On the originality of the Procedimiento: Avant-garde invention and inhuman professionalism in César Aira’s Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero

• Matt Johnson ^[1]
  1. [1] New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

     New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Bulletin of Spanish Studies, ISSN-e 1478-3428, ISSN 1475-3820, Vol. 101, Nº 1, 2024, págs. 99-121
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In the 1990s, César Aira took a negative view of artistic professionalization in his essays, but he also wrote a biographical novel about a professional artist: Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero, which depicts landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas’ South American travels in the 1830s. In his essays, Aira characterizes professionalization as a freezing of artistic form, and he positions the avant-garde as a dynamic process emerging out of a static professionalism. This essay argues that his novelistic treatment of Rugendas follows, but also diverges from, the ideas in his essays, exposing dynamics internal to professionalism itself.