[-empyre-] the city of the naked / A cidade do homem nu

[naxsmash]

I had the pleasure of meeting Inti Guerrero (BR/NL) a few nights ago  
in San Francisco where we were both attending an opening for Scott  
Treleaven's new installation works, drawings and photographs at  
Silverman Gallery. http://silverman-gallery.com/exhibition/view/1971

Meeting Inti reminded me that one of the prime motivations for  
introducing such a broad philosophical and political question as "how  
does a field become visible, when?"  is to look with desire and  
discernment, at
the works of artists who have dedicated their lives to the enterprise  
of 'making visible' -- and perhaps more, of acting this making.  Inti  
has brought to the English-reading world a concise description about  
one such artist and
architect visiionary, Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973).   http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.24/flavio-de-carvalho-from-an-anthropophagic-master-plan-to-a-tropical-modern-design

I'd like to direct our thinking to 'nakedness' in connection with  
antropofagia, the great inventive term of Oswaldo De Andrade  
(1890-1954)....Antropofagia was a movement that literally meant,  
devour ourselves, or
eat our culture, remix and shit out our mixed melange of pasts , our  
complexities of 300 or more ethnicities in Sao Paulo-- those lost  
traditions revived through a cannabalism, living again through the  
eating of culture, thus
making new bodies... "Tupi or not Tupi...(from the Manifesto  
Antropófago, Andrade 1928).

These new bodies are us, naked we are walking, coming into the city,  
the city of the naked w/mn, as de Carvalho foresaw, even as in his  
late practice, he walked the city (streetwalking) of Sao Paulo in an  
'experience'
wearing a scaffold-like crossdressing rigid structure air-dress mini  
skirt and blouse (and this at the age of about 60).

De Carvalho, moving always towards an architecture of interiority (the  
inside look, the ingestion, pregnant) , is compelled by an ironic  
gusto, con mucho gusto, to eat his own architectural (failed)  
prospectus. Early on
as a young painter and architect, de Carvalho envisioned a 'naked  
mankind' free from 'scholastic taboos'-- 'free for reasoning and  
thinking' , and, as Inti writes, 'could begin a painstaking process of  
wonderment, change and
becoming in this new city....de Carvalho's urbanism presupposed an  
existing energy within the subjectivity of the individual, a type of  
energy coming from a person's psyche and the impulse of his or
her desires, which would be stimulated within the different urban  
scenarios" of the 'Cidade do homem nu'....

De Carvalho ingested, as it were, the hostile fortress of an  
'efficient' (as he called it) internally focussed government palace  
after a palace coup ) with his rejected proposal ("Eficácia").  I  
believe that he (poetically, politically)
ate his own words, as we say in English; he metaphorically ingested  
the substance, as well as the notoriety, of his 'violent vision of a  
government that is in  a position of self-defense towards an unstable  
polity..." (Guerrero).
He antropofagized the traumatic vision of a repressive palace  
'against' the naked people, moving as it were to a profound via  
negativa, a negative walk.  The expression of this 'taking into the  
self' the
stigmata or machine of repression gives De Carvalho, to my  
imagination, a saint-like apparition, like a glow in the dark  
animation walking before me, even though his walk occurs in the early  
fifties before my
consciousness, and in another tropical city far from mine.  A walk  
'against' the repressive consciousness of state and religious systems  
of control.  The walk 'contra' led to a literal walk as an appearance  
or breakout of the unconscious.

He did this by walking against a Corpus Cristi processional, refusing  
to take off his hat (anti-naked, as naked) in 1956...... "Lyncha!  
Lyncha!"

Corpus Cristi, the body of Christ-- reconfigured through the design- 
research action of walking against the corpus of believers, 'as' a  
sacrificial Naked Man, man with (disrespectful) hat-- to make visible,  
as he wrote "to reveal the sould of believers through a mechanism that  
make it possible to study their pysiognomic reactions, their gestures,  
walk, gaze; in summery, to feel the environment's pulse, to  
psychically touch the tempestuous emotion of the collective
soul, to register the expression of that emotion, to rpovoke revolt in  
order to see something of the unconscious...' (translation Inti  
Guerrero.)

'[D]esvendar a alma dos crentes por meio de um reagente qualquer que  
permitisse estudar a reação nas fisionomias, nos gestos, no passo, no  
olhar, sentir enfim o pulso do ambiente, palpar psiquicamente a emoção  
tempestuosa da alma coletiva, registrar o escoamento dessa emoção,  
provocar a revolta para ver alguma coisa do inconsciente'. Flávio de  
Carvalho, Experiência no.2, Rio de Janeiro: Nau, 2001.


cm


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christina mcphee

http://christinamcphee.netó