1

The man who greeted us was almost naked. Caked in mud. Agitated. He had recently returned from the adjoining valley where days of arduous labor had finally turned up a source of water. He used words sparingly. He spoke of scorched earth, parched by interminable drought. "The gutted earth," he called it, the words resounding with cosmic consciousness. "We used to have everything before. Everything was right here on this hilltop. Now, everything is destroyed and the earth must struggle to create. It has been subjected to false powers by mankind..."

The elegance of his figure, the austere and vibrant texture of his blackness, the burning energy in his deep and ancient gaze – these were the things that struck me at first. I found his ceramics captivating – the metamorphosed animals and imaginary creatures and faces. They were more or less wherever the eye fell: roosting on shelves, stacked in passageways, lowered into deep holes that had been dug in the ground, shattered and scattered in the undergrowth that surrounded his vegetable garden. The best pieces were kept in a shack that doubled as an atelier.

Ulisses Pereira Chavez speaks of his baked, earthen pieces as "living nature". Their matter, he believes, draws its light from spiritual energies that reside within it. "They can see us," he said. "I sculpt their visions, their voices..." While these pieces are metaphors, they also live within the very El último artistaArte popular y cultura digitalthing they symbolize. Their artistic value follows from the unity that binds them to the cosmic nature that integrates them. This unity accounts for their dialogue with human beings and things, and for their reality which is unique and impossible to duplicate. As well as for their spiritual meaningfulness.

During my first encounter with Ulisses, my attention was drawn to the emphasis he placed on the educational and communal value of his artistic work. "We must create a pottery school for the children in this area," he said, gesturing like a desperate dreamer. He envisions a school that would offer more than just the teaching of skills and techniques. The pedagogical project he has in mind relies on artistic apprenticeship as a means for the transmission of cultural memory. In addition to sharing knowledge about specific materials and methods, it would introduce students to a particular way of seeing and understanding reality. Ulisses sees the need to bring the community's memory back to life as a pressing one, as a condition for survival. Memory as the right to be.

A similar spiritual atmosphere reigned in all the villages we visited, regardless of how large or small, and among all the artist families who lived in them. One particular place stands out and needs special mention: the "Aldeiona Grande", located in the Serra do Cipó, not too far from the city of Belo Horizonte, where the indigenous nations of the postcolonial Brazilian diaspora are gathered under the spiritual leadership of Ailton Krenak. The place is a living model for the restoration of historical memory and communities. Song, dance and religious rituals associated with millenary forms of artistic expression provide the links to a memory that modern colonialism has sought to destroy in a process that seems to have no end (1).

It was Ulisses' profound view of the work of art, his understanding of its magical and mysterious meaning as "living nature" and of its function in the retrieval of cultural memory that convinced us we had to visit him again. A year went by and in March 2002, we returned to the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais and again made our way across the Diamantina Sierra and the Jequitinhonha River valley toward the remote mining village of Caraí and the district where Ulisses makes his home. This time around the journey was being made by Lélia Coelho Frotta, the anthropologist who was leading our expedition, Beth Formaggini, a documentary film-maker interested in educational and social issues, María Lira Marques, an artist from the Jequintinhonha Valley who works in popular forms and decided to join our group, and last of all, me, a more or less distinguished professor from New York University. Our final objective, as previously stated, had to do with uncovering the poetic mystery of a blue-feathered bird. We had come to this remote and wild place in search of a potter who sculpts earthen figures of the spirits that populate the çerrado. A last artist living in a second to last Paradise.

We found a number of obstacles along the way. This vast region, culturally diverse and biologically rich during pre-colonial and colonial times, was in the midst of one of those horrendous droughts that persist for years on end as regional evidence of the effects of postindustrial global warming. Local strategies of deforestation, massive eucalyptus plantings and the consequent terminal liquidation of regional fauna and hydrographic sources have aggravated the situation even further. The Jequitinhonha River valley was in the serious grip of a process of ecological deterioration as attested to by the hunger and epidemics that come in its wake. The area had officially been declared a disaster zone. A couple of weeks prior to our arrival, torrential and unexpected rains had carried away many lives and washed away thoroughfares.

But these were not the obstacles that would hinder us from reaching our objective. We had set out equipped with an arsenal of cameras, tape recorders and digital hardware. We were here to shoot a documentary film about Ulisses, to record images of his artwork and to make a digital record of his memories. Our plan was to archive the final cut on the Web. From an academic point of view, the project was impeccable. It had been administratively packaged as an exercise in the electronic restoration of cultural memories that are on the brink of extinction. Still, we knew our project would be rife with untold unknowns.

We were all well aware that the digital conversion of cultural memories meant the elimination of their primary artistic dimension. We knew our pursuit was, in fact, an exercise in communal subtraction. Our endeavor sought to transplant a world of experience, knowledge, and symbols, inextricably linked to a millenary way of life, to a system of electronic information and the academic culture that supports it. Even worse, our digital reproduction would take an oral culture and the precise forms of human contact and relationships to nature it contained and subject it to the epistemological norms of a civilization that is bent on its destruction. We knew that what all of this implied was the neutralization of spiritual meaningfulness. Our dilemma was no more and no less than the one that had been faced by the colonial missionaries who, with one hand, had crushed the symbols and forms of knowledge of a millenary way of life and, with the other, had transplanted the broken shards of its memory to written formats, thereby changing and controlling them while subjectin them to new systems of power and representation.

The journey we had embarked on was a peculiar one. We had set out across mountains and remote valleys in search of a fabulous personage. The object of our pursuit was paradoxical. We wanted to document an artistic vision whose spiritual and cognitive dimensions could not be reduced to the software of academic industry or to the values of digital culture. We presumed we could film that which could not be filmed. And what made matters worse was my promise to produce the video for New York University's Hemispheric Institute. The video was to be included in a digital archive on Latin American popular performances. To this end, I had been entrusted with a thousand dollars. Half for tapes of Sony film and half for the artist.

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In the course of the journey, María Lira, the artist in our midst, made us stop time and again along the way. She would get out of the car and disappear into the undergrowth or scale the embankment. Some time later, we would see her off in the distance, combing through the soil, studying its grain and texture, sampling the various tonalities of sand, collecting the different kinds of clay. Then she would start in on the vegetal pigments, which she would match up to the different soils and collect in separate jars. The ritual never veered off course, and she repeated it like a woman possessed. It seemed as though her recollection and her mixture and transformation of the materials were alchemically enclosed in a single cosmic cycle.

As I watched her, I was reminded of my own routines as a professor of aesthetics at the Facultad de Arquitectura of São Paulo University. In those seminars, one of my main points had been how contemporary digital languages have unflinchingly eliminated one of the central innovations of twentieth century avant-garde art. Schwitter's collages, for example, or Max Ernst's frottages had placed the accent on the expressive importance of natural materials and on their immediate physical characteristics. These works sought to regain the spiritual and sensory properties that inhere in the materials out of which they are fashioned. In a similar manner, the Bauhaus of Dessau, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer placed a particular emphasis on the symbolic character and the tactile and textural immediacy of materials.

The expressive and formal valorization placed by modern abstract art on texture and construction, color and material density was intimately linked to the reinstatement of the creative and active signifiers of a natural world that had been demoted to a negative category and ontologically annulled by techno-scientific civilization. Post-industrial civilization proceeded to complete the job by assigning this world to a terminal category as a biological cast off beyond spiritual recuperation. These artists persisted nontheless in their understanding of creation as a repetition and extension of the generative processes that pertain to a living nature and the human existence it contains. Klee rejected the epistemologically sanctioned view of nature as an objective reality divested of its ties to a humanity that had been reduced to the discursive dimension of a rational and techno-scientific subject. Rather, the work of art aspired to become the means for the realization or the restoration of a primordial cosmic unity that had been eliminated by Newtonian science, but continued, nonetheless, to be manifest in art that had been dubbed primitive, popular, or was officially relegated to the domains of the psychopathic and the infantile.

Post-structuralist antihumanism has dismissed these profound dimensions of the artistic experience as impenetrable, a realm of the irrational, an outgrowth of dark and non-Western mystical roots entirely alien to the Newtonian and Cartesian tradition and the flat idea of modernity that followed. This prejudice has been used to exclude a vast number of contemporary artistic and cognitive expressions that do not necessarily fall into step with the global values of the techno-economic and financial concept of modernity. The Die Brücke group of painters, for example, did not embrace African sculpture because it was formally better adapted to the abstract functionalism of the machine era than, say, the academic naturalism of the day. If they were drawn to this tradition, it was because it contained a profound dimension of human existence that had entirely escaped the moral and aesthetic paradigms of European Classicism. From Gauguin to Tarsila do Amaral, reflecting on the "primitive" or the "popular" offered an escape from a Western culture whose dehumanization and self-destruction has only grown more acute over time and against which these artists had incessantly warned. The transcendental dimension, the spiritual significance with its ties to life, death and sexuality, that are present in an African or Asian work of art were precisely the elements that were being sought out by a Picasso, a Bruno Taut, a Mario de Andrade or an Antonin Artaud in their pursuits of painting, architecture, literature and performing arts. The wish to re-establish a symbolic connection between human, natural and sacred is equally evident in their experiments and artistic statements.

Current and common usage of the term "popular art" should not in any way indicate that this label contains anything that would resemble a definition. Popular art is more cultural fact than concept. In Latin America, the elements that distinguish it from high art, art which qualifies as erudite or as art pure and simple, are not characteristics intrinsic to the works that would fall under this rubric. Quite the opposite, in fact. Antonin Dvorák, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla in music, Federico García Lorca, José María Arguedas and João Guimaraes Rosa in literature were forever trespassing into this “forbidden territory”. From Cubist Abstraction to Surrealist theater, from Land Art to Pop Art, twentieth century avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes and post-gardes have incessantly duplicated and reiterated, often to mediocre effect, those arts that fall into the categories of the indigenous or the so-called ethnographic. The aesthetic frontier between "popular" and "modern" has been a porous one, and their signifiers have spilled over in both directions: mixing the erudite with the popular but also the popular with the erudite. Popular Brazilian music, for example, and the Carnival festivities it celebrates, offers an extensive sampling of the ways in which the poetic, plastic and architectonic expressions of the literary avant-gardes are incorporated.

Aesthetic categories do not enter into the classification and disqualification of a specific genre of artistic works and expressions that falls under the label of "popular". The primary qualifiers of the popular, rather, are social and geographic origins. Its creations are produced by a social milieu that is colonized politically and pauperized economically. And infrapoverty and marginality, need I remind you, are categories that have been globally confined behind insuperable ethnic boundaries in our democratic galaxy. Popular art is neither white nor Christian. Not sufficiently Christian, at any rate. The secret relationships it enters into with the natural world it views in mystical terms, with the faiths that arose around persecuted gods, and with communities that have been pillaged, have, from the outset of Western colonialism, relegated it to the inquisitorial, and later epistemological, category of superstition. Its mercantile insignificance follows from its artistic and intellectual under-valuation. And if this were not enough, works of art that qualify as popular tend to occur in non-monetary, subsistence economies. In the view of museums and institutions, these works do not come equipped as real art, so to speak. They are, instead, tools of a material culture, artifacts to be catalogued in the closed domains of anthropology or natural history. National and international art competitions either dismiss them or relegate them to a subaltern category. Their culturally sanctioned difference is perceived as a negative one. Their aesthetic dimension is not deemed genuine. And their autonomous subjective and spiritual dimensions remain unacknowledged. At best, they are shelved as a sub-category of arts and crafts.

There is one exception, however. The museum has thrown its doors wide open and lifted popular art from its subaltern ontological status in only one instance – namely, by displaying a marked receptivity to the linguistic, academic and commercial codes associated with Pop Art. An event I witnessed first hand may help us shed some light on this ambiguous relationship.

The year was 1985. We were convened in Brasilia's Museu de Arte. An annual national art competition was taking place within an institutional framework. The jury that year had rejected a particular work: a medium-size polychrome wood sculpture of an imaginary animal represented in an abstract idiom. The piece made remarkable use of color composition, and in a clear departure from the traditional palette and the canonical harmony that had been handed down by Impressionism, was powerfully expressive. The spatial dynamism of its forms gave it further powerful aesthetic characteristics. It was a work, in short, that stood out by virtue of its originality. But it had something more, something that captivated me but that I could not entirely explain. Clearly, this work distinguished itself from the anodyne linguistic uniformity of the other submissions, while it simultaneously relied on a formal repertory that was attuned to the neo-expressionist trends of European and American art that were in vogue at the time.

Still, the work was declassified and disqualified. The underlying reasons that determine these types of verdicts are, needless to say, never overtly explained in these contexts. The verdict is pronounced as inevitable, and one never entirely understands the reasons for it. The creator of this particular work was, as it so happened, a member of an Amazonian tribe, and in colonial as much as in postcolonial times, "Indian" identity has painfully lacked both historical and individual definition. Consequently, the "Indian" is not acknowledged as a subject in the transcendent sense of the word. The “Indian” cannot be an author. The "Indian" can simply be "l'autre" – to borrow yet another metaphor of contemporary racist nominalism. And this "other”, by virtue of difference, is not an artist. Similarly, the the work of art in question was not a work of art. Though one would have been hard-pressed to call it something else.

This episode was to take a futher turn. After the work had failed to win the competition, a member of the jury, who in the course of earlier evaluations had dismissed the work, proceeded to buy it from the artist in a private transaction. For a song, no doubt. This particular judge, as it so happened, was also an artist. Not just any kind of artist mind you, but one who paints bananas in compliance with the codes that have been sanctioned by American Pop Art. His works, which linguistically-speaking can be situated in some indeterminate middle ground between Andy Warhol's cans of tomato soup and Thomas Wesselman's boxes of Kleenex, had sold briskly in a Soho gallery in New York. He made himself a name as a result of this commercial success. And this good name had elevated him to the rank of judge. And this is how a magical circle is closed.

The definition of popular art is certainly a murky one. This kind of art is often mistaken for artisanal work and pinned down as folkloric. More often than not, it is demoted and assigned an ornamental value. And there are further complexities. In the context of the civilizing crisis brought on by the implosion of industrialism in early twentieth century Europe, popular art and culture are politically problematic concepts. Their nostalgic idealization at the end of the nineteenth century is fatally linked to the progress of an industrial society that razed its own European memory together with past forms of traditional life. This romantic nostalgia is responsible for driving Impressionist painters out of their rural villages in Bretagne and Languedoc toward the most far-flung oceanic islands, and at a later date, for fueling Expressionism's fascination with African and Eastern cultures. This romantic idealism, however, also found fertile ground in a vitalist ontology and a philosophy of national redemption; it would also serve the ends of twentieth century authoritarian populist movements.

Popular art's distinctive proximity to nature, its fusion with religious values as well as its roots in a past that doubled as the dawn of time served to establish the categories of Volkskunst or of Alma popular as the bedrock, at once opaque and absolute, of national identity. At the close of the nineteenth century, Unamuno championed an archaic Hispano-Christian identity naturalized in the landscape. Not long thereafter, Spengler saw popular culture as arising out of the indissoluble ties of blood and earth that manifested themselves in popular festivities and rural crafts and architectures. Vasconcelos sang the praises of the popular via a biological concept represented in a hybrid Hispano-American race that was destined to become the cosmic future of Latin nations. All of a sudden, Inca cosmology and Eastern-influenced traditional central European attire and Arab castles in al-Andalus became fodder for the industrial fabrication and falsification of new linguistic, racial and religio-national identities and the linguistic and social exclusions they ushered in.

This negative history of how popular culture was conceived by modernity does not consist in colorful Tyrolean dance, or gypsy cante jondo or pre- or post-colonial cults of the Earth Mother. The negative history of the modern populist view of culture consists, rather, in the substantiation and implementation of banners of national identity, premises for linguistic, ethnic and religious exclusion, and icons of political fanaticism. As others have pointed out, it consists in the national-statal essentialism that cuts across it (2). It also consists in two generally overlooked and fundamental postures. Its codification as stereotype that intellectual and academic elites have diffused as the essentialist identities of nineteenth century nationalisms or as the subaltern differences of late twentieth century postmodern conservatism. And finally, what is of utmost importance is that the negative history of Pop-cults has come equipped with powerful electronic and institutional means that have facilitated the diffusion and implementation of these stereotypes of popular identity in accordance first, with the expansionist positions of European fascisms and with transnational neo-liberalism at a later date.

The archaic cult of Blut und Boden, the use of blood and earth as a racial vehicle and the idealization of the tribal identities on which national consciousness is built, as promoted by Spengler and Ortega y Gasset, are among the archaic expressions of this sustancial popular identity (3). But the modern technological and industrial mediations that allowed their implementation as an effective absolute and universal value are as crucial to this concept of popular culture as its rhetoric of sacrifice, war and patriotism. It was in the context of a discussion on the function of the industrial media of audiovisual reproduction and communication, namely radio and cinema, that Goebbels stipulated the values of the authentic national popular soul. The authentic culture of authentic national values determined the authentic purpose of vanguard technical media and their global induction . . . "reaching into every last country village" (4). In much the same way, the hybrid icons of commercial Latin culture, wielded throughout the decades of North American Postmodernism as an illusory panacea, have traced a fragile dividing line between the threatened political and social survival of the Latino cultures of the Americas and the strategies of "hegemonic, corporate and governmental multiculturalism" (5).

The synthesis of an essentialist, fundamental and fundamentalistically simulating historicism, on the one hand, and the simulacra of cultural industry, on the other, bring this magic circle to a close. Kitsch reigns at the center of this circle, emerging as the expressive form of historical falsity. There can be no doubt that kitsch is a complex concept. In the context of Pop culture and Postmodernism, it has gained a new legitimacy by means of a double reduction. It has been the subject of a formal contemplation that falls under the aestheticist perspective of semiotic montage, linguistic hybridism and symbolic pastiche as well as a complementary populist principle that dictates that all things that are massively consumed are by definition popular and democratic as a result. Kitsch, in other words, has been legitimized as the total manifestation of a highly formalized linguistic design that is utterly devoid of referents and experience, whether it be hybrid Coca Cola paradises or fundamentalist slogans for the War against Evil. Kitsch is the authentic aesthetic expression of democratic culture in the era of its performative deconstruction as electronic event and commodified spectacle.

Walter Benjamin's critique of fascist aestheticism offers an interesting interpretation of this modern and postmodern phenomenon. Kitsch is the virtual representation of the irreducible individuality of the artistic object mediated by a technological production and reproduction that, in truth, serve to cancel it. The fictitious and false character of a technologically achieved individuality follows from two elemental characteristics that this critique sums up in the presumed and induced "paucity of experience" and in the predominance of the "apparatus"; these technical and organizational superstructures intervene, in other words, in the performance of the work of art and its stereotyped languages (a category that includes everything from software to the academic or mercantile administering of criticism in any of its specialized guises).

In his critique of the banalization of experience in industrial society, Benjamin focussed on the medium of film (6). The singularity and unrepeatable character of the theatrical interpretation and its interpreters is, in film, replaced by montage; which is to say by an apparatus that does double duty as deus ex machina and as a technological system for the production of reality such as it was understood by the Soviet avant-garde cinema of Eisenstein and Vertov (7). Technological reproduction, furthermore, annuls that intellectual and expressive unity of interpretation through the unique and unrepeatable individuality of the actor who determines the elemental artistic significance of theater. The technological suppression of the individual aura of the work of art has simply been the point of departure of the film industry, swiftly opening the way for the recuperation of the heroic as virtual performance, as a fiction of the sacred, as that global spectacle that, in short, distinguishes modern and postmodern cultural industry as a "factory of dreams", to use Ilja Ehrenburg's delicate metaphor (8).

But Benjamin did not only compare traditional theater and modern film in order to reconstruct the paucity of experience as a central aesthetic category of industrial culture. This critique of aesthetic impoverishment, programmatically linked to the manifestos of functionalism and the Modern Movement and to the loss of aura suffered by technologically produced works of art, also served to illuminate a radical political and civilizing shift. It exposed the transformation of political power, through the technical means of its reproduction and technological diffusion, into an aesthetic and virtual phenomenon. Industrial culture, the technological and commercial rationalization of available languages, and the impoverishment of experience brought the accursed circle to a close. Benjamin defined this circle as modern Fascism. Need I point out that the programmatic centrally and explicitly formulated moment in the famous essay on art in the era of technological reproduction has been widely side-stepped by postmodernist criticism, given its problematic implications with respect to the new forms of totalitarian power with their electronic paradisiacal displays of narcissistic dreams. Benjamin's aesthetic critique cleared the way for our understanding of Fascism as a new totalitarian system of domination that emerged from the implosion of technological modes of communication; a system, furthermore, that aesthetically projects itself as popular culture, whether it be in the name of the essentialist values of blood and earth or in the populist languages of industrial kitsch.

This critique of political kitsch was not new. While the terminology may have been different, it had already been broached by both Skinkel and Schiller as the negative vision of a future civilization that would eliminate artistic experience in favor of the aesthetic rationalization of the industrial organization of human existence. Morris introduced a similar critique of industrial society's aesthetic impoverishment from a socialist and humanist perspective. Nietzsche saw the fanfare and trivialization of Greek tragedy in Wagner's last operas as foreshadowing the synthesis of the bad taste and the industrial genocides that became distinctive features of twentieth century Europe, not only Europe, and not just in the twentieth century.

But all is not darkness for the expressions of industrial and post-industrial popular art. There are elementary conditions that expose some illuminating differences between the values of Pop Art and the strategies of national-socialist Volkskultur or realist social populism. Industrial kitsch, from Mickey Mouse to Ronald McDonald, has installed itself as the new aesthetic realism and as a configuring axis of day-to-day life (9). According to a judgement that is widely shared in postmodernist academic circles, cans of tomato soup and the sex appeal of Pop bathtubs have freed late capitalist society from the coercions of a high culture that, incidentally, has also been degraded in the commercial derivatives of opera and classical music that are being offered up for entertainment and relaxation. This socializing and freeing effective function, if you will, is widely shared by a Pop galaxy that promises redemption from bourgeois decadence by way of soviet and national-socialist kitsch. Nationalist icons were another constant of the cultural production of twentieth century European totalitarianism. From Tom Wolfe to Jasper Johns, patriotic symbols are one of the fundamental themes of Pop. The "limitless distribution" of the canons of commercial design have also been advanced as a solid alibi for the popularity of Pop (10). But this is exactly in keeping with the old national-socialist and communist position that allowed only its radio antennae and its symbols to reach every last country village.

There is a difference, however: namely, the irony that cuts across all of Pop Art without exception –from Jean Tinguely's war machines to Richard Hamilton's representations of domestic happiness by way of Robert Venturi's anti-architectonic manifesto. Ostensibly, this irony breaks with the military rigidity and monastic severity of fascist and social realism. We cannot neglect, however, to take note of how this much praised irony conceals the absurdity of representing a box of detergent as a magical object or of elevating an acrylic rendering of a national flag to a pathetic category of the sublime, while it continues to legitimize a devastating proliferation as the unifying principle of aesthetic expression in countless malls and suburbs of a Third World that has been colonized anew. In the end, lest we forget, this irony has only succeeded in achieving the exact opposite of the shock aesthetics imagined by the Dadaists. While the latter sought to demystify the icons and myths of power with the artistic violence of street acts, Postmodernism has sought to resacralize them in salons where, between sighs of tedium and cynical smiles, an integrally commodified culture thrives.

Pop has some other distinctive features. One is its iconoclastic pose; others are its aesthetic eclecticism or its anti-essentialist credo, its multicultural spectacle, in short, its neo-avant-garde gesticulations. Seen from this angle, Pop emerges as a sui generis aesthetic renewal of the pre-1945 European and American avant-garde aesthetic revolution. It turned the Surrealist Revolution into a rhetoric of spectacle (Andy Warhol), reduced the aesthetic anarchy of the Berlin Dadaists into a strategy of commercial advertising (Roy Lichtenstein), substituted the formal experiments of the historical European avant-gardes with a bazaar of recycled mediatic languages (Robert Rauschenberg), and traded the revolutionary critique of art as a realm separate from beauty for a cult of the trivial and "folksy" as ruled by the realist principle of consumerism and its spiritual transcendence in the total unity of mercantile and pornographic fetishism (Tom Wesselmann, Eduardo Paolozzi, Allen Jones, etc. etc.) (11).

Pop has elevated a concept of the popular while simultaneously stripping it of its memories and modes of life and emptying it of a profound dimension of the artistic experience that cannot be reduced to modern hyper-technological epistemologies or deconstructionist ideologies of mediatic simulacra. This has also happened in those places where Chicano, Latino and Afro-American cultures brush up against each other, in other words in the borderlands of postindustrial colonialism. Memories and modes of life that are linked to the popular have been extracted and recycled in the colonial categories of hybridism and mestizaje, categories whose common denominator has invariably been the reduction of aesthetic experience to a formalist syntax and the programmatic exclusion of any spiritual dimension whatsoever. Pop is the transposition of modern artistic culture, such as it has been defined by Picasso, Schoenberg or Guimarães Rosa, to the electronic triviality of digital culture.

Current categories of the popular have, almost without exception, ignored those aspects of it that have to do with the legacy and survival of knowledge, technologies and modes of life that are often millenary. The aesthetic approximations of the popular have very rarely signaled the civilizing significance of its prolonged confrontation with the colonial expansion of industrial and postindustrial society. The central role played by different expressions of the popular in the critique of modernity has not been sufficiently stressed; while the artists and intellectuals to whom we owe these contributions cover a wide and seemingly unrelated spectrum, they include such central figures to the development of modern thought as Ernst Bloch and Mario de Andrade, not to mention the contributions of a long list of painters from three continents as well as those of avant-garde music and of a critical theory directed at industrial civilization.

The paths for the reinstatement of the cultural and political autonomy of popular cultures and the retrieval of their aesthetic and communal significance are doubtless many. There is one in particular, however, to which I would like to briefly call your attention. It is signaled by Enlightenment hermeneutic philosophies, and particularly by some of the themes of the cultural philosophies of Johann Gottfried Herder and Giambattista Vico.

Vico understood that the historical origins that Enlightenment philosophies defined as civilization contained fables and myths. Only on the basis of these ancient traditions, with their conflation of memory and knowledge, he argued, could we understand our modern culture in historical and hermeneutic terms. His theory of metaphor, a central one to his argument, is of immediate relevance to our discussion about aesthetics and the popular. Vico challenged the definition of metaphor as formally based on the logical structure of language that was advanced by scholastic rhetoric by reminding us of its origins in the "sympathetic nature" that inheres in ancient mythological knowledge. Metaphor, the most basic form of artistic expression, reveals, above all else, the mimetic origin of language as an expression of the animate relationship between the human being and things (12).

Herder's view is of a similar kind. The memories of ancient cultures, their knowledge and legends, "have been actively collected over time in the poems of shepherds, peasants and fishermen, in other words, in societies where an innocent nature could reign without the necessity of a political art" (13) This "innocent nature" (a provocative concept in light of the contemporary terminal destruction of the planet's ecosystem) is the animate world of ancient myths and oral legend. In addition to this acknowledgement of the forms of knowledge that come to us from nature and human existence, Herder's cultural philosophy draws its value from its demonstration of how this knowledge is the foundation on which European cultures have been built. The gay science of the Greeks and Arabs, as he writes in Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, was part of its legacy. It was on the basis of these sophisticated forms of thought and expression, established in ancient Greece and medieval al-Andalus, that the barbarian nations of Europe evolved toward the artistic and philosophical civilization of the Renaissance.

This valorization of cultural traditions, dismissed in turn by enlightened rationalism and by positivism, should not in any way be mistaken as pertaining to the evolutionist or progressive perspective that was passed down by Christian apocalyptic providentialism to this same rational and techno-scientific tradition. For Vico, the revelation of ancient cultures, religions and modes of knowledge is intersected by a vehement critique of the linear construction of historical time. And for Herder, the idea of human progress was, as he openly stated it, a sham. Human and cultural perfection for Herder, unlike for the French encyclopedists, was not the achievement of a virtual temporal order that resulted from the progressive domestication of human nature; rather, it was that which an individual or an individual culture could become in and of itself, in accordance with a radical principle of the autonomy of different cultures and their modes of expression and reproduction (14).

This acknowledgement of the plurality of cultures as forms of existing historical life in their own right is not interchangeable with the Enlightenment concept of tolerance. Since the advent of eighteenth century European colonialism, the legal principle of tolerance has meant the leveling of all cultures to a single rationalist model upon which the survival of the participants, reduced to the abstract category of logical subjects and economic individuals, depends. Nor should it be mistaken for a multiculturalism that is open to the differences between historical civilizations only so it can reduce them to linguistic systems, icons and texts, while it remains simultaneously closed to the ecological conditions, modes of life and material means of production that underlie these symbolic differences. Instead, Herder's concept of culture understands that the memories and artistic expressions of nations are indissoluble from their modes of life and survival. We should not forget that Herder as much as Vico understood the fundamental interaction between cultural memory and the construction of the historical identity of nations. They both developed a concept of culture that could not be reduced to a formal structure of the segregated representations of human communities, their political practices, and their modes of production and survival. Their’s is a cultural or civilizing view that integrates productive and reproductive aspects of daily life, religious cults and metaphoric languages, and that unites technical and productive knowledge with expressive values as an integrated and indissoluble whole. In the same measure, it allows for the insertion of artistic creation as central and as inseparable from the knowledge, technologies and modes of life of a determined historical community (15).

3

In time, we reached our destination. Ulisses welcomed us with solemnity. He opened his house to us. Answered our questions. Showed us his ceramic pieces. But when we wanted to know about the creative process these involved, he snapped at us, angry: "You don't believe in God!"

Lélia, who for the past twenty-five years has assisted him and his family in times of trouble and has catalogued and promoted his art, explained to us that for almost a year now, Ulisses has been subjected to visits from corporate-sponsored evangelists who use religion as a means of fragmenting the African and indigenous communities of Latin America so as to prepare the way for their colonization by the ethical values of global capitalism. "You wouldn't ask me those questions if you believed in God," he said to our consternation. Something about the way he said it, however, spared us from the feeling that God had been invoked for dogmatic or punitive effect, or as an authoritarian and exclusive principle associated with any type of metaphysical or social privilege. The god Ulisses invoked seemed much nearer in substance to Spinoza's than to the "One and Only" cited by the catechisms of Christian propaganda. His is a latent god, sustaining all life, be it human, animal, inanimate or vegetal, in the indissoluble unity of that which is sacred and finds its most authentic expression in the work of art. "If you believed in God," Ulisses continued to exhort us, " you would not be here asking me if you can or can not reproduce my works and my words. If you really did believe, you would go deep inside and listen to the trees, the frogs, the stones, and you would speak to them as I do. You would learn to hear these living figures I make out of earth with my hands". And with that, he summarized the creative process as an act that encloses the divine creation of the universe in the harmonious unity of the cosmos.

Ulisses showed us a sculpture that was comprised of three mammal legs, the body and head of a frog along with two additional heads, those of a bird and a snake, emerging out of its back. "This is the Metamorphosis," he explained. It was, in effect, a hybrid –one half bird or reptile, the other vegetal. An imaginary protean animal with anthropomorphic faces. "They are alive and they speak," he said, referring to the multiple heads. "Their voices are those of the animals and plants that speak to me, and the memory I keep of those voices in my dreams".

According to Ulisses the forms of these sculptures is animated by a spiritual life that inheres in them. This animistic perception of the work of art, however, should not be mistaken for a subjective projection of the kind imagined by positivist psychology, nor should it be reduced to the categories of spatial dynamism and formal transformation of that popular expression, par excellence, of modern cultural industry: the animated Disney cartoon. Nor would it be accurate to speak of these works as representations of the supernatural. The nature Ulisses takes as his point of departure is not objectified by Newtonian mechanical and physical categories; consequently, he is completely oblivious to the complementary view of a segregated nature that would function as a transcendent reality. Rather, his sculptures are an expression of the "power", at once physical and spiritual, that was ousted from cognitive experience by the techno-scientific philosophies that were ushered in by Bacon's theory of knowledge and Newton's mechanical physics. They express the vital and mysterious principles that guide shamanic experiences of the real, ancient religious rituals, and rigorous aesthetic contemplation. On another front, this animated understanding of reality returns us to the structure of a profound experience that simultaneously involves the extremes of objective observation and religious experience. "They are invisible words," Ulisses said, speaking of his sculptures. His reiterated insistence on the immaterial, the invisible, the secret can only be understood as an allusion to a contemplative experience that borders on mystical vision.

One could say of his earthen figures that they are idols. But only on condition of reinvesting the word with the signifiers that were first seized by the Tribunals of the Inquisition and vetoed, some time later, by scientific positivism. His figures are idols precisely because their signifiers do not reside in the form that is immediately perceptible to the senses, or in their linguistic structure, or in their performative reality as Plato thought in his famous myth of the idolatrous cave and his theory of the eidolon. Or, as the mediatic nominalism of postmodern spectacle and consumption assumes without much subtlety. The artistic value of these figures can only be found on the other side of the aesthetic formalism and linguistic nominalism that inhere in our mediatic civilization. Ulisses says that his sculptures speak. Their profound significance does not reside in their outward, visible aspect but in their voices. And those voices that come from beings who cannot speak are never just a matter of sounds. Rather, they constitute an intellectual image, and in Eastern mystical traditions they have been understood through a chain of metaphors that allude to the transcendental. They hark back to a secret spiritual and emotional intensity. They pertain to the realm of the sacred.

Writing in 1915 about the formal abstraction of traditional African sculpture, the poet and expressionist critic Carl Einstein said: "that which appears as abstraction is a direct rendering of nature"; it is "the most intense realism." Immediately adding that the realistic abstraction or abstract realism of this so-called primitive art does not at any time achieve a plastic effect, much less a representative or performative dimension. Its emotional and existential efficacy depends on an intuitive, spiritual and inner perception. Is it a wonder, therefore, that Einstein reminded us that "idols tend to be adored in the dark" (16)

These idols are not a "separate" representation of a "magical" nature. Nor are they constructions of an autonomous linguistic reality. They are not icons. Their materials and forms are, in and of themselves, a profound expression of life and death, of cosmic cycles, and the experience of the sacred. Their expressive power is not an addendum to their tangible and material reality. It is immediate. It can be felt, touched as something prior to temporal order and the experience of representation as discursive. This was clearly understood by such modern artists as Kandinsky and Schoenberg who sought to recuperate the spiritual dimension they attributed to the artisanal materiality of color tonalities. It was also understood by artists like Itten or Dubuffet who uncovered in the immediate materiality of color and texture a medium for a cognitive and expressive intensity that had been absent from prior naturalist and impressionist trends. The modern concept of abstraction follows directly from this unity between the most common material elements and the expressive and spiritual dimensions they contain. This is abstraction that cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula. It is a concept of abstraction, rather, that for the shamanic artist as well as for twentieth century expressionist aesthetics, counters not the concrete reality of things and their daily experience, but their aesthetic trivialization as it was carried out by academic naturalism in the nineteenth century and by digital hyper-realism in the latter decades of the twentieth.

At a certain point, Ulisses showed us an anthropomorphic head. He said it was The Apocalypse because he had seen this face in dreams while thinking about the end of the world. I was struck by the similarity of this face with those of some African masks I could clearly remember. Certainly, the materials were different, as were the languages. Still, Ulisses' sculpture answered to a similar purity of mediums, a similar formal intensity and compositional rigor, a similar expressive concentration. Despite its realism, his figure of The Apocalypse was abstract. Which is what Einstein meant when he spoke of the centrality of African art to the aesthetic of modern European expressionisms. Its more sensual and tangible characteristics, those that prevail in the eroticism of its forms or in the vibrant roughness of its textures, are, at one and the same time, abstract, insofar as they communicate an immediate emotional and spiritual intensity, and also pure. Or, to put it more succinctly, they are expressions that are not mediated by a performative? function. Which is why they are idols – objects endowed with a power that is by definition invisible.

Shamans, in their initiation rites, are called upon to learn the languages of animals. The "descent of the spirits" occurs during a session of public singing during which the shaman amazes his audience with the howls, bellows, sighs and snorts of various animals. This sacred animal language possesses a further oracular character (17). Legends about animals who speak like humans and about metamorphosed human beings who speak in the language of animals are plentiful in the oral literatures and popular traditions of Latin America. The Brazilian artist Joel Borges is the author of a splendid book of engravings and poems whose title, No tempo em que os animais falavam, refers us to this golden age as it is recalled in the popular legends of the Seará region. In a series of engravings and drawings of traditional Zapotec tales, the painter Francisco Toledo explored a similar exchange between a spiritualized humanity and an animistic nature. And there are many other examples along these lines.

On the day of our last visit, we were shown a piece that had an extraordinary demeanor. It consisted of a spherical base on which rested an extended arm that formed an oval and whose extremities were festooned with a whole series of small anthropomorphic heads. Iconographically, it was a variation on the tree of life, a frequent theme of ancient and popular Latin American culture to this day. Lélia saw in it ritual vestiges of African culture, or more specifically, a reference to the legend of the sacred iroco tree that is considered an orixa by Afro-Brazilian religions and endowed with wish-granting magical powers as well as the capacity of causing great harm to human beings when angered (18). The sculpture's base was in the shape of a gourd, a sacred receptacle in indigenous traditions. Above this base, a branch rose to form an arch on which rested the small heads or anthropomorphic masks. "Can't you hear their voices? What they're saying?" Ulisses wanted to know.

My aim here is not to defend aesthetic vitalism or sui generis mysticism. Because, if for no other reason, vitalism and mysticism have been widely stereotyped by twentieth century mediatic cultures in an effort to complement the processes of industrial rationalization, communicative banalization, and the sensorial, intellectual and spiritual impoverishment they entail. Nor am I nostalgically attempting to close the distance between myself and a last artist of the jungle in an effort to further radicalize academia's vicious construction of the popular as an imaginary alterity to the orgies of bureaucratic cynicism that institutionally define an artistic production that is classified as postmodern. Rather, I wish to signal a specific and profound form of artistic expression. And to do so through a body of work that is not any more or less popular than that of Juan Gris or Käthe Kollwitz. I believe it is important, furthermore, to draw attention to the nexus between the art Ulisses makes and a specific kind of modern artist and movement that has been marginalized by dominant techno-centric epistemes such as the commercial populism of twentieth century neo- and post- avant-gardes. My intention is not to underline these proximities as conjunctural coincidence. Rather, I consider them to be a programmatic community of philosophical and cosmological principles.

A brief parenthesis about mimetic experience may be in order here and could perhaps help us to a better understanding of that "living" and "invisible" dimension to which Ulisses' sculptures aspire. Mimesis is often mistaken with the category of imitation. It has been defined as a naturalist reproduction of nature or of the real. Among the many errors that burden modern definitions of the mimetic experience, the most frequent one consists in its subordination to a concept of objectivity which pertains, in effect, to Newtonian physics and Kantian epistemology more so than to artistic "realism" if we understand the term in its most capacious sense to include Japanese sculpture from the Heian period or Italian Renaissance painting. When Apollinaire and the cubist and post-cubist movement programmatically condemned "mimesis", it was on the grounds of its naturalistic and mechanical objectivity. Moreover, much of the aesthetic rationalism identified with the Modern Movement and twentieth century functionalism and constructivism is based precisely on this cardboard interpretation of mimesis as naturalist reproduction.

The mimetic experience cannot be defined as a copy, a duplication or simple imitation of nature. Mimesis does not mean an intellectual, manual or technical reproduction of the real. Nor can it; historically and cognitively, the word mimesis designates an experience that pre-dates the construction of nature as an objective reality that is, furthermore, separate from us. The mimetic experience by necessity harks back to a relationship to "nature" that precedes the discursive separation of subject and object and that precedes the disenchantment with nature that is first ushered in by the Augustinian philosophy of guilt and later, by the Newtonian mechanistic construction of the universe.

Walter Benjamin's theory of human language in Paradise offers us one definition of mimesis. Another similarly inclined definition comes to us from Dewey's philosophy of the artistic experience of nature (19). The essays of Paul Klee, also in this vein, offer an explanation to the routes of perception of nature. But it is in Goethe's Farbenlehre that we find the most systemic and ample epistemological construction for an understanding of the mimetic experience. There is one very simple aspect that should be highlighted here: the understanding of the subject of perception, the act of perceiving and its object, that is to say light and color, are three dynamic moments in an interactive process and not instances that are logically, epistemologically and physically separated from the process that constitutes objective knowledge. "The eye owes its existence to light. From among the undifferentiated auxiliary animal organs, light has generated an organ of its own that has no equal..." (20) Colors exist for the eye as a result of its development in a medium of light and color. Goethe's proposition advances the idea that the simplest perception of the world surrounding us, a world filled with light and color, automatically entails an ontological community of all living things. Mimesis is the human experience of that which exists by way of an ontological unity that contains both things. But it also expresses the spiritual dimension that cuts across this ontological continuity.

As part of this brief conceptual review, I would like to refer you to one of the high points of European culture, namely, the body of work of Ibn 'Arabi. As it turns out, the writings of this philosopher and mystic are the only ones in which I found a rendition of the creative process that approximates the one described to us by Ulisses. I will attempt a brief summary. Artistic creation (takwin) for Ibn 'Arabi is an experience in which an archetypal dimension of being is revealed. This archetypal experience, however, is not an original logical construction in the sense of a transcendental idealism. It does not presuppose the ex nihilo participation of a demiurge or a creative genius or an artistic or intellectual subject equipped with more or less absolute constituent powers as they have been conceived by modern art from El Lissitzky to Andre Breton. Instead, Ibn 'Arabi conceived of the physical world as a dynamic reality animated by an autonomous spiritual principle. The artist at the center of his theory of creation is not tailored to suit the Christian-platonic model of the demiurge, according to an original principle that manipulates the real by means of its divine, artistic or logical power. In Ibn 'Arabi's philosophical approach, the artist assumes the far more "passive" role of contemplation in order to accede to the being that is revealed in things. And the creative act is a contemplative one in which the possibility of the inherent being of all living things becomes manifest. While this experience of revelation is not entirely alien to the original void, it is set forth affirmatively, as an acknowledgement of the invisible and occult possibility of the being that resides within all things (21).

Klee's claim that art does not represent the visible but makes the invisible and profound reality of being visible shares much with this mystical view (22). In Japan, mimesis (modoki) in the performing arts is taken in a similar way as a hermeneutic understanding of origins and associated to the function of the interpreter and daemon (23). This category also comes to a much better understanding of the creative experience as Ulisses describes it than do modern concepts of imitation as the photographic or digital reproduction of the real.

Ulisses uses earth to make his sculptures. The very same earth that sustains him. "Using" may not be the appropriate word here as the earth is not a tool. Or an instrument. It is the fertile earth. It is the material foundation of his being. The principle that inheres in all being, the animal and vegetal life that surrounds him. His works of art reveal a part of the potentiality of this earth. And this is the reason for which the formal process that is crystallized in the artistic object cannot be disengaged from a nature that exists beyond it, much less position itself in opposition to it. It is also the reason why the creative process that encloses this artistic experience cannot entertain an objective concept of the real. And why an aesthetic concept of representation is not applicable to this creative process. And why the interim categories of realism and abstraction do not apply. The creation of the work of art, here, is an extension of the cycle of creation that pertains to the earth, itself, to the materials, to nature. Not a reproduction in a second sui generis reality: the transcendent reign of beauty or reality substituted by simulacra. Rather, it is an extension of nature's creative cycles that, in the process, endows them with a spiritual significance we can assimilate to our experience. Cycles that make it impossible to draw the line between the material generation of the earth and the act of artistic creation proper, between nature and spirit, between the work of art and human life. The indefinite continuity connecting nature to the work of art is the creative process.

Ulisses made us see even more things. He does not present his sculptures as finished products, as objects in the epistemological, technical and mercantile sense of the word. His ceramic pieces are immersed in a perpetual process of change in which the meanings of the forms that had been fixed in clay were metamorphosed, and these changing meanings virtually transformed the forms. This was the dialogue, the process of unstable definitions and mutual transformations to which the artist was referring when he spoke of his works as "living nature".

4

Magic, animism, mystical contemplation, mimesis . . . I use these categories in an attempt to come to a closer understanding of the experience that Ulisses transmitted to us, both directly and indirectly, in the course of our many conversations. I use them to establish a framework from which to pursue a dialogue with this body of work. With these I try to establish a framework, drawing on the more sensitive nineteenth and twentieth century ideas about art, from which to pursue a possible dialogue between Ulisses' works and our own condition as subjects lost on the horizon of an irrevocable civilizing crisis. I want to call attention to a profound dimension of this artistic experience that has been confined to the camp of the "popular". And I want to bring the communal value of this work to the fore in a way that is diametrically opposite to the one that has been assigned to it by colonial logocentrism, in its erstwhile theocratic form as well as in its digital expressions of today.

In light of predominant Western views, never more on display than in the institutions of art and higher learning, this so-called popular art is understood as the structural manifestation of a collective system of values, lacking an individual dimension of its own as well as a proper expressive will and a transcendent spiritual value. Herein lies the reason why works of popular and ethnic art are confined to museums and departments of anthropology and folklore. They are not on view in art museums and departments. This chronicle turns such an absurdly logocentric perspective on its head. I have, on the one hand, tried to show the profound individual dimension associated to the artistic experience of an oeuvre such as the one Ulisses has created. On the other hand, I have signaled how the scope of its spiritual significance is equal to the task of integrating those communities we call popular: Latin American and Third World peoples who share a common memory and geographic space and are subject to an unrelenting process of colonization that includes, among other things, the uninterrupted subtraction of memories and the systematic destruction of natural habitats and modes of life.

This spiritual and communal dimension explains the ultimate and most important goal of this chronicle. It explains Ulisses' refusal to be filmed, his refusal to have his person, his family and his art digitally reproduced. It explains his absolute unwillingness to engage in any form of communication that does not include the spiritual presence of his creations. Only this transcendental dimension can explain his repudiation of the technology of reproduction as a final act of resistance against the electronic volatilization of his own life and the survival of popular communities in general.

When we insisted on taping our interviews, Ulisses explained to us: "What I say here means one thing. Written and published it will mean something else". And the minute the words were out of his mouth, he dashed into the alcove and made his way toward a heap of blankets that concealed a battered trunk out of which he produced an old moth-eaten issue of a local newspaper. He held it up to the light of the window and pointed to a specific paragraph which he then had his daughter read out loud. The article in question was one of a few, perhaps the only interview Ulisses had ever granted the various journalists, anthropologists and art dealers who had come knocking at his door. Basically, it said that Ulisses is a very original artist, that he speaks to animals and plants, and makes surrealist ceramics. "That's not true!" he cried in anger. The falsity of the piece was in the grammatical and syntactical correction of Ulisses' words. It was anchored in an interpretive process that mediated its publication for an unspecified journalistic audience. It was also anchored in the journalist's simple-mindedness. But Ulisses was angered by something more fundamental. His concerns were not simply of a literal kind. The central issue was the conversion of the spoken word into a written one. This conversion into writing was marred by syntactic and semantic displacements, by the elimination of expressive moments, and by the abstraction of the presences of human beings and objects that are inextricably linked by spoken communication. Beyond the mediatic manipulation of the signs of writing, the falsity of this reproduction was due, above all else, to the fact that the experience crystallized in those signs had been emptied. "Art is experience", Ulisses said, time and again. "The experience of the invisible." Later, he said, "I don't want interviews because my words are invisible".

"Invisible words" are voices that are directly linked to the presence of living things. They are, at one and the same time, visions associated to these words and to the profound experience of things. They signal the mysterious dimension that inheres in all authentic works of art. Concurrently, however, these invisible words are words shared by a community that hears and understands them. "Invisible words" are the expression, at once individual and communal, of a poetic language of forms, words, sounds and gestures that cannot be reduced to writing. They are not a text. They cannot be subsumed by a system of codes and representations because their singularity in time and space makes their presence irreducible.

Two examples come to mind, and I cannot help but succumb to them. Not surprisingly, both are located on the margins of modern Western culture. The first is Federico García Lorca's poetics of the duende. There have been attempts to relate this somewhat aleatory category to the irrational idealism of the Surrealist and postmodern theory of simulacra. A mistake. Lorca's duende is the expression of an aesthetic intuition that evolved from a Sufi mystic tradition that was deeply entrenched in Spanish religious culture even as late as the sixteenth century. In the aftermath of the inquisitional persecutions of the Imperial period, it spilled over into popular gypsy culture where it found a last spiritual refuge. Speaking for the duende, Lorca explained the mysterious manifestation of the spiritual trance in the unrepeatable moment of the poetic word, the musical movement and the flamenco dance step. The duende, too, is linked to a communally shared historical moment. It, too, is the "invisible word", an invisible dimension of a poetic language that is linked to a revelatory experience of being in music and dance (24).

The second example, Paul Klee, is less important. Klee also anchored the artistic experience in the threshold between the visible and the invisible. The work of art, he thought, could not, under any circumstances, be defined as a simple replica of the real and relegated to a separate, representational realm. His famous statement that painting is not a reproduction of the visible but the visualization of an invisible reality is built on the idea of a pre-linguistic community made up of a humanity that sees, feels and conceives and of the nature of things perceived. The same reality sustains human beings and the being of all existing things. Above all else, the work of art is, for Klee, the expression, at once sensible and spiritual, of this common ontological mainstay.

Ulisses' resistance to any type of photographic or digital reproduction is explained by this same ontological community of being and its invisible expressions. Allow me to formulate it one more time: from our first to our last visit, his position in this regard had the firmness of a religious conviction, in the most profound yet undogmatic sense of the term. Ulisses did not see mechanical and digital reproduction as a means to conserve and preserve that which exists, including his own person and his spiritual vision of what it means to be. He intuitively recognized it as a means of volatilization. Technological reproduction signifies the suppression of aura. The elimination of soul. The asphyxiation of the energetic principle of the living thing. This same principle has been designated by the ancient categories of Brahma, Energeia, Ruah, Pneuma, Geist...

We do, indeed, associate this combination of suspicion and apprehension toward photographic and filmic reproduction with superstition. In fact, we are quick to condemn this type of precaution as pertaining to a category of superstition that grew out of the old inquisitorial prohibitions against mystical experience and the epistemological discipline of modern technocentrism that succeeded it. Let us not forget, however, the colonial, Christian and enlightened violence that buttresses this negative category of superstition. Let us also not forget that in pre-Christian Latin culture the word superstitio referred to the mixture of horror and terror in the face of the existence that is at the center of all true religious experience. Superstio and religio were synonymous concepts (25). If anything, this classification of the experience of the mysterious, the sacred and the divine under a negative designation having to do with idols and superstitions is proof of the dark history of violence and intolerance that accompanied the civilizing process. It is the occult face of the theological and epistemological concept of rationalization.

The fear of the photographic replica is inseparable from the long memory of bloody persecution to which ancient modes of life and knowledge have and continue to be subjected in every corner of the alleged Third World. Within the shamanic and mystical traditions of the African and indigenous peoples of America, there is terror that sacred presences will be embezzled, horror that human spiritual energy will be violated, and lastly and most importantly, the sober and justified fear that the religious and artistic experiences associated with these traditions will be persecuted.

But there is something more. Perhaps the most important thing of all. Ulisses' relentless insistence on the irreducibility of the individual work of art as a living presence, that we can begin to understand by way of categories like mimesis, animism and magic, for lack of more accurate options, exposed some of the commonplaces of postmodern digital communication. The textual decontextualization of artistic experience and the visual freeze of the "invisible word", the two elements that struck a live nerve in Ulisses, would be two such areas. But let's start at the beginning. As far as Ulisses is concerned, the digital copy of the work of art is a fraud insofar as it annuls sensorial qualities linked to touch, smell, to the physical presence, in other words, of the existing thing. It is a fraud because it mutilates an individual reality that exists alongside a full sensory individual experience in a specific time and place. It is also a fraud because it extracts the artwork from the community in which it is created, shared and understood. Because it eliminates those most intimate categories of communal memory linked to the intrinsic qualities of the object, the human presence in their midst, and their shared expressive dimensions. It is a fraud because it strips the work of art of its most profound spiritual significance.

Technically, the digital transposition of an object is a falsification because it displaces and supplants the sensory and spiritual conditions of its individual existence with perceptive codes, schemes and models that are pre-determined by software. Secondly, digital reproduction and diffusion eliminate the individual and communal dimensions that are crystallized by the shared reception of an artistic experience. Just as the work of art is replaced in digital communication by the semiotic object, predetermined and pre-designed as a virtual reality, the community to whom the experience is addressed is replaced by an electronic mass. A fragmented, hybridized mass, dispossessed of memories and shared modes of living. A statistically defined and digitally volatilized mass. A mass that has been epistemologically degraded by the very software that condemns it to a sensory and spiritually impoverished voyeurism.

There is one more and last aspect of artistic creation that is annulled and discarded by digitalization. Ulisses explained his creative work as a revelation of the mysterious voices of existing things. Contemplation of the creative earth, of living nature and dynamic reality, of all things that naturally offer themselves up to immediate experience – these are the things at the center of Ulisses' artistic experience. This creative relationship with things is a spiritual revelation of being. Digital reproduction inverts its meaning. There is a diametrical inversion of the relationship between human being and cosmos when artistic perception is manufactured by the administrative and technological apparatus that inheres in digital reproduction. The place where being can be artistically apprehended and the living presence of the community that has gathered in celebration of revelation are withdrawn by the computer in its absolute mediation of all forms, all objects, all expressions, and all life. The screen can only offer us contact with the modular structure of digital reproduction, the " fractal structures of the new media" as they have been called (26). The vistas it offers are the epiphany of spectacle and the revelation of a second electronic nature.

On our first visit, Ulisses spoke with sorrow about the solitude and the incomprehension that surrounded his ceramic works. Added to this sadness, there was his greater pain about the sustained destruction of the African and indigenous cultural legacies of this vast region. He spoke of extermination. He spoke of silence. Of this silence, where the visible and the word meet their limit and where the dark boundaries of meaning become the place of artistic creation. That is the artist's last secret. The mediatic imperative of the visual, with its commodified and spectacular character and its indefinite proliferation, cancels it out.

5

When I returned to New York, the sensation that hung over me was still bittersweet. Our goodbye to Ulisses had been violent. Still, we felt his triumph against us as our own – a victory against an electronic civilization that feels compelled to colonize the heart of popular culture with the misery of its trivial images and omnipresent proliferation. While still in the grip of these feelings I was discovering, I finally began to write my report to my sponsors: "The video of The Last Artist is a paradox because of its goal: it reproduces that which cannot be reproduced, it performs images and sounds of natural landscapes, and conducts interviews on a "subject matter" that resists being reduced to performance. This video is also a paradox because of the intention to incorporate it in a global project of digital culture: the Hemispheric Institute."

It was a provocation. To digitalize an image that did not exist, to translate an invisible voice into a performance. While I was writing my administrative missive, I recalled the last scene at Ulisses' house. It was our final assault, the proof we needed to believe that we had used every weapon within reach to convince the artist to allow us to tape and interview him. We tried to intimidate him with money, an amount that, relatively speaking, must have meant a great sum to him. We barged into his house with a camera. We trotted out every form of persuasion we could come up with. Ulisses stuck to his argument and repeated it one more time. He again insisted on the secret language he shared with plants and animals, on the urgency of creating art schools for children, and on belief in God. All of a sudden, he jumped into the middle of the room and shouting at the top of his lungs, he said he would show us how he spoke to his animals and his jungle. And while he jumped and danced like a mad man and incomprehensible guttural sounds came from his throat as if he had fallen into a trance and a monstrous, gurgling bird had taken over his chest, he seemed to be telling us in a great peal of laughter that the artistic experience, when all is said and done, is an emotion, not a spectacle.

When the answer from the Institute came, it was cautiously phrased: "I'm not sure how to handle this... I had understood... to support part of the costs if the materials you developed ended up on our website... I would not be able to justify the expense to Ford. So please make sure that you give me a full and detailed report of what the project cost... We would definitely ask you to work with our designer". My response was violent: "I am perfectly aware of the intellectually challenging character of this video and research project. It explicitly challenges the postmodern construction of "Pop Art". It questions the reductive aesthetic category of "art as performance". It also exposes the prejudices, misconceptions and social misery surrounding so-called "popular art" in Latin America." There followed protests from my department of languages and literatures: "I must tell you that it greatly disturbs me that you would send a message of this type, aggressively attacking a department colleague... in a way that goes well beyond the bounds of collegial discourse..." To which I answered, "I can't but consider this reaction as an administrative retaliation against beauty as the invisible..."

But inwardly, I felt demolished. My provocation had been offensive and ineffectual. My project lacked meaning within the limited boundaries of an acceptable academic aesthetic and political discussion. And all those things we had experienced as a group during our repeated visits to Ulisses' small farm began to feel irrelevant in the atmosphere of unbreathable banality that the mediatic mobilization of the global war had unleashed on campus. I waited for time to pass. I tried to put the project out of my mind. A few months later, I sent Diane Taylor, the Director of the Hemispheric Institute, a confession, but I never got an answer.

"It is as difficult for me to justify myself as it would be to justify a suicide. When I received your confused response to my provocative report on The Last Artist, I consulted the Institute's website. Truthfully, I had never paid it much attention beforehand. I didn't have much trouble locating its theoretical and programmatic texts. It didn't take long for me to find myself in a direct collision with the aesthetically and politically problematic category of performance. I then came across an idea of spectacle that seemed to come straight out of Behavior Psychology. Finally, I found a project on the restoration of memory that relied on the socially and hermeneutically dubious process of digital translation and conversion and was entirely oblivious to its colonizing effects on oral memories. In similar fashion, I came across a theoretical perspective on the colonization of America that programmatically dismissed its fundamental rationality, and then comfortably installed itself with its own baroque logic of spectacle as the defining factor of the new powers and agents of globalization. I realized, in short, that I had knocked at the wrong door.

But the threshold had been crossed, and it was already too late. I had initially agreed to take on the project of digitalizing the documentary about Ulisses Pereira Chavez for the web. But now, I was beginning to understand, with some bewilderment, that the resistance of an artist from a remote hamlet in Minas Gerais to the electronic reproduction of his person, words and works was a tailor-made response to the Hemispheric Institute's programmatic postulates of digital cloning and colonization, of which he was certainly not aware.

In other words, the critical reconstruction of the artistic experience and its cosmic and communal significance, such as it had been formulated by Ulisses, would mean the calling into question of the theoretical legitimacy of the same epistemological presuppositions that bolster the Institute's project; this, notwithstanding the fact that I had promised to contribute a video to the Institute's collection. The conflict could not be resolved. Which is why it irritated me. If this story were to end here, I would simply apologize for the admittedly aggressive tone of my previous e-mails. But while I was writing my report to the academy, entitled Popular Art & Digital Culture: The Last Artist, I was overwhelmed by an insecure sensation, as if the ground was opening up beneath my feet. I slowly came to the realization that my involvement in this aesthetic and human drama had been wrong from the start. Worse yet. I realized that my point of departure was an empty one. Let me explain.

It was, on the one hand, very easy for me to criticize the category of spectacle, so central to the web pages of the Institute, and to do so by slamming the door so to speak. In 1968, I was with the Situationists in Paris. Their critique of spectacle, with its famous takeover of the Odéon Theater and its subsequent transformation into an improvised popular parliament, at least provisionally, had revolutionized the more sensitive youth of the capital. A few years later, I was in Berlin working on the strategies of spectacle that form the basis of the national-socialist state apparatus and studying their roots in European Baroque and Classicism. In the nineties, I wrote a book about Baroque and postmodern strategies and the ways in which they falsify memory and bring about the ontological inversion of experience. All I needed to close this circle was a critique of the colonizing function of digital culture.

On the other hand, when I reconstructed our expedition in search of a "last artist" and our lively discussions with Ulisses on the nature of the creative process and the legitimacy or lack of it in his resistance to being taped, I came to the realization that I, too, had assumed that cold and imperative gaze that I was intellectually challenging. By increments, I was beginning to see myself as an empty surface that recorded the real, whether it be the agony of a last artist, or the spectacle of the planet's economic and military destruction, as the irreality of a digital effect on a screen and of its nominalist classification and falsification. I suddenly saw myself inside my own spectral gaze where the codes of spectacle volatilize reality in the same gesture that points it out.

This allowed me to understand something to which I had not paid much attention until then. In all our meetings and for the entire duration of our conversations, Ulisses refrained from directing himself to me; he avoided my face, never looked me in the eye. He answered Lélia or directed himself to Beth. He spoke with his friend Lira and with his family. Me, he simply ignored. And I saw myself in his gaze as an absent presence, as a phantasmal entity, as the spectral surface that registers a world of knowledge, of pain and violence, that I, the digital and academic observer, could not participate in or understand.

Hence my exasperation. I wanted to break the ontological inversion of mediatic and academic spectacle. I wanted to leave my skin behind. And I wanted to do it all in one fell swoop. To be done with this business in a single furious assault directed at the colonizing function of electronic representation, heir and substitute to the colonizing function of the sacramental spectacle of the viceroyal Baroque. I desperately wanted to rid myself of a dilemma that involved experiencing the ontological exuberance of an artistic gaze such as the one Ulisses has, while simultaneously recognizing it had been besieged by the empty gaze of an academic and digitized culture and the values and powers it represents.

This was the reason for my compulsive and inexcusable aggression. With that provocative gesture, I wanted to keep from myself the fact that I, too, am part of spectacle. I wanted to hide my face as it dissolved in the translucid reflection of its own screen. I wanted to put out the eyes of my own dead consciousness.

Post Script

The video The Last Artist, directed by Beth Formaggini and produced by Lélia C. Frotta and Eduardo Subirats, is a documentary about the life and work of Ulisses Pereira Chaves, an unknown ceramist who sells his pieces for the price of the clay out of which they are fashioned and who makes a poor living from his animals and a small plot of land and who has seen his works degraded to an artisanal stature, and, who, like all the other African, indigenous and cabocle? artists in the region, and perhaps in the entire continent, has been swindled by dealers in popular art and the informal souvenir market aimed at global tourism they serve.

But this documentary is something more. It is a testimony to an ironic adventure. “When we set out on this trip, we already knew that we would not violate Ulisses' refusal to be filmed," wrote Beth in a letter she sent me after she reached home. This had always been the central issue. We knew that we would travel many thousands of kilometers to come face to face with a rejection . . . The experience, as it turned out, was a violent one. I was deeply shaken by Ulisses at the height of his fury, when he was seized by the gods and saw us as something to be exorcised. I wept and trembled like a man who had been lashed. And I had been lashed, we all had. And this is why the eye of the camera turned away from Ulisses to record the things around him: his artworks, the roads that brought us to him, his ovens that looked like temples, his house, the landscape, water, his neighbors, his family and his objects, animals, everything that was not him but that touched him or had been touched by him. Together, these things invoke his presence, his trace and the spiritual world in which it is steeped and that bears the wounds of the pillaging it has suffered.

The Last Artist is a documentary about an artist who goes to the bitter end to reject the violence of the digital conversion of his artistic vision of the world and of the electronic volatilization of his artworks as performances emptied of experience. This is the challenge this film took on: the capture by way of a digital apparatus of the intangible relationship of the human, the natural and the sacred; and the artistic expression, through the digital manipulation of light, of motion, a concert by three thousand frogs we unexpectedly came upon in the jungle, filmed expressions of the human face, the sparks of that spirituality Ulisses had opened our eyes to. And front and center and reigning over it all is the impressive body of work that makes up the private collection that has been assembled by Roberto Burle Marx of Rio de Janeiro.

As of today, in March 2003, the video is being presented in unfinished form. The final copy has been postponed for lack of sponsorship. Consequently, the director will only allow it to be screened to a didactic end and in very limited venues. It is my personal opinion that this unfinished state is the most apt and best expresses the core of this project. The Last Artist is the chronicle of an academic and digital project that was willingly aborted. It is also an account of the limits of digital expression and of its archival complicity with the processes of global destruction of cultural memory in the late-industrial age.

Last but not least, at the ouset, this documentary was conceived as a contribution to the digital record of popular tradition in Latin America that is being sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the Hemispheric Institute and New York University. The contribution was a paradoxical one; its central objective, the rejection of the digital reproduction of artistic experience, is after all at complete political odds with the objectives of an electronic institution that promotes the digital conversion of cultural memory and the diffusion of artistic expression as performance.

The Last Artist wants to draw attention to the spiritual wealth of the popular communities of America. But it also seeks to denounce the lethal impoverishment, economic and mediatic, to which these have been subjected. The authors of this work firmly believe that the solution to this dilemma does not depend on the digitalization of representation as performance. It is far more appropriate to support, both intellectually and politically, the survival of popular communities for whom these works of art are a means for the preservation and development of millenary modes of life and knowledge.

notes

1
KRENAK, Ailton. O lugar onde a terra descansa. Rio de Janeiro, Eco Rio, 2000.

2
FAYE, Jean-Pierre. Os linguagens totalitários. Madrid, Taurus, 1974, p. 567 y seguientes. Capitulo Die Reihe, a série.

3
SCHELTEMA, Frederik Adama van. Die deutsche Volkskunst und ihre Beziehungen zur germanischen Vorzeit. Leipzig, Bibliographisches Institut, 1938, p.14 y seguientes; ORTEGA E GASSET, José. Espanha invertebrada (1921). Madrid, Alianza, 1983, p. 94-97.

4
HEIBER, Helmut (editor). Goebbels-Reden. Düsseldorf, Droste Verlag, 1971, Bd. 1, p. 96.

5
Como ha señalado Agustín Laó Montes en “Mambo Montage. The Latinization of Nova York City”, in MONTES, Agustín Laó; DÁVILA, Arlene. Mambo Montage. Nova York, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 15.

6
Una crítica contra la producción fílmica de Hollywood y de Ufa como industria del entretenimiento que desarrollaron asimismo otros críticos de la época, como Siegfried Kracauer. KRACAUER, Siegfried. Das Ornament der Masse. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977, p. 271 y seguientes.

7
BENJAMIN, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften (R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser eds.) Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, vol. I-2, p. 492.

8
EHRENBURG, Ilja. Die Traumfabrik. Berlin, Malik Verlag, 1931, p. 220 y seguientes.

9
CANNADAY, John. “Pop Art Sells On and On” in: WHITE, David Manning (ed.). Pop Culture in America. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1968, p. 238 y seguientes.

10
HUYSSEN, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1986, p. 155.

11
FISHWICK, Marshall W. Popular Culture. Cavespace to Cyberspace. Nova York / London / Oxford, The Haworth Press, 1999, p. 247-249.

12
The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1984, p. 118.

13
HERDER, Johann Gottfried. Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Frankfurt a. Main, Deutscher Klasssiker Verlag, 1992, p. 242.

14
Ibid., p. 123 y seguientes.

15
This opening up of the concept of culture and challenging of a monolithic, techno-scientific rationality has also been a stated objective of classical anthropology, not to mention twentieth century literature. With respect to Brazil, for example, there has been a concerted effort that is reflected in a long list of critical essays and studies. We owe two of these works to none less than the founders of Brazilian anthropology: Curt Nimiendajú Unkel and Theodor Koch-Grünberg. [NIMUENDAJÚ, Curt. As lendas da criação e destruição do Mundo como fundamentos da religião dos Apapocúva-Guaraní. São Paulo, Editora Hucitec, 1987; KOCH-GRÜNBERG, Theodor. Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern. Reisen in Nordwest-Brasilien 1903/1905. Graz, Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1967].  The latter worked in the field of the visual arts of Amazonian nations and compiled a vast series of oral narrations that served as the point of departure for one of the pioneering works of Latin American Modernity: Macunaíma by Mario de Andrade. Mario de Andrade, himself, is responsible for extensive field work on popular Brazilian music. More recently, Berta G. Ribeiro devoted a theoretical work to the definitions of indigenous and popular art. [RIBEIRO, Berta G. Arte Indígena, Linguagem Visual. Indigenous art, Visual Language, São Paulo, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1989]. Nor should we forget the studies carried out by José Guimarães Rosa and Darcy Ribeiro; by existing in a middleground that seeks to combine anthropology and literature, these works expressly demonstrate how the philogical restoration of legends, artistic expressions and traditional modes of knowledge can be integrated into a modern world in order to counteract its twisted course of human destruction and plunder. [BASTOS, Augusto Roa. As culturas condenadas. México D.F., Siglo XXI, 1978].

16
EINSTEIN, Carl. Negerplasstik. München, Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1920, p. 12 y seguientes.

17
ELIADE, Mircea. Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1951, p. 98-99.

18
PRANDI, Reginaldo. Mitologia dos Orixás. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2001, p. 164 y seguientes.

19
BENJAMIN, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften (op. cit.), vol.2.1., p. 145 y seguientes; DEWEY, John. Experience and Nature. Nova York, Dover Publications, 1958, p. 82.

20
STEINER, Rudolf (ed.). Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Schriften. Weimar, H. Bèohlau, 1890-1904, vol 1, p. XXXI.

21
IZUTSU, Toshihiko. Sufismo e taoísmo. Madrid, Siruela, 1993, vol I, p. 226 y seguientes.

22
KLEE, Paul. Schriften, Rezensionen und Aufsätze. Köln, DuMont Buchverlag, 1976, p. 118.

23
MARRA, Michele. Modern Japanese Aesthetics. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1999, p. 254.

24
LORCA, Federico García. Conferências. Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1984, vol. II, p. 85 y seguientes.

25
OTTO, Walter F. Aufsätze zur Römischen Religionsgeschichte. Meisenheim am Glan, Verlag Anton Hain, 1975, p. 92 y seguientes.

26
MANOVICH, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge / London, The MIT Press, 2001. p. 30.

[translation by Nadia Benavid]

about author

Eduardo Subirats é autor de uma série de obras sobre teoria da modernidade, estética das vanguardas, assim como sobre a crise da filosofia contemporânea e a colonização da América. Escreve assiduamente na imprensa latino-americana e espanhola artigos de crítica cultural e social