ANNA

MARIA
MAIOLINO
 ANNA
MARIA
MAIOLINO
ORGANIZED BY

HELEN MOLESWORTH AND BRYAN BARCENA

ESSAYS BY

BRYAN BARCENA
BRIONY FER
SÉRGIO B. MARTINS
HELEN MOLESWORTH
ANNE M. WAGNER

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES

DELMONICO BOOKS • PRESTEL MUNICH, LONDON, NEW YORK
——
PUBLISHED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE GETTY FOUNDATION
 CONTENTS

6
DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
PHILIPPE VERGNE

7
CURATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
HELEN MOLESWORTH

150

HUNGER IS A VIRTUE
BRYAN BARCENA

158

AN EARLY LATE STYLE:

ON ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO’S 1970s WORK ON PAPER
SÉRGIO B. MARTINS

164

MOTHER KNOWLEDGE
HELEN MOLESWORTH

172

THE POLYMORPHIC IMPULSE

BRIONY FER

178

THE OFFERING TABLE, OR THE MATTER OF DEATH

ANNE M. WAGNER

184
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

189
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

190
CONTRIBUTORS
 DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
For years I have been fascinated with Oswald de Andrade’s
“Cannibalist Manifesto.” It defied all catechism and argued for a
spirit that refuses to conceive the spirit without a body; a man-
ifesto that encourages the cultural absorption of the sacred
enemy, of the catechist evils, of the oppressive taboos, of the
catholic husbands. This manifesto was a road map for cultural
and aesthetic independence, for the digestion and rejection
of norms, and for true and individual singularities. It may be a
cliché, but in so many ways, Anna Maria Maiolino’s life and work
seem to give a shape to the urgency of de Andrade’s manifesto.
Over the course of five decades Maiolino has worked
through linguistic, cultural, and personal tectonic shifts, and
despite the repressive political climates she experienced,
Maiolino’s journey is one defined by a constant desire to visu-
alize or objectify her struggle for a cohesive identity. Whether
this struggle assumes the material forms of torn-out voids and
holes punctured by thread, grainy films borne of violence and
repression, or intricate molded landscapes and accumulations
of hand-worked clay, Maiolino’s oeuvre is one that positions the
body, its senses, and the labor it is capable of—in fact its very
vulnerability—dead center. This is not to say that Maiolino’s
acts of making are laborious and unpleasant, in fact, quite the
opposite. Maiolino’s objects brim with the joy of making, and
exemplify an unyielding and universal desire to create.
Maiolino’s artistic and personal trajectory speaks to the
massive transformations of the twentieth century. Thus, The
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is honored
to present the first large-scale retrospective of Anna Maria
Maiolino’s work ever to be staged in the United States. This
exhibition is exemplary of MOCA’s long-term commitment to
organizing key surveys of the work of artists from Los Angeles
and beyond. Moreover this exhibition typifies MOCA’s desire to
bring a global perspective to the presentation of contemporary
art in Los Angeles.
Historical events profoundly shaped Maiolino’s aes-
thetic practices, and it is her navigation of these powerful
forces that have made her one of the most important artists
of her generation. Born in Italy in 1942, she immigrated with
her family to Venezuela as a young girl before moving to Brazil
in 1960 to study art. Maiolino has been subject to the global
displacements wrought by World War II—complete with their
6 7
linguistic and cultural ruptures—and later, to the oppressive mil-
itary dictatorship in her adopted country of Brazil. MOCA’s exhi-
bition pays close attention to the sociohistorical dimension of
Maiolino’s work, particularly issues of migration, assimilation (lin-
guistic and otherwise), feminism, and the ever-present tension
between art and life, between the timeless and the everyday,
and between what can be said and what is felt. I am honored
to introduce North American audiences to a Latin American
artist whose work forged connections across the boundaries
of nation-states and geopolitical divisions, and whose vision of
the world as being structured by binaries without hierarchy is
unique and utterly compelling.
This important exhibition would not have been possible
without generous grants from the Getty Foundation. MOCA is
honored to participate in the Getty’s initiative Pacific Standard
Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin
American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles. I also
extend my thanks to MOCA’s Board of Trustees for their endur-
ing support. In particular I want to recognize board Co-Chairs
Maurice Marciano and Lilly Tartikoff Karatz for their leadership
and friendship. I am extremely grateful to the individuals, gal-
leries, and institutions that have graciously loaned works from
their collections.
My deepest gratitude goes to MOCA Chief Curator
Helen Molesworth for her commitment and consistent dedi-
cation to presenting the work of artists who rupture binaries,
upend stereotypes, and lay claim to overlooked spaces. My
heartfelt thanks go to Bryan Barcena, Research Assistant for
Latin American Art, for bringing to the exhibition exceptional
standards of research and expertise.
And most importantly, I am thankful to Anna Maria
Maiolino for her support and cooperation in creating this exhi-
bition for MOCA, and for her significant contribution to the art
that shapes our time.
PHILIPPE VERGNE
DIRECTOR, THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES
CURATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Organizing a monographic survey exhibition is simultaneously The design and the editing of exhibition catalogues
intimate and rewarding. The more time one spends with the gives shape and form to our efforts in ways that I am ever
artist and her oeuvre, the more they inflect one another and humbled by. Once again it has been my great pleasure to make
are, ultimately, understood as inseparable from one another. a book designed by Purtill Family Business and edited by Donna
And the more time spent looking at and thinking about the Wingate/Artist and Publisher Services, New York.
artworks with the artist, the more this familiarity between The internal team at MOCA is exceptional in every
curator and artist grows. This was very much my experience way. Our thanks to Executive Assistant to the Chief Curator
working on this exhibition with Anna Maria Maiolino. Her gen- Hana Cohn, Director of Exhibitions Management Jill Davis, Head
erosity and candor, her willingness to open her studio and Registrar Sandy Davis, Exhibition Technician Caitlin Mitchell,
home, to speak with us at length, and her desire to create Communication Manager Eva Seta, Chief Communications
new artworks for the show made the entire process extremely Officer Sarah Stifler, and especially our Director Philippe Vergne.
fulfilling. Throughout it all, our time with Maiolino was suf- We are also deeply grateful to all of the lenders for
fused with feelings of comradery and friendship that spanned sharing artworks from their collections for this exhibition, and
generational, geographical, temporal, and linguistic divides. to our Board of Trustees for enabling MOCA to do the important
Thus, our deepest thanks must go to Anna Maria Maiolino, work of presenting art from around the world with audiences
for producing art that helps us to understand—intellectually, in Los Angeles.
affectively, and haptically—the distinct but interrelated ideas
HELEN MOLESWORTH
of the maternal, migration, sameness, difference, repetition,
CHIEF CURATOR, THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES
and the deep pleasures of making.
Nearly all of my conversations with Maiolino took place
with Bryan Barcena and Livia Gonzaga. Bryan is the Research
Assistant for Latin American Art at MOCA, and he has guided
this project in every way. A multilingual student of Latin
American art and an emerging curator and writer, his efforts
were essential to every aspect of this exhibition. Livia Gonzaga
has worked as Maiolino’s primary assistant for ten years. None
of this would have been possible without her quick translations,
indefatigable work ethic, and good humor.
We are indebted to the Getty Foundation for the
research funding that allowed us to convene all of the cat-
alogue’s authors in Brazil for a three-day discussion, half of
which took place in Maiolino’s studio, placing all of the authors
in direct proximity to her work. The Getty Foundation also sup-
ported the production of the exhibition.
Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo and Hauser & Wirth in
London, New York, and Zurich were instrumental in helping us
locate essential artworks. Special thanks go to Luisa Strina, Marli
Matsumoto, and Flavia Franca at Luisa Strina Gallery and Iwan
Wirth, Marc Payot, Barbara Corti, and Nicole Keller at Hauser &
Wirth. I’d also like to thank Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan for
her longstanding support of Anna’s work in her home country.
Anna, 1967. Woodcut, 18 15/16 x 26 in. (48 x 66 cm)

9
Glu Glu Glu…, 1967. Woodcut, 26 x 18 15/16 in. (66 x 48 cm) Glu Glu Glu…, 1967. Acrylic ink and fabric on wood, 43 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 5 in. (110 x 59 x 12.5 cm)

10 11
Schhhiiii.…, 1967. Woodcut, 26 x 18 15/16 in. (66 x 48 cm) Minha Familia (My Family), 1966. Acrylic ink on canvas, 33 1/8 x 38 5/8 in. (84 x 98 cm)

12 13
O Herói (The Hero), 1966/2000. Acrylic ink on wood with mixed media, 23 1/4 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/4 in. (59 x 46 x 7 cm) A Espera (Waiting), 1967/2000. Acrylic ink and fabric on wood, 50 3/8 x 48 3/8 x 11 3/4 in. (128 x 123 x 30 cm)

14 15
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) series, 1968. Ink on paper, 8 1/4 x 11 7/16 in. (21 x 29 cm) Untitled, from the Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) series, 1968. Ink on paper, 11 7/16 x 8 1/4 in. (29 x 21 cm)
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) series, 1968. Ink on paper, 8 1/4 x 11 7/16 in. (21 x 29 cm) Untitled, from the Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) series, 1968. Ink on paper, 11 7/16 x 8 1/4 in. (29 x 21 cm)
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) series, 1968. Ink on paper, 11 7/16 x 8 1/4 in. (29 x 21 cm) Untitled, from the Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) series, 1968. Ink on paper, 8 1/4 x 11 7/16 in. (21 x 29 cm)

16 17
Escape Point, 1971. Etching and transfer type on paper, 27 3/8 x 20 7/8 in. (69.5 x 53 cm) Escape Angle, 1971. Etching and transfer type on paper, 28 x 21 5/8 in. (71 x 55 cm)

18 19
Poema Secreto (Secret Poem), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1971. Ink and transfer type on paper, 17 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. (45 x 40 cm) Eu (I), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1971. Ink and transfer type on paper, 20 1/16 x 20 1/16 in. (51 x 51 cm)

20 21
Capítulo I (Chapter I), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1971/1999. Ink and transfer type on paper, 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50 cm) Capítulo II (Chapter II), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1976/1999. Ink and transfer type on paper, 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50 cm)

22 23
Entrada e Saída (Entrance and Exit), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1973. Acrylic, transfer type, and thread on paper, Desde A até M (From A to M), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1972. Thread, gouache ink, and transfer type on paper,
20 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. (52 x 52 x 5.7 cm) 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50 cm)

24 25
Anno 1942, from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps), series 1973/1999. Gouache ink, transfer type, and burn marks on paper, Situação Geografica: Alma Negra da América Latina (Geographic Situation: Black Soul of Latin America), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1976.
19 7/8 x 16 7/8 x 2 3/8 in. (50.5 x 42.3 x 6 cm) Acrylic ink on wood, 66 15/16 x 51 9/16 x 3 15/16 in. (170 x 131 x 10 cm)

26 27
Untitled, from the Projetos Construidos (Constructed Projects) series, 1972. Thread on paper, 15 x 15 x 2 3/8 in. (38 x 38 x 6 cm) Untitled, from the Projetos Construidos (Constructed Projects) series, 1972. Gouache ink and transfer type on paper, 15 x 15 x 2 3/8 in. (38 x 38 x 6 cm)

28 29
Untitled, from the Gravuras Objetos (Print Objects) series, 1972. Etching with thread and transfer type, 19 11/16 x 20 3/16 in. (50 x 51.2 cm)

31
Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1973. Gouache ink, thread, and transfer type on paper, 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 x 1 15/16 in. (50 x 50 x 5 cm) Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1974/2001. Thread and paper, 9 13/16 x 13 3/8 x 2 9/16 in. (25 x 34 x 6.5 cm)

32 33
Em Cima da Linha (Over the Line), from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1976. Thread on paper, 28 1/8 x 28 1/8 x 3 in. (71.5 x 71.5 x 7.5 cm) Untitled, 1974. Acrylic ink and thread on canvas, 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in. (80 x 80 cm)

34 35
Linha Solta (Loose Line), from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1975. Thread on paper, 21 1/2 x 14 3/4 x 5 5/16 in. (54.5 x 37.5 x 13.5 cm) Linha Solta (Loose Line), from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1975. Thread on paper, 21 1/2 x 14 3/4 x 5 5/16 in. (54.5 x 37.5 x 13.5 cm)

36 37
Na Linha (On the Line), from the Livro Objeto (Book Object) series, 1976. Thread on paper, dimensions variable Trajectória I (Trajectory I), from the Livro Objeto (Book Object) series, 1976. Thread on paper, 8 1/16 x 10 5/8 x 3/8 in. (20.5 x 27 x 1 cm)

38 39
Trajetória (Trajectory), from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1976. Thread on paper, 28 3/8 x 28 3/8 in. (72 x 72 cm) Buraco Preto (Black Hole), from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1974. Paper, 28 3/4 x 28 3/4 x 3 15/16 in. (73 x 73 x 10 cm)

40 41
Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1973. Thread on paper, 9 13/16 x 11 13/16 x 2 3/8 in. (25 x 30 x 6 cm) No Horizonte (On the Horizon), from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1975. Gouache ink on paper, 28 1/2 x 28 1/2 x 2 3/16 in. (72.5 x 72.5 x 5.5 cm)

42 43
Untitled, from the Projetos Construidos (Constructed Projects) series, 1973/2008. Gouache ink on paper, 25 9/16 x 22 1/2 x 4 in. (65 x 57 x 10 cm) Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1974/2011. Gouache ink on paper, 28 3/8 x 28 3/8 x 3 15/16 in. (56 x 56 x 10 cm)

44 45
De: Para: (From: To:), from the Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series, 1974. Gelatin silver print, 25 x 18 15/16 in. (63.5 x 48 cm) É o que Sobra (What is Left Over), from the Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series, 1974. Digital print, three parts, each 11 1/4 x 15 3/4 in. (28.5 x 40 cm)

46 47
Por um Fio (By a Thread), from the Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series, 1976. Archival inkjet print, 22 3/8 x 31 1/8 in. (57 x 79 cm)

49
Entrevidas (Between Lives), from the Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series, 1981. Gelatin silver prints, each 56 3/4 x 36 1/4 in. (144 x 92 cm) Following: Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação) (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981. Digital print, 11 13/16 x 17 3/4 in. (30 x 45 cm)

50 51
52 53
Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação) (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981. Digital print, 22 x 15 3/4 in. (56 x 40 cm)

55
Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação) (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981. Digital print, 12 x 14 1/2 in. (30.5 x 37 cm) Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação) (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981. Digital print, 14 1/2 x 12 in. (37 x 30.5 cm)

56 57
+-=- , 1976. Super-8 film transferred to video (black-and-white), 3:37 min.

59
Y, 1974. Super-8 film transferred to video (black-and-white, sound), 1:52 min. In-Out (Antropofagia) (Anthropophagy), 1973. Super-8 film transferred to video (color, sound), 8:14 min.

60 61
Performance of Solitário ou Paciência (Solitary or Patience). Installation view of the exhibition Aos Poucos, 1976, Petite Galerie, Rio de Janeiro Monumento à Fome (Monument to Hunger), 1978. Rice and beans. Performance-installation at Mitos Vadios (Vagabond Myths) at Rua Augusta, São Paulo

62 63
É Assim (That’s How It Is), from the Novas Paisagens (New Landscapes) series, 1989. Oil based ink on plaster and cement, 33 7/8 x 49 1/2 x 2 in. (86 x 126 x 5 cm) Untitled, from the Novas Paisagens (New Landscapes) series, 1989. Plaster, 33 1/2 x 33 1/2 x 2 3/4 in. (85 x 85 x 7 cm)

64 65
Um em Um (One in One), 1991. Cement and pigment, 17 x 15 x 6 in. (43 x 38 x 15 cm) Untitled, from the Novas Paisagens (New Landscapes) series, 1990. Cement, 18 7/8 x 31 1/2 x 2 3/4 in. (48 x 80 x 7 cm)

66 67
Na Tábua (On the Board), 1993. Cement, 16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm) Mais de Cem (More than a Hundred), from the Novas Paisagens (New Landscapes) series, 1993. Cement, 26 3/8 x 31 7/8 x 2 in. (67 x 81 x 5 cm)

68 69
Untitled, from the Codicilli (Codicils) series, 1993. Cement and pigment, 16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm) Untitled, from the Codicilli (Codicils) series, 1993. Cement and pigment, 16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm)

70 71
Untitled, from the Codicilli (Codicils) series, 1993. Cement and pigment, 16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm)

73
Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil (One, None, One Hundred Thousand), 1993. Cement and pigment, 57 x 24 x 2 3/4 in. (145 x 61 x 6 cm) 13 Segmentos (13 Segments), 1993. Cement, 57 x 12 1/4 x 5 1/8 in. (145 x 31 x 13 cm)

74 75
São (They Are), 1994. Plaster, each 4 3/4 x 18 7/8 x 12 5/8 in. (12 x 48 x 32 cm) São Dois (They Are Two), 1996. Plaster and cement, 53 9/16 x 9 7/16 x 4 3/4 in. (136 x 24 x 12 cm)

76 77
São 8 (They Are 8), 1993. Cement and pigment, eight parts, each approx. 48 x 4 3/4 in. (122 x 12 cm)

78 79
Rolinhos na Horizontal (Little Horizontal Rolls), 1993/2017. Plaster, 43 5/16 x 51 3/16 x 2 3/4 in. (110 x 130 x 7 cm)

81
Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 1990. Plaster, 16 15/16 x 11 13/16 x 3 15/16 in. (43 x 30 x 10 cm)
Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 1990. Plaster, 37 3/8 x 14 9/16 x 4 3/4 in. (95 x 37 x 12 cm) Poderiam Ser Dois (They Could Be Two), 1996. Plaster, 20 1/16 x 37 7/16 x 4 3/4 in. (51 x 95 x 12 cm)

82 83
Untitled, from the Grandes Ausentes (Large Absentees) series, 1997/2006. Cement and pigment, 18 7/8 x 18 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (48 x 48 x 8 cm) Untitled, from the Pequenos Ausentes (Small Absentees) series, 1996. Plaster, 8 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (22 x 25 x 8 cm)

84 85
Untitled, from the In series, 1996. Plaster, 8 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (22 x 25 x 8 cm) Untitled, from the Pequenos Ausentes (Small Absentees) series, 1998/2006. Plaster, 8 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (22 x 25 x 8 cm)

86 87
Untitled, from the A Sombra do Outro (Shadow of the Other) series, 1993/2005. Cement and pigment, 10 parts, each 11 7/8 x 9 3/8 x 6 5/8 in. (30 x 24 x 17 cm)

88 89
 Untitled, from the Novos Outros (New Others) series, 2013. Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic on metal table.
Untitled, from the Uns & Outros (Ones & Others) series 1996/2017. Cement and pigment, 14 parts, each 11 7/8 x 9 3/8 x 6 5/8 in. (30 x 24 x 17 cm) Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)

90 91
Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 2013. Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic on metal table. Untitled, from the Novos Outros (New Others) series, 2013. Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic on metal table.
Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm) Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)

92 93
 Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 2013. Molded pigmented cement on metal table. Untitled, from the Novos Outros (New Others) series, 2013. Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic on metal table.
Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm) Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)

94 95
 Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 2006. Molded pigmented cement on metal table. Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 2013. Molded pigmented cement on metal table.
Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm) Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)

96 97
Untitled, from the Novos Ausentes (Newly Absent) series, 2011. Cement and pigment, 17 5/16 x 18 1/2 x 1 1/8 in. (44 x 47 x 3 cm) Untitled, from the Novos Ausentes (Newly Absent) series, 2011. Cement and pigment, 17 5/16 x 18 1/2 x 1 1/8 in. (44 x 47 x 3 cm)

98 99
Ainda Mais Estes (Still More of These), from the Terra Modelada (Modeled Earth) series, 1996. Clay. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London Study for installation, artist’s studio, 1994.

100 101
Above and following: Installation views of Here & There, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012.

102 103
104 105
Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1988. Ink and colored ink on paper, 10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm) Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1984. Watercolor, ink, and pastel on paper, 10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm)

106 107
Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1985. Ink and colored ink on paper, 13 1/4 x 10 7/8 in. (33.5 x 27.5 cm) Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1987. Ink and colored ink on paper, 10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm)

108 109
Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1984. Ink and colored ink on paper, 10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm) Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 1984. Ink on paper, 27 9/16 x 19 11/16 in. (70 x 50 cm)

110 111
Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 1984. Ink on paper, 27 9/16 x 19 11/16 in. (70 x 50 cm) Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 1991. Ink on paper, 27 9/16 x 19 11/16 in. (70 x 50 cm)

112 113
Untitled, from the Novas Marcas da Gota (New Drop Marks) series, 2003. Acrylic on cardboard. 84 parts, each 13 3/4 x 9 5/8 in. (35 x 24.5 cm)

114 115
Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2000–2004. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm)

116 117
Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2000–2004. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2003. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm)

118 119
Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2003. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2003. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm)

120 121
Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2000–2004. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm)

122
Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2000–2004. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Recto and verso of Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2000–2004. Thread on paper, 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm)

124 125
Untitled, from the Novos Percursos (New Routes) series, 2007. Acrylic ink on paper, 22 x 15 in. (56 x 38 cm)
Untitled, from the Novos Percursos (New Routes) series, 2007. Acrylic ink on paper, 22 x 15 in. (56 x 38 cm) Untitled, from the Contínuos II (Continuities II) series, 2009. Ink on paper, 16 1/2 x 14 in. (42 x 35.5 cm)

126 127
Untitled, from the Abril (April) series, 2008. Acrylic ink on paper, 39 3/8 x 27 9/16 in. (100 x 70 cm) Untitled, from the Novembro (November) series, 2008. Acrylic ink on paper, 18 1/8 x 14 3/16 in. (46 x 36 cm)

128 129
Untitled, from the Incompletude II (Incompleteness II) series, 2008. Ink on paper, 16 x 13 1/4 in. (40.5 x 33.5 cm) Untitled, from the Incompletude II (Incompleteness II) series, 2008. Ink on paper, 16 x 13 1/4 in. (40.5 x 33.5 cm)

130 131
Untitled, from the Incompletude (Incompleteness) series, 2008. Steel, 19 11/16 x 24 7/16 x 10 1/4 in. (50 x 62 x 26 cm) Untitled, from the Incompletude (Incompleteness) series, 2009/2016. Steel, 34 1/4 x 27 1/2 x 11 in. (87 x 70 x 28 cm)

132 133
Untitled, from the Incompletude II (Incompleteness II) series, 2009. Ink on paper, 19 x 11 in. (48 x 28 cm)
Untitled, from the Incompletude II (Incompleteness II) series, 2009. Ink on paper, 21 x 11 in. (53 x 28 cm) Untitled, from the Vestígios (Vestiges) series, 2000. Ink on paper, 12 1/4 x 9 in. (31 x 23 cm)

134 135
Untitled, from the Vestígios (Vestiges) series, 2010. Ink on paper, 14 x 24 5/8 in. (35.5 x 62.5 cm) Untitled, from the Vestígios (Vestiges) series, 2010. Ink on paper, 14 x 24 5/8 in. (35.5 x 62.5 cm)

136 137
Untitled, from the Giro Giro Tonto series, 2012. Ink on paper, 21 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (54 x 42 cm)
Untitled, from the Giro Giro Tonto series, 2012. Ink on paper, 21 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (54 x 42 cm) Untitled, from the Giro Giro Tonto series, 2012. Ink on paper, 21 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (54 x 42 cm)

138 139
Untitled, from the In-Moto II series, 2014. Ink on paper, 16 1/2 x 11 3/8 in. (42 x 29 cm)
Untitled, from the In-Moto II series, 2014. Ink on paper, 16 1/2 x 11 3/8 in. (42 x 29 cm) Untitled, from the In-Moto II series, 2014. Ink on paper, 16 1/2 x 11 3/8 in. (42 x 29 cm)

140 141
Untitled, from the Ritornello series, 2014. Ink on paper, 18 1/8 x 15 in. (46 x 38 cm) Untitled, from the Filogenéticos (Phylogenetics) series, 2014. Ink and acrylic ink on paper, 18 x 12 in. (45.5 x 30.5 cm)

142 143
Untitled, from the Filogenéticos (Phylogenetics) series, 2015. Ink and acrylic ink on paper, 22 x 16 1/2 in. (56 x 42 cm) Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series, 2016. Ink on paper, 30 1/8 x 22 in. (76.5 x 56 cm)

144 145
Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series, 2016. Ink on paper, 30 1/8 x 22 in. (76.5 x 56 cm) Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series, 2016. Ink on paper, 30 1/8 x 22 in. (76.5 x 56 cm)

146 147
Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series, 2016. Ink on paper, 22 x 16 1/2 in. (56 x 42 cm) Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 2016. Acrylic and ink on paper, 41 3/8 x 31 1/2 in. (105 x 80 cm)

148 149
 HUNGER IS A VIRTUE
BRYAN BARCENA
A photograph from 1976 finds Anna Maria Maiolino staring
solemnly out at the viewer while seated at a black-draped
table playing a game of solitaire. The photographs document-
ing the exhibition Aos Poucos (Little by Little) capture a stoic
expression and steely gaze that convey a gravity that belies
the prosaic nature of the game. During the run of the exhibi-
tion the artist sat at the table and played in silence, repeatedly
laying out the cards in sequence and then returning them to
the deck [fig. 1]. However, the sequence remained terminally
incomplete—at the outset she removed two cards from the
set, rendering the game both unfinishable and unwinnable.
Maiolino transformed this quintessential pastime into a per-
formance that embodied both a personal and political state
of being. This “stacking of the deck” transformed the game,
and by extension Maiolino’s agency, rendering it infinite in its
incompleteness and insatiability.
The performance, simply titled Solitário ou Paciência
(Solitaire or Patience), served as the literal centerpiece to a
comprehensive exhibition at the Petite Galerie in Rio de Janeiro.
Sitting at the center of the square gallery, Maiolino was sur-
rounded by her etchings, prints, sculptural paper works,
Super-8 films, books, and drawings. The exhibition represented
the culmination of a period of rapid development and experi-
mentation for the thirty-three-year-old artist. The works that
surrounded the performance were the fruit of a particularly
definitive time frame in Maiolino’s life, marked by personal,
artistic, and political tectonic shifts. The years bookended by
her return to Rio from New York in 1971 and this exhibition
in 1976 mark a prolific and generative period that provided
a conceptual undergirding that has propelled Maiolino’s work
into the present day.
Although solitaire is a game played alone, Maiolino’s
early career is one bound to the work of those who surrounded
her. This period found Maiolino at the center of a cast of import-
ant actors that formed the core of a Latin American, and
more specifically Brazilian, avant-garde. Maiolino became part
of a network of influential figures—a rich social fabric in and
around New York and later Rio de Janeiro. During this formative
period she came into contact with artists such as Lygia Clark,
Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Antonio Dias, Artur Barrio, Rubens
Gerchman, Liliana Porter, and Luis Camnitzer, either through
direct socialization or through exposure to their work. She was
Fig. 1: Performance of Solitário ou Paciência (Solitaire or Patience). Installation view of the exhibition Aos Poucos, 1976, Petite Galerie, Rio de Janeiro
151
undoubtedly part of one of the most fertile artistic networks
to have existed in Latin America, and although it may be dif-
ficult to accurately establish direct causality or correlation,
her presence was undeniable given the similar strategies, both
formal and conceptual, that these artists shared. To use a met-
aphor provided by the artist: “We were all fishing from the
same lake, we were bound to catch the same fish.”1 This essay
focuses on Maiolino’s work during this period, drawing atten-
tion to the forms and ideas circulating among her community
of artists, while also making a claim for her unique approach
to their shared concerns.
REPETITION
In 1968 Maiolino, the mother of two young children, was liv-
ing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Her then-husband
Rubens Gerchman had decided that the family should flee
the Brazilian military dictatorship (which was entering its
most violent and repressive era under President Emílio
Garrastazu Médici2), and Maiolino and Gerchman arrived in
New York to find a community of Latin American voluntary
exiles, including the couple’s good friend Hélio Oiticica. In the
years preceding her departure to New York Maiolino’s work
had received a warm reception in Brazil. The gritty woodcuts
inspired by the style of Northern Brazilian folk imagery, and
brightly colored stuffed reliefs produced in 1967 and 1968,
gained her an invitation to include her work in the ground-
breaking exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian
Objectivity) in 1967 at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de
Janeiro. However, in New York her identity as Rubens’s wife
and Veronica and Micael’s mother became all-encompassing.
While Rubens entertained a revolving cast of Latin American
art world luminaries at their loft on the Bowery, Maiolino
vividly recalls being parked on the sidelines, serving coffee.
The demands of raising two children and working odd jobs
in the textile industry (money was tight) left little time for
her to become fully enmeshed in the artistic community
Gerchman was creating, much less make art. Few, if any, of
their visitors even knew that Maiolino was an artist, and she
herself doubted her identity as an artist during this other-
wise unproductive time.3

Fig. 2: Luis Camnitzer, Jose Guillermo Castillo, and Liliana Porter, Manifesto Cookie,
1966. Cookie mold and cookie in box, 4 1/8 x 4 1/8 x 7/8 in. (10.5 x 10.5 x 2.2 cm)
This changed when Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer
noticed her woodcut prints during a visit with Gerchman.4
Camnitzer arrived in New York in 1964, after fleeing the growing
repression in Uruguay. Along with Argentine Liliana Porter and
Venezuelan José Guillermo Castillo, Camnitzer had established
the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW) in 1965 as a conceptual
printmaking collective. The three artists banded together in
exile to investigate printmaking’s possibilities as a vehicle for
conceptual aspects of reproducibility, seriality, and multiplicity.
What was of specific interest to the NYGW was the conceptual
qualities inherent to the process of printmaking. They hoped to
elevate printmaking from its status as mere craft, or a vehicle
for “second-rate” reproductions and direct the conversation
instead towards the pregnant possibilities in objects that were
explicitly made to be reproduced. According to Camnitzer, “print-
ing in editions, the act of creating an edition, is more important
than the work carried out on the printing plate; this attitude
opens the way to molding, cutting, folding, and using space.”5
For these three artists, the inherent democratic, Marxist, or
egalitarian properties embedded in the ephemerality and seri-
ality of prints allowed them to explore new conceptual territo-
ries unavailable in other contemporary conventional mediums
that prioritized the uniqueness and permanence of a particular
object over its ability to be disseminated easily.
The expression of the NYGW’s goals was the production
of objects that the group termed FANDSOs: an acronym for
Free Assemblable Nonfunctional Disposable Serial Objects. The
form of the objects varied from artist to artist, and from exhi-
bition to exhibition, but all three artists participated in exper-
imental exhibition formats that included mailings between
artists, an exhibition inside a safe-deposit box, a display at the
1970 Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
(intended to bankrupt the institution by allowing visitors to
mail the exhibition’s posters at the institution’s expense), and a
manifesto mailed to museums, galleries, and friends that took
the form of a manifesto cookie stamped with a greeting and
152
a printed copy of the parameters of the FANDSO (it of course
a FANDSO as well 6 ) [fig. 2].
Up to that point Maiolino’s printmaking focused on the
figurative representation of her biography, a far cry from the
language-based print work that interested Camnitzer. Yet he
offered her a grant to study at the Pratt Graphic Art Center
in 1970, where he was teaching that semester. Ironically, the
grant was a gift of the FANDSO Foundation and was funded
through the sale of works by Juan Trepadori, a fictitious Latin
American artist invented by the NYGW in order to buoy the
careers of young Latin American artists whose work might
be considered commercially unviable.7 Even though Maiolino
found her stint at Pratt uninspiring and counterproductive (she
returned to Brazil shortly after beginning the program), it is
safe to argue that her exposure to the NYGW’s approach left
an indelible if latent impression on her practice.
Moreover, the work produced by NYGW founder Liliana
Porter during the late 60s and early 70s seems to have a spe-
cific resonance with Maiolino. Not only in their shared interest
in editioning (to this day, Maiolino quite freely editions, and
reeditions—or recreates—almost all of her work) but more so
in Porter and Maiolino’s shared treatment of paper as sculp-
tural medium and their recognition of the tactile qualities
that could be coaxed from it. This correspondence between
the artists becomes clear when considering a work such as
Porter’s To Be Wrinkled and Thrown Away (1969) [fig. 3]. This
installation consisted of blocks of square blank paper that
were torn by visitors, crumpled, and then discarded in the
same space, creating a voluminous and chaotic sculptural mass
Fig. 3: Liliana Porter, To Be Wrinkled and Thrown Away, 1969. Installation view,
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile, 1969
BA RCE NA
Fig. 4: Liliana Porter, Arruga y sombra derramada (Spilled Wrinkle and Shadow), 1970.
Silkscreen and relief, 31 x 22 1/4 in. (79 x 56.5 cm)
from what was once an orderly and static object on the wall.
Porter’s smaller paper works, such as Imagen tensada (Cinched
Image; 1970) and Arruga y sombra derramada (Wrinkle and
Spilled Shadow; 1970) [fig. 4] were made by crumpling, tearing
and cutting at the surface to reveal layered compositions that
incorporated string, etching, ink, and screen printing. More
than a mere formal correspondence, the work by Maiolino and
the work by Porter share an interest in the tactility of tear-
ing, cutting, and stamping, and more importantly the ability
for the paper to betray its own intrinsic “materiality”—not in
an alchemic or formal operation, but in the ability to trans-
fer slight, repetitive physical gestures into psychologically
charged actions.8
The two prints produced by Maiolino upon her return
to Brazil, Escape Angle and Escape Point, both 1971, served as
goodbye letters to her relationship with Rubens, New York, and
printmaking [pp. 18–19]. These images break from the figura-
tive printmaking of the late 1960s, and adopted an iconographic
and cartographic language that defined her later work in paper.
The subtle embossing found in both prints teases a multi-dimen-
sional consideration of paper that came to full fruition upon her
return to Rio in 1971. Maiolino’s return to Brazil prompted her
to embody a new subjectivity and to confront what she saw as
the definitive existential question of just how to internalize and
fully embrace her identity as an artist and citizen.
H U N G E R I S A V I RTU E
HUNGER
Much has been written under the rubric of Oswald de Andrade’s
“Manifesto Antropófago” (Cannibal Manifesto) of 1928.9 Broadly,
this metaphor for Brazilian identity aligns consumption (cul-
tural cannibalism per se) with the integration and ultimate
dehierarchization of disparate cultural elements, producing a
fully realized Brazilian subjectivity. The metaphor was usually
materialized or objectified via its representation of the body
as digestive tract—an internal “black box” where culture is con-
sumed, processed, and synthesized. The presence and central-
ity of the body in Brazilian art is widely recognized, and could
broadly (and clumsily) be described as a historical leitmotif that
binds multiple generations of artists working in a variety of
mediums throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.
The artists working alongside Maiolino in the mid 1970s were
acutely aware of Andrade’s text and sought to harness it to
forge a new postmodern, postcolonial, and uniquely Brazilian
identity. Film, video, and performance became the mediums
where Oswald de Andrade’s theory of Brazilian cultural identity
found its most vibrant outlet.
Maiolino’s return to Brazil in 1971 coincided with the
germination of film and video as artistic mediums. A trickle of
Portapak and Super-8 cameras entered the country and into
the hands of the artists, and Rio de Janeiro in particular became
a hotbed for the development of the medium. A Super-8
camera gifted by her mother allowed Maiolino access to the
expanding field. Films such as Lygia Clark’s Baba Antropofágica
(Anthropophagic Drool; 1973) [p. 161], Lygia Pape’s performance
Roda dos Prazeres (Wheel of Pleasures; 1968) and Maiolino’s
own In-Out (Antropofagia) (1973) [p. 61] directly reference
the metaphor and can be read as visualizations of the process
Oswald de Andrade suggests. In Clark’s film, strings are coated
with a group’s saliva, which is then laid upon a reposed indi-
vidual, creating a net-like structure that binds the disparate
strings together. In Roda dos Prazeres Pape sits on a beach
drawing from pools of colored dye, which she then drops into
her mouth to combine. Maiolino similarly positions the mouth
as an organism that both produces and consumes in her film
In-Out (Antropofagia), with tight shots of a variety of mouths
ingesting and regurgitating eggs and strings.
However, in order to understand Maiolino’s work
in relation to her contemporaries it is useful to extend the
anthropophagic metaphor beyond its common cannibalistic
or syncretic deployment. In addition to acknowledging the
primacy of the anthropophagic process, it is useful to question
how a repressive environment of censorship and harassment
might inflict a preemptive cessation of this consumption, a
denial of the ability to nurture the body—a closing of the
ability to both consume and exude. If the process of cultural
consumption is denied, what does a subsequent inability to
produce or consume the “nutrition” of a culture do to the
Brazilian organism?
Filmmaker Glauber Rocha, considered the origina-
tor of Brazilian auteur cinema, or “Cinema Novo,” identified
153
the relationship between hunger and political repression in
Brazilian film during the 1960s. In an article titled “Aesthetics
of Hunger” he suggests that hunger exists as a perpetual and
essential state of Brazilian existence, a result of colonization
and dependency, and is in fact a catalyst to a national aes-
thetic. He states, “This economic and political conditioning has
led us to philosophical weakness and impotence that engen-
ders sterility when conscious and hysteria when unconscious.
It is for this reason that the hunger of Latin American is not
simply an alarming symptom: it is the essence of our society. . . .
Our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that
this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood.” Although
Rocha retroactively addresses the aesthetic of films produced
during the 1960s, the eliding of hunger and violence functions
with equal impunity when describing the aims of artists work-
ing during the 1970s. He goes on to equate the unavoidable
entropic process by which repression leads to hunger and sub-
sequently begets violence: “he does not eat, but is ashamed
to say so; and yet, he does not know where this hunger comes
from. We know—since we made these sad, ugly films, those
screaming, desperate films in which reason has not always
prevailed—that this hunger will not be cured by moderate
government reforms and that the cloak of technicolor cannot
hide, but rather only aggravates, its tumors. Therefore, only a
culture of hunger, weakening its own structures, can surpass
itself qualitatively; the most noble cultural manifestation of
hunger is violence.”10
The irony of Maiolino’s relationship to hunger can-
not be understated. Her biography is defined by a literal and
metaphoric hunger. A refugee of the hunger and poverty
that existed in postwar Italy only to become naturalized in a
society that privileges hunger as an essential state of being.
Thus, Maiolino’s oeuvre can be read as a testament to this
hunger, to a culture of hunger. It was not until much later in
her career that she would find a way to assuage this hunger,
albeit temporarily.
VIOLENCE
As the dictatorship continued to weigh heavily on the artis-
tic community in Rio, Maiolino’s desire to address the polit-
ical climate became all the more pressing with her return
to Brazil. Led by Anna Bella Geiger, video and film became
the operative way for artists—female artists in particu-
lar—to document their responses to the military dictator-
ship.11 Contemporaries such as Maiolino’s ex-husband Rubens
Gerchman, Antonio Dias, Carlos Zillio, Sonia Andrade, Lygia
Parente, and Lygia Pape all began working in film and video.12
The medium was utilized as a means to document perfor-
mance more than one that presented its own particular aes-
thetic at this early stage; and, along with its use as a vehicle
for anthropophagic manifestations, the content was equally
focused on crafting an affective response to the political
climate.13 During this early period of the medium, film and
154
Fig. 5: Anna Maria Maiolino with installation Estado Escatológico (Scatological State),
at Mitos Vadios (Vagabond Myths), Rio de Janeiro, 1978
video imagery of the body, and violence against the body in
particular, became visceral and immediate.14
In films such as X and Y [p. 60], both from 1974,
Maiolino’s veiled face appears and is blindfolded and is then
interrupted by a close-up shot of a mouth crying a blood-
curdling scream. Fellow Rio inhabitant and progenitor of
Brazilian time-based art Sonia Andrade produced videos that
used remarkably similar visual strategies to Maiolino’s work
in film, as both artists seemed to confine or inflict harm on
their own bodies as a nod towards the restrictions that were
carried out under the military dictatorship. Andrade wraps her
face in wire until her disfigured skin seems to bubble and split
due to the wires in Untitled (Fio [Thread]), 1974–1977, just as
Maiolino does with ribbon in the photographs documenting
the 1974 performance De: Para: (From: To:) [fig. 6; p. 46]. Both
Maiolino and Andrade—the former in Super-8 and the latter
in video—bind their faces, writhing and turning in response
to the confining elements. In the photographs documenting a
performance titled É o que Sobra (What is Left Over; 1974) [p.
47] Maiolino feigns cutting her eyes, tongue, and ear, invoking
violence to her senses suggestive of the repressive nature of
the political climate [fig. 8]. Similarly, in Andrade’s film Untitled
(Pelos [Hair]) 1974–1977, close-up shots find the artist hacking
at her body hair with a pair of scissors.
Fig. 6: De: Para: (From: To:), from the Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series,
1974 (detail) [p. 46]
BA RCE NA
Fig. 7: Artur Barrio, DEFL ....................- SITUAÇÃO-+S+ ........................RUAS......................
Abril .... 1970., 1970. Blood, nail clippings, saliva, hair, urine, excrement, fish bones,
toilet paper, cotton, sawdust, foodstuffs, ink, and film, dimensions variable
In addition to video and film, performance became a
key outlet for the manifestation of violence against the body
in response to political oppression. The early 70s saw a dra-
matic increase in interest in performance, no doubt sparked by
Hélio Oiticica’s pioneering work with his Parangolés during the
late 1960s. With these wearable sculptures Oiticica blurred the
lines between installation, performance, and dance, sparking a
generation of artists to consider the experiential and phenom-
enological potential in art produced in real time, performed
outside the museum or gallery, and in opposition to the static. In
light of this and the dialogues surrounding the anthropophagic
impulse, contemporaries such Artur Barrio were committed to
producing visceral, incendiary, and decidedly public works that
spoke directly to the violence perpetrated upon the body. For
his intervention DEFL ....................- SITUAÇÃO-+S+ ........................
RUAS...................... Abril .... 1970., [fig. 7], Barrio filled white sacks
with blood, nails, urine, excrement, bones, toilet paper, sanitary
napkins and other objects associated with the body, tied them
together with rope, and flung them onto the streets of Rio
de Janeiro. The bloody bags resembled cadavers and crowds
formed around the objects as passersby attempted to discern
whether they were in fact human remains.
The visceral and startling films and performances pro-
duced during the 1970s seem to embody the kind of outcry and
manifestation of violence that Rocha suggests in “Aesthetics of
Hunger.” These hungry bodies inflict self-harm, or are eviscer-
ated and left as piles on the street as a result of their inability
to function via consumption. Literally deprived of their civil
liberties and metaphorically deprived of cultural sustenance,
these mangled bodies served as the catalyst for Maiolino to
find a path towards self-realization.
H U N G E R I S A V I RTU E
PATIENCE
Returning to her 1976 exhibition Aos Poucos and the game
of solitaire, Maiolino’s performance of Solitário ou Paciência
was not her first foray into zero-sum games as metaphor. In
fact, her interest in childlike games weaves through her oeu-
vre. It surfaces in the chessboard-like configuration of the
Mental Maps series—it’s easy to imagine an imaginary piece
(perhaps the objectification of Anna herself) rolling the die
and bouncing across the grid—a comparison between the
popular board game “Life” and these “Chapters” is apropos.
La Construction - Jeu (The Construction – Game; 1973) found
both children and adults using long multicolored rolls of fab-
ric to create shapes, build spaces, and run around the lawn
of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. Her video
+ - = - (1976) documents a performance where two men sling
eggs across a table at each other [fig. 9; p. 59]. The rules of
the game are such that the man who catches the most eggs
before they fall off the table becomes the winner. +-=- nods
to the fragility of human life and its ability to be made trivial in
the hands of men. However, the equation that titles the work
clues the viewer to the underlying attitude with which Maiolino
confronts the political: despite all things being equal, the out-
come is bound to be negative. If the game is rigged, and a loss
all but certain, how does one continue? Rather than assume
this cynical position as critique, I would suggest that Maiolino’s
work finds a way through—rather than against—desperation
and hunger. If these are inextricable parts of her existence,
than the goal is to find a way, find an expression through art
that represents a hardening of the will to continue despite
diminishing returns and stacked odds.
It is important to note the shift in tone represented
by works such as Solitário ou Paciência and +-=-. Rather than a
desperate need for sea change, they express a greater desire
Fig. 8: Aos Poucos (Little by Little), from the Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction)
series, 1976. Gelatin silver print, each 15 3/4 x 17 3/8 in. (40 x 44 cm)
155

Fig. 9: +-=- , 1976 [p. 59]
to come to terms with existential struggle on a conceptual or
metaphoric level. Solitário ou Paciência succinctly materializes
this attitude; by rigging the game and still submitting herself
to playing it she acknowledges an ironic attachment to “fruit-
less” repetition. The Beckett-like conundrum Maiolino sets up
with these “games” does not suggest resignation, but rather an
understanding that life (specifically that of a mother [read pro-
vider]), is structured and given form via repetition. Continuity
and repetition, exemplified by the intergenerational transfer
found in the photograph Por um Fio (By a Thread; 1976) [p. 49],
thus provides structure and hope, a bastion from the turbu-
lence created through rupture and cataclysm. The title of the
1976 exhibition at the Petite Galerie in Rio, Aos Poucos (Little
by Little), clues us in to this maturing. That is not to suggest
that Maiolino’s commitment to repetition and continuity align
her with a kind of conservatism or docility. Rather it suggests
an acceptance of patience as a virtue; a recognition of, and
faith in, the cyclical nature of life that bulwarked her against
the adverse effects of the repression that surrounded her.
Maiolino’s place within the art historical record of this
important period has been marginal until recently, and this
marked omission owes to a variety of reasons: Latin American
patriarchy, language barriers, a fractured sense of identity, and
even the artist’s own reluctance to advocate for her inclusion.
Yet a large factor was undoubtedly the character of the work
itself. Maiolino’s art, along with that of many other women of
the period, challenges us to rewrite the canon by asking us to
include a career built around the intimate, personal, profoundly
human, vulnerable, and private. How do we categorize objects
and actions born from the everyday life of a mother? How are
we to learn to read into small offerings and slight transforma-
tions as we would grand gestures? Do we include an artist who
is surrounded by talent yet chooses to advocate for indepen-
dence? How should we categorize an artist who plays solitaire
while her contemporaries throw their bodies onto the street?
The spectacular sculptures of molded cement and rolled
clay installations Maiolino began to produce during the early
1990s reignited interest in Maiolino’s project, and this renewed
156
interest has only now begun to include the artworks produced
during the late 60s and 70s. If we jump forward and examine
the works made more recently, we see how the ideas percolat-
ing during the generative period discussed here came to roost.
Moreover, her prints, films, and performances provide a codex
with which we can come to understand and narrativize the
entirety of her body of work, including her more recent work
in clay and cement. Considering her sculpture Um, Nenhum, Cem
Mil (One, None, One Hundred Thousand; 1993) as one example,
the conceptual framework defined by hunger, repetition, and
patience consolidates around the object [fig. 10; p. 74]. Its seri-
ally repeating forms, each slightly different yet of equal worth,
suggest a commitment to the radical printmaking practices of
the NYGW and its democratization of the multiple, and the title,
again, speaks to an infinity of repetition—what begins with one
singular form can stretch out into an innumerable quantity of
slight variations. The techniques by which they take shape—a
simple repetitive rolling method that speaks directly to the work
of the hand, which in turn references the rolling of bread or
pasta—ultimately addresses her interest in consumption, in pro-
viding nutrition to the body. Finally, and perhaps most poetically,
the act of offering an object such as this, an object that can
only function to temporarily satiate hunger, sustain life and
thus prevent violence, is in fact a political one. Her installation
Fig. 10: Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil (One, None, One Hundred Thousand), 1993 [p. 74]
BA RCE NA
Fig. 11: Anna Maria Maiolino protecting Monumento à Fome (Monument to Hunger)
from vandals wanting to use the rice and beans as confetti, 1979 [p. 63]
Monumento à Fome (Monument to Hunger; 1978) [fig. 11; p. 63],
is paradigmatic of this attitude: rather than address the vio-
lence associated with the dictatorship, she exalts the staple of
Brazilian diet—rice and beans—by displaying them in sacks on a
pedestal. Again, with this intervention she references hunger,
but rather than suggest its lack, she extolls the power of pro-
viding nutrition, and thus avoids violence via the most basic and
accessible means.
Tasked with feeding an individual, a family, and a pop-
ulace, the act of making food becomes a political gesture,
a humble offering spurred by a desire to prevent violence.
Feeding the body is synonymous with life itself; the human
organism requires constant nutrition to function and thus
the never-ending cycle of eating and defecating indefinitely
repeats. Just as there is no way to win her version of solitaire,
there is no “beating” hunger; its return is inevitable and the
game is never ending. Maiolino accepts and appropriates hun-
ger as an inescapable state of being. The eternal condemnation
to hunger, to immutable insatiability, is the fuel that nurtures
her productive impulse.
H U N G E R I S A V I RTU E
Notes
1. Anna Maria Maiolino, interview with the author via Skype, September 14, 2016.
2. The years 1969–1974 were considered the most repressive of the Brazilian military
dictatorship (1964–1984). During this period, the risk of censorship or detainment was
at its highest. That having been said, the visual arts were infrequently targeted by cen-
sorship mechanisms, as the dictatorship’s apparatus was more focused on supervising
mass media outlets such as the state-operated Globo network and print journalism.
For more information, see Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio
Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
3. Anna Maria Maiolino, interview with the author via Skype, September 14, 2016.
4. Beyond the personal relationship between Gerchman and Maiolino, the works the
two artists made during the late 1960s share an affinity for the simplified palette
and populist visual lexicon associated with the Nova Objetividade. However, once
Maiolino and Gerchman parted ways in 1971, Maiolino abandoned both vivid color
and figuration.
5. “Liliana Porter: Durero, Industry, Object, Week-end,” El Mundo (Buenos Aires), October
23, 1966, sec. 2, p. 41. Quoted in Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Ursula Davila-Villa, and Gina
McDaniel Tarver, The New York Graphic Workshop, 1964–1970 (Austin: Blanton Museum
of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, 2009).
6. See Pérez-Barreiro, Davila-Villa, and McDaniel Tarver, New York Graphic Workshop.
7. See Gina McDaniel Tarver, “The Trepadori Project” in Pérez-Barreiro, Davila-Villa, and
McDaniel Tarver, New York Graphic Workshop, 70–77.
8. According to Maiolino, given her own tangential presence within the New York
art world, the two artists came into contact, but never developed a professional or
personal relationship.
9. Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” reprinted in Latin American Literary
Review 19, no. 38 (Jul.–Dec. 1991): 35–37.
10. Reprinted in Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin American Cinema, Contemporary Film
and Television Series (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 59–62.
11. See Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2016), 91–122.
12. For more on Brazilian video art see Arlindo Machado, ed., Made in Brasil: Três
Décadas Do Vídeo Brasileiro = Three Decades of Brazilian Video (São Paulo: Iluminuras,
2007).
13. Few if any of these artists produced video only; it was considered a auxiliary
practice to their other work.
14. See “Bodies in Peril: Enacting Censorship in Early Brazilian Video Art (1974–1978),”
in John C. Welchman, ed., The Aesthetics of Risk: SoCCAS Symposium 3 (Zurich: JRP/
Ringier, 2008), 265–83.
157
 AN EARLY LATE STYLE
ON ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO’S 1970s WORK ON PAPER
SÉRGIO B. MARTINS
The trajectory of Anna Maria Maiolino’s art is shot through with
a lingering sense of apartness and exile. As an Italian émigré
from Venezuela, the artist viewed her early production as an
effort to find her own place (or “construct [herself] as a per-
son,” as she once put it) amongst generational peers such as
Antonio Dias, Carlos Vergara, Roberto Magalhães, and Rubens
Gerchman—her former husband.1 Together, this group played
a major part in reshaping the avant-garde in Brazilian visual
arts in the 1960s, propelling it to the country’s cultural spot-
light during the Tropicalist moment.2 But Maiolino’s life as a
young foreigner married to a rising artist—who soon became
a young mother with only meager artistic output at the time—
relegated her to a somewhat marginal place. It would be some
thirty years later—in the wake of her inclusion in Catherine
de Zegher’s groundbreaking show Inside the Visible (Institute
of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1996)—that recognition would
come, both in Brazil and abroad, once her later sculpture was
received by critical sensibilities that were initially informed by
feminist readings of postminimalism which, in turn, were willing
to expand their scope to other times and contexts.
Inside the Visible placed Maiolino alongside key women
artists of the twentieth century such as Gego, Louise Bourgeois,
Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Susan Hiller, Mona Hatoum, Martha
Rosler, and Mira Schendel. It comprised four thematic axes,
each of them chronologically arranged across three periods:
1930s–40s, 1960s–70s, and 1990s. However, unlike contempo-
raries such as Hiller and Rosler, whose work was deemed rep-
resentative of the 1960s and 1970s, Maiolino was presented as
a 1990s artist, thus cementing her anachronism (conversely,
Louise Bourgeois, whose belated reception poses an arguably
stronger case for challenging—or at least muddling—conven-
tional chronological allotments, was placed in the 1930s and
1940s). To complicate matters even further, the Maiolino art-
work that graces the catalogue’s cover, entitled Entrevidas
(Between Lives; 1981) [pp. 50–51], not only falls outside any of
the show’s chronological constraints, but it also dates closer
to the 1970s than the 1990s.
In short, it is not only socially, emotionally, and linguis-
tically (as she often stresses) that apartness and exile define
Maiolino’s sense of displacement, but also art historically.3
Maiolino’s late work gained a level of prominence unlike her
Brazilian generational peers (save perhaps for Dias, whose
Fig. 1: Anna Maria Maiolino with works from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1974
159
better-known work nevertheless remains that of the 1960s
and 1970s), though at the cost of making her earlier produc-
tion a vexing art historical problem. From the standpoint of
her 1990s work, it became, at best, a pre-history: her nominal
output remained modest and seemingly derivative, compared
to the 1960s and 1970s work of Dias, Gerchman, and Vergara.
It is as if these were two incompatible art histories clashing
during the course of her career, one stemming from a mar-
ginal (or maybe marginalized) position within the avant-garde
movement that coalesced around the 1967 Nova Objetividade
Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity) exhibition at the Museu de
Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM), and the other coming
from an opposite direction, that is to say, from the late crit-
ical acclaim that followed Inside the Visible. Though perhaps
it is simply that, rather than clash, these two art historical
pathways tended to cross over each other, without even so
much as a nod.
I shall not argue that these histories must be—or even
can be—reconciled. To my mind, Maiolino’s anachronism begs
to be read against the grain of conventional historiographical
molds. Indeed, apartness, exile, and anachronism are at the crux
of the philosopher Edward Said’s discussion of late style, which
he regards as an oblique critical stance vis-à-vis the commonsen-
sical metaphors of youth, maturity, and decay that shape most
artistic biographies.4 I find Maiolino’s trajectory resistant to the
latter; more to the point, my suggestion is that she provides
us with a singular case of an early late style. Said’s terms most
forcefully resonate with the first two decades of her career,
and with their rather unresolved relationship to her late critical
acclaim. Her work thus evidences the inadequacy of narratives
that rely too neatly on either coming of age and maturity on
the one hand, or on derivation and influence on the other.
Maiolino’s sparse production of the 1960s was likely
part of a very young artist’s effort to cope with an emerging
artistic vocabulary in an increasingly effervescent avant-gardist
setting, and many of her black-and-white works involving grids,
maps, and words in the early to mid-1970s unquestionably
resemble Dias’s production after his move to Milan in 1968—
epitomized in works such as Anywhere Is My Land (1968), The
Prisoner (1969), and The Place (1970).5 But to insist on prece-
dence and derivation as historical criteria in themselves is essen-
tially a modernist move, one that still informed interpretive
frameworks in the 1960s and 1970s. Think, for example, of the
mobilization by poets Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, and
Haroldo de Campos (and, especially through the latter, by Hélio
Oiticica), of Ezra Pound’s categories of inventor, master, and
diluter. By suggesting instead that Maiolino’s work stands as a
paradoxically early case of late style, my point is to dwell not so
much on the similarities between her work and its precedents
(thus foregrounding the question of originality) but rather —
following Said’s cue—on elements that set it apart. In the case
of this particular period, one of the most crucial of such ele-
ments is her use of paper in the Book Objects, Drawing Objects,
Print Objects, and Constructed Projects series.
As the common denominator that cuts across Maiolino’s
seemingly eclectic recourse to various formal matrixes, what is
at stake in these series is the palpable materiality of paper as it
is constantly folded, torn, and punched or sewn through. In fact
the artist herself is the first to recognize that she attacked
paper in these series from a material standpoint in opposition
to her previous treatment of paper as a support for printed
images. The latter, of course, was the standard printmaking
convention shared by her colleagues Dias, Gerchman, and
Magalhães at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio during the
1950s and 60s.6 During this same period, however, Lygia Pape’s
Concrete and Neo-Concrete printmaking was already engaging
with paper in strikingly different ways. For Pape, the translu-
cence of Japanese paper was a means of instilling the line in
her woodcuts with a luminous quality that wrested it from
its conventional role as a compositional element vis-à-vis the
plane. In her Poemas-luz (Poems-Light; 1956–57), she played with
the opposite effect, as words acquired a distinctive material
weight precisely in their opaque opposition to the translucent
surface.7 Alongside Pape’s Livro da criação (Book of Creation;
1959), Livro da Arquitetura (Book of Architecture; 1959–60), and
Mira Schendel’s slightly later Monotipias (Monotypes; 1964–66)
[figs. 2 and 3], the Tecelares and Poemas-Luz counted amongst
Figs. 2 and 3: Mira Schendel, left: Untitled, from the Linhas—Pré-arquiteturas 
(Lines—Pre-architectures) series, 1965, oil on rice paper, 18 5/8 x 9 in.
(47 x 23 cm). Right: Untitled, from the Letraset series, c. 1964–65, oil on rice
paper, 18 5/8 x 9 in. (47 x 23 cm)
160
the most sophisticated experiences with paper-based media
ever made in the Brazilian avant-garde. This is not to say that
Maiolino and her peers lagged behind Pape or Schendel. On
the contrary, her initially conventional approach to woodcut-
ting would eventually lead her in a very different, but equally
experimental direction. By virtue of her focus on the printed
image rather than on its support, the artist chose the cheap-
est papers around, including the greyish or brownish varieties
typically used for wrapping bread rolls.8 It is tempting to see
this choice as an initial chance contact with the textures, col-
ors, and procedures that would eventually emerge as the key
staples of her trademark clay and cement sculptures (as well as
later paper works), especially given the domestic context those
papers belonged to—shopping for, unwrapping, and serving
bread—all integral aspects of the daily housekeeping routines
that consumed Maiolino throughout the 1960s.
The comparison with Lygia Pape begs the question
of Neo-Concretism’s impact on Maiolino’s work, which is by no
means straightforward. One of the points she most often ref-
erences from the Neo-Concrete Manifesto is Ferreira Gullar’s
discussion of the artwork as a quasi-corpus, a term from ancient
philosophy to distinguish the physicality of gods: 9
“We conceive the work of art as neither “machine” nor “object”,
but as a quasi-corpus, that is, a being whose reality is not
exhausted in the external relations between its elements;
a being which, while decomposable into parts by analysis,
only delivers itself wholly through a direct, phenomenolog-
ical approach. We believe that the artwork overcomes that
material mechanism upon which it rests, not by virtue of
extraterrestrial qualities: it does so by means of transcending
such mechanical relations (which Gestalt makes objective) and
creating a tacit signification (M-Ponty) for itself.”10
Gullar enlisted the term as part of his effort to refuse causal
determination in the apprehension of the artwork, in favor of
a phenomenological approach in which perceiving subject and
perceived object would mutually constitute each other from
the temporal and spatial thickness of perception itself, rather
than standing as discrete poles. The Neo-Concrete artwork was
thus meant to become a catalyst for such imbrication. As the
self-reflexive matrix of perception, the body was conceived nei-
ther as an object of representation nor as a mere physiological
support for the apprehending subject of such object. Suffice
it to recall Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh” or the
psychoanalytic definition of the drive as the border between
the somatic and the psychic, to appreciate how the embodied,
perceiving subject could be taken to intersect with the making
and apprehension of meanings in ways that escape the pale of
representation. Indeed, from Glu Glu Glu… (1967) [pp. 10–11] to
the Terra Modelada (Modeled Earth; 1994) [p. 100] series and
beyond, Maiolino’s work involves the body both by means of
its explicit figures and of metaphors and processes, such as
the imprint of the working hand in rolled clay pieces that oscil-
late between the register of rolled dough (a proper product of
M A RTI N S
the human motor of labor) and excrement (a rather improper Drool; 1973) [fig. 4] —in which the skin once again becomes
by-product of the human motor of labor). a crucial medium for subjectivity, as the lying participant is
But Maiolino herself was not a Neo-Concrete artist, drowned in drooled thread—In-Out (Antropofagia) (1973)
and the quasi-corporeality of her work, so to speak, departs [fig. 7; p. 61] remains closely focused on the ingesting or
in fundamental ways from that of former Neo-Concretists regurgitating mouth, which mostly fails to mediate the flux
such as Pape and Lygia Clark.11 Having been obscured by of sounds and substances in and out of a body. Moreover, the
the non-object, the quasi-corpus remained an undeveloped interiors of Maiolino’s work constantly foil our sight: in Untitled
concept in Neo-Concretism’s own (and short) lifetime as a (1974) [fig. 5; p. 45], the superimposed, but spaced, layers of
movement. Lygia Clark’s Fantasmática do corpo (Phantasmatic paper hint at inner cavities that remain visually unavailable,
of the Body) is its most notable heir: her Objetos relacionais thus conflicting with the geometric grid lines that suggest,
(Relational Objects) mobilized a wealth of bodily metaphors on the contrary, the rationalization of viewing. Critic Paulo
that constantly threatened to crumble under the weight of Herkenhoff compares such works from Maiolino’s Drawing
their sheer sensorial accumulation, as if the memories they Objects series to “sculpted blocks,” rightly sensing how cru-
evoked acted to lower the guard of the subject whose libidinal cial their interiority is, though also—and somewhat hastily—
deadlocks they sought to dissolve. Crucially, the prime locus of projecting on them the logic of her later sculpture. For their
the phantasmatic body, both sensorially and metaphorically, spatial paradigm is not so much block as the box.
was the skin: in a video presenting Clark’s therapeutic practice, This leads to yet another path taken by the reception
critic Paulo Sergio Duarte notes that the drop of honey she of Neo-Concretism, one Maiolino was very close to, namely
fed him at the end of the session restored his interiority, since the avant-gardist movement that culminated in the Nova
previously, as his blinded and semi-naked body was exposed Objetividade Brasileira show at the MAM. The Nova Objetividade
to and progressively covered by the Relational Objects, he group faced a difficult problem: how to propose collectively
had felt as if he was “all skin, all surface.”12 Moreover, in the meaningful art that neither relied on a revolutionary metaphys-
same video, the artist shows a “very curious” object—actually ics of “the people,” as the Centros Populares de Cultura (CPC)
a body scrubber—brought to her by a patient who claimed had done, nor exploited, as Tropicalist musicians did, a level
that “this is the skin of my father” and then begged: “rub me
with the skin of my father.” Pape’s post-Neo-Concrete work Fig. 4 (top): Lygia Clark, Baba antropofágica (Anthropophagic slobber), 1973
Fig. 5 (bottom): Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series,
also appeals to the skin, which had been faintly alluded to in 1974/2011 [p. 45]
her use of Japanese paper, although in a different guise: in
O ovo [The Egg; 1968], the cubic “eggs” are themselves paper
shells to be ruptured and shed, as the sheltered subject per-
formed the abandonment, as it were, of his or hers own body
in favor of a collective one. As the artist writes: “You are
enclosed in there, enveloped in a sort of skin, or membrane:
and then you stick your hand out like this—the membrane
starts to give: suddenly it breaks and you are ‘born’: you put
your head through the hole and roll out.”13 In this sense, the
paper cubes are eggshells as much as snakeskins. The white
fabric of Pape’s Divisor is even more skin-like: it is a medium
that conjoins participants as it stretches and recoils, bringing
together their loose movements and impulses into an organic,
albeit conflictive whole. Paper and fabric, in these works, can
thus be read as two different qualities of skin. The former,
rigidly shaped and inelastic, becomes most significant pre-
cisely at the moment it is outgrown; the latter, malleable and
expandable, sustains an organic conception of the collective.
Maiolino’s work is clearly at odds with this appeal to
the skin either as the site of sensorial and mnemonic innerva-
tion (Clark) or as a plastic index of collective becoming (Pape),
even if some of her works at least share a sense of resistance
and rupture with O ovo. Clark’s and Pape’s propositions are still
in thrall, even if in a much-changed form, of the Neo-Concrete
conception of the artwork as a catalyst for the subject’s open-
ness to the world. Conversely, Maiolino’s interiorities tend to
reject the surface, and indeed, tend to complicate any act of
surfacing. Unlike Clark’s Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagic
A N E A R LY L ATE S TY L E 161
 tension between public and private that they could perfectly
illustrate Roberto Schwarz’s famous verdict about Tropicalism
resembling a strident “family secret dragged out into the mid-
dle of the street.”15
Despite having been a member of the Nova Objetividade
group, Maiolino’s elaboration of its debates and activities is
marked, once again, by a sense of belatedness. Having followed
Gerchman to New York in 1968, it was not until her return to
Rio in 1971 that she would resume her own career and finally
realize ideas she spent the preceding years penning down in
her notebooks.16 Two drawings from that year—as she often
notes—Escape Angle and Escape Point [pp. 18–19], signal a new-
found moment of artistic and personal assertiveness that led
her to break free from further linguistic alienation and domestic
Fig. 7: In-Out (Antropofagia) (Anthropophagy), 1973 [p. 61]
dimension: its long, single thread is more effectively extended
outward into the surrounding space by a group of people, thus
becoming allusive of storytelling gatherings. The work may be
wordless, but is nevertheless indebted to an oral tradition.19 As
group would gravitate towards MAM’s orbit, where they formed the core of the
avant-gardist group that exhibited in influential shows such as Opinião 65 and Nova
Objetividade Brasileira.
7. For my own treatment of Pape’s trajectory, see Sérgio B. Martins, “Lygia Pape: An
Anticlass in Avant-Gardism,” in Iria Candela, ed., Lygia Pape (New York: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2017).
8. Anna Maria Maiolino, interview with the author, September 16, 2016.
9. As Isobel Whitelegg has stated in her essay on Brazilian artist Maria Laet: “The term
‘quasi-corpus’ … originated in attempts by ancient philosophers to conceive of the
physicality of gods, a linguistic answer to the paradox of their presumed resemblance
to us: equivalent yet not the same as a human body. In more recent memory it was a
word used by Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar to describe the Neo-Concretist art work.”
See Isobel Whitelegg, “Maria Laet, Untitled, 2007 / Untitled (from the series diálogo),”
in Maria Laet, exhibition folder (London: Camberwell College of Arts/House Gallery,
2008). In his dialogue De Natura Deorum, Cicero has the Epicurean Velleius explain that
the bodily form of the gods “is not a body, but a quasi-body [quasi-corpus], nor has
it blood, but quasi-blood.” See Jeffrey Purinton, “Epicurus on the Nature of Gods,” in
David Sedley, ed., Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 21 (Oxford: Oxford University

Fig. 6: Antonio Manuel, Urnas Quentes (Hot Ballot Boxes), 1975 (left) and 2004
(right). Wood, sealing wax, and tape, both 24 x 13 x 8 in. (61 x 33 x 20 cm)
of mass-cultural diffusion the visual arts simply didn’t partake
in? With Oiticica as their main theorist, their response involved
recasting aspects of Neo-Concrete theory and practice as the
renewed foundation of a collective project staked on—but not
confined to (and this is crucial)—subjective perception and indi-
vidual experience. As I have argued elsewhere, this shift can be
clearly noted in the difference between Oiticica’s Bólide-Caixa
18, Poema Caixa 2, Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo (Box Bolide 18,
Poem Box 2, Homage to Cara de Cavalo, 1966) and his earlier
Bólides. While the latter begged an intimate, introspective expe-
rience, with viewers bending over in order to manipulate them,
the former admitted both close manipulation and reverent (or
offended) distance; indeed, in a famous photograph, Oiticica
displays Bólide-Caixa 18 straight to the camera, conscious of
how powerfully the image of the dead outlaw projected itself
outwards.14 Regardless of whether this or that particular viewer
would be drawn into mourning or confronted with the seeming
body of a martyr, the fact is that the image demanded a collec-
tive response. But its ambivalent address could easily revert to
a renewed sense of intimacy (as in personal mourning): indeed,
much of the production by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and Lygia
Pape from this period is shot-through with an unresolved ten-
sion between the inward drive that stems from their earlier
production and the will to formulate collective proposals. The
box format was a major avatar of this tension: on the one hand,
many box-like works reclaimed the legacy of non-object by vir-
tue of being seemingly mundane objects meant to be manip-
ulated; on the other, even when they pointed to processes of
unfolding and becoming-public—like the Cara de Cavalo bólide;
after all, they were meant to be opened and displayed—they
still fell short of affirming themselves unequivocally as public
artworks. Like O ovo, Antonio Manuel’s Urnas quentes (Hot Ballot-
Boxes; 1968) [fig. 6], for example, required a performative act
of breaking them open that relied on prearranged public situa-
tions external to the work itself—like the Apocalipopótese hap-
pening—and that, as performative acts, remained ephemeral.
Indeed, so well do the Urnas embody the period’s unresolved
reclusion (she spoke no English at all). The seemingly rarefied
graphic vocabulary of the drawings thinly veils the persistence
of bodily metaphors; as Michael Asbury has noted, Escape Point
suggests “the act of devouring and excreting” that “had become
for Maiolino equated with the potential of renewal in life.”17
More to the point—and this is why the pairing with Escape Angle
remains fundamental—this bodily metaphor is short-circuited
with a series of other spatial matrixes: box, page, screen, and
even architecture. Throughout these displacements, Maiolino’s
quintessential model of “enclosed openness”—to use Guy Brett’s
expression—remains the mouth; that much is clear in the way
works such as Buraco Preto (Black Hole; 1974) [p. 41] and Linha
Solta (Loose Line; 1975) [p. 36] remain so uncannily akin to the
open-mouthed silhouettes that peopled her early works18 (and
also, of course, throughout the A Sombra do Outro [Shadow of
the Other; 1993] [p. 88] and Uns & Outros [Ones & Others] [p. 90]
series), as the sculptural block finally joins her spatial repertoire.
In any case, the vast majority of her works with “mouths”—that
is, with excavated (and sometimes filled) or punched single holes
framed in blocks or boxes—remain vertically oriented, or even
wall works, thus reinforcing the association between hole and
mouth in an upright body. Indeed, even in Escape Point, as the
graphic lines begin to “spill” from the open square, the sense of
spatial recession thus generated parallels, from a purely formal
standpoint, the contrast between the receding toilet floor in
the woodcut version of Glu Glu Glu… and the stacked up verti-
cality that culminates, in the upper part of the drawing, with
the human figure and its gaping mouth [p. 10].
It is relevant, in this regard, that Maiolino’s 1976
book-object Na Linha can be interpreted as either box or mouth;
the thread that is pulled out of the box as one “reads” it, and
then folded back in, parallels the thread being either chewed
or regurgitated by the mouth in In-Out (Antropofagia). Na Linha
(On the Line; 1976) [p. 38] is one of Maiolino’s most intricate and
successful mediations between imagined interiority and formal
externalization. It undoubtedly recalls both the Neo-Concrete
books by Pape and Ferreira Gullar’s pre-Neo-Concrete book-poem
from 1955, O formigueiro (The Anthill), which exploit spatial and
temporal distensions of the act of reading. However, at odds
with Pape’s thematic approach, Na Linha evokes the archaic by
shifting the act of reading from an individual to a collective
such, it offers no clear sense of reconciliation—the recurrent Press, 2001), 181.
10. Ferreira Gullar et al., “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do
figures of blockage of speech throughout Maiolino’s oeuvre are
Brasil, March 22, 1959, 4–5. Translation by the author.
eloquent enough in this regard—but rather a poignant image 11. This rather obvious assertion becomes necessary in light of statements such as
of apartness dialectically reworked into the collective. On its this one by Paulo Herkenhoff in an essay published in the most important international
turn, and this is perhaps Maiolino’s best answer to the riddle catalogue on the artist: “Neo-Concretism included [Hélio] Oiticica, [Amilcar de] Castro,
Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Mira Schendel, Sérgio Camargo, and Cildo Meireles,
of Nova Objetividade Brasileira, the collective is rendered not among others.” This list is misleading and plainly wrong: there is absolutely no sense
as yet another countercultural vision of joyful belonging, but in which Dias, Gerchman, Schendel, Camargo, and Meireles may be said to have taken
rather as a fragile and barely palpable object to be cared for. part in Neo-Concretism. As a matter of fact, Meireles was an eleven-year old living in
Brasília in 1959 when the movement was launched. Herkenhoff, “Maiolino’s Trajectory:
A Negotiation of Differences,” in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida
Afora / A Life Line (New York: The Drawing Center, 2002), 330.
Notes
12. See Mário Carneiro, Memória do Corpo [Body Memory], vídeo, 29 min (Rio de Janeiro:
1. Anna Maria Maiolino, “Helena Tatay conversa com [interviews] Anna Maria Maiolino,”
in Helena Tatay, ed., Anna Maria Maiolino (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2012), 35.
Rioarte, 1984).
13. Lygia Pape, as quoted in Guy Brett, Aberto Fechado: Caixa e Livro na Arte Brasileira
2. Literary critic Flora Süssekind maintains that the sheer diversity of artistic practices
[Open Closed: Box and Book in Brazilian Art] (São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado, 2012),
and cultural tendencies that floated around the general term Tropicalism should be
16–18.
described as a “moment” rather than a “movement.” See Flora Süssekind, “Coro, con-
trários, massa: experiência Tropicalista e o Brasil de fins dos anos 60” [Choir, Opposites,
14. See Sérgio B. Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), especially chapter 2.
Mass: The Tropicalist Experience and Brazil in the Late 1960s], in Carlos Basualdo,
15. Roberto Schwarz, “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964–1969,” in Basualdo, Tropicália,
org., Tropicália: uma revolução na cultura brasileira [Tropicália: a Revolution in Brazilian
279–308.
Culture] (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), 31.
16. Maiolino, “Helena Tatay conversa,” 41–42.
3. As critic Michael Asbury has noted, Maiolino “shifts from one extreme to another
17. Asbury, “Maiolino: Order and Subjectivity,” 29.
until a sense of identity, of belonging, is found in the mature work.” Michael Asbury,
18. Brett, Aberto Fechado.
“Anna Maria Maiolino: Order and Subjectivity,” in Michael Asbury and Garo Keheyan,
19. This recourse to the collective by means of the archaic and the communal would
eds., Anna Maria Maiolino: Order and Subjectivity (Nicosia, Cyprus: Pharos Publishing,
also inform her later works in clay, as rolling would take place in yet another space
2009), 31.
4. Said finds in Theodor Adorno’s fixation on Beethoven’s final period a resolute
reminiscent of domestic gatherings: the long table.
attempt to recast lateness qua untimeliness—not for its own sake, but rather as a
figure of resistance against myths of false reconciliation. Indeed, in his own final years,
Adorno took late modernism itself as his critical motor, with the bleak but starkly
coherent landscape of Beckett’s plays as an antidote against the untenable nominalism
that derived, or so he argued, from the earlier heroics of montage. The philosopher
passed away in the height of a cultural crisis that many deem modernism’s endgame,
with nominalism, or heteronomy, finally becoming the new orthodoxy of advanced
art. It was also a crisis that ultimately dictated the decline of Adorno’s own theoret-
ical influence, but left open the question as to whether his critical acumen could be
reclaimed—dialectically, one hopes—against the grain of his own tastes and affiliations,
in light of the seeming demise of their historical frame of reference. See Edward Said,
On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
5. As a matter of fact, the strong influence Dias’s work exerted among his peers,
despite his very young age, was already registered in Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 exhibition
essay “General Scheme for the New Objectivity,” and Maiolino’s works O Herói and Glu
Glu Glu… are likely part of the production Oiticica refers to. See Hélio Oiticica, “General
Scheme of the New Objectivity,” in Hélio Oiticica, exh cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de
Arte Hélio Oiticica, 1992), 112.
6. Unlike the school of the Museu de Arte Moderna, where painter Ivan Serpa ran
an influential workshop around which Grupo Frente was formed, and which served
as an institutional haven for the Neo-Concrete group, the Escola Nacional de Belas
Artes was devoted to a far more traditional artistic education. And yet, it was
also where Oswaldo Goeldi, a key figure of Brazilian modern printmaking, and his
assistant Adir Botelho ran an influential workshop. Later in the 1960s, Maiolino’s

162 A N E A R LY L ATE S TY L E 163

 MOTHER KNOWLEDGE
HELEN MOLESWORTH
I remember approaching a small cottage, tucked, in a particu-
larly bucolic German way, amidst a stand of trees in Karlsruhe
Park in Kassel, Germany, at dOCUMENTA (13) to see Anna Maria
Maiolino’s installation [fig. 1; pp. 102–05]. This wasn’t the first
time I had seen the work, but it was the first time I felt cracked
open by it. I entered the small house through the front door
to find that the domesticity of the setting was intact—it had
not been transformed into a conventional white cube for the
display of art: no generic concrete floors and exposed steel
ceiling beams here. Instead there was a modest kitchen and
traditional rooms with windows and doors scaled to the ergo-
nomics of the human body. Then there was the smell, subtle
and overwhelming, deeply familiar, although it took me a second
to identify it: clay. Drying clay. I find myself wishing there was a
dictionary of smells. How does one describe the damp aroma of
the potter’s studio? (I have a childhood memory of being in the
car with my Mother as she described a new form of pottery in
which people threw wet pots, recently pulled from the wheel,
on the ground, or cut holes through them. Decades later, in my
late forties, I realize she must have been describing the work of
Peter Voulkos.) The smell was emanating from something akin
to sculpture, for every room in this little house was filled with
stacks, rows, and piles of rolled, unfired clay. A profusion. An
abundance. Excess: chairs and tables in the dining room were
covered with rolls and rolls of clay. The neatly made bed was
covered from pillow’s edge to the bottom of the mattress with
u-shaped coils of clay, and emerging from underneath the bed,
like the boogie men of childhood, more of the same, much more.
Each kitchen surface was saturated—the stove, the windowsill,
the countertops, the sink. Coils, ropes, small balls, ovoid shapes,
everything at the scale of the human hand, the process clear:
rolling, kneading, tearing, cupping. It was a horror vacui, for it
seemed as if every plane had been covered by the almost mani-
acal force of a possibly demonic endeavor. And yet a distinct
rationality prevailed. The stacks of coils were neat and beau-
tifully proportioned. The rows of balls lined up with an almost
perfect display of Japanese wabi sabi. The obsessive workman-
ship recalled Yayoi Kusama and Eve Hesse. The rooms suggested
some of the menace found in works by Lee Bontecou. The overall
installation, despite its precision, or perhaps because of it, was
vaguely fecal. The objects, despite their precision, or perhaps
because of it, were all vaguely alimentary. Pasta, bread: the
Fig. 1: Installation view of Here & There, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012 [pp.102–05]
165
staff of life. Abject/not abject. The little house was pervaded
with a distinct feeling of a housewife gone mad. Rational/crazy.
The work was titled Here & There.
Maiolino began using clay in 1989, a solid three decades
into her life as an artist: “My first encounter with clay provoked
a storm in me.”1 When one looks at her oeuvre from its begin-
nings in the late 1960s to the present, this discovery seems
like a coup de foudre: she had found her ultimate material. Her
competency with clay seemed innate, as if it had always been
there, right under her nose. Prior to clay Maiolino had primarily
made works on paper. As an accomplished printmaker, she incor-
porated both sides of the paper through tearing and folding, in
essence mirroring the logic of printmaking’s use of reversal and
the interdependency of the block and the paper. Interested in
the problem of the line, she used engraving, Letraset, ink, and
thread to produce a series of drawings as indebted to the new
logics of conceptual art as they were to the spatial and bodily
concerns of Neo-Concreticism.2 And like many artists of her
generation, she created a variety of performance and instal-
lation-based works as well as conducted experiments with film.
In this regard her career is “typical” of an artist at work in Rio
de Janeiro under the Brazilian dictatorship, which started with
a US-backed military coup in 1964 and ended with the election
of Tancredo Neves in 1985.
And yet, Maiolino was not Brazilian per se. She immi-
grated from Italy to South America—first to Venezuela at the
age of twelve and ultimately to Brazil, where she arrived as a
young woman of eighteen in 1960. “It wasn’t my decision,”3 she
said flatly. Born in Calabria in 1942, her childhood memories
are notable for their descriptions of hunger in a war-ravaged
Europe. This physical depravation is frequently countered with
memories of doting parents. Her mother tongue is Italian and
her peregrinations from Italy to Venezuela to Brazil meant that
by the time she was eighteen, she had moved linguistically
from Italian, to Spanish, to Portuguese. Maiolino was acutely
sensitive to these displacements of language, food, and cul-
ture. (In my many visits to Anna’s home in São Paulo her lovely
cook Aline Maria de Souza Alves always prepared lunch, but
never pasta. Anna always makes the pasta herself.) Maiolino
was part of a great postwar migration that was to complicate
permanently the idea of the nation-state, and her work “from
the very beginning relates food to language and language to
food.”4 Mother tongue and mother’s cooking, the migrant
carries culture in her body.
(My spouse’s maternal family also came from Calabria.
My mother-in-law, born Rose Borzumato in Brooklyn in 1931,
spoke of her mother, Teresa, often and with great affection.
I only know of her through family stories in which she was
exclusively called Noni. Noni was put on a boat from Calabria
to the United States in 1927—against her personal wishes—an
attempt on the part of her family to ensure that she escape
the poverty and destruction brought on by the devastat-
ing earthquake of 1908. Every story I ever heard about Noni
involved cooking.)
Once in Brazil Maiolino began, in earnest, to become
an artist. Her earliest works were rough-hewn woodcuts that
borrowed heavily from the popular printmaking tradition O
Cordel found in Northeastern Brazil. They were a combination
of the iconographic and the autobiographical that depicted the
everyday acts of love, coupledom, and the creation of the family
unit. In 1963 she married fellow artist Rubens Gerchman and
in 1964 she gave birth to her son Micael, followed two years
later by her daughter Veronica. In 1967 she participated in the
landmark exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian
Objectivity) at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.
One work stands out as an early self-portrait: in Anna (1966)
we see two generic approximations of the human form side by
side, their heads mere circular appendages with gaping black
holes to indicate mouths [fig. 2; p. 9]. Between these two figures
floats a bubble of speech that connects the two mouths to one
another, while the word “ANNA” in white letters floats on the
black ground. Below the figures sits a large caption, engraved
like a tombstone, which too contains the word ANNA, this time
in black against a white ground. The shifts between black and
white lay bare printing technology’s dependence on mirroring,
duality, and the ability of the printmaker to think backwards
or in reverse. For Maiolino, this was perhaps an easier task than
for others; her name is a palindrome. “Anna” is the same coming
and going, hence Maiolino’s play with the inherent complemen-
tarity of printmaking is embedded in the linguistic utterance
Fig. 2: Anna, 1967 [p. 9]
166
these actions, photographed by Maiolino, are untitled but are
called fotopoemaçao—a Portuguese neologism that translates
to photo-poem-action. The metaphor of “walking on eggshells,”
combined with an image of complete linguistic blockage, and
the precarity of attending to even the simplest of daily activ-
ities (getting into bed) are staged here as a response to a life
lived under dictatorship. They also furthered Maiolino’s uncanny
exploration of the logic of the binary, for the egg is both fertility
and its denial. It is both hard and soft, solid and void, durable and
fragile, positive and negative. An egg is radically dialectical, and
in Maiolino’s work it refuses to be sublimated, preferring instead
to rock back and forth in a permanent state of mutuality.
In the midst of these poetic images and actions a rela-
tively straightforward black-and-white photo serves, for me, as a
Fig. 3: Glu Glu Glu…, 1967 [p. 10] Baedeker to Maiolino’s work in its entirety. Reading left to right,
Fig. 4: Untitled, from the Entre Pausas (Between Pauses) series, 1968 [p. 17] Por um Fio (By a Thread; 1976) depicts three women, arranged
that names her. And while we assume that the opposite or other by age—oldest to youngest—each connected to the other via
of speech is listening, that language flows from mouth to ear, works dealt explicitly with the conditions of speech under the a thread that runs from mouth to mouth [fig. 5; p. 49]. Maiolino
Maiolino’s print suggests that language can either flow from Brazilian dictatorship. Some of the most poetic and elegiac is in the center and out of her mouth run two threads, to her
mouth to mouth, or it can issue forth in unison from two sep- are a series of photographs of eggs staged in impossible loca- right she is connected to her mother, to her left to her ten-
arate mouths. In actuality, the print refuses my art historian’s tions. Scattered throughout a cobble-stoned street [pp. 50–51], year-old daughter. All three women stare directly at the camera
“either/or scenario,” for in Anna these actions happen simulta- we watch a set of unshod female feet step gingerly through without affect. I have always admired this image: Maiolino’s
neously. Anna offers “an intrinsic duality…without any kind of a field of eggs. Eggs cover a well-made bed and a mouth, its beauty, her mother’s Old-World fatigue, her young daughter’s
moralization.”5 This “intrinsic duality” appears early in Maiolino’s lips stretched to the limits, precariously holds an egg. All of slightly suppressed smile, the continuity of the Maiolino nose,
work, and she never abandoned the implications of what it
means to think in binary without hierarchy. In Glu Glu Glu…, a Fig. 5: Por um Fio (By a Thread), from the Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series, 1976 [p. 49]
1967 woodcut, the composition is tripartite: head and torso
on top, a table set with food the middle, and a white toilet in a
black-tiled room is at the bottom [fig. 3; p. 10]. An immediately
recognizable exquisite corpse, the print offers a map of the way
of the world: hunger, food, defecation. Repeat. An endless cycle.
A primal instinct. The foundation of civilization. No hierarchy,
just process. Printmaking dominated Maiolino’s work through-
out the 1970s: printer’s block, ink, paper. And since repetition
is at the heart of the matter, Glu Glu Glu… would be repeated
by Maiolino as a three-dimensional wall relief as well, this time
rendered in the bright hard colors of pop art.
Maiolino’s development as an artist and her identity
as a mother overlap profoundly. She called some of her early
drawings, made during a two-year sojourn in New York from
1968–71, “between pauses,” quickly jotted pictorial observa-
tions, often sly and sardonic in relation to the foibles of men
(think equestrian statuary) [fig. 4; p. 17]. They were no doubt
made in between the all-consuming tasks of child-care. I can
almost see her on the park bench, placating her childrens’ needs
for food, reassurance, and affection, while intermittently mak-
ing small entries into her drawing notebook.6
Upon returning to Rio she divorced and spent the rest
of her child-rearing years as a single mother, working full-time
to provide for herself and her children.7 (Maiolino worked mostly
in various aspects of textile production, as did my own mother.)
During this period, she made art consistently, and modestly, like
so many of her contemporaries, in the realms of performance,
photography, film, and installation. Many of these ephemeral
M OL E S WORTH M OTH E R K N OW L E D G E 167
the sameness, the difference, the DNA. Given Maiolino’s play
with the seeming inevitability of binary logic, the punctum of
the image resides in the young girl’s T-shirt, with its frieze of
tennis rackets. Tennis: a game played in singles or doubles, a
game where zero is called love.
(My other attraction to the image, if I’m honest with
myself, is formed by a mixture of envy and relief, for this is a
picture I could never have taken part in. I did not have children
and my mother lost her mother at a young age. So even though
this mytho-poetic image describes the inevitable, indeed univer-
sal, structure of the generational transmission of bodies and
language, of self and family, it does not contain my experience
of the world. I wish I could be in this picture; I am hugely relieved
this picture doesn’t describe me.)
When the American art historian Linda Nochlin rhetor-
ically asked “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
her answer was deceptively simple: they hadn’t been allowed
to attend art school.8 All that would change for women of
Maiolino’s generation. They went to art school and many of
them became great artists. But many of them were also moth-
ers, and the discourse of art history and the practice of art
criticism has remained noticeably silent on what happens to the
category of artist when it is synonymous with the category of
mother. Neither a mother nor an artist, I fear it is not my place
to narrate this conundrum. But perhaps it is because I am nei-
ther that I can see how the two categories don’t always align.
The artist has typically been narrated as a figure for whom
art is everything, a narcissist in pursuit of a singular vision, a
child in a state of perpetual wonder, a tormented genius who
sacrifices the contentments of the everyday for the timeless-
ness of art. These characterizations are clichéd for sure, all the
more powerful for being so. How do we hold the narratives of
the artist in relation to the vision we have of the figure of the
Mother: she who sacrifices her own ambitions for that of her
family, she who is a source of constant care, she who is the
provider of food and language to the child, she whose daily
acts of feeding, cooking, and cleaning maintain the structure
of civilization? How can this antinomy—selfishness and gener-
osity—be reconciled in the figure of the artist who is a mother,
the mother who is an artist?9
Perhaps I should go back to the beginning.
My first real encounter with Maiolino’s work was with her sculp-
tural installation Here & There, primarily composed of unfired
clay [figs. 6 and 7; pp. 102–05]. In it she articulated an alphabet
of forms—coils, lines, loops, balls—and those forms were also
an alphabet of the processes one uses with clay: kneading, roll-
ing, dividing, tearing, stacking, cleaning, saving, discarding, and
above all, repeating. The gestalt of this work was immediately
alimentary: the hundreds of objects looked and felt like food;
more specifically, they looked and felt like the production of
food. There was a strong implication that for Maiolino the art-
ist’s studio might have more to do with the kitchen (fatta in
casa) then either the scientist’s laboratory or a room of one’s
168
own. The work enacts abundance and plentitude, it literally
spills excessively across surfaces, even emerging from beneath
the bed. Unfired, the clay is in a transitory state: it is either
waiting to be fired, and hence rendered more permanent, or,
through the addition of water, it can be reconstituted, returned
to an undifferentiated state. The clay is in limbo, for in its cur-
rent form it has no capacity for longevity. The smell of clay is
the smell of the earth; the combination of its texture, shape,
and color is fecal. It reminds us that we are composed of matter.
All clay objects bear the trace of the hands that made them,
and although beautiful and sensuous, Maiolino’s forms are rudi-
mentary. Here & There toggled between the base functions
of the body (eating and shitting), foregrounding the tempo-
rality of the everyday, ceaseless in its demand for repetition.
Though her version of repetition is offered neither as critique
nor theory: Here & There did not offer handmade repetition
as a counterproposition to the repetition of industrial produc-
tion, nor did it suggest that repetition was the handmaiden
of desire. Maiolino’s use of repetition did not offer a means to
critique consumerism, rather, Here & There staged repetition
for and as itself: repetition as an operation; repetition as a
value; repetition as the structure of life, and, ultimately, the
work presented and enacted repetition as being bound to the
structure of the maternal. Looking at Here & There through
the lens of Por um Fio, I started to frame Maiolino’s oeuvre as
positing the maternal as the ur-moment of repetition. Such
talk of the maternal typically makes me nervous—too essential-
izing, too mythic, too moralizing. But in Maiolino’s hands there
is an insistence on difference as repetition’s inevitable com-
panion, for when one looks at the hundreds of similar hand-
molded forms, one knows that each one is ever so different.
Different because they were made by a group of helpers
assisting Maiolino in her work, different still when all of the
forms were made by Maiolino herself. This making and remak-
ing represent the inevitability of difference; the facticity of
difference; the ethical value of difference. By the time Maiolino
had reached dOCUMENTA (13) she had been working in clay for
twenty years, and her work in clay had led her to explore the
role of mold making in sculpture, which in turn had engendered
her experiments with plaster and cement. With her molded
works, Maiolino was able to continue her deft negotiation of
binary oppositions. Molds permit work concerning ideas of the
solid and the void, full and empty, positive and negative, with
neither polarity ever positioned in a hierarchical relation. The
mold introduced yet another way Maiolino could establish her
interest in binary thinking with parity. Art historian Briony Fer
would enumerate Maiolino’s relationship to the mold as both an
object and a process: “A narrative of beginnings becomes impos-
sible to extricate from that of leavings,” further stating that
a mold “is both the thing that shapes and which is left over.”10
I began to intuit that Maiolino’s version of repetition—
and her use of it to complicate the simplicity of binary logic
without sacrificing the binary tout court—stemmed from her
composite identity as artist and mother. In Por um Fio Maiolino
offers herself as both mother and child, and further, as artist
M OL E S WORTH M OTH E R K N OW L E D G E Fig. 6: Installation views of Here & There, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012 [pp. 102–05]

Fig. 7: Installation views of Here & There, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012 [pp. 102–05]
and mother and child. This image significantly heralds that she
is no longer making work in between the pauses of mother-
hood, and profoundly, she is not creating art in spite of being
a mother. Rather this photograph signaled to me that her work
in clay is produced as part of the reflective accumulation and
production of knowledge that emanates from motherhood.
Maiolino’s oeuvre challenges the conventional wisdom that
“Mothers don’t write, they are written.”11 Similar to other art-
ists of her generation—Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles
come to mind—Maiolino’s work insists on a reorienting of the
maternal away from the sentimental, away from the Mother
as an archetype or a fantasy. Maiolino’s installations in clay pro-
pose the mother as craftsperson, the mother as laborer, the
mother as provider of sustenance, the mother as someone who
does not choose between binary oppositions (say, the choice of
one child over another). The mother is not selfless; the mother
is a maker, a producer. Even as the mother establishes habit, the
mother is also an engine for the production of difference. The
mother who is an artist may be suspicious of narratives that
privilege rupture, autonomy, originality, and other avant-garde
myths. Maiolino’s work suggests that the knowledge produced
by the field of the maternal is that humanity is structured by
repetition, and that human relations are a web of interrelations,
a network of dependencies, a system of complex alliances. Her
work in clay holds together the antinomies of primordial urges
and deep cultural sophistication (this is the logic that allowed
humans to move from sustenance to cuisine). In doing so her
work also suggests a path wherein the duality of mother/child
is broken and/or augmented by the third term “artist.” In Por
um Fio Maiolino is a child sitting next to her mother, while at
once she is a mother sitting next to her daughter. But she alone
holds two threads in her mouth; simultaneously she incorpo-
rates and expels them, their double-ness in her mouth enacts
her difference as the artist from her relations on either side
of her. But this unique subject position is only temporary, for
the logic of the photo is like that of the grid: it presumes the
possibility of infinity, the ad nauseum of generational time, the
inevitable displacement of a fixed position. While we may under-
stand that her mother raised an artist (without knowing the
particulars), who knows what her daughter can or will become?
This too is a new story waiting to be written, the generational
tales of children whose mothers were artists.
I was drawn to Maiolino’s work early on because it was
clear that she complicates the conventions of Western civiliza-
tion’s ruthless deployment of binary logic. Maiolino’s play with
formal antinomies and her refusal to separate them—front/
back, solid/void, hard/soft, permanent/impermanent, mother/
artist—or privilege one over the other led me to realize that
binary logic per se is not the problem, the problem (of Western
culture) is the constant drive to privilege one term in a binary
relation over another and to then layer that hierarchy system-
atically throughout cultural expressions.12 But I hadn’t realized
that what really cracked me open in my experience of Here &
There was the work’s tacit insistence on the centuries’ worth of
knowledge that has been produced by the field of the maternal,
M OL E S WORTH M OTH E R K N OW L E D G E
knowledge that remains undertheorized, underrecognized, and
undervalued.
What is to be “learned” then, as well as felt, from Anna
Maria Maiolino’s work? In other words, what knowledge does her
careful combining of the subject positions mother and artist
make possible? I have only tentative responses to such arguably
large questions. But Maiolino’s experiments with clay, and mold
making in general, and her steadfast complication of the binary
as such, demonstrate that the world’s repetitions are endless
and consist of our deepest needs (food) and our deepest plea-
sures (eating). The making of food is the provision of sustenance,
and the provision of sustenance is inextricably linked to our
culture’s ongoing manufacture of—and play with—materials.
And while such unpaid repetitions have confined millions of
women over thousands of years to a landscape of drudgery at
their core, these repetitions are also a space of infinite play and
pleasure. And Maiolino’s repetitions hold forth the gentle pos-
sibility of resistance to our contemporary culture’s demands
for conformity and endless hierarchies of value. Here & There
offers an escape hatch out of the tightly woven warp and weft
of patriarchy and capitalism: When Maolino acts as both artist
and mother, she conjoins the knowledge produced by art and
the maternal, opening a space as yet not completely defined
and occupied by patriarchy. At these tables new discussions are
happening, there is room to move.
Notes
1. Holly Block, “Conversation with Anna Maria Maiolino” in Catherine de Zegher, ed.,
Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora / A Life Line (New York: The Drawing Center, 2002), 353.
2. Neo-Concretism was formed in the late 1950s by a group of Brazilian Concrete
artists in Rio de Janeiro who were reacting against what they perceived as an excess
of rationalization in Concrete art. The first Neo-Concrete exhibition was held in Rio
de Janeiro in March 1959. The artist and poet Ferreira Gullar was asked to write an
introduction to the show, which inspired the term Neo-Concrete and his Neo-Concrete
Manifesto, signed by all artists in the exhibition: Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Ferreira
Gullar, Reynaldo Jardim, Lygia Pape, Theon Spanudis, and Franz Weissmann. See Ferreira
Gullar in conversation with / en conversación con Ariel Jiménez (New York: Fundación
Cisneros, 2012).
3. “An interview between Anna Maria Maiolino and Helena Tatay,” in Helena Tatay, Anna
Maria Maiolino (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2010), 38.
4. Catherine de Zegher, “Ciao Bella: The Ins and Outs of a Migrant,” in de Zegher, Anna
Maria Maiolino, 81.
5. Tatay, “An Interview,” 42.
6. Hélio Oiticica gave Maiolino the idea to carry a notebook in her pocket and continually
sketch and write after seeing her upset following an article that covered Brazilian
artists living in New York but did not mention Maiolino. See Tatay, “An Interview,” 46.
7. “Even at the end of the 1970s, when she worked full time at a textile factory
designing patterns and was forced to put aside her art practice, she kept a sheet of
drawing paper, 24 x 38 inches, on her studio table always waiting for her: ‘I drew every
day, even if it was just for a few minutes.’” In de Zegher, “Ciao Bella,” 92.
8. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69, no. 9
(January 1971): 22–39.
9. See Nancy Houston, “Novels and Novels” in Moyra Davey, ed., Mother Reader: Essential
Writings on Motherhood (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 211–24.
10. Briony Fer, “The Mould: Anna Maria Maiolino’s Work in Clay,” in Anna Maria Maiolino:
Order and Subjectivity (Nicosia, Cyprus: Pharos Publishers, 2009), 160–61.
11. Susan Ruben Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in Davey, Mother Reader, 117.
12. Hence, the binary male/female is then mapped onto hard/soft, rational/emotional,
clean/dirty, etc.
171
 THE POLYMORPHIC IMPULSE
BRIONY FER
Anna Maria Maiolino’s Na Linha (On the Line; 1976) is not one
thing but several: an object that can exist in various different
forms and versions of itself [fig. 1; p. 38]. Seen in its closed
state, it is flat, black, and square. When opened the shallow
box expands to form the shape of a cross, containing a rather
untidy heap of unevenly sized black cardboard discs with a
straggly white string at the center. It looks like a heap of
nothing, though also—more disconcertingly—like a pile of
waste or a mound of excrement, as if there might be some-
thing scatological about these things, card or string. In fact
the heap is intricate. Pulling it out by the thread—along the
length of which are the black, unevenly distributed, circular
shapes—the form extends to become a long clothesline of a
sculpture suspended in space.
Something flat and square turns into a three-dimen-
sional arrangement of circles; an unkempt pile becomes a
kinetic, linear form that can hang down and fall according to
gravity or stretch out horizontally. Its structure is not rigid, so
it can change depending on whether it is pulled taut or allowed
to collapse back on itself. Rather than the rectangular pages
of a traditional book, the form of the object has expanded to
become entirely responsive to the hands that manipulate it. As
such, it becomes a kind of extension of the body, but it’s also
too long to be held by a single person, inviting multiple hands
to organize it and keep it in some kind of check. A pristine black
square has ended up running amok.
The way Na Linha works—its internal logic—is exem-
plary of Anna Maria Maiolino’s method, one aspect of which
we could call a polymorphic impulse: the object’s capacity to
contain many other versions of itself, which are revealed over
time, and which seem to self-generate from within a powerfully
hermetic formal system. As a part of this dynamic, a dispro-
portionate amount of attention is given to the inside of things.
There appears to be no end to it: this line of circles emerging
from a black square, only to render the original form just one
possible iteration of what it actually is.
Na Linha is made very simply out of a few basic compo-
nents derived from a geometric vocabulary: lines, circles, and
squares. And yet it ends up being acutely sensitive to the envi-
ronment it opens onto. The basic language of Constructivism,
rooted in the European historical avant-gardes, has proven to
be much more elastic than the standard accounts of geometric
Fig. 1: Anna Maria Maiolino with Na Linha (On the Line), from the Livro Objeto (Book Object) series, 1976 [p. 38]
173
abstraction, based on a reductive compositional model of
pure essential form, ever acknowledged. The great lesson of
Brazilian Neo-Concretism was to show precisely how adaptable
and contingent a geometric lexicon could be. Maiolino’s poly-
morphism is rooted in this radical moment in Brazil during the
1950s. So in her hands a line can become straight or curved,
a circle flat or three-dimensional, an object planar or linear,
square or round, or all of these things, possibly all at once. The
object exists only in its variable forms: it is always potentially
in movement, waiting for a hand to pull it out, even sitting in
an unruly heap in its box.
Na Linha has a certain elegant precision, but it is also
clear that it has been made by hand. The string has been metic-
ulously threaded through the cardboard circles that have been
pierced by a needle to make a point, and knotted on either
side of the discs to determine the intervals between them.
The shapes have been carefully torn by hand, giving them an
edge that is slightly irregular and textured. Several aspects
of Na Linha relate to the graphic work that Maiolino was mak-
ing in the early 1970s, which also use processes of threading,
stitching, piercing, and tearing. Her other Book Objects, such
as Trajectória I (Trajectory I; 1976) [p. 39], for example, also
carve out a tunnel of empty space through which a length of
red cotton has been threaded like a fine umbilical cord winding
its way into the most intimate bodily viscera of the object.
In the process, parts drop through to other parts.
The internal workings of one object are systemically related
to those of several others. In paper constructions such as
Buraco Preto (Black Hole; 1975) [p. 41], paper circles have been
extracted and left empty, only for such forms to be used again
elsewhere. The inside removed from one work is literally re-used
to make another. There is a temporal as well as a material and
spatial relation between them: a process of evacuating parts
that creates the possibility of more. Artworks produce their
own waste, like bodies. Leftovers are generative. An economy
of production and waste is constantly churning, being recycled
and renewed.
One of the only apparently anomalous aspects of
Maiolino’s trajectory as an artist is that she began to make
work in the 60s, alongside an emerging generation of new
figuration and conceptual artists, yet would eventually hold
to a predominantly geometric lexicon inherited from an older
Neo-Concretist one. She started out working in figuration, yet it
was always clear that her mentor was Lygia Clark. Even though
by the time Maiolino began—it is worth pointing out—Clark
herself had abandoned making conventional artworks in favor
of a psychoanalytic conception of what she named the rela-
tional object (the miniature monochrome Matchbox Structures
were her last artworks in the narrower sense of a discrete art
object to be shown in a gallery1). It is as if Maiolino took Clark’s
preoccupation with “the inside of the inside”2 and used it as a
starting rather than an endpoint, as a means to regenerate
the potential artwork.
Maiolino also deployed the language of psychoanaly-
sis to provide a new kind of narrative, but the object never
became subordinate to it. Rather than threatening its demise,
or its disappearance into the psychoanalytic field, a poetics of
the void would offer her the terms to imbue the art object
with a new kind of vitality. She often used metaphors for the
maternal female body, as when she later described to Catherine
de Zegher the way “the void appears, and with it the possibil-
ity of its becoming pregnant.”3 She has spoken of defecation,
for example, as the first work, rooting the creation of art in
infantile experience. But even before she came to formulate a
maternal poetics in these terms, the potential for abstraction
to become a highly subjective and corporeal narrative form
had already come into sharp focus.
Maiolino described to Helena Tatay how frustrated she
felt when she lived in New York, where she was completely
marginalized even though she had had some early success as
an artist in Brazil.4 Only at the end of her two-year stay, in 1971,
did she finally manage to gain access to the printing studios at
the Pratt Graphic Art Center. This marked her reentry into the
art world, and coincided with her decision to leave her husband,
the artist Rubens Gerchman, and to return to Rio de Janeiro.
In the etching entitled Escape Point (1971) [fig 2; p. 18], many
supposedly incompatible elements are brought together in an
unlikely—and highly distinctive—combination. A narrative of
psychic rupture and release coincides with a series of formal
operations, in ways reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois’s insertion
of a psychoanalytic (and in her case strongly Freudian) narrative
of infantile drives situated right at the very heart of her work.
Escape Point consists of a square of hundreds of finely
etched horizontal lines, contained except for a gap that allows
lines to appear to flow out down to the bottom edge. As they
fall, the lines thin out, meandering down to a point. This etch-
ing relates to a large and diverse body of graphic work that
has included woodcuts, drawings, and cut-paper constructions.
It corresponds particularly closely to another print from the
same year, Escape Angle [p. 19], which also plays on the idea
of a possible leakage caused by a gap or break in the continu-
ous outline of a square. Although insistently non-figurative, in
the sense that the basic formal lexicon of squares, grids, and
lines was derived from the constructive avant-gardes, Maiolino
invests that language with a narrative that is both powerfully
corporeal and autobiographical. In the process, abstract form
becomes radically subjectivized.
174
Fig. 2: Escape Point, 1971 [p. 18]
Her trajectory is marked from the outset by the
unusual importance of print amongst artists in Brazil, with its
own specific graphic traditions. When Maiolino first arrived
in Brazil from Venezuela in 1960 and began her formal stud-
ies in art at the age of eighteen, she entered the famous
print workshop of Oswaldo Goeldi [fig. 3]. As Paulo Venancio
has shown, Goeldi was a key protagonist of a woodcut tradi-
tion that invested the technique with raw intensity, depict-
ing heavily inked images of social and psychic alienation.5 For
Maiolino, the workshop gave her an early sense of the strength
of monochromatic black and white and the physicality of pro-
cess. Formative for many, the woodcut became a kind of labo-
ratory within which to experiment—and to turn Goeldi’s own
expressionist techniques against themselves. Fuelled also by an
interest in O Cordel folk prints from the Northeast Region of
Brazil, the woodcut enabled her to create simple pictorial sche-
mas. Maiolino’s woodcut prints, such as Schhhiiii.... (1967) [p. 12],
would use the woodcut technique to transform an expressive
language into one of bodily functions.
It is striking to see how Escape Point substitutes the
pool of vomit spewing out of the open mouth depicted in
Schhhiiii.... with a few very spare abstract shapes. A mouth is
also an orifice or hole in Glu Glu Glu..., another woodcut from the
same year [p. 10]. It is a simple pictorial schema of despair and
FER
alienation that descends through a table of food to a lavatory
basin, as if the picture itself is a digestive tract. This process is
repeated in much of work of the late 1960s, to create strong
formal rhymes. In this context it is hard not to see Escape Point
in the same terms, except now the excess or waste flowing out
from the abstract form of the square takes on the shape of the
continent, linking it to other cut paper works that she would
later make such as Situação Geografica: Alma Negra da América
Latina (Geographic Situation: Black Soul of Latin America; 1976)
[fig. 4; p. 27]. Her own narrative of migration is not depicted but
activated as a series of formal operations and movements.
The insertion of the autobiographical into an abstract
grid can also be seen in Maiolino’s Mental Maps, which plot out
the bare facts of a life, the story of her own origins reduced to
their most basic markers, as in Capítulo I (Chapter I) (1971/1999)
[p. 22]. In all these works, the artwork becomes less a static
frame and more of a fluid container through which the process
of life must pass—less like a box, even though she often uses
that form, and more like a digestive tract. This is true whether
or not such bodily functions are literally depicted, as in the early
woodcuts, or rather merely implied, as in Escape Point or Na
Linha. There is always a sense of internal psychic pressure—that
might also suggest an interior monologue or thought process.
It is at once hermetic and sealed in, though also in danger of
breaking out.
As I have said, the lexicon of geometric abstraction
embedded within a constructivist tradition provides Maiolino Fig. 4: Situação Geografica: Alma Negra da América Latina (Geographic Situation: Black
Soul of Latin America), 1976 [p. 27]
with a surprisingly flexible set of tools. Perhaps precisely
because of its extreme hermeticism, its strictures could be
seen to stand in for the social and political constraints opera- a release of tension. In Schhhiiii...., the letters being spewed
tive at the time of the military dictatorship as well as offer a out are testament to a repressive regime where things cannot
means to subvert them. The conjunction of systems in play— be spoken, and yet the scatology of the image itself lays bare
art, digestion, politics—is nothing if not volatile. The internal a kind of violent bodily reaction to it. The image provides a
pressures exerted within the formal constraints of the artwork reaction formation to a regime of secrecy, spilling out of itself.
always give way to some kind of expulsion of waste matter, or What is more, if a visual image is necessarily mute, Maiolino uses
it to dramatize what escapes the system.
The Aguadas (Watery) series of drawings that Maiolino
Fig. 3: Osvaldo Goeldi, Abandono (Abandonment), 1937. Woodcut, 6 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.
(17.5 x 22 cm) began to make in the early 1980s mark an interesting shift
in her work, but also demonstrate a surprising continuity
[pp. 111–13]. She began to make them when she was working
with the mythic “0”—a zero but also an ovule. At this point she
had not yet begun to work with clay (which she would discover
in 1989). When she did so, clay, that “wet mass of earth—dirt,
matter,”6 seemed to connect, with the benefit of hindsight at
least, to the damp medium of watercolor. If she came to think
of clay as “the perfect prototype of matter,”7 then ink had
offered her a means to think about a wet substance as in a
constant state of coming into being and endlessly malleable:
forming shapes, or cut into segments or other parts.
The benefit of hindsight is one thing, the uneven, halt-
ing changes an artist makes over long periods of time are quite
another. The same applies to the long history of abstraction.
But nor should it be underestimated how powerful polymor-
phic abstraction had been even at the moment of its inception.
Perhaps what we see in Maiolino’s method is simply her tapping
A P OLY M OR P H I C I M P U L S E 175

Fig. 5: Kasimir Malevich, Composition 8b, 1916. Pencil on paper, 4 3/8 x 6 1/2 in.
(11 x 16.5 cm)
into that historical impulse in a particularly productive way.
Whilst not a conscious influence on her, Malevich’s little known
early pencil drawings from 1917 show any number of permu-
tations on the egg-form [fig. 5]. The deeply engrained practice
of defining first a pencil frame in which abstract forms could
act lent itself to this kind of proto-narrative of mutation where
an egg becomes a mandala, and so on. Maiolino’s Piccole Note
series from the early 1980s can be seen to reflect on this key
aesthetic impulse [fig. 6; pp. 106–10].
The Piccole Note works are drawings for drawings. The
photocopied sheets contain a grid of empty rectangles that are
filled in with watercolor and ink. The standard framework is
predetermined, but every segment is different—animating, like
a storyboard, a fragmented narrative of forms in movement,
coming together, falling apart, coalescing, liquefying. Maiolino’s
multiplication of the small rectangular frames cut or crop a form,
implying or anticipating movement beyond it. Clearly cinematic in
the way that a narrative is broken down into individual frames,
the Piccole Note drawings relate to her film work, but they also
vividly demonstrate the way forms mutate and morph into
Fig. 6: Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1988 [p. 106]
176
other forms. The egg, in particular, becomes an ur-form from
this point of view—linked to the stills from the performance of
Entrevidas (Between Lives; 1981) [pp. 50–51] and the series of
photographs entitled Life Line (1981) [pp. 56–57]. In some ways
we can see the graphic frame of the Piccole Note as a fragile
container, like an eggshell, inside of which there is a gestating
yolk, an emerging form that grows and develops. Because of the
movements between the frames, the grid becomes unstable,
unable to contain the variables or the sum of its parts. It only
just holds together the microcomposites of forms that are con-
stantly reassembling or dissolving or fragmenting.
In the Vestigios (Vestiges; 2010) [fig. 7; pp. 135–37]
series, each drawing is a double, comprising two sheets. There
is no obvious point of leakage or escape, or at least the framing
edges seem to be more or less in tact. The sheet on the left
contains an uneven grid—so incomplete, in fact, that it is more
like a net that is torn and full of holes. It has been drawn in ink,
by pressing down on the axial points to allow the ink to spread
into small blots. The second drawing looks rather different,
with more diagonals and a smaller pattern. But the drawings are
intimately connected, made one on top of the other: ink from
the top sheet bleeds through to the sheet beneath. Like its own
form of printing, she then joined up the dots or points that had
been left by her chance operation, as the overflow, the waste
or “vestiges” of the first, which follow a certain logic of the
original drawing. The leakage involved here is more dispersed,
like a colander, through a scattering of holes in the graphic
field. This is drawing producing its own waste products—first
Fig. 7: Untitled, from the Vestígios (Vestiges) series, 2010 [p. 136]
they are extractions in the form of paper cutouts, now they
are seeping fluids.
In a video interview made in 2008, Maiolino talked
about the morphology of hydra—the microscopic water-born the artwork as a process in which subjectivity is automatically Notes
organisms—as a model form.8 Using a dropper to make her caught up (rather than a vehicle for expressive gesture). How
1. I have discussed these in “The Problem of Art,” in Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of
most recent ink drawings, this kind of morphological descrip- Art, 1948–1988 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 223–28.
could her own autobiography not be at stake in such a pro- 2. Anna Maria Maiolino described Lygia Clark’s visits and her constant returning to
tion suggests how elastic her formal vocabulary has become. At cess? The fact of a geometric or organic vocabulary of forms “the question of immanence …the nostalgia of the body…the inside of the inside of
moments it can seem calligraphic, almost like writing, or simply and the move from one to the other over the long arc of her her art….” in “Sine Die – logbook,” 1966, cited in Daniel Lins, Anna Maria Maiolino: Anna’s
liquid pools of color. In this series, Phylogenetics [pp. 143–144], career does not register a break in the basic method. Rather it
Skin (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2016), 207.
3. E-mail sent to Catherine de Zegher, May 30, 1999, cited in Lins, Anna’s Skin, 215.
we see forms that are like organisms that can expand and con- draws attention to that process (and its vocabulary’s) capacity 4. Maiolino eventually secured a grant for foreign artists to work in the studios at
tract in a drawing; the pools of liquid pigment determine the to create many variables. Pratt. See “An Interview between Anna Maria Maiolino and Helena Tatay,” in Helena
shape of a form, which then determines the marks that expand The conditions under which Maiolino came to define
Tatay, Anna Maria Maiolino (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2010), 38–60, and Bryan
outwards from it. The accident determines the rule rather than Barcena’s essay in this volume, page 152.
her graphic practice in the early 70s were harsh, but they 5. For a discussion of the importance of Goeldi, see Paolo Venancio Filho, “Goeldi: Um
the other way around. forced her to create a particularly mobile and polymorphic Expressionista nos Trópicos,” Novos Estudos, no. 40 (November 1994): 117–24.
Although the forms are amoeboid now, reminiscent of strategy. The internal workings of her process may look spare 6. Anna Maria Maiolino, in “A conversation between Holly Block and Anna Maria
microscopic organisms as much as bodily organs, they still mimic and precise, elegant even, but those same workings were the
Maiolino,” in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora / A Life Line
(New York: The Drawing Center, 2002), 353.
the procedures that she set in motion in her earlier graphic primary means for her to articulate fraught subjectivities in 7. Anna Maria Maiolino, cited in Tatay, “An interview,” 54.
work. It is worth remembering that one of Maiolino’s key prem- difficult circumstances. It also says something about how work 8. Anna Maria Maiolino, LOG, 2008/2016, video (color, sound), 3:02 min.
ises from the outset was a refusal of the opposition between gets made out of work, in short, how art continues to be made.
the geometric and the organic. Works like Na Linha had made One of the questions that Maiolino has consistently seemed to
this clear much earlier: with its circular black “drops,” already ask in her work is, where does art begin? It has prompted her
leftovers from other works, falling or lifting, their connecting to look inside art for its capacity to continually remake itself,
strings in varying states of tautness or lassitude, almost as if rather than to fix an original form; to contain so many different
they were part of a web of interlacing lines. It’s surprising how versions of itself inside itself. Rather than invite a retreat into
fresh it still seems, even in relation to her most recent work. art, she insists that under dire circumstances, this question
Moving through her own “emotional geography” as must continue to be asked. That urgency has not gone away.
she has called it, Anna Maria Maiolino has consistently imagined
FER A P OLY M OR P H I C I M P U L S E 177

Fig. 1: Anna Maria Maiolino working clay in her studio, 2016
THE OFFERING TABLE,
OR THE MATTER OF DEATH
ANNE M. WAGNER
Libation on the offering table! Receive the divine offering!
May Hapy grant you all goodly foods.1
— From an ancient Egyptian spell recited while funerary offerings are presented
within the burial chamber
Clay is the perfect prototype of matter, and it contains
the possibility of form and invites us to look for it.
Meanwhile, form organizes amorphous matter, it sets
limits on it. We are faced with a paradox. The form
that organizes matter is also the beginning of death.2
— Anna Maria Maiolino, in conversation with Helena Tatay
MAIOLINO’S MAKING
It is now more than twenty years since Anna Maria Maiolino
first presented an installation using unfired clay—years during
which the tasks of forming, firming, counting, and placing
became increasingly central to her artistic process and to her
work’s public life. Enough time has gone by, in other words, to
begin to take stock of what it means for an artist of Maiolino’s
seriousness and ambition to have focused so closely on working
with clay. If, as she puts it, clay represents the “perfect proto-
type of matter,”3 it has also become the substance, literally and
metaphorically, of her art.
I should say at the outset that in turning to clay as a
subject, my main consideration is not just the vital aesthetic
uses the artist found for this deeply traditional material. I am
also keen to suggest some of the implications of that long
tradition, on which her art so consciously draws. Like fire, air,
and water, clay is physically amorphous, inherently inert — yet
it will take on even the most subtly nuanced shape and hold it
unless somehow disturbed. If it is fired, its new form endures.
If not, any unfired clay object, however subtle its modulations,
“returns to its original state once dehydrated and can return
to the earth.”4 Little wonder, then, that this mutable material
figures in so many ancient myths as the substance from which
the gods first fashioned the human form. As hardly needs say-
ing, the artist herself has fully grasped the singular capacities
of clay — including its existential metaphors. In underscoring
them, my argument builds on, but also seeks some distance
from, the interests shown by other writers in addressing her
179
art. For many, the theme that often dominates—is most enthu-
siastically presented—is her role as maker: the good news about
the artist is that she works with her hands.
The emphasis on Maiolino’s process has increasingly
taken on a life of its own, a life most vividly expressed in such
phrases as “The Doing Hand,” and “With Eyes in Her Hands,” each
of which has served as the title of an essay on the artist.5 Both
invoke an interpretive strategy that locates the interest, the
essence, of the artist’s work in the gestures she employs. Such
arguments do not simply present her hands as tools; instead,
they give them special powers not merely to create, but also
to analyze. As one writer, Paulo Venancio Filho, put it (he is
the author of “The Doing Hand,” first published in 1996, and
reprinted in 2002), Maiolino’s clay pieces convey the “sum total
of the daily actions the hand performs.”6 Which is to say that in
clay she manages not only to concretize, but also to condense
and epitomize the gestures and actions of a daily routine. But
whose routine is this? Filho is reminded of “elementary and
archaic tasks, extremely meaningful and very remote from
today: the preparation of the constructive element and food—
inaugural tasks and labors.”7
These ideas have been a mainstay of writings about
Maiolino for most of her career. Not coincidentally, they evoke
a line of argument within the philosophical study of human evo-
lution, above all its insistence that a “specifically human intel-
ligence has evolved in concert with the hand.”8 And they have
also been argued for graphically and photographically, in the
exhibition catalogues devoted to her work. I am thinking of the
“documentary” photographs they routinely include [fig. 1]. On
the one hand, such photographs are entirely conventional, not
least when the artist is a sculptor. On the other, representing
an artist at work is hardly obligatory. Why, then, do publications
about Maiolino so consistently feature such an unusual interest
in the imagery of hands?
What is depicted in this imagery? Here is an incomplete
list: the hands of Lygia Clark, shown cutting the paper sculpture
she called Caminhando (Walking), 1963; the thumbs and hands
of an unknown man, in stills excerpted from Maiolino’s movie
Ad Hoc, 1982; Maiolino’s own hands holding a large ball of clay,
kneading, massing, and opening it into a rudimentary cup, in a
grid of twelve photographs from 1998; her fingers, shown over-
lapping and occasionally interlaced, in a montage of stills from
her film + & - (1999). Finally, on the cover of Anna Maria Maiolino:
Order and Subjectivity, the catalogue of an exhibition staged in
Cyprus in 2009, a single film still, again from + & - (more and less)
presents a fairly inscrutable detail of a single hand—or does it
show two hands, joined together? The camera comes so close
to their puckers and crevices that they are transformed. Is this
Maiolino, we wonder, presented as a strange sculpture herself?
I call attention to such images above all because they
work so hard to point up the central contradiction in Maiolino’s
work—call it “repetitive immediacy,” for want of a better term.
Over the years, her art has achieved its own finely calculated
balance between touch and finish, or uniqueness and repetition;
in other words, the artist has taken hold of the key opposi-
tions made available in sculpture through the skilled practice
of the hand. Traditionally, those oppositions were brokered
by enforced distinctions in skill. Touch and uniqueness stood
together against finish and repetition. These the sculptor could
safely contract out to specialized workers, leaving his or her
own claim to mastery intact.
Against this hierarchical backdrop, the insistently
asserted “handedness,” or “handiness,” of Maiolino’s sculpture
stands out. Seldom does the literature on an artist so ener-
getically lay claim to the hand. Such images insist that Maiolino
has made “making” the theme, even the ethic of her art. Her
practice is thus cast as one that, to cite Briony Fer, “takes the
lived body as its model and continues to be part of an emanci-
patory project of resistance.”9 Emancipatory, we infer, because
the artist reclaims handwork so assertively, and in the most
bodily of terms. Maiolino’s clay forms invoke hands, mouth, and
anus. Yet because they remain unfired, they stake no claim on
a lasting life.
The basis of Fer’s claim—which is seemingly fundamen-
tal to her interest in the artist—is Maiolino’s feel for unfired clay.
As the author puts it, the artist’s work “makes us think about
how art comes into the world”—though not necessarily in any
broad-based way. When Fer followed that directive herself, her
thoughts were mainly in regard to a photograph of Maiolino’s
first unfired clay installation, as documented in 1994 at the
artist’s Rio de Janeiro studio by Beatriz Santos de Oliveira.10
Although Maiolino has never said so directly, the photo
declares her sense that the untitled piece assembled in her
workroom was sufficiently resolved to record. The result was
a black-and-white photograph rather awkwardly known as
“Study for installation” [fig. 2; p. 101]. Who could help asking
what this deceptively straightforward title should be taken to
convey? What “installation” was this? Did Maiolino set to work
with a time and place in mind? Or do title and photograph
suggest that the artist had transformed a general idea for an
installation into something like a model or prototype? What we
do know is that a photograph was needed, not only as a record,
but also as a map. Looking at it, Maiolino could recall the logic
of this new sequencing of shapes and shadows as an explorer
turns to a diagram to rediscover a half-forgotten path. This
will show you, says the photograph, how to make “installation-
type” work.
180
But is this all? Surely there is something to be said of
the fact that in the many years since this picture was taken, it
has been reproduced in two quite different versions. The first
to be published was quite closely cropped. The result closes in
on the subject of the picture, an elaborate patchwork pattern
composed of serial rows of clay shapes positioned on a fairly
long and narrow table seen from above.11 Where that table sits,
how far it extends, what supports it—none of this is shown.
Instead, the focus falls on the rows of clay shapes.
What of them? Well, they are variously fat, skinny, long, short,
twisted, squeezed, and sliced. And they are clearly made of
clay. But what their dimensions are, and their color, and if they
sometimes touch each other, and what sort of room they are
in—again we do not know. Above all, the image offers no evi-
dence that what it shows — not the fat rolls, not the skinny
sausages—is the work of an artist. Perhaps this absence helps
to explain why eventually the camera came in close, to play
with focus and scale. And it was also used to capture Maiolino’s
hands deftly fitting two round, apple-shaped objects into their
place in the whole.
Fig. 2: Study for installation, artist’s studio, 1994 [p. 101]
WAG N E R
Once again, madeness and making are at stake. Like
the other photographs I have mentioned, both these images
shrug off time and space. Their immediacy brings artificial life
to shapes arranged in the light of a Rio studio, a composition
never meant to last. The two versions of the image, in other
words, grant us permission to speak of Maiolino’s art in the pres-
ent tense. And so we do. Maiolino makes. Here are her hands.
The clay is fresh. The forms pile up.12
Perhaps we cannot resist this temptation, but we
should not allow the photographic illusion of immediacy to
erase the place of the past in Maiolino’s art. It is this conceit
that is perhaps most complex, even contradictory in the artist’s
motivation in working with clay. Clay, she maintained, gave her
the “possibility of form.” Not a promise, but a possibility, to be
realized through the fundamental malleability of viscous yet
inanimate earth.13
Yet if it is right to tie Maiolino’s sense of artistic poten-
tial to clay’s innate plasticity, it is equally necessary to recognize
that the full range of clay’s key metaphors follows as a matter
of course. Clay yields to the touch, yet is also inherently form-
less and inert. Maiolino knew precisely where its limits led: “The
form that organizes matter is also the beginning of death.”
Or, as she explained the paradox, “Form limits the life force,
imprisons it, but nonetheless permits it to organize itself. As the
embodiment of discipline, form is, at the same time, the begin-
ning of death.”14 Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: here the artist is
invoking clay’s physical character, which inevitably means that,
until the material is fired, it can be rehydrated or returned to
the earth.15
Figs. 3 and 4: Anna Maria Maiolino in her studio, Rio de Janeiro, 2005
THE ALIVENESS OF DEATH
Nearly everything about Maiolino’s work and thinking invites work. Hands matter, clay matters, but where is death? Although
a discussion of death. It is needed not only because her philo- I raise this question tentatively, as befits its subject, its rele-
sophical leanings incline to the temporal and ritualistic, but also vance is not really in doubt. “Media vitae in morte sumus”: what
because she subscribes to the idea of a shared human past, in is most alive within Maiolino’s practice is its exploration of life’s
which the fact of death inevitably looms large. Such commit- limits and depths.18
ments often appear. Take the wide-ranging conversation with To provide some grounding for what follows, let me
Helena Tatay quoted at the beginning of this essay: in that con- summon a set of loosely connected impressions and thoughts.
text, death and the dead become figures of memory and time. Initially, these cluster around two photographs of Maiolino in her
The human body, the artist argues, is what “carries the legacy Rio studio in 2005 [figs. 3 and 4]; next, they try to turn the tables
of the dead and the social imprints of [the] ritual.”16 Her image on her tables; finally, they make their way back to her signature
gains in power as the reader brings its implications into view. Terra Modelada (Modeled Earth) [p. 100] series of installations, in
Here death, with its victims and rituals, becomes the potter, order to offer yet another reading of her uses of unfired clay.
imparting new shapes to the body’s mortal clay. As I am suggesting, death stays with us all the way.
Maiolino’s views on such topics have been enriched by The photographs I am thinking of were taken on the
her engagement with various philosophical approaches, the same occasion. One shows a smiling Maiolino leaning against a
main lines of which have often been discussed. To Tatay, she long table bearing samples of her poured-ink drawings, their
spoke of José Gil, a Portuguese philosopher, the source of the “drop marks,” as she calls them, opening black gaps in the white-
ideas just cited; to Daniel Lins, the author of the recently pub- ness of each sheet of paper.19 At the far end of the studio, her
lished mediation Anna’s Skin, she wrote of Gilles Deleuze, who assistant is working, and in the other picture (the “second”), his
among many other things is a key figure in Maiolino’s thought.17 stance is similar.20 As for Maiolino, the second photo shows her
But such references notwithstanding, we still lack a sense of drawings spread out for the camera, which has moved position
how death and its rituals might have actively shaped the artist’s to allow for a higher, wider shot. The change in emplacement
TH E OF F E R I N G TA B L E , OR TH E M ATTE R OF D E ATH 181
not only captures the drawings more fully, but it also allows the
jumbled objects on Maiolino’s table to start making sense. They
resolve as a set of terra-cotta components designed to form a
model enclosure, or precinct: one part sacred temenos, one part
hill fort, perhaps. Sculpturally speaking, the idea is clearly related
to the 1930s table pieces of Alberto Giacometti, remade here in
crimped and channeled clay.
What strikes me about these photographs is how
horizontality seems to spread through Maiolino’s studio, from
surface to surface and plane to plane: floor, tables, shelves,
drawings, even the rows of sculptures comprising the wall
piece, with its egg/breast motif. It is as if the images manage
to subordinate multiple differences, the better to suggest that
here in Maiolino’s workroom, surface and depth rule the roost.
Both the dropped ink of the drawings and the gouged pits and
paths of the model precinct create openings—no, absences—
where by rights, only substance should appear.21
One reason these photographic portraits seem so
suggestive is their characterization of depth and surface as
these are summoned in Maiolino’s work. Traditionally, sculptors
attempted to master the language of relief, achieving effects
of bodily substance or salience through the overlap and projec-
tion of forms. Here the artist does more or less the opposite.
She works within, even under the surface, deriving depth from
poured inky puddles, the aforementioned “drop marks,” and dig-
ging out open-roofed tunnels that might well have been made
by energetic worms.
Nowadays critics don’t often try to generalize about
artistic sensibility or habits of mind. What appears in these
photographs, however, seems to justify the risk. To gaze across
the works spread out in the studio context is to encounter an
artist interested not only in solids, but also in voids. Substance
is essential to Maiolino’s habits of forming, granted, but so is
the production of absence. Absence can be invoked through ink
or clay, though the result is not precisely the same. Drop marks
open a void that reads like a tear in emptiness. Tunneling, by
contrast, is excavation, a digging out and laying bare.
Fig. 5: An offering tray. Umbro-Etruscan terra cotta votive offering. Todi, North
of Rome, 3rd century BCE
182
These metaphors can, though they need not, be
strongly archeological. In Maiolino’s case, however, this impli-
cation seems clear. I think not only of the strange clay model
precinct just mentioned, but also of a series of boxes made for
both wall and table from cast concrete [p. 90]. However they
are installed, on the wall as a series, or in a metal framework
that allows them to lie flat, the front face of each box has been
broken into, to let in the light. Often, “artifacts”—quasi-geolog-
ical features—lie hidden within. The effect is clearly meant to
summon a cave or casket, or perhaps even the darkness of a
long-sealed tomb; in other words, to evoke a drama of discovery,
with archaeology as the subject of the script. Thanks to Freud,
the linkage between the psychoanalyst’s task and the archaeol-
ogist’s methods is as firmly established as it is frequently noted;
no one, least of all Maiolino, is likely to confuse the resistances
of the psyche and those imposed by the layered weight of soil.
In the end, what may be most Freudian in Maiolino’s
practice is its starting point, a surface apparently devoid of
depth or layers—that of the table chosen on each occasion to
act as the omnipresent support of her work. Authors cannot
quite manage to avoid mentioning its obvious presence but
unsurprisingly find little else to say on the topic. Fer, always a
careful observer, calls the one pictured in the 1994 photograph
a “studio table,” presumably for the logical reason that it was
put to use in the artist’s studio, where it normally belonged.
Later, as the artist continued the Terra Modelada series, it was
the commissioning museum that provided both tables and clay.
Tables and rituals go together. What matters most to
their alliance is the smooth and elevated surface, with its capac-
ity to lift the objects placed upon it above the surface of the
ground [fig. 5]. A table does not simply bear its burden; it also
makes space for a ceremonial ordering of the objects it carries
while keeping them clear of the earth. Such rituals need not be
religious—think of games and meals and medical procedures; in
most cases, tables supply the bases of ceremony, cleanliness,
and convenience to their users. A table, we might say, functions
as a social site.
Fig. 6: Slab Stela of Prince Wep-em-nefret, Egypt, Old Kingdom, 2575–2134 BCE.
Painted limestone, 18 x 26 x 3 in. (45.7 x 66 x 7.6 cm)
WAG N E R
In dynastic Egypt, that site allowed the living to care for the
dead [fig. 6]. Their main concern was not merely to supply the
ba, or soul, of the departed with the meat, bread, and beer
essential to the afterlife; the deceased must also be roused by
the sound of the priestly spell. From the Pyramid Texts:
Raise yourself, Osiris N.!
take your head,
gather your bones,
collect your limbs, shake the soil from your flesh!
Take your bread, which does not grow moldy,
and your beer, which does not grow sour.22
These lines send me back to Maiolino, and her own repeated
efforts to summon inert matter to life.23 The presentation so
carefully recorded in her Rio studio set the pattern for many
more to come. Hundreds of kilos of clay grew to thousands.
Photographs accumulated showing the artist as she kneaded
and rolled this inert material into artifices of life, each seem-
ingly more uncannily evocative than the one before. Her instal-
lation at dOCUMENTA (13), in Kassel, featured clay in five colors
and took over three floors of a house.24 There its coils spilled
from tables, poked out of closets, climbed onto coverlets, and
lay in wait beneath the bed. In these uncanny antics— in their
increasing scale and performative ambition, even exhibition-
ism — I seemed to hear echoes of yet another ancient spell. It
spoke of the will to aliveness, of the fugitive promise of clay.
Perhaps Maiolino’s greatest offering is her ability to find so
much animation in the mere matter of death.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the potter Naine Woodrow, founder of North Street Potters, London,
for a helpful conversation about clay; to Beatriz Oliveira de Santos, for her answers to
my questions about her photographs; and to Anna Maria Maiolino, for clarifying what
happens to the clay used in her installations following exhibition.
Notes
1. Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2005), 348. Assmann’s chapter 14, “Provisioning the Dead,”
has been of particular use to this essay.
2. “An Interview between Anna Maria Maiolino and Helena Tatay.” in Helena Tatay, Anna
Maria Maiolino (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2010), 54.
3. Ibid.
4. Anna Maria Maiolino, e-mail message to the author, August 11, 2016. Translation by
Bryan Barcena. For an account of various origin myths and theories of creation, see
Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962), 25–62. Readers are reminded of the key role in many creation
myths of a god, sometimes a potter, who creates humans from clay. These included
the Egyptian Khnum, the Sumerian Nammu, the Greek Prometheus, the Christian
Yahweh, and the Islamic Allah.
5. These two essays appear in Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora/A Life Line, exhibition
catalogue, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New York: The Drawing Center, 2002). See Paulo
Venancia Filho, “The Doing Hand,” 284–5; and Sonia Salzstein, “With Eyes in her Hands,”
345–49.
6. Paulo Venancio Filho, “Anna Maria Maiolino: The Doing Hand,” Inside the Visible, ed.
Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 441.
7. Ibid.
8. Colin McGinn, Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2015), 68.
9. Briony Fer, “Precarious Fields,” in Anna Maria Maiolino: Continuous, File Note 51, exhi-
bition pamphlet (Camden Arts Centre, London, 2010), n.p.
TH E OF F E R I N G TA B L E , OR TH E M ATTE R OF D E ATH
10. Today Beatriz Santo de Oliveira is an associate professor in the Faculdade de
Arquitetura e Urbanismo at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
11. De Seghers, Vida Afora/A Life Line, 257, fig. 161. The role of Beatriz Santos de
Oliveira as the maker of this image, as well those on pp. 258 and 259, is not credited
in the Drawing Center catalogue.
12. A striking series of images of the artist at work is included in Anna Maria Maiolino:
Order and Subjectivity, ed. Michael Asbury and Garo Keyhan, exhibition catalogue
(Nicosia, Cyprus: Pharos Arts Foundation, 2009), 164–79. They are the work of Asbury,
the exhibition’s curator and currently Reader in History and Theory of Art at Chelsea
College of Art, London.
13. It bears noting that at this time in her career Maiolino had more than a passing
interest in earth. In the chronology prepared for publication in Daniel Lins, Anna Maria
Maiolino: Anna’s Skin (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2016), 239, she provides details of a
project developed in 1993, the year before Study for Installation, to use “the multiple
colored earths from Brazil’s soils to form the body of the sculpture.” The artist also
states that in the event, only two such pieces were made.
14. “A Conversation between Holly Block and Anna Maria Maiolino” in De Seghers, Vida
Afora/A Life Line, 353.
15. In an email message to the author of August 11, 2016, Maiolino provided a help-
fully pragmatic account of her practice in dealing with the clay used in her Terra
Modelada (Modeled Earth) series: “No, I have never recycled clay used to make the
Terra Modelada installations. The clay remains until the end of the exhibition and it is
up to the institution that commissioned the work to make the decision whether to
offer to recycle the clay and offer it to schools. The installations are all made in situ
and in faraway places, away from Brazil, where I live. Because of this, I always leave
the decision of what to do with the clay up to the local institutions and museums.
In the studio, I do recycle clay when I’m making the molded sculpture. That having
been said, the amount used in works produced in the studio is much smaller in relation
to the quantity used in the installations. I would like to emphasize that all the clay is
manipulated by hand and without the help of any machines; because of this, recycling
500 to 1,500 kg of clay would be a huge undertaking for a small group or one person.
To recycle these quantities of clay would require the appropriate machinery.
What is of interest to me is the intrinsic qualities of being recyclable that the clay
possesses. Also interesting is the fact that the clay returns to its original state once
dehydrated and can be reincorporated into the earth.” Translation by Bryan Barcena.
My thanks to Barcena and Maiolino for her answers to my very basic questions.
16. “An Interview between Anna Maria Maiolino and Helena Tatay.” in Helena Tatay,
Anna Maria Maiolino, 58.
17. Anna Maria Maiolino, “My Encounter with Deleuze,” in Lins, Anna’s Skin, 18–19.
18. “In the midst of life we are in death.” The Latin version of this phrase appears
in medieval Christian breviaries; it appears in English in the Book of Common Prayer
famously translated by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury (1489–1556).
19. Taken in 2005, both images show Maiolino with her then assistant Edmundo de
Paiva in her studio at Rua Presidente Carlos de Campos, 13, Rio de Janeiro. Visible in
both on the wall at left is Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil (One, No One, One Hundred Thousand),
1993, cement and pigment.
20. I write “second” to convey that I do not know the order in which they were taken.
21. The roots of this tabletop construction reach back to a set of works produced
in 1989–90, to which Maiolino gave the title Novas Paisagens (New Landscapes), not
least in view of their “topological bent.” As she put it in a March 6, 1999, e-mail to the
curator Catherine de Zegher, they “emerge[d] from the reconquest of the tactile,
the sensuality of one’s hand on earth and clay.” They aimed, she said, at topology, at
“territoriality”—a place where memory reencounters itself.” See Lins, Anna’s Skin, 231.
22. Assmann, Death and Salvation, 331.
23. Although I say “summon,” it seems important to insist that the gestures and
techniques Maiolino uses in this process art, as they are captured in photographs,
are considerably more evocative: in some cases she seems to tease the material into
an unusual, even uncanny, degree of activity.
24. The project proposal that Maiolino submitted to dOCUMENTA (13) took the
form of a self-administered questionnaire; once the project was realized under
the title Here & There (with the assistance of Marc Vidal Vilaprinyó), the same text
served as its press release. See http://annamariamaiolino.com/eng/diariodebordo
/pressrelease_eng.pdf.
183
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST Buraco Preto (Black Hole), from the Desenhos +-=- , 1976 Entrevidas (Between Lives), from the
Height precedes width precedes depth. Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1974 Super-8 film transferred to video Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series, 1981
Unless otherwise noted works are courtesy of the artist. Paper (black-and-white), 3:37 min Gelatin silver prints
28 3/4 x 28 3/4 x 3 15/16 in. (73 x 73 x 10 cm) Page 59 Each 56 3/4 x 36 1/4 in. (144 x 92 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2421.2001.a-e Pages 50–51
Page 41 Em Cima da Linha (Over the Line), from the
Minha Familia (My Family), 1966 Untitled, from the Entre Pausas Untitled, from the Gravuras Objetos
Acrylic ink on canvas (Between Pauses) series, 1968 (Print Objects) series, 1972 Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1976 Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação)
De: Para: (From: To:), from the Fotopoemação Thread on paper (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981
33 1/8 x 38 5/8 in. (84 x 98 cm) Ink on paper Etching with thread and transfer type
(Photopoemaction) series, 1974 28 1/8 x 28 1/8 x 3 in. (71.5 x 71.5 x 7.5 cm) Digital print
Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna, 11 7/16 x 8 1/4 in. (29 x 21 cm) 19 11/16 x 20 3/16 in. (50 x 51.2 cm)
Rio de Janeiro Gelatin silver print Page 34 11 13/16 x 17 3/4 in. (30 x 45 cm)
Page 17 Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna,
Page 13 Rio de Janeiro 25 x 18 15/16 in. (63.5 x 48 cm) Pages 52–53
Page 31 Page 46 Na Linha (On the Line), from the Livro Objeto
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas
O Herói (The Hero), 1966/2000 (Book Object) series, 1976 Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação)
(Between Pauses) series, 1968
Acrylic ink on wood with mixed media Untitled, from the Projetos Construidos É o que Sobra (What is Left Over), from the Thread on paper (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981
Ink on paper
23 1/4 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/4 in. (59 x 46 x 7 cm) (Constructed Projects) series, 1972 Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series, 1974 Dimensions variable Digital print
11 7/16 x 8 1/4 in. (29 x 21 cm)
Museu de Arte São Paulo Thread on paper Digital print, three parts, each 11 1/4 x 15 3/4 in. Page 38 22 x 15 3/4 in. (56 x 40 cm)
Page 17
Page 14 15 x 15 x 2 3/8 in. (38 x 38 x 6 cm) (28.5 x 40 cm) Page 55
Page 28 Page 47 Por um Fio (By a Thread), from the Fotopoemação
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas
Anna, 1967 (Photopoemaction) series, 1976 Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação)
(Between Pauses) series, 1968
Woodcut Untitled, from the Projetos Construidos Y, 1974 Archival inkjet print (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981
Ink on paper
18 15/16 x 26 in. (48 x 66 cm) (Constructed Projects) series, 1972 Super-8 film transferred to video 22 3/8 x 31 1/8 in. (57 x 79 cm) Digital print
8 1/4 x 11 7/16 in. (21 x 29 cm)
Page 9 Gouache ink and transfer type on paper (black-and-white, sound), 1:52 min Page 49 12 x 14 1/2 in. (30.5 x 37 cm)
Page 17
15 x 15 x 2 3/8 in. (38 x 38 x 6 cm) Page 60 Page 56
Glu Glu Glu…, 1967 Page 29 Situação Geografica: Alma Negra da América
Escape Point, 1971
Woodcut Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos Latina (Geographic Situation: Black Soul of Latin Untitled, from the Vida Afora (Fotopoemação)
Etching and transfer type on paper
26 x 18 15/16 in. (66 x 48 cm) Entrada e Saída (Entrance and Exit), from the (Drawing Objects) series, 1974/2011 America), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) (Life Line [Photopoemaction]) series, 1981
27 3/8 x 20 7/8 in. (69.5 x 53 cm)
Page 10 Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1973 Gouache ink on paper series, 1976 Digital print
Page 18
Acrylic, transfer type, and thread on paper 28 3/8 x 28 3/8 x 3 15/16 in. (56 x 56 x 10 cm) Acrylic ink on wood 14 1/2 x 12 in. (37 x 30.5 cm)
Glu Glu Glu…, 1967 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. (52 x 52 x 5.7 cm) Page 45 66 15/16 x 51 9/16 x 3 15/16 in. (170 x 131 x 10 cm) Page 57
Escape Angle, 1971
Acrylic ink and fabric on wood Collection of Andrea and José Olympio Pereira, São Paulo Page 27
Etching and transfer type on paper
43 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 5 in. (110 x 59 x 12.5 cm) Page 24 Untitled, 1974 Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 1984
28 x 21 5/8 in. (71 x 55 cm)
Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna, Acrylic ink and thread on canvas Trajetória (Trajectory), from the Desenhos Ink on paper
Collection of Ricardo Rego, Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro In-Out (Antropofagia) (Anthropophagy), 1973
Page 19 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in. (80 x 80 cm) Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1976 27 9/16 x 19 11/16 in. (70 x 50 cm)
Page 11
Super-8 film transferred to video Collection of Andrea and José Olympio Pereira, São Paulo Thread on paper The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2422.2001
(color, sound), 8:14 min Page 35 28 3/8 x 28 3/8 in. (72 x 72 cm) Page 111
Schhhiiii.…, 1967 Poema Secreto (Secret Poem), from the
Page 61 Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. Gift of the artist
Woodcut Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1971
Linha Solta (Loose Line), from the Desenhos Page 40 Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 1984
26 x 18 15/16 in. (66 x 48 cm) Ink and transfer type on paper
Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1975 Ink on paper
Page 12 17 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. (45 x 40 cm)
(Drawing Objects) series, 1973 Thread on paper Trajectória I (Trajectory I), from the Livro Objeto 27 9/16 x 19 11/16 in. (70 x 50 cm)
Page 20
Gouache ink, thread, and transfer type 21 1/2 x 14 3/4 x 5 5/16 in. (54.5 x 37.5 x 13.5 cm) (Book Object) series, 1976 Page 112
A Espera (Waiting), 1967/2000 Thread on paper, 8 1/16 x 10 5/8 x 3/8 in.
on paper Collection of Antonio Quintella, São Paulo
Acrylic ink and fabric on wood Eu (I), from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps)
19 11/16 x 19 11/16 x 1 15/16 in. (50 x 50 x 5 cm) Page 36 (20.5 x 27 x 1 cm)
series, 1971 Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1984
50 3/8 x 48 3/8 x 11 3/4 in. (128 x 123 x 30 cm) The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami
Ink and transfer type on paper Collection of Elaine and Álvaro Pereira Novis, São Paulo Watercolor, ink, and pastel on paper
The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami Page 32 Linha Solta (Loose Line), from the Desenhos Page 39
Page 15 20 1/16 x 20 1/16 in. (51 x 51 cm) 10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm)
Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1975
Page 21 Collection of Marli Matsumoto, São Paulo
Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos Thread on paper Capítulo II (Chapter II), from the Mapas Mentais Page 107
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas 21 1/2 x 14 3/4 x 5 5/16 in. (54.5 x 37.5 x 13.5 cm) (Mental Maps) series, 1976/1999
(Drawing Objects) series, 1973
(Between Pauses) series, 1968 Capítulo I (Chapter I), from the Mapas Mentais Ink and transfer type on paper
Thread on paper Collection of Ricardo Rego, Rio de Janeiro Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1984
Ink on paper (Mental Maps) series, 1971/1999 Page 37 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50 cm)
9 13/16 x 11 13/16 x 2 3/8 in. (25 x 30 x 6 cm) Ink and colored ink on paper
8 1/4 x 11 7/16 in. (21 x 29 cm) Ink and transfer type on paper Page 23
Collection of Ricardo Rego, Rio de Janeiro 10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm)
Page 16 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50 cm) Page 42 No Horizonte (On the Horizon), from the The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2423.2001.5
Page 22 Desenhos Objetos (Drawing Objects) series, 1975 Monumento à Fome (Monument to Hunger), Page 110
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas Anno 1942, from the Mapas Mentais Gouache ink on paper 1978/2017
(Between Pauses) series, 1968 Desde A até M (From A to M), from the Mapas (Mental Maps), series 1973/1999 28 1/2 x 28 1/2 x 2 3/16 in. (72.5 x 72.5 x 5.5 cm) Rice and beans Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1985
Ink on paper Mentais (Mental Maps) series, 1972 Gouache ink, transfer type, and burn marks Page 43 Performance-installation at Mitos Vadios Ink and colored ink on paper
8 1/4 x 11 7/16 in. (21 x 29 cm) Thread, gouache ink, and transfer type on paper (Vagabond Myths) at Rua Augusta, São Paulo 13 1/4 x 10 7/8 in. (33.5 x 27.5 cm)
Page 16 on paper 19 7/8 x 16 7/8 x 2 3/8 in. (50.5 x 42.3 x 6 cm) Untitled, from the Desenhos Objetos Page 63 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2423.2001.8
19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50 cm) Page 26 (Drawing Objects) series, 1975/2001 Page 108
Untitled, from the Entre Pausas The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2420.2001 Thread and paper
Page 25
(Between Pauses) series, 1968 Untitled, from the Projetos Construidos 9 13/16 x 13 3/8 x 2 9/16 in. (25 x 34 x 6.5 cm)
Ink on paper (Constructed Projects) series, 1973/2008 Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland
11 7/16 x 8 1/4 in. (29 x 21 cm) Gouache ink on paper Page 33
Page 16 25 9/16 x 22 1/2 x 4 in. (65 x 57 x 10 cm)
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Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1987 Untitled, from the Codicilli (Codicils) series, 1993 Untitled, from the Grandes Ausentes Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, Untitled, from the Novembro (November) series, Untitled, from the Novos Outros (New Others)
Ink and colored ink on paper Cement and pigment (Large Absentees) series, 1997/2006 2000–2004 2008 series, 2013
10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm) 16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm) Cement and pigment Thread on paper Acrylic ink on paper Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2423.2001.22 Collection of Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch, São Paulo 18 7/8 x 18 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (48 x 48 x 8 cm) 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) 18 1/8 x 14 3/16 in. (46 x 36 cm) on metal table
Page 109 Page 70 Collection of Lisa and Tom Blumenthal, Boston The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami Collection of Eliane and Álvaro Pereira Novis, São Paulo Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm);
Page 84 Page 124 Page 129 table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)
Untitled, from the Piccole Note series, 1988 Untitled, from the Codicilli (Codicils) series, 1993 Page 91
Ink and colored ink on paper Cement and pigment Untitled, from the Pequenos Ausentes Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, LOG, 2008/2016
10 7/8 x 13 1/4 in. (27.5 x 33.5 cm) 16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm) (Small Absentees) series, 1998/2006 2000–2004 Video (color, sound), 3:32 min. Untitled, from the Novos Outros (New Others)
Collection of Andrea and José Olympio Pereira, São Paulo Collection of Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch, São Paulo Plaster Thread on paper series, 2013
Page 106 Page 71 8 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (22 x 25 x 8 cm) 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Untitled, from the Contínuos II (Continuities II) Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic
Collection of Alice and Nahum Lainer, Beverly Hills The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami series, 2009 on metal table
Untitled, from the Novas Paisagens Untitled, from the Codicilli (Codicils) series, 1993 Page 87 Page 125 Ink on paper Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm);
(New Landscapes) series, 1990 Cement and pigment 16 1/2 x 14 in. (42 x 35.5 cm) table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)
Cement 16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm) Untitled, from the Vestígios (Vestiges) series, Untitled, from the Novas Marcas da Gota Page 127
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
18 7/8 x 31 1/2 x 2 3/4 in. (48 x 80 x 7 cm) Page 73 2000 (New Drop Marks) series, 2003 Page 92
Collection of Luisa Strina, São Paulo Ink on paper Acrylic on cardboard Untitled, from the Incompletude
Page 67 Untitled, from the A Sombra do Outro 12 1/4 x 9 in. (31 x 23 cm) 84 parts, each 13 3/4 x 9 5/8 in. (35 x 24.5 cm) (Incompleteness) series, 2009/2016 Untitled, from the Novos Outros (New Others)
(Shadow of the Other) series, 1993/2005 Page 135 The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami Steel series, 2013
Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 1990 Cement and pigment Pages 114–15 34 1/4 x 27 1/2 x 11 in. (87 x 70 x 28 cm) Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic
Plaster 10 parts, each 11 7/8 x 9 3/8 x 6 5/8 in. Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, Page 133 on metal table
16 15/16 x 11 13/16 x 3 15/16 in. (43 x 30 x 10 cm) (30 x 24 x 17 cm) 2000–2004 Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 2006
Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm);
Page 82 Pages 88–89 Thread on paper Molded pigmented cement on metal table Untitled, from the Incompletude II table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)
13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm); (Incompleteness II) series, 2009 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 1990 Rolinhos na Horizontal (Little Horizontal Rolls), The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm) Ink on paper Page 93
Plaster 1993/2017 Pages 116–17 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
19 x 11 in. (48 x 28 cm)
37 3/8 x 14 9/16 x 4 3/4 in. (95 x 37 x 12 cm) Plaster Page 96
Page 134 [top] Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 2013
Page 82 43 5/16 x 51 3/16 x 2 3/4 in. (110 x 130 x 7 cm) Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, Molded pigmented cement on metal table
2000–2004 Untitled, from the Novos Percursos
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Untitled, from the Incompletude II Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm);
Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 1991 Page 81 Thread on paper (New Routes) series, 2007
(Incompleteness II) series, 2009 table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)
Ink on paper 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Acrylic ink on paper
Ink on paper Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
27 9/16 x 19 11/16 in. (70 x 50 cm) São (They Are), 1994–2005 The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami 22 x 15 in. (56 x 38 cm)
21 x 11 in. (53 x 28 cm) Page 94
Page 113 Plaster Page 118 Page 126
Page 134 [bottom]
Each 4 3/4 x 18 7/8 x 12 5/8 in. (12 x 48 x 32 cm) Untitled, from the Novos Outros (New Others)
13 Segmentos (13 Segments), 1993 Page 76 Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2003 Untitled, from the Novos Percursos
Untitled, from the Vestígios (Vestiges) series, 2013
Cement Thread on paper (New Routes) series, 2007
series, 2010 Molded pigmented cement and raku ceramic
57 x 12 1/4 x 5 1/8 in. (145 x 31 x 13 cm) Poderiam Ser Dois (They Could Be Two), 1996 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Acrylic ink on paper
Ink on paper on metal table
Collection of Marli Matsumoto, São Paulo Plaster Collection of Gonzalo Parodi, Miami 22 x 15 in. (56 x 38 cm)
14 x 24 5/8 in. (35.5 x 62.5 cm) Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm);
Page 75 20 1/16 x 37 7/16 x 4 3/4 in. (51 x 95 x 12 cm) Page 119 Page 126
Page 136 table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)
Page 83
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Mais de Cem (More than a Hundred), from the Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2003 Untitled, from the Abril (April) series, 2008
Untitled, from the Vestígios (Vestiges) Page 95
Novas Paisagens (New Landscapes) series, 1993 Untitled, from the Pequenos Ausentes Thread on paper Acrylic ink on paper,
13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) series, 2010
Cement (Small Absentees) series, 1996 39 3/8 x 27 9/16 in. (100 x 70 cm) Untitled, from the Outros (Others) series, 2013
Collection of Gonzalo Parodi, Miami Ink on paper
26 3/8 x 31 7/8 x 2 in. (67 x 81 x 5 cm) Plaster Page 128 Molded pigmented cement on metal table
Page 120 14 x 24 5/8 in. (35.5 x 62.5 cm)
Page 69 8 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (22 x 25 x 8 cm) Cement: 4 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (10 x 47 x 44 cm);
Page 137
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Untitled, from the Incompletude II
Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, 2003 table: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 17 3/8 in. (75 x 47 x 44 cm)
Na Tábua (On the Board), 1993 Page 85 (Incompleteness II) series, 2008
Untitled, from the Giro Giro Tonto series, 2012 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Thread on paper
Cement Ink on paper Page 97
Untitled, from the In series, 1996 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Ink on paper
16 1/8 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 46 x 6 cm) 16 x 13 1/4 in. (40.5 x 33.5 cm)
Plaster Collection of Gonzalo Parodi, Miami 21 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (54 x 42 cm)
Page 68 Private Collection, Switzerland Untitled, from the Filogenéticos (Phylogenetics)
Page 121 Page 138
8 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (22 x 25 x 8 cm) Page 130 series, 2014
São 8 (They Are 8), 1993 Collection of Frances Bowes, San Francisco Ink and acrylic ink on paper
Untitled, from the Indícios (Traces) series, Untitled, from the Giro Giro Tonto series, 2012
Cement and pigment Page 86 Untitled, from the Incompletude II
2000–2004 18 x 12 in. (45.5 x 30.5 cm)
(Incompleteness II) series, 2008 Ink on paper
Eight parts, each approx. 48 x 4 3/4 in. Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland
Untitled, from the Uns & Outros (Ones & Others) Thread on paper 21 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (54 x 42 cm)
(122 x 12 cm) Ink on paper Page 143
series 1996/2016 13 5/8 x 10 in. (34.5 x 25.5 cm) Page 138
Pages 78–79 16 x 13 1/4 in. (40.5 x 33.5 cm)
Cement and pigment The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami
Private Collection, Switzerland Untitled, from the In-Moto II series, 2014
Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil (One, None, One Hundred 10 parts, each 11 7/8 x 9 3/8 x 6 5/8 in. Pages 122–23
Page 131 Untitled, from the Giro Giro Tonto series, 2012
Ink on paper
Thousand), 1993 (30 x 24 x 17 cm) Ink on paper
16 1/2 x 11 3/8 in. (42 x 29 cm)
Untitled, from the Incompletude 21 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (54 x 42 cm)
Cement and pigment Collection of Ana Christina Degens, São Paulo; Collection of Zeev Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Horovitz, São Paulo; Collection of Marli Matsumoto, São Paulo; (Incompleteness) series, 2008 Page 139
57 x 24 x 2 3/4 in. (145 x 61 x 6 cm) Page 140
Collection of Suely Rolnik, São Paulo; Collection of Luisa Strina, Steel
Collection of Antonio Quintella, São Paulo
São Paulo 19 11/16 x 24 7/16 x 10 1/4 in. (50 x 62 x 26 cm)
Page 74
Page 90
Collection of Ricardo Rego, Rio de Janeiro
Page 132

186 187
Untitled, from the In-Moto II series, 2014
Ink on paper
16 1/2 x 11 3/8 in. (42 x 29 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Page 140
Untitled, from the In-Moto II series, 2014
Ink on paper
16 1/2 x 11 3/8 in. (42 x 29 cm)
Private Collection, Zurich
Page 141
Untitled, from the Ritornello series, 2014
Ink on paper
18 1/8 x 15 in. (46 x 38 cm)
Page 142
Untitled, from the Filogenéticos (Phylogenetics)
series, 2015
Ink and acrylic ink on paper
22 x 16 1/2 in. (56 x 42 cm)
Private Collection, New York
Page 144
Sotto Voce, 2016
Video (color, sound), 6:42 min
Untitled, from the Aguadas (Watery) series, 2016
Acrylic ink and ink on paper
41 3/8 x 31 1/2 in. (105 x 80 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Page 149
Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series,
2016
Ink and acrylic ink on paper
30 1/8 x 22 in. (76.5 x 56 cm)
Page 145
Estão na Mesa (They are on the Table), from the
Terras Modeladas (Modeled Earth) series, 2017
Clay and metal
Approx. 28 3/4 x 35 7/16 x 283 in.
(73 x 90 x 720 cm)
Hic et Nunc, from the Terras Modeladas
(Modeled Earth) series, 2017
Clay
Dimensions variable
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION
Jaime Acioli: 31, 40 Lisa and Tom Blumenthal, Boston
Everton Ballardin: 36, 37, 45, 64, 65, 78–79, 82, 83, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, Frances Bowes, San Francisco
97, 135, 146 The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami
Elzbieta Bialkowska: 101–03, 104, 105, Ana Christina Degens, São Paulo
Romulo Fialdini: 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland
141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149 Zeev Horovitz, São Paulo
Romulo Fialdini and Valentino Fialdini: 13 Alice and Nahum Lainer, Beverly Hills
Edouard Fraipont: 67, 70, 71, 75, 81, 98, 99, 107 Collection of Cely, Ronie, and Conrado Mesquita, Rio de Janeiro
Genevieve Henson: 33 Marli Matsumoto, São Paulo
Vicente de Mello: 11 Gonzalo Parodi, Miami
Max Nauenberg: 46, 47, 60, 61 Andrea and José Olympio Pereira, São Paulo
Beatriz Santo de Oliveira: 101 Eliane and Álvaro Pereira Novis, São Paulo
Henri Virgil Stahl: 50–51, 52–53, 55, 56, 57 Museu de Arte São Paulo
Oriol Tarridas: 114–15, 116–17, 118, 122–23, 124, 125 Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro
Regina Vater: 49 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Digital Image © MoMA. Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY: 108, 109, Private Collection, New York
110, 111 Private Collection, Switzerland
Courtesy of Luis Camnitzer: 152 (top left) Private Collection, Zurich
Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery, Houston: 152 (bottom right), 153 Antonio Quintella, São Paulo
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Millan, São Paulo, 155 (top left) Ricardo Rego, Rio de Janeiro
© Mira Schendel Estate. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth, Zurich: 160 Suely Rolnik, São Paulo
Courtesy of Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark” (top): 161 Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch, São Paulo
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Luisa Strina. Photo by Mario Caillaux: 162 Luisa Strina, São Paulo
Image courtesy and in accordance with the regulations of the Goeldi
Project—www.oswaldogoeldi.org.br: 175
Courtesy of Annely Juda Fine Art, London: 176
Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology, MS 1407, MS 1409-1423, MS 1425-27: 182 (left)
Courtesy of Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology,
University of California, Berkeley, 6-19825: 182 (right)

Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series,

2016
Ink and acrylic ink on paper
30 1/8 x 22 in. (76.5 x 56 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Page 146

Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series,

2016
Ink on paper
30 1/8 x 22 in. (76.5 x 56 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Page 147

Untitled, from the Conta-Gotas (Dropper) series,

2016
Ink on paper
22 x 16 1/2 in. (56 x 42 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Page 148

188 189
CONTRIBUTORS BOARD OF TRUSTEES 2016–2017 MOCA STAFF

BRYAN BARCENA HELEN MOLESWORTH Maurice Marciano, Co-Chair Michelle Antonisse Philippe Vergne
Bryan Barcena is the Research Fellow for Latin American Art at The Museum Helen Molesworth is the Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art Lilly Tartikoff Karatz, Co-Chair Catherine Arias Kim Vollstedt
of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. In his previous position as cura- (MOCA), Los Angeles. From 2010–14 she was the Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eugenio Lopez, Vice Chair Bryan Barcena Kate Vourvoulis
torial assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA), Barcena at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston, where she organized Lillian P. Lovelace, Vice Chair Patricia Bell Patrick Weber
worked on Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 (2015) solo exhibitions by Steve Locke, Catherine Opie, Josiah McElheny, and Amy Maria Seferian, Vice Chair Marco Braunschweiler Angela Yang
and exhibitions and publications with artists Liz Deschenes, Erin Shirreff, Sillman, and the group exhibitions Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain Clifford J. Einstein, Chair Emeritus Madison Brookshire Kim Zuniga
Mona Hatoum, Adriana Varejão, and Jim Hodges. He serves as the research College 1933–1957, Dance/Draw, and This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics Dallas Price - Van Breda, President Emeritus Tim Butler
fellow and curatorial assistant for Anna Maria Maiolino. in the 1980s. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writ- Jeffrey Soros, President Emeritus Brendan Carn
ing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, Olivian Cha
BRIONY FER and October. Wallis Annenberg Alyssa Cohen
Briony Fer is an art historian who has written extensively on modern and John Baldessari Sarah Cohen
contemporary art. Her research interests have consistently moved between ANNE M. WAGNER Mark Bradford Hana Cohn
the history of the avant-gardes and the work of contemporary artists, Anne M. Wagner is Class of 1936 Chair Emerita in History of Art at the Gabriel Brener Emily Cregg
including Anna Maria Maiolino, Gabriel Orozco, Roni Horn, David Batchelor, University of California, Berkeley. She has also served as Visiting Distinguished Steven A. Cohen Colleen Russell Criste
and Tacita Dean. Fer’s publications include On Abstract Art (1997), The Infinite Professor at the University of York, 2010–13, and Visiting Professor at the Charles L. Conlan II Jill Davis
Line (2004), and Eva Hesse: Studiowork (2009). She has also organized exhi- Courtauld Institute, 2013–24. Together with T. J. Clark, she co-curated Lowry Kathi B. Cypres Sandy Davis
bitions of Eva Hesse’s studio work and most recently, an exhibition of the and the Painting of Modern Life for Tate Britain; the book accompanying the Laurent Degryse Brooke Devenney
work of Gabriel Orozco, accompanied by the monograph Gabriel Orozco: show was among the Best Art Books of 2013 chosen by the Financial Times. Ariel Emanuel Michael Emmetti
Thinking in Circles (2013). In Spring 2014 she was Kirk Varnedoe Professor Wagner’s other books include Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second The Honorable Eric Garcetti* Aldo Espina
at the Institute of Fine Art in New York. She is Professor of History of Art Empire (1986), Three Artists (Three Women) (1996), Mother Stone: The Vitality Susan Gersh Jorge Espinosa
at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy. of Modern British Sculpture (2005), and A House Divided: American Art since Aileen Getty Priyanka Fernando
1955 (2012). In 2013, she became a Trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation. Laurence Graff Kaileena Flores-Emnace
SÉRGIO B. MARTINS Currently she is a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. Mark Grotjahn Christy Francois
Sérgio B. Martins is Professor at the History Department of Pontifical Michael Harrison* Jillian Griffith
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and author of Constructing an Avant- Bruce Karatz Michael Harrison
Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979 (2013). His writings have appeared in journals Barbara Kruger Alex Herrington
and magazines such as October, Artforum, and Third Text. He has contrib- Wonmi Kwon Amanda Hunt
uted to exhibition catalogues such as Cildo Meireles (2013), Alexander Calder: Daniel S. Loeb Jeanne Hoel
Performing Sculpture (2015), Lygia Clark: uma retrospective (2014), among Mary Klaus Martin Nevin Kallepalli
others. In 2012 Martins organized the exhibition Dois Reais by artist Matheus Jamie McCourt Anna Katz
Rocha Pitta at Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro. Edward J. Minskoff Brian Khek
Peter Morton Andy Kolar
Catherine Opie Jack LeDoux
Victor Pinchuk Jean Lee
Lari Pittman Walter Lopez
Heather Podesta Rebecca Matalon
Carolyn Clark Powers Caitlin Mitchell
Steven F. Roth Helen Molesworth
Carla Sands Rosenda Moore
Chara Schreyer Jay Myres
Adam Sender Kim O’Grady
Sutton Stracke Valerie Partridge
Cathy Vedovi Bonnie Porter
Philippe Vergne* Amy Rafti
Christopher Walker Sergio Ramirez
Council President Herb J. Wesson Jr.* Jessie Rich
Orna Amir Wolens Sarika Sanyal
Woodburn Schofield Jr.
LIFE TRUSTEES Eva Seta
Eli Broad, Founding Chairman Jodi Shapiro
Maria Arena Bell Laura Sils
Betye Monell Burton Bennett Simpson
Blake Byrne Shannon Slater
Lenore S. Greenberg Jin Son
Audrey Irmas Sarah Lloyd Stifler
David G. Johnson Lanka Tattersall
Frederick M. Nicholas Ace Ubas
Thomas E. Unterman Andrea Urban

*Ex-Officio

190 191
Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
August 4–November 27, 2017

Published in 2017 by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and

•
DelMonico Books Prestel

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213-633-5392
www.moca.org

DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
House GmbH in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
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Neumarkter Strasse 28 wise, without written permission from the publisher.
81673 Munich
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Prestel Publishing Ltd. Names: Molesworth, Helen | Maiolino, Anna Maria, 1942- | Museum of
14-17 Wells Street Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.), organizer, host institution.
London W1T 3PD Title: Anna Maria Maiolino / organized by Helen Molesworth and Bryan
Barcena; essays by Bryan
Prestel Publishing Barcena, Briony Fer, Sérgio B. Martins, Helen Molesworth, Anne M. Wagner.
900 Broadway, Suite 603 Other titles: Anna Maria Maiolino (Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles,
New York, NY 10003 Calif.))
www.prestel.com Description: New York : DelMonico Books/Prestel ; Los Angeles : The Museum
of Contemporary Art, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007316 | ISBN 9783791356860 (hardcover)
Purtill Family Business
DESIGN:
Subjects: LCSH: Maiolino, Anna Maria, 1942---Exhibitions.
Donna Wingate with Marc Joseph Berg/Artist and Publisher Services,
EDITORIAL:
Classification: LCC N6659.M326 A4 2017 | DDC 700.92--dc23
New York
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007316
PROOFREADING: Beth Chapple

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PRODUCTION: Karen Farquhar, DelMonico Books Prestel
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2017 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and ISBN: 978-3-7913-5686-0
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Prestel Verlag, Munich London New York
Printed and bound in China
All images © 2017 Anna Maria Maiolino

Major support is provided by Hauser & Wirth.

Generous support is provided by Tom and Lisa Blumenthal and Alice and
Nahum Lainer.

Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions, with lead
annual support provided by Sydney Holland, founder of the Sydney D. Holland
Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by Allison and Larry Berg, Delta Air
Lines, and Jerri and Dr. Steven Nagelberg.

Published with the Assistance of The Getty Foundation.