100 years of Brazilian modernism
[Previous posts in this series]
The Semana da Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), often cited as the start of Modernism in Brazil even though there were modernists producing art in the country before that week, was held from February 10 to February 17, 1922, in São Paulo. To mark that important centenary in Brazilian arts, here is the rest of my translation of one of (if not the) most important Brazilian modernist manifesto.
THE ANTHROPOPHAGIST MANIFESTO
(sections 36 - end)
Migrations. Fleeing from tedious states. Down with urban scleroses. Down with Conservatories and speculative boredom.
From William James to Voronoff. The transfiguration of the Taboo into a totem. Anthropophagy.
The paterfamilias and the creation of the Moral of the Stork: Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + feeling of authority in the face of curious progeny.
We need to leave behind a deep atheism to get to the idea of God. But the Carib didn’t need that. Because they had Guaracy.
The created objective reacts like the Angels of the Fall. Later Moses wanders off. What does that have to do with us?
Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.
Down with the torch-bearing Indian. The Indian child of Mary, stepchild of Catherine de Medici, and godchild of D. Antonio de Mariz.
Joy is casting out nines.
In the matriarchy of Pindorama.
Down with Memory as a source of tradition. Personal experience renewed.
We are concretists. Ideas take charge, react, and burn people in public squares. Let’s suppress ideas and other paralyses. With routes. Believing in signs, believing in instruments and in stars.
Down with Goethe, mother of the Gracchi, and the Court of D. João VI.
Joy is casting out nines.
The fight between what could be called the Uncreated and the Creature - illustrated by the permanent contradiction between humans and their Taboo. Everyday love and the capitalist way of life. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform it into a totem. The human adventure. The earthly purpose. However, only the pure elites succeeded in reaching carnal anthropophagy, which carries in itself the highest meaning of life and avoids all the evils identified by Freud, catechistic evils. What results is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It’s the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From the carnal, it becomes elective and creates friendship. From the affectionate, love. From the speculative, science. It takes detours and moves around. We have arrived at disgrace. Low anthropophagy clustered in the sins of catechism - envy, usury, calumny, murder. We act against this plague of the so-called cultured and Christianized peoples. Anthropophagists.
Down with Anchieta singing of the eleven thousand heavenly virgins, in the land of Iracema - the patriarch João Ramalho, founder of São Paulo.
Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. A typical sentence from D. João VI: “My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does it!" We expelled the dynasty. We need to expel the Brigantine spirit, the decrees and Maria da Fonte’s snuff.
Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud - reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions, and without penitentiaries in the the matriarchy of Pindorama.