The Great Water Lily of America // A Science Fiction (On Ornaments and Yrupes)
Ana Maria Tavares, Euryale Amazonica, installation view. Sicardi Gallery, Houston, TX, USA, 2014.
The Great Water Lily of America: A Science Fiction (On Ornaments and Yrupes)
Commissioned for the exhibition Ana Maria Tavares: Euryale Amazonica
Sicardi Gallery, Houston, TX USA
Exhibition brochure available for download here.
Republished by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo
In the Very Place: An Anthology of the Artwork of Ana Maria Tavares
São Paulo, Brazil, 2017.
In 1854, American botanist John Fisk Allen penned a history of the discovery and cultivation of the Victoria regia to that date. Allen writes, “The Victoria Regia is found distributed north and south of the Amazon, in the bays and still waters of the river and its tributaries, in many of the lakes or ponds of Tropical America, the Ber- bice River, and various localities of that section of the continent. A plant so remarkable, for the rapidity of its growth, the leaves often expand- ing eight inches in diameter daily; instances under my own observation having occurred wherein they have increased, between sunrise and sunset, half an inch hourly...” When Euro- pean botanists encountered the plant in Brazil in the first years of the 19th century, they were wild about its color and size (up to nine feet in diameter) and its “luxuriant flower, consisting of many hundred petals.”2
The European encounter with the plant sparked a gardening rivalry, among British and US-based botanists eager to transplant the mys- terious floating flower to their corners of the world. The action of discovery quickly became the action of possession and replication.3 Upon its successful cultivation in 1849 by Joseph Paxton (hired by the Duke of Devonshire), the lily was presented to Queen Victoria and given the name Victoria regia in her honor. A famous drawing shows Paxton’s daughter, Alice, stand- ing on one of the massive leaves. To name is also to claim as one’s own. To stand on is surely a symbol of conquest.
The architecture of the plant—its ribbed un- dersurface and the support structure of the leaves—subsequently inspired Paxton’s design of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition. And here the Amazonian plant becomes intertwined with the most iconic moment of the Industrial Revolution at the height of British Empire.
In 1991, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held its first exhibition of work by a landscape architect. Featuring drawings, plans, and models by the renowned Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994, Brazil) the exhibition, Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Garden, contextualized Burle Marx’s work within a grand trajectory of Modernism.
Born in Brazil to German emigrants, Burle Marx moved to Germany during the Weimar Republic to study painting. Upon visiting the Botanical Garden in Berlin, he re-discovered the plants of his homeland, seeing them for the first time in a different context. Often dismissed at home as being too scrubby, these native plants suddenly appealed to Burle Marx as specific forms. Land- scape design, he would later write, “was merely the method I found to organize and compose my drawing and painting, using less conventional materials.”4 Indeed, Burle Marx’s unique ouevre combined the field of botany and architecture with the aesthetic principles of the 20th century artistic avant-garde. He later collaborated with Lucio Costa, Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer in 1936 for the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio de Janeiro—the so-called “Ministry of Man.” Later, Burle Marx was invited to design several interior gardens for buildings in Brasília. And, in 1969, Burle Marx designed the iconic mosaic sidewalks that border Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro.
As early as 1910, architect, theorist, and writer Adolf Loos (1870–1933, Czech Republic, Austria) argued that the evolution of culture was dependent upon the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use. Gingerbread should go without frosting, and leather shoes should be unscalloped. Associating ornamentation with what he considered to be the under-development of non-European cultures, his argument was as much about the decorative arts as it was a sociopolitical critique. The use of ornamentation, he wrote, was a sign of spiritual and moral weakness, as well as a problem for the flow of capitalist progress: “The relationship between the earnings of a woodcarver and a turner, the criminally low wages paid to the embroidress and the lacemaker are well known. The ornamentor has to work twenty hours to achieve the income earned by a modern worker in eight....”5 This radically functional aesthetic would come to define modern architecture and design, eventually leading back to Brazil and to Lucio Costa’s design of the country’s capital city, Brasília.
Euryale Amazonica is the result of a collaborative project developed by Ana Maria Tavares in Fortaleza, Brazil, with designer Celina Hissa and a group of seven artisans from the Ceará region. This work, which brings ornament to the center of the discourse surrounding modernism, is part of Natura in-Vitro: Interrogating Modernity— a larger research project that examines the cross-pollination of tropical nature and modern architecture at the core of Brazil’s ethos of modernity. The artisans who worked on the project are: Benedita Áurea de Sales, Elenir Fideles da Silva, Francisca Aldenice de Souza Felix, Helena Fideles da Silva, Júlia Fideles da Silva, Tatiana Santos da Silva, Verônica Vieira dos Santos.6
Naming is important.
The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, directly influenced as it was by the Euryale amazonica flower (or, if you prefer, the Victoria regia) was the first international display of decorative art. After the exhibition, the British “implemented a national policy of arts education intended to improve the application of art to manufacture.”7 The flower, taken to Europe, leads us to the Crystal Palace, leads us to decorative arts edu- cation, leads us to Loos, leads us to Modernism, leads us back to Brazil.
The Guarani people of Argentina called the flower Yrupe. In Brazil, it is called Aguapé-assú, Abatiyú, Agoapé, Aguapé, Hoja de sol, Iguapé, Maíz de agua, Maruru... The list goes on.
In a 1991 interview, Burle Marx made a case for the significance of garden design within the his- tory of art: “Unlike any other art form, a garden is designed for the future, and for future generations,” he said.8
To look forward and to imagine the world is a gesture not only of modernist progressivism, but more, it is a gesture of science fiction. Meaning: to imagine the future is to look in new ways, to find new possibilities.
With her first exhibition at Sicardi Gallery, Ana Maria Tavares brings major concerns of the 20th century in dialogue profoundly and simply. The exquisitely handmade objects, created in collaboration with artisans from Brazil—remember, women’s textile work has been dismissed for centuries as merely ornamental or (strangely enough) solely functional and therefore unworthy of study or exhibition—is placed within pristine Plexiglas cubes. The tinted glass and metal legs of the cubes reference a scientific mode of looking, a way of exploring the world around us. To pair these flowers, handmade by artisans in Brazil, with the vitrine is to make a statement about the legacies that inform modern modes of viewing. It is also to reclaim the flower that transformed 19th century Europe, inspiring significant cultural change in the practices of Modernism, and to say, “look again.”
Laura August
October 2014
Houston, TX
Special thanks to Fabiola López-Durán for her generous insights throughout the writing of this essay.
1. John Fisk Allen, Victoria regia, or the great water lily of America, with a brief account of its discovery and introduction into cultivation, with illustrations by William Sharp, from specimens grown at Salem, Massachusetts, USA. Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1854: np, preface.
2. Ibid.
3. For more on the Victoria regia’s remarkable history, see Tatiana Holway, The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
4. Larry Rohter, “A New Look at the Multitalented Man Who Made Tropical Landscaping an Art,” The New York Times, January 21, 2009: C1.
5. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1929). Reproduced in The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750–1940. Ed. Isabelle Frank, with translations by David Britt. New Haven: Yale University Press and The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2000: 291.
6. Artist statement, October 2014. From email correspondence with author, in collaboration with Fabiola LópezDurán.
7. Isabelle Frank, ed. The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750–1940: 5–6 (introduction).
8. June 6, 1994, by James Brooks.