translator – Sarah Ann Wells is a PhD candidate in the Department of
Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
1 The word in Portuguese is ‘buraco’, which implies, simultaneously, ‘hollow’, ‘hole’,
‘gap’, and ‘cavity’. – Trans.
2 Arbus, Diane. 1971. Five photographs by Diane Arbus. Artforum May, as quoted in
Diane Arbus: Revelations, 278.
3 Cesar, Album de retazos.
4 Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 11th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: 30.
ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 41
5 Cesar, A teus pé, 106; César, Intimate diary, 32. Unless otherwise indicated, other
translations are the translator’s.
6 A tus pés, 91.
7 Ibid., 106; Intimate diary, 32. The word ‘vitrina’ in the original is more specific than
the ‘window’ of the English translation; it refers to the shop window in which
merchandise is displayed. – Trans.
8 Here I am playing with the title of Ana Cristina’s Masters thesis in Communication:
Literatura não é documento. Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1980, or ‘Literature is not a
document’.
9 Sontag, On photography, Barthes, La chambre claire.
10 The author plays with the two meanings of the word ‘revelación’: to reveal and to
develop, as in a photographic negative. – Trans.
11 Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique and de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’.
12 De Man, 920.
13 The word ‘approach’ is in English in the original. – Trans.
14 Cesar, 279 and 289, respectively.
15 In addition to the Bataille text already cited, see also the work of Crimp, Douglas.
1998. On the museum’s ruins. In The anti-aesthetic. essays on postmodern culture, edited
by Hal Foster. New York: New Press: 49– 64.
16 Bataille, Manet, 51.
17 Garramuño, ‘En estado de emergencia.
18 Cesar, A teus pés, 69; Intimate diary, 83.
19 In the original, the ‘I switch’ in italics is written in English – Trans.
20 A teus pés, 91; Intimate diary, 101.
21 Süssekind, Até segunda ordem não me risque nada.
22 A teus pés, 35; Intimate diary, 61.
23 Süssekind, 9.
24 Here the author uses the word ‘ensayo’, which also means ‘essay’ or ‘attempt’. –
Trans.
25 Ibid., 12. It seems to me that the first photographic project of Cindy Sherman,
contemporary to Ana Cristina’s production, functions as the perfect other side to this
poetic experimentation. Sherman, a young woman from New York and a graduate in
Visual Arts, having recently moved to Manhattan, was trying, in the late 1970s, to
create a project that would define her as an artist. She begins, in 1977 – some years
after Ana Cristina has begun her poetic practice – to photograph herself in a series of
black-and-white images in which she poses/acts as different (imaginary) actresses,
observed in the intimacy of their houses: in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bed. In this
way she constructed from herself the characters which would comprise the series,
Untitled film stills, composed between 1977 and 1980. The methodology that Ana
Cristina, as the present reading suggests, elaborates is precisely the methodology that
Cindy Sherman would find through her film stills: autobiography and photography as
disfiguration, as a way out of truth but, at the same time, or perhaps precisely because
of this, as a shop window of desire. Between posing and acting – for this and other
reasons they are called film stills – Sherman appears in disguise, with wigs, composing
her self-non-portraits. Working with clichés of pop culture, her film stills work by way
of a double recognition on the spectator’s part: on one hand the sensation of
recognizing where the image belongs to and, on the other, in recognizing the subject
that appears. Yet if the stills are self-portraits, they are only in so far as figures-en-abime,
42 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES
in so far as something like a visual prosopopoeia, and given that they do not refer to any
film, we could think that this double recognition is nothing more than the product of
the projection of desire. Sherman’s project works on a double negation: self-portraits
but not of herself; film stills that belong to no film. In this sense, the photographs do not
refer, essentially, to anything. Sherman’s experiment resulted in a total of 69 images
and in a project (Untitled film stills) that radicalized photography in the US. This, at a
moment in which photography was still stuck in a certain documentarian and
ethnographic gaze – which emerged, to a great extent, from the project of the Farm
Security Administration. Yet Untitled film stills, in its dialogue with other works in the
field of visual and conceptual art that were using photography as a methodology of
other works treating subjectivity, referentiality, the relationship between art and life –
we can think of the projects of Adrian Piper, such as ‘Food for Thought’ (1971) or ‘The
Mythic Being’ (1975), or certain works of Gerard Richter beginning in 1972, as well as
the era’s experiments with performance art (and this genealogy could also include
performances of Marina Abramovic such as ‘Role Exchange’ in 1975 or the masks with
mirrors Lygia Clark would construct in the late 1970s) – was making clear on one hand
the centrality of the photographic mechanism, to a great extent as vehicle, and on the
other a questioning of the limits of the I in the articulation of contemporary art. In this
sense, it is no coincidence that the film Blade Runner (1982), an emblem, or classic of
that era and its problematics, would be the staging of a crisis in subjectivity, and that
photography, the gaze and the autobiographic story would function as the mechanisms
upon which and from which this crisis would be played out. Perhaps like Deckard, the
futurist replica of that film, and like Descartes (Descartes/Deckard) Sherman and
Cesar – like Piper, Richter, Rauschenberg, Oiticica, etc. – all know that there is no
direct access to the world, only to its representations and that representations only
circle around that which escapes from perception, understanding and imagination:
desire. See Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. Cindy Sherman: Untitled. In Bachelors. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press: 101 – 59; and Bruno, Giuliana. 1987. Ramble city: Postmodernism
and Blade Runner. October 41: 61– 74, for compelling and suggestive readings of
Sherman and Blade Runner respectively.
26 Ibid., 9.
27 Cesar, Correspondências incompletas, 192.
28 Buarque de Hollanda, ed. Vinte e seis poetas hoje, 97.
29 Süssekind, Literatura e vida literária, 124.
30 Süssekind, ibid., 132.
31 Cesar, A teus pés, 152.
32 Within this problem surrounding the editorial use of visual material in the publication
of Ana Cristina’s writings, we should certainly pause over the exception, the author’s
own addition of Caderno de Portsmouth– Colchester from 1980, a book which was
intended as an object while the poet was still living, and on whose cover Ana Cristina
had decided to place a photographic portrait of herself. This photograph was then
reproduced in the posthumous edition of Inéditos e dispersos, in which Ana Cristina
is leaning against a white railing, hands in her pockets, looking at the camera through
glasses. Next to the young woman, a suitcase. Has she just arrived, is she leaving?
From where, where to? This exception – the only book that Ana Cristina intended
with that photograph – is perhaps neither strange nor exceptional, if we take into
account the absence of a title for the book and, where the proper name itself might
appear as the title, the photographic portrait of the author as a kind of subheading.
ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 43
Critics began to refer to the book as Caderno de Portsmouth –Colchester simply because
the name of those two cities appears underneath the photography. In any case, it
would be Ana Cristina Cesar’s name that could serve as a title, upon reading the name,
in capital letters, at the top of the cover. It is worth pausing over this detail of the
graphic organization because, although Ana Cristina’s poetry is not in any way a direct
descendent of the traditional avant-garde (as in the modernists or the Concrete poets)
in which the visual organization formed part of a programmatic exercise around the
poetry, this book, perhaps her most experimental, is to a great extend a ‘pictographic
exercise’ (Süssekind). Yet also, if on one hand the photograph of the author, situated
as a subheading or subtitle of the book, is surprising – if we were to consider the name
as the title – on the other hand the inscription is not surprising, in the context of a
poet who works constantly at decentring the poetic subject, the concrete, fixed
subjectivity: as this fixity is sustained, literally, by a spatial-temporal displacement
from Portsmouth to Colchester, from 30 June to 12 July 1980.
33 The author uses the adjective ‘desvairado’, which can mean ‘mad’, ‘delirious’,
‘hallucinated’, or ‘extravagant’. – Trans.
34 Süssekind, Até segunda ordem, 12– 13.
35 Cesar, A teus pés 80; Intimate diary, 92.
36 Cesar, Inéditos e dispersos. Poesia e prosa, 35.
37 Ibid., 198.
38 Cesar, ‘Luvas de pelica’, A teus pés, 136; Intimate diary, 18.
39 Barthes, ibid.
40 ‘Photography is privileged within modern culture because, unlike other systems of
representation, the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by the
world. Light bounces off an object or a body and into the camera, activating a light-
sensitive emulsion and creating an image. Photographs are therefore designated as
indexical signs, images produced as a consequence of being directly affected by the
objects to which they refer’. Batchen, Forget Me Not, 31.
41 Anther possible translation would be ‘We miss her’, although the original does not use
the pronoun. The Portuguese word ‘saudade’ is not entirely equivalent to nostalgia;
encompassing both a retrospective and prospective longing for a lost object, it is
notoriously untranslatable. – Trans.
42 Inéditos e dispersos, 126.
43 Ibid., 168.
44 Cesar, Correpondências incompletas.
45 Cesar, ‘Luvas de pelica’, A teus pés, 125.
46 Ibid., 126.
47 Ibid., 127.
48 Ibid., 129.
49 The translations are from Intimate diary, 9 –11.
50 Ibid., 13.
51 Cesar, ‘Instruções de bordo’, A teus pés, 94.
52 Intimate diary, 61– 2.
53 This phrase is in English in the original. – Trans.
54 Intimate diary, 27.
55 Ibid., 26– 7.
56 Cesar, ‘Epı́logo’, A teus pés, 148 – 9; Intimate diary, 28.
44 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES
57 I am citing and reconfiguring in this initial sentence the beginning of Georges Didi-
Huberman’s work on anachronism and temporality in the image, which has been
fundamental for the development of this essay: ‘Facing an image we are always facing
time’ (‘Siempre, ante la imagen, estamos ante el tiempo’). See Didi-Huberman, Ante
el tiempo, 11.
58 I am playing here with two verses of Ana Cristina Cesar, unedited during her life time,
and which Flora Süssekind, in her study of the poet, will salvage: ‘Mirror, a hollow in
the wall’ and ‘Your portrait, a hollow in the wall’ (‘Espelho, buraco na parede’ y ‘Teu
retrato, buraco na parede’).
References
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Bataille, Georges. 2003. Manet. Trad. Juan Gregorio Murcia: IVAM Documentos.
Batchen, Geoffrey. 2004. Forget me not: Photography and remembrance. New York and
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Natalia Brizuela is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the
University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on Argentine and Brazilian cultural
production of the nineteenth and twentieth century, particularly on the intersection
between literature, visual culture, technologies and new media. She is currently
completing a book on nineteenth-century Brazilian photography, nationalism and
melancholy.