Anna Bella Geiger, Diário (Diary), 1974. Artist’s book, 20 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 5 7/8 × 5 7/8 in. (15 × 15 cm). Ed. 5/25
The Writer in Residence series offers scholars the opportunity to conduct research on Latin American art through materials in the ISLAA Library and Archives.
It’s 1974, and in her Rio de Janeiro studio, the artist Anna Bella Geiger produces one of her first artist’s notebooks. She faintly traces a horizontal line in pencil on the white rectangular cover and then, on top of it, she composes the word “Nearer,” transferring the Letraset letters one by one. Inside, a sequence of photocopies reproduces, page after page, the successive enlargement of an image of a blade inside another white rectangle. The set of close-ups, through which the artist gradually approaches the object, lead the reader of the notebook to the point where the edge of the blade fills the entire image of the frame diagonally, accompanied by a phrase at the bottom of the page: “Nearer to the edge” (figs. 1–3).
Fig. 1: Anna Bella Geiger, Nearer, 1974. Artist’s book, 22 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 7 1/8 × 8 7/8 in. (18 × 22.5 cm). Ed. 5/50
Fig. 2: Anna Bella Geiger, Nearer, 1974. Artist’s book, 22 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 7 1/8 × 8 7/8 in. (18 × 22.5 cm). Ed. 5/50
Fig. 3: Anna Bella Geiger, Nearer (Más cerca), 1974. Artist’s book, 22 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 7 1/8 × 8 7/8 in. (18 × 22.5 cm). Ed. 5/50
Geiger’s notebooks are a means of engaging in open aesthetic exploration.
In total, Geiger produced about twenty notebooks between 1974 and 1977. 1 She called them “caderninhos.” Most of the titles on the covers were made with Letraset, and inside, she recurrently used photocopying as a means of reproducing images. Regarding the notebooks, Geiger said at the time that they were a response to the impossibility of sustaining the artist’s relationship with the art system, and that they served as a tool to inquire about the true function of the artist in today’s society, particularly in Brazil. 2 From cartographies to drawing, from the use of text to the appropriation of mechanisms of school teaching and evaluation, incorporating photoconceptualism and even the stickers that circulated popularly in newspaper stands, Geiger’s notebooks are a means of engaging in open aesthetic exploration.
In the following lines, I propose a reading of those books—although I will prefer to call them notebooks, as the artist herself called them—in dialogue with a category articulated in Latin America during the seventies: non-objectualism. 3 This term wasn’t just a way of naming conceptual practices from Latin America. It was primarily an operative category for considering the intersections between the sociopolitical realities of the region and various forms visual thought that manifested across a wide range of cultural and artistic expressions, including geometricisms, mail art, urban interventions, walkable sculpture, environmental art, action art, handicrafts, designs, and conceptual practices.
In May 1981, Brazilian critic and curator Aracy Amaral presented a lecture at the Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano sobre Arte No-objetual y Arte Urbano (First Latin American Colloquium on Non-Objectual Art and Urban Art), highlighting the main aspects of non-objectualism in Brazil. The lecture’s appendix included a chronology of the key events of this type in the country (figs 4–7). Amaral included several works and actions by Geiger, such as the pedagogical activities she carried out with Lygia Pape and Antonio Manuel in 1971 at the Museum de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro during the summer course “Atividade Criatividade,” the action Circumambulatio (Circumambulation, 1972), the course “Arte, um percurso. Do objeto ao corpo,” held with Frederico Morais and Guilherme Vaz (1973), and O pão nosso de cada dia (Our Daily Bread, 1979). Although the artist’s notebooks were not included in Amaral’s chronology, likely due to their limited circulation, their material condition, conceptual proposal, and embodiment of a particular visual thought align closely with the characteristics of non-objectualism.
Fig. 4: Aracy Amaral, “Tentativa de cronologia de principais eventos do não-objetualismo no Brasil,” 1981. Typewritten document. Archive of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia
Fig. 5: Aracy Amaral, “Tentativa de cronologia de principais eventos do não-objetualismo no Brasil,” 1981. Typewritten document. Archive of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia
Fig. 6: Aracy Amaral, “Tentativa de cronologia de principais eventos do não-objetualismo no Brasil,” 1981. Typewritten document. Archive of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia
Fig. 7: Aracy Amaral, “Tentativa de cronologia de principais eventos do não-objetualismo no Brasil,” 1981. Typewritten document. Archive of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia
The notebooks emerged as a response to the erosion of the arts due to the political situation, which inevitably led to experimentation with alternative media and forms of expression that sought in the artistic object new possibilities for communication.
Geiger’s foray into conceptual practices occurred after an intense period of rethinking prompted by her disillusionment with the traditional object of art and its modes of representation. Questions about the meaning and significance of creation, the role of the artist within the social and political conditions, 4 and explorations of less conventional formats, among other concerns, marked a singular turn in Geiger’s work from the early seventies. In this context, the notebooks emerged as a response to the erosion of the arts due to the political situation, which inevitably led to experimentation with alternative media and forms of expression that sought in the artistic object new possibilities for communication. 5
In this context, the polysemic quality of Geiger’s work and her extensive use of media during the 1970s (engraving, pedagogical actions, maps, video, photomontage, postcards, etc.) finds in the notebooks an inescapable point of articulation. The notebooks bring together a series of concerns and ideas ranging from cartographic representation to Brazil’s colonial and historical circumstances, from philosophy to linguistics, and from the art system to pedagogy. Functioning as a sort of antenna, the contents of the notebook perceptively capture the events of the present moment, always drawing a dialectical parallel between social reality and the evolving landscape of art. Moreover, they testify to a particular way of experiencing art, perhaps as a vital necessity—in the words of the critic Mário Pedrosa—where Geiger channels her personal experience in relation to the art system and the country’s conditions. 6
For Amaral, the proposals that distinguished non-objectualism in Latin America from the neo-avant-garde of the main artistic centers in the United States and Europe, were those in which, through the integration of creativity was integrated, political connotation emerged in a broad sense (both directly and through metaphor). 7 According to Amaral, “by manifesting that ‘political’ intentionality, [the artists of non-objectualism] reveal their commitment to their here-and-now, establishing a divergence between their proposals and those coming from a purely cosmopolitan information.” 8 Geiger’s notebooks coincide with this statement.
For example, the feeling of being on the razor’s edge present in Nearer recurs in Diário (Diary, 1974). In it, Geiger selects an illustration from a children’s booklet designed to teach them to read a clock. The notebook begins with the original sentence that appears at the top edge of the booklet’s page, pointing to an instruction: “The clock is striking the hours. This clock is striking ...,” to which the artist responds, as if completing the lesson of the booklet: “the time when the artist fell asleep.” The image is repeated six times, with the clock always empty, without its hands, as if this absence marks an eternal present, an instant, a definitive here and now. On the seventh page, the answer changes, and the artist writes, still by hand and in pencil: “The time when the artist should wake up.” Finally, the eighth and last page has a question as its answer: “At what time?”, with the clock still empty, as if that awakening, as if the artist’s consciousness about his social function, remains completely uncertain in the face of the urgent political conditions of the country (fig. 10).
Fig. 8: Anna Bella Geiger, Diário (Diary), 1974. Artist’s book, 20 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 5 7/8 × 5 7/8 in. (15 × 15 cm). Ed. 5/25
Fig. 9: Anna Bella Geiger, Diário (Diary), 1974. Artist’s book, 20 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 5 7/8 × 5 7/8 in. (15 × 15 cm). Ed. 5/25
Fig. 10: Anna Bella Geiger, Diário (Diary), 1974. Artist’s book, 20 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 5 7/8 × 5 7/8 in. (15 × 15 cm). Ed. 5/25
The contents of each notebook generally follow a narrative sequence that interweaves images and text. Dária Jaremtchuk notes that Geiger’s use of photocopying as a printing and reproduction system for most of the images was more of a technical resource rather than a conceptual exploration of Xerox photocopying, a medium commonly used at the time by other artists such as Hudinilson Jr. or Paulo Bruscky. The notebooks were produced manually, and show a decidedly handcrafted character in their production. 9 The binding, in most of them, is the same one that was used for photocopied books—a type of acetate spiral binding—with the exception of the notebooks Manual ilustrado (Illustrated Mannual, 1974), Fórmulas (Formulae, 1975), A Little Golden Book (1975), and Pequena lenda brasileira (Little Brazilian Legend, 1975), which have a half-cloth binding with a straight spine, and Encontros (Encounters, 1975), which is made from a telephone book.
It is precisely in Encontros that the contacts of the art world are intertwined with personal and emotional bonds. There, Geiger appears alongside other artists—both Brazilian and international—and with members of her own family. The alphabetical order of the phone book is used to locate each of the characters by last name: Acconci Vito, under A; Beuys, Joseph, under B; Clark, Lygia, under C … Each name is accompanied by the year of the encounter and a photocopied photograph, pasted onto the page, showing Geiger with the respective person. In some cases, such as the pages dedicated to Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, and Barnett Newman, the artist employs photomontage to turn the encounters into fictional narratives.
Fig. 11: Anna Bella Geiger, Encontros (Encounters), 1975. Artist’s book, 76 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 6 1/2 × 4 1/4 in. (16.5 × 10.8 cm). Ed. 5/25
Fig. 12: Anna Bella Geiger, Encontros (Encounters), 1975. Artist’s book, 76 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 6 1/2 × 4 1/4 in. (16.5 × 10.8 cm). Ed. 5/25
Fig. 13: Anna Bella Geiger, Admissão, 1975. Artist’s book, 20 pages, collage and graphite on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 8 3/8 × 5 7/8 in. (21.4 × 15 cm).Ed. 7/25
Fig. 14: Anna Bella Geiger, Admissão (Admisión), 1975. Artist’s book, 20 pages, collage and pencil on paper with spiral binding; page (each): 8 3/8 × 5 7/8 in. (21.4 × 15 cm). Ed. 7/25
The main contents in the notebooks are the artistic and cultural system, on the one hand, and Brazilian history, on the other. In both cases, the critical and ironic force lies in what appear to be responses to the civilizing program of the military dictatorship. Thus, faced with the triumphalist myths of the country’s progress and growth that official propaganda promoted through different communication strategies and advertising campaigns, Geiger recurrently responded with satire, parody, and humor. 10
In Admissão (Admission, 1975), the artist takes a school exam on the geography of Brazil that includes questions about the country’s size relative to other continents and countries, its location within South America, its proximity to the equator, the links between fauna and the economy in the Amazon, and demographic issues, always with an implicit ideology that suggests a certain air of progress and similarity to First World countries, attributed to Brazil’s vast territory. To the exam questions Geiger adds, on a typewriter, other questions and statements about the art system: Which countries have art infrastructures inferior to Brazil’s? Who are the main producing artists? Can art be considered a staple for Brazilians? This strategy, which subtly inserts content—since it is difficult to identify them at first glance—places the content in a sort of camouflage or counterinformation.
Two maps made by the artist also appear amid the exam. The first shows Brazil’s territory in white surrounded by a typewritten text about the country’s colonial history, while the second preserves a hydrographic map overlaid with the text of the previous map. It is worth noting at this point that in 1969, Geiger began to seek a geographical system of representation, which initiated a type of cartographic thinking that, as the artist herself has mentioned, led to the production of different types of maps, marking a transition from geopolitics to geopoetics. This type of cartographic representation also extended to works such as Correntes culturais (Cultural Currents, 1976), in which Geiger seems to engage with the postulates of dependency theory and the notion of the Third World, which by then was a central theme within the intellectual debates of the cultural field and the social sciences. Ideas such as those of the avant-garde and underdevelopment—and the consequent response by different artists in Latin America—territory as a signifier of a specific geography, or criticisms of Mercator’s projection, were issues that appeared both in the notebooks’ maps and in other screen prints of the time. In this sense, Bernardo Mosqueira points out that the development of counter-cartographies was also one of the main features of these works. 11
How to think about Geiger’s artist’s notebooks through a notion such as that of non-objectualism? This question prompts me to revisit one of the ideas proposed by Amaral in 1981. In addition to bodily proposals often linked to popular festivities or esotericism, the Brazilian critic highlighted as part of non-objectualism what she called “actions stimulating creativity,” which included the summer course “Atividade Criatividade” conducted by Geiger, Lygia Pape, and Antonio Manuel at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 1971. 12
This allows us to establish a link between non-objectualism and pedagogy as an immediate antecedent to the notebooks. The course served as an homage to the critic Mário Pedrosa, who was in exile in Chile at the time. It sought to demystify the museum space through objects and stimuli proposed to students, with the goal of opening artistic practice to the urban space. Held Monday to Friday, the course, according to Geiger, centered on the notion of the “non-material,” that is, in avoiding the use of conventional art materials to produce an artistic experience. Students were to bring materials they found on the way from their homes to the museum to experiment with during the sessions. The concept of creativity sought there by Geiger, Pape, and Manuel, in tune with Pedrosa’s ideas, ultimately unleashed a sense of creative freedom with materials beyond the confines of the museum.
Many of the strategies used in the “caderninhos” are closely linked to pedagogy. According to Bernardo Mosqueira, this link, which the artist had been cultivating since the 1960s, extends to the notebooks, in an act in which teaching and artistic production go hand in hand through experimentation with materials, mediums, and ideas. The similarity of Geiger’s notebooks with school notebooks is indicative of the presence of pedagogy, both in terms of material support and of the ideological and conceptual approaches embodied in their contents. The expressive structure, which juxtatposes words and images, seeks to dismantle, in a sort of counter-pedagogy, the educational postulates of the military regime. How to teach national history, the question of identities, and the meaning of the national? The bias that the dictatorship had placed on the teaching of these issues led Geiger, who saw these forms of education firsthand in her own children, to experiment in her notebooks with a type of visuality that tried to dissociate itself from these norms. These strategies, according to Mosqueira, “parodied or appropriated booklets, school exams, and children’s books. In these notebooks, we can perceive a tension between the desire to transmit knowledge and communication about political issues forbidden at the time and, at the same time, a desire for codification and stealth.” 13
Amaral pointed out that non-objectual experiences assumed various dimensions during the 1970s: some opted for a playful-anarchic quality, others were purely playful, some were pedagogical, others satiricized conventional art; some, at times, addressed different forms of urban intervention, and others assumed a practice of a conceptual character (in the latter category, Amaral included Geiger’s works, in addition to those of Waltércio Caldas and Cildo Meireles, among others). The singular point of intersection that can be seen in the notebooks between the appropriation of school teaching methods and elements of visual culture, the questioning of ideological and conceptual issues, institutional criticism, and experimentation on the artistic object, generates a singular, rich, and heterogeneous visuality that situates Anna Bella Geiger’s production in distinctly Latin American coordinates. This visual thinking leads to the central postulate of non-objectualisms: to serve as forms of creative expansion, embedding within the artistic object a liberating potential in the face of the socioaesthetic reality of Latin American countries.
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