Conceptions and determinations
of baroque and new baroque
in the last decade
A discussion between Jens Baumgarten, Claire Farago, Stefano Jacoviello,
Monika Kaup, and Gabriela Siracusano, moderated by Helen Hills
Baroque needs to be thought across chronological and geographical divides
to connect architecture and dance, painting and natural science, philosophy,
sculpture and music (and not in the sense of representations of music) and,
above all, in relation to encounters with difference – heavenly, earthly, social,
political, religious, geographical. What possibilities in baroque are open now
in relation to present dilemmas in art history and world events?
Baroque enables – arguably, it – a radical rethinking of historical time –
and a rethinking of familiar history. It permits a liberation from periodization and linear time, as well as from historicism. While the scholars below acknowledge that baroque is often equated with style or historical period, it is
most productively thought beyond them. Mieke Bal has argued that baroque
epistemology permits an “hallucinatory quality” of relation between past and
present that also allows a release from a supposed academic objectivity, while
insisting that the engagement with the past should remain discomfiting and
profoundly disturbing. Instead of repressing the past and time, creative retrospection allows its implications to emerge. In its materiality and bodiliness,
baroque undermines resolution, gropes towards fragmentation, overgrows,
and exceeds. Baroque architecture may be seen as overflowing, an excess of
ornamental exteriority and evasive proliferation. This brings to the fore the
question of surface. Andrew Benjamin’s approach to surface as neither merely
structural nor merely decoration in architecture is important here. Baroque
time and form impinge on each other – that is, not simply the time that it
takes to process point of view into form, but of form into point of view. Thus
the pursuit is for a baroque vision of vision, a baroque audition of hearing,
and a multitemporality. The question of materiality (not mere matter, materials, or technique) must also come into play.
While Heinrich Wölfflin insists on a chronological periodization for baroque
(broadly, the sixteenth century), even as he identifies formal characteristics
that may exceed that periodization, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze in
particular permit baroque to free itself from such an anchor.
Irlemar Chiampi writes: “The Baroque, with its historical and geographical, not to mention aesthetic, eccentricity, confronts the historicist canon (the
new ‘classicism’) constructed in the hegemonic centers of the Western world,
thereby functioning to redefine the terms according to which Latin America
enters into the orbit of Euro-American modernity. The Baroque, crossroads
Débat
Claire Farago is Professor of
Renaissance art, theory, and
criticism at the University of
Colorado-Boulder. Her publications include Art Is Not What
You Think It Is (2012).
Helen Hills is Professor of
Art History at the University
of York. She has published
extensively on baroque art and
architecture and is completing
a monograph on miracles and
baroque materiality.
Monika Kaup is Professor in
English and adjunct Professor
in Comparative Literature at the
University of Washington. Her
projects include Neobaroque in
the Americas (2012).
Gabriela Siracusano is a researcher for the CONICET, professor
of art history, and director of the
Centro de Investigación en Arte,
Materia y Cultura (Universidad
Nacional de Tres de Febrero).
Jens Baumgarten is Professor
of Art History at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo and
a researcher at the Conselho
Nacional de Desenvolvimento
Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).
Stefano Jacoviello teaches
Semiotics of Culture and History of Music at the University of Siena. He is involved as
scientific coordinator in several
international research projects
on performing heritage.
15
Baroque and new baroque
1. Church of Santa Caterina,
Palermo.
16
of signs and temporalities, aesthetic logic of mourning and
melancholy, luxuriousnesss and
pleasure, erotic convulsion and
allegorical pathos, reappears
to bear witness to the crisis or
end of modernity and to the very
condition of a continent that
could not be assimilated by the
project of the Enlightenment.” 1
Ye t “ b a r o q u e a s C o u n t e rReformation” already too hasty
elides baroque and CounterReformation. Certainly, this
has been the dominant model
within European scholarship
on European baroque. But it is
a perennial cliché, endlessly reiterated but rarely critically examined. In the great churches of Pallavicino
in Bologna the cry of the Counter-Reformation resounds. But this is far from
the situation in Naples or Sicily (fig. 1) where the greatest adventures of the
baroque take place. Baroque is far more than a first response to the spiritual
crisis of the Reformation. Hostilities to Muslims, Moriscos and Jews arguably
have as much purchase as anti-Protestantism.
Arguably, the deficiencies of “baroque as Counter-Reformation” come most
sharply to light, less within the Old World than in relation to their implications in the “New.” While the damaging (limiting) effects outsideOld
Europe of what is, after all, a representational (and reactionary) mode of
conceptualizing baroque within Europe become more readily and horribly
apparent outside Europe, this does not mean that this is a problem to be
addressed only outside of Europe. Far from it. It is vital to recall that the
Spanish monarchy took advantage of baroque for its imperializing projects within Europe, as well as beyond it. Thus while scholarship that looks
beyond Europe is urgently required, the Europe/non-Europe paradigm is
unhelpful in thinking about baroque’s effects and impulses. A rethinking
of the paradigms of baroque and of the so-called “Counter-Reformation”
within Europe is thus urgently required. Indeed, arguably, it is precisely here that new paradigms are most urgently needed. This should send us
back to “Old Europe” as much as to Latin America – with a desire to re-examine, this time far more critically, precisely those most familiar and outworn Old European paradigms.
Might scholarship of baroque in Latin America usefully be redeployed in relation to European baroque? “Why is Latin America the chosen territory of
the baroque?” asks Alejo Carpentier, “Because all symbiosis, all mestizaje,
engenders the baroque” 2. How might baroque Europe be thought in terms
of mestizaje? Does baroque exhalt in the ineradicable character of antagonism? If New World baroque emerges as more than a faithful imitation of
the colonial model, more than simply a ‘top down’ imposition by colonialists,
but something new, original, a rebellious affirmation of a nascent mestizo
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Baroque and new baroque
American culture, generated through the minoritization of a colonial model
at the hands of the subjected users who were forced to inhabit it, then what
are the implications of this for Spanish colonized Flanders or Italy?
How might the potential that baroque offers in relation to history – including history of art, music, literature – and conceptions of the past be best
seized? In what ways might baroque decenter familiar narratives of the
long seventeenth century? One of baroque’s greatest offerings is in terms of
historical time. History is too readily mobilized for political ends. Resisting
periodization assists in thwarting simple historicism. Instead of subjecting time to chronology, Benjamin’s allegorical way of seeing grasps the constellation which one era has formed with an earlier one, opening a possibility of resistance to the catastrophe of modernity. Deleuze’s theory of the
baroque fold, in contrast, investigates the baroque as a creative principle. 3
Together they demonstrate baroque’s rich potential. Baroque as a nonobjectivist mode might explore slippages between appearance and truth, deception and insight. On the other hand, it may reiterate these tropes precisely as a means to halt a rethinking of history and thus an opening of a
different future. One needs only to consider the usefulness of baroque to the
absolutists. It is, rather, the untapped possibilities within baroque that can
now be engaged. But must baroque inevitably be seen in relation to “modernity”? There is a risk here of seeing the past only in relation to a certain conception of the present’s concern with the present, not as an opening afforded within that present, but as leading in a more teleological sense to its own
conventional representation of itself to itself. To think “across” chronologies
already depends on some recognition of them; thus the issue of temporality and of a history that is not historicist emerges as central. Baroque brings
discrepancy and rupture, not simply harmony; the shattering of what was
taken for granted. This is not a question of linear time: baroque is always
already contemporary. Fold and scale are already at play and one is enfolded in what one studies: point of view involves self-reflection, a self-awareness and self-consciousness. A serious engagement with history as a problem
should prevent this from being a simply narcissistic matter. The fold involves
the subject within materialist experience, but the matter or materiality extends beyond the subject. [Helen Hills 4]
Helen Hills. How useful is the term “baroque” in your current research? Do you use
it? What do you see as its principal opportunities and traps?
Monika Kaup. I am currently exploring new approaches to conceptualizing the
baroque and neobaroque as a “networked” aesthetics of complexity. On the one
hand, this speaks to the formal characteristics of baroque and neobaroque expression – excess, ornateness, de-centering proliferation (the anti-minimalist principle
of “more is more”). But it is also a continuation of my efforts to resolve the impasse
of what Walter Moser calls the “conceptual Babel” of the baroque. 5 My comparative study Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual
Art, and Film focused on finding a way of theorizing the transhistorical and transcultural continuities of the baroque and neobaroque in ways that would neither
dismiss the original European baroque nor shortchange the heterogeneity of the
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Baroque and new baroque
2. Side Altar, Church of Santa
MaríaTonantzintla (1690-1730),
State of Puebla, Mexico.
18
“new” baroques that have emerged in its wake. As I argued there, after four centuries of nonlinear development across multiple boundaries among nations, ethnic
groups, historical periods, and disciplines, we have to dispense with the notion
of “one single baroque,” the property of segregated social groups and disciplines.
A new “image of thought” (Deleuze) has to be found to account for the multiplicity of baroques accumulated by centuries of nonlinear development: the European
baroque (a continental formation and the cultural logic of early modern authoritarianism – absolutism and the Counter-Reformation); the New World baroque (the
rebellious, de-colonizing offshoots of the European baroque in Europe’s colonies in
the Americas), and the neobaroque (the recuperation and revival of the seventeenthcentury baroque in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, visual art, film,
and philosophy). Examples of neobaroque theoretical reconceptualizations of the
baroque are: a “timeless,” transhistorical style (Eugenio d’Ors); the medium of rebellious anti-colonial Latin American expression (Ángel Guido; Alejo Carpentier; José
Lezama Lima); the alternative modernity of the Hispanic world (Irlemar Chiampi
and Bolívar Echeverría) – the list goes on. In Neobaroque in the Americas, I suggested that – against the grain of familiar scholarly attempts to “own” the baroque
(by the Hispanophone world, or by the discipline of art history) – the baroque and
neobaroque today must be recognized as an “open system” or hybrid network, a
kind of non-totalizable whole: “the baroque refuses to regard culture as a fixed,
‘self-contained system,’ the property of discrete, segregated social groups. Rather,
the baroque is an ‘anti-proprietary expression’ that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists; few artistic and representational phenomena are so good
at bending so many ways as the baroque.” 6 Evidence of this is the existence of
neobaroques in Anglo American modernism (T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes), largely ignored because of Anglophone culture’s ingrained wariness of the baroque.
Eliot and Barnes, paralleling the Spanish Generation
of ’27’s recovery of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora, or the Mexican vanguardista Contemporáneos’
recuperation of New World baroque writers such as
Sor Juana and Bernardo de Balbuena, contributed to
the neobaroque revival and rehabilitation of baroque
writers and artists by reclaiming the English metaphysical poets (Eliot) and Robert Burton and early modern
melancholia (Barnes) respectively. Further afield, the
baroque-neobaroque network connects, for example,
Góngora with the hip-hop baroque, in works by the
contemporary African American artist Kehinde Wiley
and Cuban American artist Luis Gispert. And the baroque strategy of rebellious stylization and re-creation
of the icons of dominant Western culture links eighteenth-century Mexican folk baroque churches such as
the Church of Santa María Tonantzintla (fig. 2) with the
rasquache baroque in contemporary Chicano culture,
such as Chicano lowrider automobiles (fig. 3). 7
In short, the transhistorical and transcultural
continuities of the baroque and neobaroque pose the
problem of theorizing emergence and the phenomenon
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Baroque and new baroque
of re-origination. How do we understand the appearance of “new” baroques, some
of which go against the social meanings the baroque had at its origins in Europe? My
new project explores links between the baroque and contemporary “holistic” and
network theories, such as complexity theory (the theory of dynamic or self-organizing
systems), and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. 8 These theories offer new ways
of conceptualizing the complex historical aggregate of the baroque network. Dynamic systems are systems operating far from equilibrium, which have self-regulating
mechanisms, multiple causality and interactive feedback loops that allow the system
to maintain itself in a dynamic state of balance. These self-organizing mechanisms
enable the system to pass from one state (or “attractor”) to another in different ranges
of parameters, as well as evolve in time by undergoing major discontinuities (or “bifurcations”). Complexity or self-organization theory was first elaborated by chemist
Ilya Prigogine and further developed by biologists Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Stuart Kauffman as well as sociologists such as Niklas Luhmann. I argue that
the shift to a “dynamical systems” view was a step taken by the founder of modern
baroque studies, Heinrich Wölfflin. Wölfflin’s formalist and morphogenetic account
of the baroque aesthetic can be linked to the dynamical systems model, which prioritizes wholes and patterns of relationships over the independence of parts, just as
his account of Renaissance classicism can be seen to embody the dominant modern
analytic paradigm, which anatomizes wholes by breaking them into parts. Reversing
the dominant modern relationship between parts and wholes, Wölfflin placed the
baroque squarely within the twentieth-century paradigm shift from the analytical to a
holistic or complexity approach.
3a. Jesse Valadez, Gypsy Rose,
1964 Chevrolet Impala; b. Mike
Lopez, Twilight Zone, 1962
Chevrolet Impala SS, interior with
custom-tailored velour upholstery,
swivel chairs, wet bat, and
decorative skulls.
Claire Farago. For the past year I have been working on a research topic centered on
early seventeenth-century Rome that bears directly on the construction of chronological turning points, specifically on the locus classicus for the transition from the Late
Renaissance to the baroque in painting. Why is Caravaggio’s work still seen as an interruption in linear developmental schemes of periodization? 9 In my current research,
Catholic Reformation-minded ecclesiastics who were also major art collectors and
directly involved with the recently established Roman Accademia di San Luca initially supported Caravaggio. 10 Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte was Caravaggio’s
first major Roman patron as well as protector of the Roman Accademia di San Luca.
At his death in 1626, the recently elected Pope Urban VIII appointed his 27-year
old nephew Francesco Barberini as Cardinal-Protector of the Accademia. Cardinal
Barberini built his own art collection by acquiring many works from the estate of del
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Baroque and new baroque
Monte. Soon, however, he directed his patronage to the new modern style exemplified in the work of Pietro da Cortona, whose bravura brushwork and dynamic compositions consisting of voluminous, dramatically foreshortened allegorical personifications and historical figures praising the Barberini family soon decorated the ceiling
of the family palace. The poetics of the grand manner that also came to be practiced
by sculptors like Bernini can be identified with/as epideictic rhetoric, that is, highly
embellished praise in visual form. 11 This new, elevated “modern” style distinguished
Barberini’s taste in monumental painting from other alternatives, including the very
different dramatic effects of Caravaggio and the caravaggisti, and Poussin’s restrained
historie long associated with Albertian decorum transposed to the visual register from
the Ciceronian middle style. 12 Yet Cardinal Barberini also continued to sponsor publications where optical naturalism focused on documenting objects and specimens
“scientifically” was effective and preferable.
I can say unequivocally that the period term “baroque,” with its inevitable shadings of style (in the modern sense of that word), is both anachronistic and misleading
when it is applied to the historical circumstances in which art historians of the nineteenth century (but not earlier) located a major periodic threshold. 13 Furthermore, the
concept of periodization is unnecessary to do historical work – nor is it desirable in my
view. 14 My own engagement with period/style terms is historiographical – because so
much is invested in our archives, I engage these terms in order to unpack them.
Stefano Jacoviello. Through perseverance, Wölfflin and Eugenio d’Ors 15 freed the baroque from the fetters of chronology, transforming it into a particularly fruitful space
of reflection. This shift has been relevant not only for the history of the arts and aesthetics but for studies on culture in general. Reasoning through anachronisms, and
pointing out common forms and devices in objects pertaining to diverse periods and
fields of knowledge, helps to intimately understand Seicento works while at the same
time showing how and why they concern us. That is the path I usually try take in my
research about music, between semiotics and theory of arts.
In musicology studies, which usually fluctuate between a philology radically
rooted in the sources – described as finds – and reflection on the socio-historical
reception of the works, the baroque is typically treated as something self-evident.
Coping with the impossible congruence of authors like Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Vivaldi, Bach and Leo without relying upon mere chronological labels (late,
early, full…) does not seem so intriguing to the majority of scholars.
Nonetheless, as Deleuze says, “irregular pearls exist, but the baroque has no
reason to exist without a concept that forms this very reason.” 16 Therefore, while fully
respecting the musical sources, in my opinion, the analysis of specific formal configurations can lead to rediscovering in the folds of Monteverdi’s compositions those devices
aimed at endowing sound with a vibrant sensuality. Through the application of those
devices, which establish the traits of a new musical discourse, the listener is transformed
into a world where passions clash and music becomes an experimental field for observing the physics of the soul, similarly to the way in which Galileo’s instruments were
utilized to explore the external nature of the world. 17 A deep structural understanding
of how Monteverdi’s works relate to the birth of modernity in music can additionally
highlight the features of the epistemic turning point we call the baroque.
Furthermore, an approach of this kind may help to understand how Domenico
Scarlatti provided the listener with a sentimental role, one that not only resurfaces
in the work of François Couperin or Jean-Philippe Rameau but that also emerges in
20
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the structure of the beholder in the
paintings of Alessandro Magnasco,
Fra Galgario, Canaletto, Bernardo
Bellotto, Francesco Guardi and up
to William Mallord Turner (fig. 4). 18
All in all I think that “baroque,” rather than providing concepts for classifying objects created
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, can be useful in
that it teaches us to examine the
cultural phenomena of every period
through a certain lens. The comparative use of its formal models
can reveal how Peter Greenaway’s 19
or Paul Klee’s work on images or
György Ligeti’s on sounds operate. 20
And it is not so much because their
works are nurtured by ghosts of the past or by musical remnants, but because they
revive and pursue an inquiry of issues raised by Seicento culture: that is, art as a
self-reflexive instrument for describing on an immanent level forms of sensibility
that speak about the way we feel alive.
4. Peter Greenaway, installation
view of Leonardo’s Last Supper:
A Vision by Peter Greenaway,
exhibited December 3,
2010-January 6, 2011 at the Park
Avenue Armory, New York.
Jens Baumgarten and Gabriela Siracusano. We would still consider the term “baroque” to be important – but mainly as part of a discursive analysis. It can be seen
either from a historiographical or from a theoretical or conceptual perspective. This
leads to the question of different culturally defined “baroques” and different – or even
conflicting or contradictory – inscriptions in local discourses. This includes a distinct
meaning of the term itself and its cultural implications and categories. In studies on
the Spanish viceroyalties, the term “baroque” has embraced diverse and sometimes
opposing styles, giving rise recently to conflicting uses. Because of the different existing discourses of the “baroque,” there is no one chronological definition but several,
which have to be considered in their respective contexts.
The label is also important, because it is, in our opinion, one of the founding
terms of art history as a discipline. The style paradigm, and its importance in establishing art history as a “science” (Wissenschaft), plays a crucial role, as does the continuing debate about the term and its different discourses. When teaching we characterize
the baroque as a dazzling notion that everyone seems to agree upon spontaneously
but that, when one is asked to define it, leads to rich discussions and debates.
Jens Baumgarten. One of my research fields is to analyze the different traditions of the
baroque in Europe and Latin America – its differentiations and contradictions.
Gabriela Siracusano. As for studies regarding the material dimension of Spanish
American artistic production, it is worth saying that, although the art of Spanish, native, mestizo and creole artists may have displayed materials and techniques similar to
those used on the Old Continent, they applied diverse and original strategies to create
images seemingly quite different from those that, over time, came to be understood as
baroque in the historiography.
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Baroque and new baroque
5. Capilla doméstica, Iglesia de
la Compañía de Jesús, Córdoba,
Argentina.
22
Jens Baumgarten and Gabriela Siracusano. As important contributions to the field
of baroque we would emphasize the “classics” from Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin
Panofsky, Walter Benjamin, Eugenio d’Ors, and Germain Bazin, including the neobaroque works of Omar Calabrese. 21 It depends, however, on whether the baroque
is related to early modern arts, which would include a rather large list, or rather to
its reception in contemporary arts and culture as analyzed by Angela Ndalianis 22
or its reception in the political-cultural context of Brazil as examined by Janice
Theodoro and Hanna Levy. 23
Although we would avoid the term “baroque” (as well as Counter-Reformation) in the study of Catholic theory and the politics of visualization, the discourse on
the baroque in Latin American and especially Brazilian contexts attracts interest in
shifting and flickering “baroques.”
The baroque, as a seemingly universal stylistic phenomenon that connects
the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, shall be analyzed as a case
and model of the globalization of art and art history. While focusing on Brazil,
whose modern cultural identity is founded on the idea
of the baroque, the cultural context of the baroque discourse will be extended to the spheres of influence
of the early modern Portuguese and Spanish empires.
The exploration of local adaptations of architectural
style and national myths of modernity, for example,
can also be helpful. The transcultural approach to the
baroque covers the cross-cultural impact of its style,
the intercultural and local differentiation of its forms
and meanings, its function as a means of cultural hybridization and amalgamation, and its uses as a means
of national identity building. The transhistorical approach points to the alleged historical transcendence
and universality of the baroque style, as established by
late nineteenth century art history, and aims at analyzing the ensuing ideological and aesthetic constructions
of history in Latin America.
The global baroque calls for an interdisciplinary
method, including different fields of the humanities and
social sciences, such as economics and anthropology. For
example, new approaches like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of perspectival anthropology and controlled
equivocation, or the post-comparative notion of “false
friends,” 24 can help in analyzing the complexity of the
global baroque and in understanding how different visual
systems and processes of conflict and negotiation were
established in contexts of cultural alterity. This approach
can facilitate the reevaluation not only of the relations
between Christian colonizers and the indigenous communities, but also between the contemporary scholar and
his objects of research, and offers alternative concepts to
the dichotomy of center and periphery.
In order to deal with the complexity of a global
baroque and avoid the perpetuation of national art-
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historical traditions and mythologies, it is necessary
to compare Latin American baroque, for example, to
Asian contexts, and to address the appropriation of
the baroque in twentieth- and twenty-first-century arthistorical and political discourses. The formation of an
artistic system in the Americas and Asia, ensuing from
dialogues and clashes between European models and
local prescriptions, will be a major point of discussion. The circulation of art objects, not only between
European nations and their colonies, but also among
the different colonial settings and between European
countries themselves, will be taken into account. For
instance, this concerns the formation of an Italian taste
in eighteenth-century Portugal, the study of Central European varieties of baroque art, and the cultural differences between German or Italian Jesuit workshops in countries such as Paraguay,
Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia (fig. 5), while not to dismiss the native guaraní particular
and creative appropriations of baroque aesthetics in their own terms (fig. 6).
6. Anonymous, Holy
Trinity, eighteenth century,
Guarani Jesuit Mission of The Holy
Trinity, Paraguay.
Helen Hills. In recent years, a wide range of scholarship has re-engaged with
the question of baroque and its histories, especially through the work of Walter
Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze. How useful is this approach? What are its premises, its promises and its strengths? What are its weaknesses and its limits?
Claire Farago. The writings of Benjamin, Deleuze, and Félix Guattari have been tremendously useful to my own work for a long time. Benjamin’s conception of responsible cultural history, epitomized in his statement that every history of civilization is
also a history of barbarism, was a formative text for me at the time I was first articulating an ethical imperative for foregrounding crosscultural studies. My theoretical
interests in crosscultural research were initially fostered by reading Latin Americanist
art historians working on the so-called “Early Contact” period such as Cecelia Klein at
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the first major art history department in
the United States to embrace a predominantly non-Western curriculum. I read Klein
alongside scholars from other disciplines such as Rolena Adorno, Inga Clendinnen,
John Elliott, James Lockhart, Sabine MacCormack, Anthony Pagden, Eric Wolfe, and
the French anthropologist Serge Gruzinski, another important writer for me because
his work dealt with partial recovery of the culturally dispossessed at a time when
the very different interpretative standards of George Kubler still dominated the arthistorical discourse. In the early 1990s I also read critiques of Eurocentrism written
by postscolonial literary critics such as Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak and Homi Bhabha,
and political theorists such as Samir Amin, Maxime Rodinson, and Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978), which was the galvanizing text for my 1995 Reframing the Renaissance project. 25 African Americanist literary historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was
another formative voice for me in those years.
Benjamin helped me give voice to what is urgently at stake in the re-writing
of art history. Deleuze’s critique of transcendentalism has been widely influential, far
beyond the association of the fold with the word baroque. Specifically, the Deleuzian
concept of a rhizomatic structure developed by Bruno Latour in his Actor-Network
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Baroque and new baroque
Theory (ANT) account of agency is widely being used and also worth discussing here
in the context of debates over the term “baroque.” 26 According to this Deleuzian
model, agency is relational in the way stuff is connected. This means that materials
(things, but not just things, anything material ranging from water to tar to electricity)
are acknowledged to have agency of their own (Deleuze and Guattari call them nonhuman “actants”). 27 Deleuze and ANT encourage attention to the semiotic power of
materials as they are fashioned into works of art. It is this account of the work of art
as an “event” occupying an interstitial state of “in-betweenness,” and not the word
“baroque” per se, that is an important tool in today’s toolbox.
Stefano Jacoviello. To be honest I am not yet familiar with studies in my research
field that refer to Benjamin in this sense. Reflections made by aestheticians on the
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (the mourning play or tragic drama) 28 usually
produce an examination of Benjamin’s own thinking on the baroque or, generally,
about music, instead of dealing with its eventual application to other “objects”, 29 as
is perhaps the case with Passages or Angelus Novus.
Otherwise, if we understand the baroque as an epistemic structure, or a stylistic configuration crossing periods and forms of culture, there are many concepts
propounded by Deleuze (not only in his book on Leibniz) that show an obvious efficacy if projected from the past time when they were created onto the contemporary,
the scene of their applicability. Obviously, any anachronism should be subjected to
proof of the texts and squared with their possible resistances to avoid the risks of a
baroque “wandering theoretics”.
The fold, the consummate baroque device, 30 helps for example to understand the efficient mechanisms of the “tactile” digital images submerging us. The
notion of the fold offers a philosophical set of tools for understanding the presentday slipping of the aesthetic paradigm from illusion to simulation 31 – a shift that had
already occurred with the so-called rococo when the pictorial over-ripeness of still
lifes acquired the substance of inlays and gilded stuccoes to be immediately “experienced” in the space “beyond” the representation.
The replacement of the “matter-form” pair with “material-power,” as pointed
out by Deleuze, 32 enables us to describe the substantial effect of the sound that, in the
instrumental and vocal music of various early eighteenth-century authors, reveals its
texture and is discharged, expelled from the order of musical time, to present itself to
the listener as “object-matter” that is to be listened to and experienced. In the field of
images the unfolding form triggers from within an impulse that is manifested on the
outer surface as a tangible force, overflowing the edge of the figures and acting on the
aesthetic experience’s subject by means of a conformation. 33
In Mille Plateaux, Pierre Boulez’s interwoven reflections on the pairing of
“smooth” and “striated” led Deleuze and Guattari to suggest an interpretive key for
the effect of musical sounds that are drawn out in a non-pulsed tempo: the matter
explicitly renders itself as material, and lets emerge on its surface the forces that
shape and arrange it as in a continuous modulation. According to this, certain “ambient” music can reasonably be defined as “baroque.”
Monika Kaup. Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory, a study on German baroque plays (Trauerspiele), and Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the fold, a reading of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (fig. 7), are two important neobaroque theories that nonetheless
lead in opposite directions: Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory and melancholy is
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part of his theory of Western modernity as catastrophe. Deleuze’s theory of
the baroque fold, in contrast, investigates the baroque as a creative principle. Together, Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s theories, each an equally important part of the baroque-neobaroque network, illustrate the complexity of
the baroque. Benjamin views baroque allegory as a critical, de-mystifying
mode of insight that shatters the false harmonies of the dominant modern
ideology of progress. This is connected to the baroque cult of the ruin: allegories are word-ruins that present objects in states of decay and destruction: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of
things.” 34 The way that baroque artwork presents things – in a late, exhausted stage, as broken, as discarded detritus – is reproduced at the level of the
baroque artwork’s poetics of fragmentation and artificial construction. The
theory of baroque allegory and melancholy in The Origin of German Tragic
Drama seeded Benjamin’s theory of modern history as catastrophe in his
1940 essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 35 The angel of history
sees that modern history is not continuity and progress, but a pile of debris that grows skyward. The angel’s revelation, conditional on a backward
glance (he is writing history against the grain of chronology, by looking
backward), is also a neobaroque instance of the baroque play of illusion
and disillusionment: the baroque is a theatrical, non-objectivist mode that
explores slippages between appearance and truth, deception and insight.
Conversely, in The Fold, Deleuze explores the sunny face of the baroque – as it were –
the other side of the coin of Benjamin’s melancholic neobaroque. Deleuze’s baroque
fold is not an instrument of critique as is Benjamin’s baroque allegory, but a mode
for the speculative creation of worlds: the “baroque solution,” writes Deleuze, is to
“multiply principles.” 36 One might say that Benjamin’s baroque is epistemological,
whereas Deleuze’s baroque is ontological. The baroque fold that “unfurls all the way
to infinity” 37 is a dynamic principle, expressing a becoming not premised on being.
By developing Leibniz’s pluralism that sought an alternative to the dominant modern
principle of Cartesian dualism, the Deleuzian fold demonstrates that the baroque is
an alternative, nondissociative modernity, a modernity that hybridizes and weaves
networks instead of purifying and dividing.
7. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque, Minneapolis,
1993.
Helen Hills. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines have tangled with the term
“neobaroque.” Which directions in the existing scholarship have you found or do you
find most productive and in what ways?
Gabriela Siracusano. How does one write visually about the Brazilian baroque and
the translational processes of theoretical concepts and therefore, implicitly, about
the relations to the neobaroque? And how does one create a Baroque canon? In
my research I refer in particular to recent studies by Angela Ndalianis and Walter
Moser. In her works on the neobaroque, Ndalianis, a film, art, and cultural historian, compares the media and entertainment culture, especially since the 1930s,
with the so-called historical baroque of the seventeenth century. Paraphrasing Focillon, she defines a trans-historical and -cultural baroque, namely a form that has
dynamically and constantly shown its presence across the centuries, with varying
degrees of intensity. The moments of greatest intensity are those that interest her
most. In her research she works predominantly with two concepts that are related
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to the trans-cultural concept of the neobaroque: the teatrum mundi and the Wunderkammer. 38 Her epistemological interest in the neobaroque paradigm leads her
to examine the historical relevance and effectivity of a so-called baroque concept,
developed post factum was in the second half of the nineteenth century in reaction
to a certain form of “high culture,” and especially its reappearance in contemporary
entertainment culture. This baroque created a fascination (Faszinosum) on the level
of the cultural discourse as well as on that of cultural practice. Walter Moser, in his
cultural theoretic studies about the neobaroque, advances the hypothesis that the
baroque was conceptualized as a rhetorical and aesthetic device (puissance) that
was wielded differently in different media, as well as in distinct technical, political,
and social-economical contexts. These approaches serve to analyze the potential of
modern and contemporary entertainment culture to fully realize the baroque aesthetic of efficacy. Considering the political aspects of this approach of a neobaroque
aesthetic, it can be understood as a “democratized baroque” that levels hierarchical differences between so-called high and popular cultures and finally radicalizes
trans-cultural mobility into a globalized paradigm. Thus the neobaroque, through
trans-medialization, recycles the baroque, its efficacy, and its historical topoi for
contemporary mass culture. Teatrum mundi and Wunderkammer were always related to, and therefore contribute to, a theoretical debate on reality, virtuality, simulacrum and spectacle.
In her analysis of entertainment culture, including the decoration of casinos in Las Vegas, with their architecture of effects and structures similar to Wunderkammern in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ndalianis shows the parallels to the historical cabinets of curiosity. The interior spaces in particular evoke
and join different fragments from the whole world, thus creating an impression of
sensorial immersion. One need only to think of the architecture of the Venetian
Casino or Caesar’s Palace with its Ancient Roman and Renaissance architecture
and decoration: views of architecture, media displays, music, smells and tastes of
different “Food Squares,” tangency of different textures, sculptures, and products of
consumption. Like in the early modern Wunderkammer, where the macrocosm is
represented in the microcosm, the complete entertainment world is presented and
represented in the microcosm of the Las Vegas casino. 39 The sensorial experience is
therefore decisive for the interpretation of neobaroque spaces with their technological and – in the literal sense – spectacular wonders; multiple perspectives, axes of
gaze, and sensorial experiences multiply the rare, special experience referred to in
René Descartes’ definition of admiration in his Discours de la Méthode. The spectator shifts to an intellectual register when he evaluates his miraculous, almost mystical experience. Each saltation in visual observation leads to a shift in the sensorial
perception of the spectator, when the position of spectator/consumer is changed in
a continuous process of evoking other transformative miraculous experiences. This
process also ensures the virtuosity of the artist-architect as central to the performance experience of the spectator. 40
Jens Baumgarten. In my own research I analyze the architecture, decoration and
other visual material of the church Nossa Senhora do Brasil, one of the best known
and most impressive churches in São Paulo, which can be classified as neo-baroque
(fig. 8). The church combines different elements that reflect a political, religious and
aesthetic project of Brazilian culture and history. It shows also the configurations of
the discourse about an historical baroque and a transcultural and -historical neo-
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baroque. The architecture as well as the decoration clearly reflects the idea of the relationship between Brazilian and European art history within a concept of one common
baroque. The church thereby aims, through visual discourse, to establish a political,
religious, and aesthetic position for the city with its multiethnic emigration groups,
as well as in relation to the Brazilian “national project” of positioning itself as an
inclusive “racial democracy” (democracia racial). Additionally, I discuss the historiography on the historical baroque as a starting point to analyze specific notions of neobaroque discourse in the Brazilian visual arts. This second topic seeks, through a case
study of the art historian Hanna Levy, to demonstrate the importance of developing a
transcultural neo-baroque. My intention is to focus on the ways in which baroque art
is discussed in Brazil, and the place that it occupies at the crossroads between Brazilian and European art historiography.
8. Church of Nossa Senhora do
Brasil, São Paolo, façade and
interior.
Stefano Jacoviello. In music the term neobaroque usually recalls the present revival
of stylistic elements of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourse on music,
and most notably the position of the virtuoso, including recuperation of some clothing
accessories (hats, frills…). It also can refer to a way of executing eighteenth-century
compositions, highlighting connections with present modes of producing, experiencing and consuming music, with an eye on the market.
This has nothing to do with the neobaroque conceived by Deleuze as the
evolution of the baroque harmony towards the coexistence of incompossibilities: a
pleasingly unresolved aesthetic of paradox arisen in the late nineteenth century with
the elevation of chromaticism as a principle of overall regulation of the musical form
and whose highest expression is Boulez’s “polyphony of polyphonies.” 41
I maintain that Omar Calabrese with his L’età neobarocca and other later
texts, 42 in the wake of Wölfflin, D’Ors, Focillon, Severo Sarduy, and George Kubler,
and blending semiotic tools with the art theory of Louis Marin, Hubert Damisch and
Daniel Arasse, outlined an effective conception to analyze cultural phenomena that,
though appearing very different, can be attributed to a common episteme. For Calabrese the neobaroque is a category of a social aesthetics – crossing every field of
knowledge (art, science, customs) – that considers aesthetic value relevant not only
to the works and their producers’ intentions, but also to the audience and the way
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its members consume those works, through an action that expresses a taste. Nevertheless, as much as the neobaroque could be understood as a re-emergence of
the sixteenth-century “forma del vivere” (Baldassare Castiglione, 1528), it does not
arise either deterministically or logically as the evolution of the baroque. Through an
anachronistic approach, Calabrese’s method examines the adequacy and effectiveness
of the historical baroque’s formal categories through the analysis of today’s cultural
phenomena. This comparative investigation, arched backwards from the present to
the past, aims to identify the theoretical similarities as well as the practical differences that depend on the specific habits in consuming cultural objects present in
diverse communities and periods. Current morphological trends in art production
toward restraint or excess, fragmentation, and instability, find an echo in the scientific
approach, which is tending toward complexity, dispersion, indetermination, and approximation. Thus we discover a direct nexus between these formal categories and
their expression in social practices. So it is easy to understand why neobaroque was
often superimposed on postmodernism, and at the same time it is clear why baroque
revival, which is satisfied with a superficial likeness to the baroque without embedding its aesthetic principles, has nothing to do with the neobaroque.
This inquiry on style in contemporary culture reveals similar forms of sensibility in objects belonging to different periods, which are anachronistically united
in the aesthetic and epistemic attitudes of a subject with baroque tastes, thereby
disclosing profound cultural dynamics that would otherwise be concealed by the
outward characteristics of isolated artistic and social phenomena.
Helen Hills. Is there a sense in which the “baroque” is implicated in the Spanish/
Portuguese/Iberian colonial project? If so, in what ways? Please sketch the implications of this in terms of rethinking colonialism. If you do not accept this, please
explain the grounds on which you think this approach unhelpful.
Claire Farago. First one has to ask when the term baroque matters; then where, what
the alternatives are, and how such terms matter at all. Regarding the “when” question:
if we take the term “baroque” to apply simply to the seventeenth century throughout
the world, many things will not seem to fit – they will “appear out of sequence.” 43 Regarding the “where” question: among the first art historians to offer synthetic histories
of Latin American art was Pál Kelemen, who attempted in Baroque and Rococo Art in
Latin America (1951) to establish colonial art within the same stylistic continuum that
governed European art. 44 In this respect, his intervention was no different from what
Dmitri Sarabianov, for example, attempted to do in writing the history of westernized
Russian art for a Euro-American audience. 45
Regarding the question of alternatives. Monika Kaup argues that the Deleuzoguattarian theory of emergence was anticipated in the structure of a New
World baroque. 46 The history of the history of Latin American art began to change in
the 1970s. Although it drew examples almost exclusively from Spain, José Antonio
Maravall’s study, Culture of the Baroque became a touchstone across the humanities because it stepped away from formalist categories and put questions of media,
power, and technology at the center of discussion of the baroque as a “historical
structure.” 47 Critical response to Maravall’s top-down approach encouraged productive attention to counter-hegemonic discourses on the same terms, for instance, on
the question of how the colonial imposition of authority opens onto complex ma-
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neuverings and transformations within colonial societies. Walter Mignolo writes in
these terms about the Barroco de Indias as the angered expression in art and ideas
“built upon colonial expression and the colonial wound.” 48 Mignolo and a newer
generation of writers who employ de-colonial rather than neo-colonial strategies
insist that the aesthetics of the modern be expanded to include the entire world, and
the scene of cultural production be explored historically – meaning that studies of
coloniality include the viewpoint and contributions of the culturally dispossessed
and the politically and economically oppressed, even and especially when individuals remain anonymous in the historical record. 49
So on to the final question: how does the term baroque matter now? Helen
Hills recommends retaining the baroque understood as a mode of translation that
resists the singular translation of one sign to another and offers instead the possibility
of engaging with the material without treating materiality too hastily as the instantiation of an idea. 50 I agree that Deleuze’s baroque refers to a trait, a specific way of
thinking that endlessly produces folds. I have written elsewhere about the complexity
of constructing subaltern readings of “baroque” art. With regard to the discourse on
idolatry, which was a major concern in cross-cultural interactions during the opening century of global contact, Protestant Reformation theologians renounced lavish
religious displays and material aids as idolatrous while their ecclesiastic counterparts
in New Spain and Brazil levied charges of idolatry against their newly colonized subjects on the same grounds. 51 European associations of the baroque with the exotic, the
abstruse, the strange, put ritual practices and material culture rooted in the indigenous
Americas in the conflicted position of being regarded as grotesque signs of moral corruption at the same time that the same so-called “idols” were also regarded as signs
of the subtle creative powers of the human imagination, especially once the objects
were domesticated and re-functioned in European Wunderkammern.
Benjamin’s critique of historical time as chronology rejects notions of periodization by emphasizing how the past is imbricated within the present. 52 To give
an example: by the end of the nineteenth century, the controversial and contradictory past of the “baroque” was largely occluded from view. The complex foldings
and re-foldings that resulted in mutually-inflected cases of cultural interaction are
still rendered invisible by conventional sub-disciplinary categories organized by
geographical location and time period. For this reason, an emphasis on the transoceanic baroque and the technologies employed to ensure the operation of society
and the transmission of cultural knowledge (and of cultural amnesia) are needed.
Porous, flexible, folding past into future and re-folding what is in-between in order
to undercut the anachronistic cultural and aesthetic boundaries that interfere with
our ability to see the complexity of interactions. To practice a Benjaminian/Deleuzian cultural history, we must utilize a “double vision” – to borrow a term from Joan
Kelly – by looking both “inside” and “outside” the frameworks traditionally associated with the baroque. 53
Stefano Jacoviello. If we want to analyze the connection between the Spanish/Portuguese colonial program between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and the
baroque, we obviously have to view the latter as a historically determined cultural
and artistic experience. Certainly the “normative” or “normalizing” commitment of
Catholic Europe (of the time) with regard to the world was prodigal in the operation
of conquest and unfolded in the missionary adventures of the Franciscans and Jesuits.
Things are more complicated however – more baroque, so to speak.
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The Jesuits who set out on the route to the East brought to the coasts of
India and East Asia a great number of musical instruments and utilized them for
predication so effectively as to convince the locals to learn to use them for the same
purpose: such was the fate of the harmonium, which passed from the hands of the
Portuguese to those of the Chishti Sufis with the resulting restructuring of the Indian modal system in line with the intonations offered by this tempered instrument.
In China and Japan Francesco Saverio and Matteo Ricci found musical grammars
whose principles were analogous, by translating them, to those Greek modes that
were being discussed at the time in Italian intellectual cenacles. Ricci imported
Persian instruments to China that had been reconstructed in Flanders; he wrote
songs to be translated in Chinese and encouraged writing methods to teach the
harpsichord. As a result, after their initial distaste for the polyphonies widely in use
at the court of Charles V, Chinese nobles began to appreciate instrumental sonatas
and request that they be performed during public ceremonies. In line with Ricci’s
approach, 54 we observe in China a reciprocal translation of musical forms, which
nonetheless remained distinct and were almost never mutually understood. 55
The polyphony that had disgusted the Chinese nobles was successfully imposed
by the Franciscans in New Spain and efficiently exported by the Jesuits in South America. But here things took a more interesting turn: although Spanish and Italian music
was used as an instrument of conversion and social control, it became at the same time
the most efficient artistic form for expressing the taste of the new colonial elites. As
such it was easily “tainted” with the musical practices of the Indios and African slaves,
producing a corpus of popular music in which features of Jewish-Arabic culture, which
the ruling Spaniards and Portuguese had sought to eradicate in their native land, resurfaced. Composers coming from Europe showed a particular receptivity to the musics
of the subjected populations and produced folk hybrids of every kind that were added
to the canonical liturgical celebrations or formed new ones ad hoc for the “negros”; at
the same time a new musical culture grew, whose roots can no longer be retraced. Yet
instead of calling for recognition an indigenous cultural identity, this musical culture
looked instead to the Iberian peninsula, claiming to embody the first true “Spanish” culture, one that never could have existed in that no longer native land. The Caribbean became a baroque place where everything was constantly rewritten and corrected; where
anyone could sing the villancicos, interweaving nahuatl and huatxechi poetic verses
with Spanish dialects; and where the shapes of guitars multiplied to such an extent
that guitar ensembles could compete with traditional string instruments to accompany
double choirs in church and a l’italiana arias in the theater.
Rather than an instance of the colonial process, therefore, the baroque was
one of its effects that assumed the forms of creolization processes, consisting in
the production of multiple identities in continuous reciprocal translation, placed
in a highly unstable multidimensional system of social relations, ready for strategic
use. 56 What happened to music in the New World is very similar to what happened
to sculpture and architecture in southern Italy, particularly in the Salento, and later
in some areas of Southern Sicily: the baroque aesthetic encountered craftsmen who
translated the overall formal principles, creating an utterly original artistic experience, scarcely comparable to the more formal expressions of the baroque, save for
a certain “family resemblance”. 57
Moreover, in order to represent the imagery of a baroque Mexico, many Spaghetti Western movies found their ideal landscape in the countryside of southern Italy,
dotted with small churches perhaps resembling those of the Franciscans and Jesuits
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built on the other side of the ocean. This reversed creole neobaroque creative practice
gave recent American western movies the “baroque-like” settings and sounds – which
had not existed in previous “indigenous” US productions –, together with a new visual identity and a perspective on a picturesque past that unexpectedly includes Latinos
(and sometimes Afro-Americans as well). In all of its forms, baroque seems still to be
ironically connected with the cultural dynamics of colonial processes.
Monika Kaup. The baroque originated as the repressive tool of European absolutism and the Counter-Reformation; its arrival in the Americas was due to European
colonialism. In Alejo Carpentier’s words, the baroque first reached the Americas on
the ships of the conquistadors. 58 The baroque’s beginnings as an authoritarian style
raise questions about the baroque that grew up in the Americas: was it nothing but a
reactionary force, a derivative of the colonial European baroque? It was not until the
post-World War II period that a generation of Latin American and Caribbean writers
and cultural critics (Cubans Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, Brazilian Haroldo de Campos, Martiniquan Édouard Glissant, and others) popularized the idea,
first proposed by Argentine art historian Ángel Guido in the 1920s and 1930s, that the
baroque had worked poorly as a colonizing instrument in the New World. There, it
had gradually been adapted and transformed at the hands of the indigenous, mestizo
and mulatto artisans and artists who crafted the monuments of the baroque overseas,
thereby creating the rebellious New World baroque, a transculturated and mongrelized hybrid that inserted pre-Columbian and local elements into the iconography of
the Catholic baroque. In Lezama Lima’s memorable phrase, the New World baroque
was not the instrument of the Counter-Reformation, but of counterconquest (contraconquista). 59 As critics such as Lois Parkinson Zamora, César Salgado and Carlos
Fuentes have noted, this is one of colonial history’s few satisfying ironies: somehow,
the colonizer was himself colonized.
This said, two important observations are needed: first, the emergence of the
transculturated New World baroque would not have been possible without some
level of official tolerance. The process of transculturation underpinning the New
World baroque is actually a dialectical process, whereby the decolonial transculturation “from below,” which sought to Indianize Christianity, co-existed alongside
official modes of transculturation “from above,” which in turn sought to Christianize
indigenous culture. The most famous instance of the latter was the Jesuit missionary
policy of syncretism. My second point is theoretical: the Latin American counterconquest baroque illustrates the substantial creative possibilities of baroque aesthetics. For the baroque is a second-hand, non-original, or dependent mode of creation:
creation by way of recycling and re-creation, rather than by creating from scratch.
The baroque is a way of saying something new by remaking the old. The New World
baroque’s rebellious remaking of the European colonial baroque is an instance of
appropriation (Stuart Hall) and of the becoming-minor of a majoritarian cultural
formation (Deleuze and Guattari). It is dependent rather than autochthonous by
virtue of being built on a European base. Its decolonial function is in deforming and
overwriting the alien, colonial text.
Jens Baumgarten and Gabriela Siracusano. The baroque seems to be interwoven not
only geographically/culturally but also from a generational and disciplinary point of
view. In the case of Brazil, visual art histories point to the connection of the baroque
and the neo-baroque to other terms that are similarly amorphous, like “modernity” or
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9. [Could you please complete this
caption?]
32
“national art.” As an example, it is worth mentioning the
debate between Antônio Candido, João Adolfo Hansen
and Haroldo de Campos regarding the term and notion
of baroque in the formation and definition of a Brazilian national literature. 60 The debate concerned parallel
epistemologies within a national discourse and, implicitly, their transfer to the academic setting.
The discussion about the baroque has evolved
into a political and historical conversation about the
formation and transformation of a specifically Iberian
modernity. It is also revelatory that this exchange of
ideas has largely taken place without the participation
of art historians, who should be intrinsically interested in questions of representation. As for the Spanish
viceroyalties in South America, the category of “baroque” is sometimes related to the necessity of defining borders within national identities, such as Barroco
Peruano, Barroco Andino or Barroco Mestizo, categorizations that in many cases are confusing or even contradictory. It can also refer to a wide range of artistic
and architectonic productions created mostly within
the eighteenth century (fig. 9). The discourse constructed around the baroque and its relations to the
neobaroque contains irresolvable paradoxes opposing
historicist and theoretical approaches, yet it nonetheless attempts to overcome these tensions.
There are different phases of neo-baroque use
and re-use: a first one along with modernist ideas, a
second one as a religious-aesthetic foundation of neobaroque theology and a third one that Walter Moser
has considered the baroque form of using, the neobaroque aesthetic. The neobaroque in Latin America
also inscribes itself in the conservative tone of a hierarchical appropriation of the baroque, including its
function in popular culture and a parallel appropriation of its subversive character.
These neo-baroques present different art histories: aesthetic, religious, and political.
They narrate and visually present the art history of the baroque in a neobaroque
manner. They re-negotiate the impacts of nationalism and modernism and fold them
in the Baroque discourse as a relation between Europe and Latin America. Therefore
we can speak of a return to and a return of the baroque.
The baroque and the neobaroque present in Latin American art since colonial times can be considered to be (almost) a “second Neobaroque foundation”
of Western art. Yet, since it is a version of Western Art that follows its own internal
rules and patterns, it seems complicated to position it in relation to European and
Northern American art or to define it as native or as post-colonial art as opposed
to European, Western art. The project of national art since the nineteenth century
can be understood as a reflection of the European model; it was based on the idea
of “colonial art,” in which the concept of the “baroque” functioned as a catalyst
for revising the model. 61 Contrary to Europe, where art created roots and traditions,
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in the Americas this ideal was transformed in the hands of artists who were more
ambitious to know how to create than to copy. “Baroque” and neobaroque art in
Brazil was an art made without questioning its subjectivity. This specificity of Brazilian art resulted in a lack of intellectual tradition dedicated to art-historical studies.
This does not imply the absence of the field of art history in Brazil; it simply means
a stronger presence of a baroque and neobaroque visual language – representations
that in an Iberian tradition more strongly express the amalgam between subject and
object than their separation.
Recent debates within the writing of world art history have broken with references to the Brazilian reflection of Europe, the national paradigm; they seem to prefer an approach that follows a rather ethnically determined paradigm. Levy found
a third way that could serve as stimulant or a meta-theoretical impulse for further
developments of an art history of the baroque and the neobaroque.
Stefano Jacoviello contribution was translated by Susan Wise.
1. Irlemar Chiampi, “The Baroque at the Twilight of
Modernity: Chapter 1 from Barroco y Modernidad,”
in Lois Parkinson Zamora, Monika Kaup, Baroque
New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation,
Counterconquest, Durham (NC), 2010, p. 508.
2. Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (1975), lecture published in Lois
Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris eds., Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community, Durham
(NC), 1995, p. 100.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Le pli : Leibniz et le Baroque,
Paris, 1988, p. 46; English edition: Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque, Minneapolis, 1993.
4. Grateful thanks to Chad Elias, Margaret Littler,
Emanuele Lugli, and Mike Savage.
5. Walter Moser, “The Concept of Baroque,” in
Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, 33/1,
2008, p. 11-37, especially p. 11.
and extravagance. See Tomás Ybarra-Fraustro,
“Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985,
(exh. cat., Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), Los
Angeles, 1990, p. 155-162.
8. “What Comes after Poststructuralism? New
Ecological Realisms in Contemporary Theory and
Post-apocalyptic Narrative” explores an emergent phase of intellectual change in the wake
of structuralism and post-structuralism – a trend
towards new realisms. My point of intervention within this broader movement is to orient
myself towards a realism of complex wholes,
actor-networks and ecologies, rather than realism of isolated parts and things. This ecological
approach to things via their connectivity has a
strong affinity with the baroque.
6. Monika Kaup, Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and
Film, Charlottesville, 2012, p. 3.
9. Itay Sapir’s paper “The Repressed Watershed:
1600, the Early Modern, and the Moderne,” presented at the College Art Association Annual
Conference 2014, began with this question.
7. Rasquache is a Chicano vernacular aesthetic
of everyday use that combines the recycling of
used objects with a baroque taste for ostentation
10. Claire Farago, “Historical Introduction,” in
Claire Farago ed., The Fabrication of Leonardo da
Vinci’s “Trattato della Pittura,” forthcoming.
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11. Girolamo Tezio, Aedes Barberinae ad Quirinalum, Rome, 1642, is a guide to the Barberini
Palace that makes the rhetorical principles of the
artistic program and the viewer’s response absolutely clear.
12. On Alberti and Cicero, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers
of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial
Composition, Oxford, 1971. On Poussin’s rhetorical
strategies, see Todd P. Olson, Poussin and France:
Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style, New
Haven, 2002.
13. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image :
question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art, Paris,
1990 [English edition: Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, University
Park (PA), 2005, with an expanded preface].
14. In agreement with this view, see further
scholarship on the issues assembled by Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann, “Malaise dans la périodisation,” in Perspective: la revue de l’INHA, theme
issue “Périodisation et histoire de l’art”, 4, 2008,
p. 597-601 [English edition: “Periodization and its
Discontents,” in Journal of Art Historiography, 2,
June 2010, p. 1-6].
15. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principi Fondamentali
della Storia dell’Arte (Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe), Munich, 1915; Eugenio d’Ors, Du Baroque,
Paris, 1936.
16. “Les perles irrégulières existent, mais le Baroque n’a aucune raison d’exister sans un concept
qui forme cette raison même” (Deleuze, 1988,
cited n. 3, p. 46).
17. Stefano Jacoviello, Dolce è il tormento: Monteverdi, Poussin e i passi dell’amore, Florence,
forthcoming.
18. Stefano Jacoviello, “The Sound of Substance.
Domenico Scarlatti and the Capriccio’s painting
device,” in Teresa Malecka, Małgorzata Pawłowska
eds., Music: Function and Value, (conference,
Kraków, 2010), Kraków, 2013, p. 143-155.
19. Stefano Jacoviello, “Il sacrificio, il devoto,
l’immagine e il testimone. L’ultima cena con Peter
Greenaway,” in Marco Del Monte ed., Far comprendere, Far vedere: cinema, fruizione, multimedialità,
(conference, Venice, 2010), Treviso, 2010; “In
memory of me. Time, space and witness in Peter
Greenaway’s ‘Leonardo’s Last Supper,’” in Claudia
D’Alonzo, Ken Slock, Philippe Dubois eds., Cinéma,
critique des Images, Campanotto, 2012.
20. Stefano Jacoviello, “Lumina ad limina lucent,”
in Stefano Jacoviello et al., Testure, Sienna, 2009.
21. Omar Calabrese, The Neo-Baroque: A Sign
of the Times, Princeton, 1992; Heinrich Wölfflin,
Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über
Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien,
Munich, 1888; Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on
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Style, Irving Lavin ed., Cambridge (MA), London,
1995; Germain Bazin, L’Architecture religieuse
baroque au Brésil, 2 vols., São Paulo/Paris, 1958;
Benjamin, (1963) 1985, cited n. 24.
22. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics
and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge
(MA), 2004.
23. Janice Theodoro, América Barroca: tema e
variações, Rio de Janeiro, 1992; Hanna Levy, “Valor
artístico e valor histórico: importante problema da
História da Arte,” in Revista do Patrimônio Histórico
e Artístico Nacional, 4, 1940, p. 181-192; Hannah
Levy (she began adding an “h” to her last name in
1941), “A propósito de três teorias sobre o barroco,”
in Revista do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, 5, 1941, p. 250-284; “A pintura colonial no
Rio de Janeiro,” in Revista do Patrimônio Histórico e
Artístico Nacional, 6, 1942, p. 7-79, and “Modelos
Europeus na pintura colonial,” p. 7-66; “Retratos
coloniais,” in Revista do Patrimônio Histórico e
Artístico Nacional, 9, 1945, p. 251-290.
24. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A inconstância da
alma selvagem, São Paulo, 2002.
25. For full citations to all the authors cited in this
paragraph, and many more, see Claire Farago, “Editor’s Introduction: Reframing the Renaissance,” in
Claire Farago ed., Reframing the Renaisance: Visual
Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450-1650,
New Haven/London, 1995, p. 1-20. A French
edition of this essay, condensed with a new introduction, is forthcoming as “‘Race,’ Nation, and Art
History,” in Jean-Yves Andrieux, Fabienne Chevalier, Anja Kervanto Nevanlinna eds., Idée nationale
et architecture en Europe, 1830-1919 = Architecture and National Identities in Europe 1830-1919.
26. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford/New
York, 2005.
27. The capacity of things to act as “quasi agents
or forces,” actants, a term Latour uses to describe
distributive agency. See discussion in Jane Bennett,
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham (NC), 2010.
28. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels, Rolf Tiedemann ed., Frankfurt-amMain, 1963; English edition: The Origin of German
Tragic Drama, London, 1985.
29. On the subject, among the recent essays published in Italian, I suggest: Tamara Tagliacozzo,
Walter Benjamin e la musica (ebook), Rome, 2013.
30. The device of the fold holds together an exterior – an everted, stratified surface – offered to
the subject’s perception as material organized autonomously with respect to the development of an
interior – that instead shows itself in its totality “like
a jewel-case where the absolute dwells” to a single
viewpoint that grasps its intension. Thanks to this
coalescence between internal and external, the
Baroque and new baroque
acquisition of the concept of fold in the aesthetic
of the digital image clears the field of all the concerns about the referential performance of images
“without imprint”, and allows to concentrate on the
effects of surface and intermediality that occupy the
space between image and beholder’s eye. For the
relation between “internal/external,” “intension/
estension”, “high/low,” see Deleuze, 1988 (1993),
cited n. 13, p. 44.
31. Stefano Jacoviello, “Lo sguardo del testimone.
Etica e estetica e politica dell’immagine contemporanea,” in Dimitri Chimenti, Massimiliano
Coviello, Francesco Zucconi eds., Sguardi incrociati, Rome, 2010.
32. Deleuze, 1988 (1993), cited n. 13, p. 124.
33. Giovanni Careri, Envols d’Amour: le Bernin,
montage des arts et dévotion baroque, Paris, 1990.
In this case, analyzing the effectiveness of the folds
of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni’s clothing, the
author is referring to the concept of “impulse-image” proposed by Deleuze in L’Image-mouvement :
cinema 1, Paris, 1983.
34. Benjamin, (1963) 1985, cited n. 24, p. 178.
35. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” in Hannah Arendt ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York, p. 253-267.
36. Deleuze, (1988) 1993, cited n. 13, p. 67.
37. Deleuze, (1988) 1993, cited n. 13, p. 3.
38. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baorque Entertainment
Spaces and Experimental Design, in: Design as
Rhetoric, ed. by Gesche Joost and Arne Scheuermann, Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2008, p. 1 and 5.
39. Angela Ndalianis, “Neo-Baroque Entertainment
Spaces and Experimental Design,” in Gesche Joost,
Arne Scheuermann eds., Design as Rhetoric, Basel,
2008, p. 5-6.
40. Ndalianis, 2008, cited n. 31, p. 7.
41. Deleuze, (1988) 1993, cited n. 13, p. 124.
42. Omar Calabrese, L’età neobarocca, Rome/Bari,
1987 [English edition: Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the
Times, Princeton, 1992]. Some of Calabrese’s texts
are collected in Omar Calabrese, Il neobarocco:
forma e dinamiche della cultura contemporanea,
Florence, 2013.
43. Citing Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, “Discomfited by the Baroque: A Personal Journey,” in Helen
Hills ed., Rethinking the Baroque, Farnham/Burlington, 2011, p. 43-98, citing p. 92.
44. Pál Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin
America, New York, 1951.
with Alejo Carpentier,” in The New Centennial
Review, 5/2, fall 2005, p. 107-149. My thanks to
my graduate student Raquel Flecha Vega for this
reference and for the observation that temporal
destabilization combined with a fixed narrative
sequence enabled the European concept of the
“baroque” to become something new, something criollo.
47. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the
Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, Minneapolis, 1986 [orig. ed.: La cultura del barroco:
aná lisis de una estructura histó rica, Esplugues
de Llobregat, 1975]; according to Evonne Levy
and Kenneth Milles, editors of the interdisciplinary, bi-cultural Lexicon of the Hispanic Baroque:
Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, Austin, 2013, p. 3-4.
48. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America,
Malden, 2005, p. 61-63, citing the Ecuadorian philosopher Bolivar Echeverría on the appearance of
Creole identity “from the lower social levels” that
was no longer Spanish or Portuguese but properly
Spanish American and Luso American.
49. Here “modern” is defined broadly to include
everything since the initiation of global contact,
similar to the French usage of the term “contemporain” to designate everything since the French
Revolution; according to Sapir, 2014, cited n. 6,
p. 7-8.
50. Helen Hills, “The Baroque: The Grit in the Oyster of Art History,” in Hills, 2011, cited n. 35, p. 31.
51. Claire Farago, “Reframing the Baroque: On
Idolatry and the Threshold of Humanity,” in Hills,
2011, cited n. 35, p. 99-122.
52. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy
of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt ed., New
York, 1969.
53. Joan Gadol Kelly, “The Doubled Vision of
Feminist Theory: A Postscript to the ‘Women and
Power Conference,’” in Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory, Chicago/London, 1984. And
we need more poetry in our langauge articulating
these events; see Anne Waldman, Laura Wright
ed., Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics, an Anthology, Minneapolis, 2014.
54. Matteo Ricci, Descrizione della Cina, Macerata,
2011
55. Jospeh Marie Amiot, Mémoires concernant les
Chinois, XIII, Paris, 1788.
45. Dmitri Sarabianov, Russian Art: From Neoclassicism to the Avant Garde, 1800-1917, New
York, 1990.
56. For the concept of creolization as a model for
describing the dynamics between cultures in contact, see Tommaso Sbriccoli, Stefano Jacoviello,
Shifting Borders: European Perspectives on Creolisation, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2012.
46. Monika Kaup, “Becoming Baroque: Folding
European Forms into the New World Baroque
57. Maybe we should also consider that the baroque style that spread over southern Sicily until
Débat
35
Baroque and new baroque
the early nineteenth century is partially related to
the need for reconstructing an ideal recent past,
redesigning through architecture the shape of a
homeland destroyed by the earthquake of 1693.
de Matos e a Bahia do século XVII, São Paulo, 1989;
and Haroldo de Campos, O sequestro do barroco
na formação da literature brasileira: o caso Gregório
Matos, Salvador, 1989.
58. “But when the Spanish plateresque arrives in the
ships of the conquistadors, what does the craftsman
who knows the secrets of the Spanish plateresque
find?” (Carpentier, 1995, cited n. 2, p. 100).
61. This argument is related to modification of
notions of center and periphery; including the
distinction between archaic and modern that Ella
Shohat and Robert Stam have shown: it is no longer about grafting the archaic onto the modern, but
rather using the archaic, paradoxically, to modernize the present in a dissonant temporality. This
combines an imagined community from the past
with the utopia of an equally imaginary future. See
Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Crítica da imagem eurocêntrica: multiculturalismo e representação, São
Paulo, 2008, p. 412.
59. José Lezama Lima, “Baroque Curiosity,” in Lois
Parkinson Zamora, Monika Kaup ed, Baroque New
Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, Durham, 2010, p. 212-240 et 213.
60. Antônio Candido, Formação da literatura
brasileira, (São Paulo, 1959) Belo Horizonte, 1993;
João Adolfo Hansen, A sátira e o engenho: Gregório
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