Two anthropophagies: Modernism and Tropicalism through the eyes of Roberto Schwarz

Abstract

This work seeks to scrutinize Roberto Schwarz's analysis of early twentieth century modernism and 1960s tropicalism. Both thought of as allegories of Brazil, these two versions of anthropophagy take place with different outcomes. The former, of which can be said to be utopic, aims for a post-bourgeois society, in which the new is born in the light of modernity’s reconfiguration by the hands of brazilian archaism, whereas the latter is marked both by the indistinction between these two opposites and the impossibility of any resolution to the conflict. Thus, we intend to demonstrate that Schwarz's critique of the two anthropophagies sheds light on the reciprocity between historical intuition and a formal configuration of artistic phenomena. Thereby showing that, instead of adopting generic schemes of evaluative hierarchization, the analysis plays out in terms of a social diagnosis of those issues portrayed by the artwork, therefore focusing on question formulation rather than on it’s foreseeable answers.