On the Originality of the Procedimiento: Avant-Garde Invention and Inhuman Professionalism in César Aira’s Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero

Abstract

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.