1. Introduction
Love, love, love — the glowing hearth that explains the world with an orgasm
2.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1992, p. 72)
The motif of the «machine of the world» has been realised down
through the centuries in a vast array of con- texts, with different
meanings and characteristics, not least of all in the art and
literature of contemporary Brazil. Indeed, much like the musical
moto perpetuo or science’s eternal search for truth,
the limits of the concept seem endless.
Like classical literature, the image can be defined as a
perpetuum mobile in a constant process of growth. Yet
it also contains a sphinx-like quality due to its progressive
incorporation of ambiguous meanings and illu- minating riddles in its
transitions over time and space and the ad hoc
redefinitions of transformative appro- priation. In fact, in terms of
the world view it represents for each creator, the world machine in
motion uses the external energy of its basis in the sociohistorical
reality that influences and reformulates it, in addition to its own
cumulative intrinsic symbolic potential.
Its recurrence in the culture and literature of Brazil, therefore,
is not surprising, given the contemporary, mod- ern nature of the
country’s artistic production, one of the defining characteristics of
which is the happy paradox of possessing a strong tradition of both
anti-tradition and judiciously anthropophagic devouring of the
other.
The interdisciplinary and interartistic approach used to examine
the presence and reinterpretation of the world machine image in the
examples of hybrid art practice proposed in this article is very much
in keeping, in the first case, with established critical-theoretical
practice in this area, and in the second, with new emerg- ing
methodologies for studying the expansion of literature into art, and
vice versa. In fact, the exploration of interartistic creation raises
numerous additional challenges owing to the othering and estrangement
wrought by new materialities and meanings. This new reality requires a
new approach: one of reciprocal, transitive metamorphosis, in which
each component or reality is transformed, to a great or lesser degree,
in a process of encounter with the other (Halpern, 2020).
For reasons of space and convenience, out of the vast seas and
oceans of interartistic creative production in Brazil, the study
navigates only within the realms of the literary and visual, and
avoids the wider channels of out- worn traditional theory and
criticism. To understand the full complexity of interartistic practice
today, the estab- lished approaches no longer hold. Mimesis, misguided
ut pictura poesis, dialogics, and theories of
addition or correspondence all cease to apply in the changing
disciplinary landscape of expanded and diluted borders.
Furthermore, the study takes into account the communal perspective
and consensual contribution of the internal and external contexts of
the artworks examined, as well as their dialogue with and revival of
past tradition. In the insightful words of Lygia Clark in 1975, these
are works which «bridge the fissure of this sepa- ration» (1984, 33),
whose analysis offers us the «poor knowledge of their
interpretation»3 (1984, 17).
To give some examples of how this intricate interplay between time
frames, texts and art forms is manifested in contemporary Brazilian
art and literature, let us consider first the constant, repeated,
differential recreation of Amazonian art and mythology, as witnessed
(and, indeed, originated) by the canonical anthropophagic poetry
collection Cobra Norato by Raul Bopp (1931). The same
current is also reflected in two exhibitions held by Maria Martins in
New York in the 1940s: in the first instance, in the correspondences
between her sculptural rep- resentation of the Amazonian deities and
her act of «anthropophagic» recreation in rewriting in English the
myths and legends portrayed; and in the second, in the transitive
echoes between the tortured «confes- sion-frenzy» of a four-part
erotic poem entitled Explication (in French) and the
insuperably ekphrastic series of etchings created ad
hoc for the homonymously named exhibition catalogue (Martínez
Pereiro 2020).
The second example is the transcultural appropriation of
traditional Japanese Noh theatre: the translator and founder of the
Brazilian concrete poetry movement Haroldo de Campos’s heterodox
«transcreation» of Hagoromo (The Feather Mantle), one
of the most popular works of Noh, attributed to the
15th-century play- wright Zeami Motokiyo; the
literary-performative association invoked by Campos and Hélio Oiticica
between the feather mantle and Oiticica’s famous
parangolé capes; and experimental writing and
painting by Nuno Ramos, inspired, once again, by the Noh play
(Martínez Teixeiro 2020).
The third and final example refers to the practices of contemporary
art creators in Brazil from the 1950s onwards based on the
«tropicalisation» of the legacy of Giorgio Morandi (his «metaphysics
of the mundane», and his exceptional and distinctive cultivation of
the still life form) and their oblique influence «on the outskirts of
the cloistered space of
representation»4 (Morales Elipe,
2016, p. 13) on artists such as Ferreira Gullar (Martínez Teixeiro
2018) and Iberê Camargo (Martínez Teixeiro and Martínez Pereiro
2022).
2. From Renaissance transhumanisation to modern dysphoria
In the western world, the image of the «machine of the world» was
first established as a symbol of the journey through this world and
another (and through writing itself) in pursuit of learning and
perfection by Dante’s Commedia (first raised to
«divinity» by Giovanni Boccaccio in 1362 and known as such to
audiences from the 16th century onwards) and by Canto X of
The Lusiads by Luís de Camões.
From the Renaissance perspective of the latter, the contemplation
of the mathematical physical (Platonic) and metaphysical (scholastic)
realities of the machine offer the privilege and recompense of seeing
and knowing: the symbolic euphoria of «Supreme Wisdom» (X, 76, ll.
2-3) to behold with fleshly eyes what things the future hath the power
«to save from Mortals’ petty pride and science
vain»5 (X, 76, ll. 3-4), thus
marking the culmination of Vasco da Gama’s heroic rise — and with him
the Portuguese people and all of weak human- kind — from «earthly
worm» to all-powerful «demigod». Dante encapsulates this same process
with connota- tive precision in «Paradiso» by creating the verb
trasumanar, «to transhumanise» (I, v. 70), by which
he ex- presses human beings’ transformation beyond the human, while at
the same time acknowledging his inability to explain it even
paraphrastically with existing words.
Under the light of transcendence, the symbolic content of the world
machine in Dante’s scholastic met- aphysical context is intimated in
Commedia in the interpretative caveats expressed to
readers, firstly in «Inferno»: «O ye in whom intelligence is sound, /
heed carefully the teaching, which lies hidden / beneath the veil of
my mysterious lines»6 (IX, ll.
61-63); and again in «Purgatorio»: «Reader, focus your eyes here on
truth, / for the veil is now so thin, / that surely to pass within is
easy»7 (VIII, ll. 19-21). As in
Camões, therefore, the machine of the world is constructed as a
super-celestial plane, upon which the human soul discovers, in the
words of João Adolfo Hansen, «during and after the physical journey
that is the ascetic’s path to anamnesis, the purification of a
reminiscence of the fundamental essence that, when seen by the
physical eye and contemplated by the intellectual eye of judgement,
becomes the ecstatic, wordless vision of
God»8 (2018, p. 309).
Unsurprisingly, the revival in the 20th century of such
a culturally and symbolically specific motif, either lit- erally or
approximately, proved problematic at best and inane at worst. As
Georges Bataille denounced in his 1930 criticism of the excessive
formalism of «purified» French art, the derivative, localised «game of
transpo- sitions» stripped language of its primordial symbolism. Yet
formalist excesses were a trap that the playfully pessimistic and
perceptively Pyrrhonian Carlos Drummond de Andrade could never, would
never and did never fall into. Beyond its mechanistic world view and
religious belief system, the topos of the world machine in its ancient
sense presupposed an explanation of everything: of the complex,
ambiguous relationship be- tween the binaries of heaven and earth,
universe and cosmos, culture and nature, poetry and science, knowl-
edge and magic. Drummond, therefore, might be seen as a «luddite» of
sorts, standing against the faith and certainties of symbolic
mechanisation: against change for change’s sake, against blind belief
and sweeping tides of opinion, against totalising explanations, and
against the destruction of natural omniscience of the world by
technical-scientific progress.
It is generally accepted that Drummond’s «A Máquina do Mundo»,
published in its definitive version in the collection Claro
Enigma (1951), is the work that distorted and resignified the
symbolic value of the machina mundi for the
generations of Brazilian artists and writers that came after him.
The poem was first published on 2 October 1949 in the Rio de
Janeiro daily Correio da Manhã. The final version,
published two years later, introduces a number of small but
significant Horatian changes of style and expression, all of which
serve to reinforce the new thematic elements which Drummond
incorporates into the reflections of his «disillusioned self» on the
«rocky road to Minas»: his sceptical refusal of «a reality that tran-
scends» (l. 19), of «that total explanation of
life»9 (l. 43), or of the
knowledge of what he has lost, when he chooses to «weigh» rather than
to know10 (l. 95); and, in lines
55-60, as he shifts from the continuity of «to» to internalising
«in»11, his inclusion of animal,
plant and, in particular, mineral life, substituting in this last
instance the objective, external observation «of the rough substance
of the ores» for a subjective, personified image of immersion «into
the spiteful sleep of the
ores»12 (l. 58):
and everything that defines earthly being,
including the animals
and the plants, and is imbibed
into the spiteful sleep of the ores,
goes round the world and is engulfed again
in the strange geometrical order of everything
and the original absurdity and its riddles,
its truths standing higher than so many
monuments to truth;
and the memory of the gods, and the solemn
sense of death, which blooms
on the stem of the most glorious existence
13
(ll. 55–66)
The poem ends epiphonemically with the lines:
Pitch blackness had settled
on the rocky road to Minas,
and the machine of the world, repelled,
reformed piece by piece,
while I, weighing what I had lost,
continued slowly, hands slack by my side.
14
(ll. 93–96)
Drummond thus situates us between «resignation» and «loss», just as
Jorge Luis Borges would a decade later in El hacedor
(1960), when he concludes in the closing lines of
«Inferno, I, 32» that «the machine of the world is
too complex for the simplicity of man» (or beast) and only «a dark
resignation, a valiant ignorance» remains of what «could not be
regained». 15 (2005, p. 807):
the infinite thing that had been received and lost in the inevitable
transition from vertical celestial transhumanisation to the
terrestrial horizontal transhumanisa- tion of modern life in
extenso.
3. Hybridising variations on the topos of the machine
In disavowal of such «dark resignation», Brazilian artists and
authors, particularly in the 21st century, have re-
peatedly sought by an array of expressive forms and practices to
recover and reconstitute the layers of mean- ing within and around the
machine, ourselves and the troubled world in which we live. Their
endeavour follows Samuel Beckett’s (1983, p. 7) «Try again. Fail
again. Fail better» principle, in diametric counterpoint to the er-
rors of humanism, which, in the view of Philippe Sollers (1965, p.
13), «immobilised» Dante’s Commedia and reduced it to
«a cultural reference» and an eternal state of
«torpor»16.
The first uninhibited reimagining of the metaphor was the
seriocomic epic Por mares nunca dantes (2000) by
Geraldo Carneiro. The poem depicts Camões on a voyage around the Cape
of Storms making land, «by whim of the world machine» (2000, p. 183)
and «some strange stratagem of the stars» (2000, p. 184), in
modern-day Rio de Janeiro. The whole delirious tale of «chaos
engineering»17 (2000, p. 183) is
based on a biographical mis- take by Voltaire regarding Camões in the
first French edition of his Essay on Epic Poetry
(1785), in which he claims the poet accompanied Vasco da Gama on his
expedition to the Indies — 25 years before his birth!
The poem, thus, reformulates the trope of a bewildering «world
turned upside down» and invites readers to follow Camões’s
carnivalesque adventures, (mis)fortunes and «apocalyptic
follies»18 (2000, p. 22) «by
seas — and loves — never before navigated» to the lands of the
Tupinambá, and to witness in fascination the skil- fully humorous
intertextual intertwining of lines and modes from Dante, Camões,
Carneiro and Shakespeare in Carneiro’s own translation. Not only that,
in anticipation of a quantum mechanical component, we, like Camões,
are also treated to a view of the «sunset mayhap the mechanics of love
/ theory of quanta Hydra
clepsydra»19 (2000, p. 194).
The following sections examine four more examples of the world
machine idea in recent Brazilian art and literature, to illustrate the
diverse, paradigmatic, hybridised reimagining of the metaphor in
interartistic prac- tice in Brazil today through the lens of three
past masters.
3.1. From the asceticism of ignorance to the «beauty» of the quantum
The cumulative weight of new meaning created by these
interdisciplinary reinterpretations of the world machine metaphor
has pushed back the established boundaries of the contemporary
Brazilian literary space. As part of this reformulation of the
prevailing epistemological narrative, the Plotinist panpsychic view
that «everything thinks and feels» removes from human beings their
monopoly on emotional and intellectual per- ception by extending and
diversifying it, à la Drummond, to animals, plants
and even minerals.
In other words, the examples of contemporary interartistic
practice discussed here revive and assert an «animistic physics» of
matter, qua Aristotle’s physis,
against Descartes’s disdainful counter-conception of matter in terms
of quantitative, mathematised «mechanical physics». To paraphrase
the spiritual philosopher Christian de Quincey (2022) in a dual
axiom, their work involves a reciprocal and complementary
materialisa- tion of the mind and mentalisation of matter. Theirs is
an acentric, or rather multicentric, model of existence that takes
into account every feeling and thinking being and reality.
Significantly, just as the French writer and thinker Paul Valéry
called on modern physics to reconnect with the world of the senses,
so Niels Bohr, Valéry’s contemporary and one of the founders of
quantum theory, once stated that the language that we choose (that
we are) is reflected in the answers we receive from nature. Nature
merely reflects our own theoretical, instrumental shadow.
In contrast to the slightly unfeeling, unsensing, utilitarian
pragmatism and uncertainty of Drummond’s sceptic, rendered in
perfect decasyllable, 70-year-old Haroldo de Campos’s A
máquina do mundo repensada (2000) in tercets presents an
irreverent poetic commentary on the theme, in which he constructs a
new dis- course of the «riddle of the universe» for the third
millennium. Campos refuses the transcendence of any asceticism and
all esoteric knowledge, parodies Dante and Camões and their
Platonic-scholastic searching for the light, and denies Drummond’s
resignation to loss, proposing in their place the «asceticism of
igno- rance» of a new aestheticised metaphysics of what could be
called Schenbergian quantum physics (after Campos’s friend, the
astrophysicist and art critic, Mário Schenberg).
Campos’s new philosophy of science is preceded and predicted in a
letter (23 February 1950) by Drummond to his son-in-law, the
Argentinean poet Manuel Graña Etcheverry, in which he adverts to «a
natural relation- ship, even synthesis, between science and poetry,
which is philosophy. There is no science that does not end in
philosophy, or poetry that does not meet
it»20 (Ferraz, 2016).
A similar union between science and philosophy occurs in the
poetic thought of the all-knowing, multi-tal- ented Marco Lucchesi,
whose work combines the humanist (ethno)mathematics of Uribitan
d’Ambrosio and the quarks and flavours of quantum physics. In regard
to the latter, let us recall, firstly, the origin of the word
«quark», borrowed into science from James Joyce by the elementary
particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann, from the line «three quarks for
Muster Mark» in Joyce’s enigmatic Finnegan’s Wake,
a novel once described as a «a quantum leap into the darkness»; and,
secondly, the six «flavours» of quark according to quantum
chromodynamics: «up», «down», «charm», «strange», «top» (or «truth»)
and «bottom» (or «beauty»).
In the first version of his paradigmatic «A quarta parede» in
Alma Vênus (2000), Lucchesi interweaves human love
and the neoclassical tradition of Arcadian beauty — «laura, nise and
glaura», «musical / spheres / of Pythagoras», «lauras / and
jasmines» — with «the precious / and lovely lesson / of Mann and
Bohr / and their sublime /
mechanics»21 (Lucchesi, 2006,
p. 263). In the final edition of the poem, however, published two
years later in Alma Vênus (Temporais) (2008), in
addition to wider spacing and different line breaks, Lucchesi
replaces the contrastive, anachronistic neoclassical references of
the earlier version with the «once discord- ant» exclusive beauty of
the quantum world:
This was the precious
and lovely lesson
of Mann and Bohr
and their
once discordant
now beautiful
sublime mechanics
The machine
of the world
fluctuates
in a thousand
pieces
particles flavours
And the void
floats
amid infinite
infinities22
(Lucchesi 2019, pp. 463–464)
In a chapter entitled «Doubt» of the novel Adeus,
Pirandello (2020), Lucchesi writes that «[t]he sufferings
of this world are lessened when we look towards the sky. The gods
have left us. What remains is a sense of infinity. That is
something»23 (2020, p. 125).
While at an ethical level, the author continues to wait and hope for
Boccaccio’s umana cosa, at an aesthetic level, he
uncovers in science the beauty of poetry in harmonious confluence
with the beauty of physics and mathematics. That balance of
scientific and poetic understanding is what leads him to dilute part
of Paul Dirac’s well-known belief, recalled by Paolo Beltrame
(2021), that «phys- ics is the attempt to say what nobody has known
before in such a way that everybody can understand it», and to
mitigate its obverse, that «poetry is obliged to say things that
everybody knows in such a way that nobody can understand
it»24.
For Lucchesi, therefore, as for physicists, beauty can be simple,
concise, natural and elegant. Equally, however, there must always be
a component of libertarian unpredictability and asymmetry in beauty
that al- lows it to overflow the boundaries of the
Pythagorean-Platonic aesthetics of symmetry favoured by scientists.
As Francisco Soler Gil observes, «the aesthetic intuition of
physicists is by no means mistaken. The beauty of nature is
essentially the element of symmetry and simplicity. But it is not
only that»25 (2018, p.
85).
3.2. Sculptural distortion and eternity in transition (<italic>tempus
fugit</italic>)
Moving now from the textual poetry of Campos and Lucchesi, this
section and the next examine two exam- ples of visual-verbal art and
their reconceptualisation of the world machine idea: Laura Vinci’s
expanded sculptural installation of eternity in transition
(tempus fugit); and the ecometamorphosed deformity
of Nuno Ramos’s (pseudo-)analogical «book to come» (Blanchot, 2003).
Both might be described as estranged «strange fruits», to borrow
Florencia Garramuño’s (2014) clever reworking of the title of a
different work by Ramos («Fruto estranho», shown at the Museo de
Arte Moderno de Rio de Janeiro in 2010) for her book on the
difficulty of definition and categorisation in contemporary
Brazilian art.
Another reason for this focus on the visual as opposed to the
textual tout court is that the so-called «pic-
torial turn» sometimes leads us into the realm of material metaphor
and to consider artistic reflection and self-reflection from a
non-linguistic, non-literary point of view. It is for this reason
that the art theorist W. J. T. Mitchell writes in his
Picture Theory of the emergence of the pictorial
turn «as a central topic of discussion in the human sciences in the
way that language did: that is, a kind of model or figure for other
things (including figuration itself), and as an unsolved
problem»26 (1995, p. 13).
Sculpture that «leaves the pedestal» is a revolutionary act and
in Brazil this tradition of disruption has been developing for over
a century: from artistic genre to material-conceptual mode,
mixed-media installation of all kinds, «cannibalistic» performance,
and, at the end of the 20th century, the disunity of
unique experience and experimental uncertainty, and materiality and
objectness as correctives and challenges to idea and for- mat. As
the art critic Bea Espejo astutely concludes, reflecting on the
«elasticity of the discipline» witnessed in the exhibitions
Escala: Escultura (1945-2000) (2023), at the
Fundación Juan March in Madrid, Escultura expandida
(2022), at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, and
El sentido de la escultura (2022), at the Fundació
Joan Miró in Barcelona:
At the risk of falling into the trap of definition, sculpture
today is a hybrid grammar, a mixture of contin- uously escaping
gestures and actions […]; it is bound up with the language of the
material, the maxim of sculpture to come. Above all, however, it
is an attitude, an invitation to transform our perception about
history, a possibility to expand our experience of
life27 (2023, p. 14).
A good individual example of the disruptive impulse within
Brazilian visual-literary interart is «Davi» (Figure 1), part four
of the subversive performance art installation
Opening by Nuno Ramos, (re)presented in February-
March 2023 at Galeria Francisco Fino in Lisbon. The work was
originally planned to take place the year before as a «delirious»
performance consisting of the reinauguration «on successive
occasions with different (and fake) “authorities”» (Ramos, 2023) of
the giant bronze horse sculpture by Victor Brecheret (1939) in
honour of the Brazilian military «hero» Luís Alves de Lima e Silva,
Duke of Caxias, in Praça Princesa Isabel at the heart of
«Cracolândia» in downtown São Paulo, but was ultimately censored and
cancelled by São Paulo State Department of Culture. In «Davi», Ramos
mechanises the procedures of his performance into a form of sculp-
ture to create distance and a strongly comic-ironic sense of
virtuality. Constructed in marble with silk fabric and a sound
column, and activated using a mechanised pulley system, «Davi» is a
hybrid work that explores the relationship between a discourse
(literary and visual) and an object (sculptural and
decharacterised).
Figura . Nuno Ramos. «Davi», Opening. Galeria
Francisco Fino, Lisbon, 2023.
![]()
Photo by Vasco Stocker Vilhena
The rise and fall of the fabric activates the sound and words of
Ramos’s «Davi in the Arno: an interview», a dialogue between Davi —
Michelangelo’s giant David, of whom only his
footsteps in the pedestal remain — and an interviewer who has found
him floating in the River Arno. In his responses, the statue talks
of «time, fame, culture, nature, history, art, audience […] of
disappearing from the world, of being buried in the earth […] in the
hope that the disappearance will not be absolute. He senses that the
return to oblivion is not the
end»28 (Marmeleira, 2023).
Into this state of the art of the subversive paradox of the
sculptureless pedestal and the transformation of human scientific
knowledge by the materiality of visual art, fits the literarily
expanded neo-sculpture of Laura Vinci: «Máquina do Mundo» (Figure
2). Vinci, for whom «land art is a major reference» (2013, p. 208),
moves our senses and our point of view, and draws once again on the
meanings and symbols of Drummond’s world machine. The metaphor is
recontextualised to reflect a certain ecologism and its meanings are
objectified: the inexorable passage and devastation of time; the
naturalised degradation of nature; the relentless erosion of mineral
matter.
In response to a question from Guilherme Wisnik in relation to
her work as «a continuum, with no begin- ning or end», in reference
to earlier echoes of the world machine motif in the installation
«Ampulheta» (Hourglass) in 1997, Vinci replied that the
continuum exists «with infinite horizontality
instead of transcendent verticality» (2013, p. 206). Her «Máquina do
Mundo» («replicated» variously in the form of installations, dram-
atisations and exhibitions in 2005, 2007 and 2010) consists of a
sculptural installation of marble/quartz dust, conveyor belt and
dispenser, with an anti-utilitarian, anti-Fordist circular motion in
which the passage of time modifies and transforms what tradition has
constructed as immovable:
My machine transports each grain of marble almost individually
in an ore-like silence, as though carrying the history of
sculpture back and forth in powder form. Within that pile of
marble dust may lie the possi- bility of eternal sculptures. And
it may reflect, grain by grain, our precarious
transience29 (Vinci,
2023).
Pointing to the expanded literary component of her work, Vinci
also highlights the dialogue between her «Ampulheta» and subsequent
«Máquina do Mundo», and verse 41 of «Fragments of an apocryphal
Gospel», from the collection Elogio de la sombra
(1969) by Jorge Luis Borges: «Nothing is built on stone; everything
is built on sand, but we must build as though the sand were
stone»30 (2005, p. 1011).
Writing in the catalogue of the first exhibition of Vinci’s
«Máquina do Mundo» at the Palazzo Delle Papesse in Siena in 2004,
Rodrigo Naves notes of her work since «Ampulheta» (1997) that:
It is not by chance that, in this regard, Laura Vinci’s works
are closer to the interventions of American Land
Art. Artists such as Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson and
Michael Heizer also deeply interested in this image of nature as a
physical force and exteriority, even if they are always on the
point of leading it into the unfathomable depths of the
sublime31 (2004, p. 34).
The same interest and parameters of sublimated meaning — animal,
plant and mineral — are revisited in «Máquina do Mundo», whose
conception the artist links explicitly to the aforequoted lines
55-66 of Drummond’s poem. The essayist José Miguel Wisnik also
highlights the echoes of Drummond in the artist’s work when he
dedicates his Maquinação do Mundo: Drummond e a
mineração to «Laura Vinci, who intuited artistically the
main theme of this book in her installation Máquina do
Mundo (2004)»32
(2019, p. 7), in reference to his own anal- ysis of the mining
industry in the poet’s hometown Itabira as a symbol of the
degradation and degeneration of life and nature, in what is an
illuminating, transformative reinterpretation of Drummond’s
work.
In addition to her individual sculptural work on the theme, Vinci
has also pluralised her creative process as an artistic director by
working collectively, visually and narratively to bring the work to
the stage in As Máquinas do Mundo, performed five
times between 2017 and 2019. As before, the play refers explicitly
to Drummond’s machine of the world, but also to those found in a
chapter entitled «The Delirium» in Memórias póstumas de Brás
Cubas by Machado de Assis, and in extracts from the novel
A Paixão Segundo G. H. by Clarice Lispector. The
result is a spectacularly experimental, consistently and completely
free way of seeing worlds in the rhythms and durations of time.
Not alone have her metaphorical reflections on the machine of the
world been pluralised in her own work, however, but her
(neo)understanding of modern life and the world around us has also
been adopted and adapted by numerous other artists. These include,
to name just two examples: Susana Anágua’s exhibition
Wait at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, in
2019; and A máquina do mundo: Arte e indústria no Brasil
1901-2021 (Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2021-2022), curated by
José Augusto Ribeiro, a group exhibition of work by more than a
hundred Brazilian artists covering 120 years of artistic
(re)envisioning of the idea of a mechanised modern world.
Figura . Laura Vinci. «Máquina do Mundo» (front view
of the «vault»). Palazzo Delle Papesse, Siena, 2004.
![]()
Photograph by Ela Bialkowska
3.3. Ecometamorphosed deformity
Just as Vinci’s reinterpretations of the world machine motif
explore and reflect on the changes of state, tran- sitions,
transformations and metamorphoses of material elements, «[s]ome
works by Nuno Ramos […] deal with similar issues, which helps to
understand the extent and richness of these problems» (Naves, 2004,
p. 20). A case in point is the seeping of Vaseline from the rock in
Gota (1998): «only enormous pressure forces the
most intimate aspects of nature to the
surface»33 (Naves, 2004, p.
20).
Another essential example in this regard from Ramos’s collective
practice is poem 43 from the collection Junco, in
which he quotes from lines 44-46 of Drummond’s «A Máquina do Mundo»:
«olha, repara, ausculta: essa riqueza / sobrante a toda pérola, essa
ciência / sublime e formidável, mas hermética, // essa total expli-
cação da vida». The lines are quoted exactly, but broken and spaced
differently to produce a defamiliarising effect in the reader:
look
watch
listen
that surplus wealth of every pearl
that tremendous, sublime
yet hermetic science
that total explanation of life
(Ramos, 2011, p. 110)
Differences aside, Ramos’s hybrid amalgamation of text and image
in Junco is every bit as radical as, for example,
Lygia Clark’s reflective, conceptual, self-referential and
experiential Livro-obra (1954-1964), or Oiticica’s
premonitory, many-sided, almost digital «book to come»,
Newyorkaises: Conglomerado (1971-1978).
The complex intersection and transitive, reciprocal dialogue
between 18 «brutalist» photographic images (a dead dog melding into
the road, a rush, or it would be better to say a driftwood corpse
washed up by the waves and swallowed up by the sand. Figures 3 and
4) and 43 poetic texts is a deformed form, but also strays into the
shadowy territory where, in Flávio Moreira da Costa’s (2021, p. 205)
words, «a dog is a rock / (when he’s dead on the
ground)»34, from «Divisão dos
cães» in O desastronauta (1971). At the same time,
the reci- procity and division of discourses in the book lead to
endless overtones. In each of these ways, Junco ad-
dresses and bears witness to the symbolic dialectic between the
omnipresence of finitude and the inexorable metamorphosis of matter:
«a place where things sink into and receive one another. That’s kind
of what these photos are, the memory of that place of passage and
transformation»35 (Ramos,
2017, p. 154).
Figura and 4. Nuno Ramos.
![]()
Photographs on pp. 116 and 117 of Junco, 2011.
Ramos’s «thinking artist» rejects the riddle of the material and
explores instead Drummond’s resignation from a «total explanation of
life», his epistemological pessimism, and his rejection of the
omniscient, omnip- otent machine of the world’s offer to resolve any
«clear enigma», as illustrated in poem 18:
I can’t explain. I bite
or see the hard parts
moving like ants
(chocolate chip ice-cream
ash rattle).
I don’t understand. I fly
like a trunk stepping
into its roots. I smooth
my feathers, witchlike
lean my broom.
I don’t write. I live
like a felt urubu
still among the hard carrion
of these cars.
I knock on glass
that isn’t there, but it breaks.
I seek in the blue centre
the exact womb
that exhales that fire
towards me
the last urubu in the world.
I pierce the void
and my eyelid
closes
into a shield when I attack36
(Ramos, 2011, pp. 50-51).
In addition, however, Ramos also redirects and reconverts the
«traditional» world machine into what was referred to by readers
even prior to Junco’s publication in book form as
the «Machine of the dog (or rush)
world»37, as noted by Flora
Süssekind on the cover flap of the book. The same epithet was later
adapted by the ever-pertinent Júlia Studart for her review of the
collection in the newspaper O Globo, in which she
explains:
The political force of this book by Nuno Ramos is in the impasse
between living being and the sur- rounding world; that is, between
man, animal and a drifting, abandoned piece of world (a tree trunk)
[…] because it suggests that we rethink the swirling sphere that has
separated within man what is man from non-man and what is
animal from human38
(2012, p. 6).
4. Hidden meanings and clear enigmas
More and better could and should be said about the complex
creations convened in these pages to explore the presence of the
machine of the world metaphor in modern Brazilian artistic practice,
and the progressive accumulation and multiplication of complex new
meanings by the country’s most recent generation of an-
ti-traditionalists. In order to appreciate the full depth and strength
of these works, therefore, we must persist in the Nietzschean art of
reading properly, and in our critical, (co-)creative contemplation and
theorisation of the (neo)literary materiality of these anomalous
sculptures and «spectacles». In this regard, Nuno Ramos (2005) himself
reprises Hélio Oiticica’s idea of the «foundation of the object»,
explained by the latter as «work that is no longer the object as it
was known, but a relationship that turns the known into new
knowledge»39.
What this short foray into the topic does highlight is that
critical literary and art theory today are not yet equipped to explain
the radical transformation and dislocation of these strange and
estranging cross-disci- plinary conceptions and creations. While it
may be, as per Duchamp’s famous retort to attempts to interpret his
own work, that «there is no solution, because there is no problem», it
may also be that critical theory does not yet possess a sufficiently
inclusive, paradigmatic critical formula beyond the cumbersome,
complex pro- cess of explication: ex-plicating, in
the etymological sense of the word, to open out the different layers
of meaning within the work, pleat by pleat, fold by fold.
In a very interesting essay by João Cezar de Castro Rocha, entitled «Notes on postmodern
positivism. Or: All cats are crosses. Or: Anything goes in the crisis of the subject», the
author reflects on Spitzer’s definition of comparative philology in terms of critical
distance and proximity, highlighting from the latter’s analysis «a twofold
nearly linking literary experience, critical analysis and anthropological
dislocation», before asking: «Could this be a solution to the impasse»40 (2016, p. 147). Certainly, there is much to recommend in his
suggestion that the current crisis in literary and art studies may represent a «moment of
freedom» in which to trial (and err at) new hypotheses and transform our mistaken claims
into the new rules of a «method yet to be invented»41
(2016, p. 144). With its pearls and pitfalls, therefore, that is precisely what this
analysis proposes: to peel back the layers of meaning within the richly multivalent motif of
the world machine in terms of the vibrant anti-tradition of expanded, radically
interdisciplinary, interartistic practice in contemporary Brazilian art.
The perpetuum mobile of clear enigmas and hidden
meanings that is the metaphor of the world machine helps us to
understand (or understand ourselves) and to express (or express
ourselves) better and more, both ethically and aesthetically. In the
context of contemporary Brazilian art, as this brief cross-section
shows, it has allowed powerful creators from different spaces on the
spectrum to put into practice Beckett’s salutary and quintessentially
human advice to «fail, try again, fail again, fail better».