In May 2010, Prof. Lauren S. Weingarden held the IEAT/FUNDEP Chair in Humanities, Letters and Arts, at the Institute for Advanced Transdisciplinary Studies (IEAT), Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in recognition of her expertise in Word & Image Studies. During her month-long residency she taught a graduate seminar on “Word & Image Methodologies” (in the department of Literary Studies) and consulted with intermedia research groups in Humanities, Theater, Music, Visual Arts, and Literary Studies. Her activities also included a university-wide lecture titled, “Reflections on Baudelairean Modernity.”

Reflections of Baudelaire

[Interview by] Itamar Rigueira Jr.

This week the month-long stay at UFMG of Professor Lauren Weingarden, of the Art History Department of Florida State University, will come to an end. Invited by the Institute for Avanced Transdisciplinary Studies (IEAT), she will give a lecture this Wednesday on the topic “Reflections on Baudelairean Modernity.” In this interview for the BOLETIM she explains the metaphors of the French poet and theorist (Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, 1821-1867) which help to understand post-modernity and the connections between the diverse media that constitute what she calls “virtual global culture.”

How does Baudelaire help to understand the world of today?

Baudelaire was interested in the physical changes that happened in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. He was preoccupied with a negative aspect of that change, which was the displacement of the less privileged far from the city center. But he also held a positive view of this transformation. Things changed every minute, on every corner, and he saw a kind of modern beauty in all this. The artists captured that experience through the use of fragmented forms. I believe that while today we live in a world that is so multidimensional and so changeable, Baudelaire initiated this type of fragmented encounter with change. In the 21st century we experience the transformation through the internet, through rapid transformations in the cities, in transportation, in advertising, and in constant encounters with people from diverse cultures.

Your presentation explores the idea of the mirror in modern art . . .

Baudelaire identified modern art as a mirror that reflects the transitoriness of urban experience. Or a kaleidoscope, where what we see changes every moment. The other level of the metaphor is more complicated, because it involves irony. The individual is capable of getting outside of himself and seeing something different, incorporating that difference in his own being. He has a double nature, an internal and external being. Baudelaire used that notion in talking about the artist, who is part of the multitude and at the same time apart from it. As part of the multitude he reflects it. Outside of it, he reflects upon that experience. This is the other level of that mirroring. To be at the same time inside and outside creates an ironic situation. Manet (the painter Édouard Manet, 1832-1883) showed us mirror reflections in two-dimensional surfaces. There, we are not allowed to penetrate pictorial space, as the viewer was before. Manet painted mirrors, but we could no longer penetrate their surfaces, because it is as if the mirror reflects something behind us. Manet’s mirror has an ironic function, you expect one thing and there is something else. This causes a shock. The conventions are subverted, which transforms our way of seeing a work of art.

Would the installations at Inhotim, which you visited recently, be examples of this change in the way to appreciate art?

At Inhotim, I thought a lot of Baudelaire and the artists who followed him. There is a change in our perspective when we move around in an artistic installation. Baudelaire also believed that the new art would shock our senses and that we would have to find new ways to appreciate it. One of the principal attributes of aesthetic experience is to transport us to another level of understanding and of reality. And you leave the artwork bringing that experience into your daily life. The way I perceived the installations at Inhotim was the way space is reconfigured. And, in my lecture, I go back to the way Manet creates a spatial experience for the viewer, which makes it possible for him/her to become part of the action in a two-dimensional space. In the installations the spectator is in the center of the action, experiencing the art work in four dimensions, because s/he is moving around. We are transformed by the experience of multiple interactive dimensions.

At UFMG you offered a course about intermedality. Under what aspects do you develop your studies?

I study the relations between word and image. My work begins in the 19th century comparing literature and painting, but one can also make comparisons between scientific and philosophical texts and the visual arts. Every medium has its own language and its own conventions. If Cubism uses newspaper and wallpaper, this happens always in dialogue with the conventions governing the visual arts. I discuss how to analyze a visual representation in accordance with these conventions, how to analyze a verbal articulation in accordance with verbal conventions, and how to consider them as constituting the same discourse. Artistic and literary activities speak one and the same discourse. The question is how to reconnect them in order to understand a historical moment. Today, the computer offers us a new dimension, that of global virtual reality. The study of contemporary art is no longer restricted to painting or sculpture – it is intermedial. And in literature, in the theater and in any of the performance arts we have a multimedial experience. Therefore, we might locate these similar encounters with intermediality within the digital universe of hypermediality.

How do you think can Brazil inspire your research?

I have come to know here the work of a doctoral student who collects poems by individuals from the periphery about the urban structure of the 21st century. In a certain sense, the less privileged gain access to the discourse. This creates an entirely new idea of what is the urban environment. It is information to which I do not have access. For me, as a historian of art and architecture, this is fascinating, because these communities have their own language and their own culture. It makes me more attentive to the fact that there are other voices speaking about the urban environment.

IEAT Program PDF