Jardim Miriam Arte Clube's atelier. Photo: Courtesy JAMAC
Both the choice of five collectives as nominees for the Turner Prize, in 2021, and the announcement of 14 collectives as the first participants in documenta fifteen indicate an important moment of inflection in artistic practice, which reveals the spirit of the time: the passage of isolation from the called the plastic artist in his atelier for an action of solidary and sustainable character, which aims at new forms of action in the world. Finally.
1 de 3
Jardim Miriam Arte Clube's atelier. Photo: Courtesy JAMAC
"Povo, cama, sonho" [People, bed, dream] is part of the series "Colchas de histórias" [Stories' quilt], produced at JAMAC. Photo: Courtesy JAMAC
JAMAC's entrance wall. Photo: Courtesy JAMAC
In other artistic areas, such as theater, dance and music, for example, the collective experience has always been present. In the visual arts, very little, despite several isolated historical cases. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, initiatives have been growing that have not ceased to be mapped in important exhibitions such as the Panorama of Brazilian Art in 2001, curated by Paulo Reis, Ricardo Basbaum and Ricardo Resende, at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM-SP).
Among the groups selected there were Atrocidades Maravilhosas, Mico and Clube da Lata, who for twenty years had already sought a new form of agency in the artistic scene. Artist Mônica Nador also participated in that edition of Panorama, with the project Paredes Pinturas, the origin of Jamac – Jardim Miriam Arte Clube, which five years later participated in the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2006.
With general curatorship by Lisette Lagnado, the edition, entitled Como Viver Junto, actually brought more collectives besides Jamac itself, such as the Argentine Eloisa Cartonera and the Chinese Long March Project. Eight years later, in the 31st edition, a group of curators selected by Charles Esche again focused on collectives, such as ruangrupa itself, who now directs documenta fifteen, but also Bolivian Mujeres Creando, Russian Chto Delat or Argentinean Etcetera and the Brazilian Contrafilé Group.
ruangrupa, 2019. Photo: Jin Panji
It is ironic that this growth of collectives has emerged during the phenomenon of the expansion of art fairs which, due to its essentially commercial profile, brought back a somewhat fetishistic character of the artist and his work, in addition to elevating the figure of the collector as the main legitimator of the circuit – only what sells should be considered.
As a sort of antidote to this system, which had already shown decay for some years, these collectives sought new practices, often far from fairs and collectors’ homes. They are either in institutions or universities, such as Forensic Architecture, based on the Goldsmiths of the University of London, which, incidentally, was nominated for the Turner in 2018, or they are just informal groups of artists, such as #coleraalegria, in Brazil, who have been contributing to relevant political manifestations with the creation of innovative visual material, far from the serious clichés of conventional militancy, in addition to having a strong presence in social networks.
Not by chance, in his recent book What Comes After Farce, American critic Hal Foster points out that many artists have been working on the key of “reconstruction”, that is, they are looking for systems that serve as alternative possibilities to the collapsing world.
The case of #coleraalegria is exemplary, because it is a grouping of militancy, where each one continues with their individual work, but in the collective there is an energy that is multiplied by singularities.
Thus, contrary to what is conventionally stated that documenta sets trends, the next edition of the event will enshrine practices under construction for more than two decades, which are repositioning the arts system.
"Moto-contínuo", José Damasceno's exhibition. Photo: Isabella Matheus/Pinacoteca de São Paulo
It gives a certain relief to enter José Damasceno’s exhibition, Moto-continuo, at Estação Pinacoteca, in such an unfavorable context, when a CPI unveils all the preposterous acts of a government that contributed to the nearly 500,000 deaths as a result of Covid-19 in the country.
The diversity of procedures, from magnanimous installations to delicate designs, the disparity between the materials used, from the noble marble to the decaying and perishable cigarettes, and the absence of an explicit theme, can point to an exhibition that deals at its limit with art as an “experimental exercise of freedom”, as defined by art critic Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981). In times of pandemic, freedom can be everything.
As the North American curator Lynn Zelevansky points out in the exhibition’s catalog to describe one of the artist’s works, but which serves for the exhibition as a whole, Damasceno creates “a world of its own, inhabited by strange creatures”.
1 de 3
"Trilha Sonora" and "Snooker". Photo: Isabella Matheus/Pinacoteca de São Paulo
"Trilha Sonora", José Damasceno. Photo: Isabella Matheus/Pinacoteca de São Paulo
"Snooker", José Damasceno. Photo: Isabella Matheus/Pinacoteca de São Paulo
Among the more than 70 pieces exhibited, made between 1989 and 2021, some of the works that help in this feeling of disconnection from the context are those that, due to their size and seriality, create strange landscapes, such as Trilha Sonora, with hundreds of hanging hammers in nails create the representation of mountains, and Snooker, a pool table covered with woolen threads that come out of the lamps arranged above it. The same principle is seen in Paisagem crescendo, where hundreds of cigarettes that look like dots on the wall create images of trees.
It is a set of works that seduce because of the tricks of their compositions and provoke that Mona Lisa smile, for their ingenuity and originality. In his text, Zelevansky seeks to value this strategy by pointing out that there is a “psychological dimension in Damasceno’s work that borders on the surreal” and cites the artist’s favorite authors such as William James, Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges as possible dialogues with his work.
In fact, the aforementioned works have surreal dimensions, as their unusual construction processes, from mountains made by nails and hammers to lights made from woolen threads, result in images that resemble collages of contradictory elements. However, unlike the multiple possible meanings of surrealist works, there is nothing much more than the elements of the works themselves. Hammers follow hammers, wool threads follow wool threads, which takes contemporary art to a mere formalist exercise.
Another set of Moto-contínuo that points to this superficiality are the so-called Esculturas Borracha, made in marble that oversize common everyday objects, such as the school material that gives the title to the works.
1 de 2
"Método para Arranque e Deslocamento", José Damasceno. Photo: Isabella Matheus/Pinacoteca de São Paulo
"Paisagem crescendo", José Damasceno. Photo: Isabella Matheus/Pinacoteca de São Paulo
When the viewer becomes aware of this lack of depth, relief turns to irritation, because the virtuosity of the show points to a total lack of connection to any context, other than that of art itself, and the only possible lens to observe the set is thinking about categories of the art itself. It is not by chance that Zelevansky’s text in the catalog revolves around the technique of drawing.
In a society so polarized, conflicted, prejudiced, and one can say so many other terms that point to the failure of any humanist thought, the exhibition curated by José Augusto Ribeiro brings a selection and disposition of highly aestheticized works, a set that reveals a cold and distant beauty, full of puns like Can you hear me? (você consegue me escutar?), with two trumpets joined at the mouth.
Interestingly, the exhibition’s catalog goes in the opposite direction, practically an artist’s book, since most of it is composed of photos of a lambe-lambe with the image of the effigy of the Republic – that illustrates the Brazilian Real notes – pasted on the walls of the city, mostly in decaying and impoverished places, and in some of them political demonstrations such as “Fora Temer” can be read, giving a sense of the context and becoming a documentation of a powerful public installation.
It is this vitality that is lacking in Moto-contínuo itself, which proves to be too monotonous because it is so beautiful and perfect. Leaving the building in the cracolândia area is a shocking contrast, but it ends up being a relief to return to the ugliness and difficulties of the real world, with all its dynamism and potential.
Leia a crítica de Moto-contínuo em português, clique aqui.
"Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós", Sidney Amaral, 2014. Foto: Coleção particular/Cortesia Sesc Jundiaí
“Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós”, Sidney Amaral, 2014. Photo: Private collection/Courtesy Sesc Jundiaí
*By Daniel Lima
I never met You, Sidney. Although we are two plastic artists from the same generation, from the same city, we have not met while you were alive. This mismatch is even rarer if we consider that we are two black artists, an exception in the world of contemporary art – even more so in the early 2000s, when we started our careers.
In my first exhibitions, my path forked to a distance away from the art galleries. I was part of this generation that opted for an encounter with the city, with the contradictions of urban space. A battleground for poetic creations in a clash of scale, languages and social-political contexts.
While you were developing these powerful works that are part of the exhibitionViver até o fim o que me cabe! – Sidney Amaral: aproximação, curated by Claudinei Roberto da Silva, I was also dealing with poetic works with different plastic and conceptual solutions. But the crossings are the same, Sidney…
I realized these transversalities in my encounter with your work when I was conducting the exhibition Agora Somos Todxs Negrxs?, at Galpão Videobrasil in 2018. With the help of Claudinei Roberto – who had been a colleague at USP and who can certainly agree to be black in these spaces of exception – I was able to find your works in their natural habitat: the studio where golden snakes with fork teeth lay down; headless barbies in solid bronze; eating trap spoons. The drawings and paintings of a virtuosity of technique meet this double of identity: the contradiction of blackness.
1 de 2
"Embate (O Eu e o Outro)", 2010. Private collection/Courtesy Sesc Jundiaí.
"Bem Me Quer, Mal Me Quer (2011)", Sidney Amaral. Private collection/Courtesy Sesc Jundiaí.
Being part of a huge minority in contemporary art and a majority in the population gives us this certainty of the importance of inscribing this so invisible Afro-Brazilian perspective. At the same time, the identity trap that we have to transcend is certain. A double challenge to bring the unique context that forged us, but also to cross the limits of what is considered as a denunciation of social ills in our world. A contradiction to be elaborated in two senses: in relation to the identity trap and another, connected to identity, in the articulation of social denunciation and the announcement of other future perspectives.
The traps are similar insofar as they pose the problem of how to escape from the frames created for a poetic political making. In other words, Sidney, we were faced with the challenge of speaking from the place of black individuals – and in this operation of looking at oneself it is almost impossible to ignore the violence that goes through us – but, at the same time, to undress black identity because they were created to bind us and hinder potentials of life. As Achille Mbembe puts it in Critique of Black Reason:
Does the Black Man not insist, still, on seeing himself through and within difference? Is he not convinced that he is inhabited by a double, a foreign entity that prevents him from knowing himself? Does he not live in a world shaped by loss and separation, cultivating a dream of returning to an identity founded on pure essentialism and therefore, often, on alterity?
This double in your work, Sidney, comes up in attack on himself. Asserting oneself black in image, plenitude, struggle, dignity, in a reverse sense to the historical animalization of blacks in the colonized world. Simultaneously struck by the certainty that something bury us in a rhetoric of death:
(…) the fear felt by the millions trapped in the ruts of racial domination, the anguish at seeing their bodies and minds controlled from the outside, at being transformed into spectators watching something that was, but also was not, their true existence (Mbembe)
Sidney, when I went to Africa, I could understand that “black” was created here in the Americas to define, dominate and diminish us. A term that, as I put it in the provocative question title of our exhibition Agora somos todxs negrxs?, was created to “signify exclusion, brutishment and degradation, that is, a limit that is always conjured and abhorred”, writes Mbembe. But which, due to the need for survival, was redefined by a path of struggle in the same history of violence and resistance. Being black has come to mean that we are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. And since then, this black being “has become the symbol of a conscious desire for life, a thriving, floating and plastic force, fully engaged in the act of creation and even in the act of living in several times and several stories simultaneously”.
Study for “O Anjo”, 2016. Private collection/Courtesy Sesc Jundiaí.
I believe that this double that we reenact together with so many others in this generation redefines meanings of consolidated images and consolidating stereotypes. The black boy in the mask T-shirt; the soldier angel; the woman who smiles with a wreath of flowers… Ways of replacing images in the world – and, in this way, we replace ourselves.
These movements are aware of the limitation in “simply setting up new symbols of identity, new ‘positive images’ that fuel an unreflective ‘identity politics‘’’, as Homi Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture. By wearing out and provoking this double identity, we build a labyrinth that leads, after all, to the multiplex identity: not fluid, amorphous or slippery, but solid on many sides defined by negation, by what we are not.
Thus, the themes, whether slavery in Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós?, whether the colonial Catholic religion in Demiurgo or O Pão Nosso, but also recent history in Diálogos/ Encontro return as this “disjunctive present”, a present broken into conflicting, contradictory interpretations. This shift bothers many because it deconstructs worlds of stable beliefs. Only racial displacement, the black figure in the canonical context of art, displaces the world around them.
These myth images, memory images, time images that invade and colonize subjectivities, Sidney, are being reinscribed by us not as heroic symbols of a politics of identity. They are reinscribed in “the very textuality of the present that determines both the identification with, and the interrogation of, modernity: what is the ‘we’ that defines the prerogative of my present?”, points out Bhabha.
It is true that this “we” of the Brazilian nation never included us. And at this stage of capitalism, many are beginning to realize that it doesn’t include them anymore either. The current stage of exploration, whether material or cognitive, places a vast majority side by side in a fractal of segregation. “Shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks”, affirmed the Haitian Constitution of 1805, the result of the only black revolt to take definitive power and the first American nation to abolish slavery. “Now we are all blacks!”
We agree, between fits and starts, between battles and wars, between deconstructions and decolonizations, that we will not succumb to the kidnapping of the future. We re-enact the past with the delusions of the present. I see in your work, Sidney, a force nothing close to the surreal oneiric, but bordering on delirium: a power of fascination and hallucination.
…
Sidney, I had a shot of the vaccine that immunizes against the virus that causes Covid-19 the day I went to visit your exhibition Viver até o fim o que me cabe! In the morning, I had prepared my documents. The doctor who greeted me after the short wait in line was sitting in the disabled drive-thru. Some people passed by asking which vaccine was being applied and what day the Pfizer vaccine would arrive. The doctor’s green eyes examined the PUC diploma filled with gold writing. Then she filled out a form and asked me about my self-determination: black. I remember that I manage to escape the statistic that places the black population among the least vaccinated in the country. Brazil vaccinates twice as many white people as black people (data from Agência Pública). I escaped because I am in the ranks of those who have a degree in Clinical Psychology. This is a type of measure that underground opens the way for a white portion – which does not necessarily have a greater risk – to get vaccinated first. “Accepting only the diploma is a measure made for whites to get vaccinated”, the doctor agrees. And I see myself here. Yes, we were always the exception, Sidney.
"Sum of days", at MoMA (2011). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery
Carlito Carvalhosa at his solo exibithion at Galeria Nara Roesler (2017). Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler
The untimely death of Carlito Carvalhosa last May, at the age of 59, aroused a strong feeling of sadness and impotence, strongly expressed in the social networks of admirers, artists, critics, collectors, dealers and all those categories that make up the diffuse group known as the “arts scene”. The impossibility of holding a farewell ceremony and collectively elaborating the mourning added to the feeling of hopelessness experienced in the country as a result of the health, social and political tragedy in which we are immersed. It is known that the artist did not die from Covid-19 and that he had been fighting cancer for many years, but there is still a feeling that losses like this sum up the fraying and destruction of a civilizing project in which art would play a fundamental role. Object of intense expressions of affection and admiration, Carlito Carvalhosa and his work ended up embodying this notion of art as an element of reflection and transformation, so violently threatened today.
If there is something that characterizes the artist’s work in a more general way, it is his desire to act on the perceptive frontiers, transforming our apprehension of the world and reaffirming the transitory character of things. His career began in the 1980s, linked to a project with a collective approach, together with a group that included Fábio Miguez, Nuno Ramos, Paulo Monteiro and Rodrigo Andrade. The group, known as Casa 7 (referring to the number of the studio they shared), shared common interests such as the link with neo-expressionism and the use of non-noble materials such as Kraft paper and industrial paint. Carlito’s initial experiences with drawing and painting, little by little, also gave way to research of a more sculptural nature, for a growing interest in the occupation of the surroundings. He began to explore the environment, incorporating simple and crude elements, but with a strong symbolic charge, such as light, translucent fabrics, wood and plaster, materials that became frequent in his production.
1 de 2
"Sum of days", at MoMA (2011). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery
"Sum of days", at MoMA (2011). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery
“I wanted to tie a knot in this space”, he confessed during the assembly of his first large site-specific installation, held at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (MuBE), in 1999. In this work, entitled Duas Águas, Carlito Carvalhosa literally transferred his studio to the museum and clashed with the rigorous and straight architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha (another big loss in recent weeks), creating in loco a series of monumental plaster structures, with organic forms, which inverted the notion of interior and exterior. With a light appearance, but weighing eight tons, these pieces kept that paradoxical, inscrutable aspect that the artist claimed to seek in his work.
This work inaugurates a series of dialogues he engages with museum environments of great institutional and architectural importance, considered as milestones both in his production and in the growing importance of large installations in Brazilian contemporary art. This is the case, for example, of the Sala de Espera, which inaugurated in 2013 the annex of the new headquarters of the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo (MAC-USP), of the installations Sum of days, with similar versions presented in the the octagon of the Pinacoteca do Estado (2010) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2011), or even of the monumental sculpture It was already like this when I arrived. The piece, originally exhibited at MAM Rio in a temporary exhibition held in 2006 and later incorporated into the Sesc Guarulhos collection, refers to the image of Sugar Loaf Mountain in reverse, a voluminous mountain that floats inverted in the air, provoking the visitor with its unstable and precarious. A secondary but intriguing aspect of Carlito’s work is the attention he pays to the word. His titles always bring a poetic dimension, a temporal or narrative suggestion that adheres to the work, adding to the formal aspect and generating another layer of meaning.
1 de 3
Carlito Carvalhosa's "Sala de Espera" at MAC-USP (2013). Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery
"It was already like this when I arrived",
at MAM Rio (2006). Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery
"Faço tudo para não fazer nada" at Galeria Nara Roesler São Paulo (2017). Photo: Everton Ballardin / Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler
There is in common in all these projects, which play with light, balance, volume, depth and transparency, a permanent desire to subtly transform our apprehension of what surrounds us. By activating these spaces through small interventions (such as when he raised the Eva Klabin Foundation’s mobile heraldics, placing fragile glass cups under them) or actions with greater visual or sensory impact (such as the large spirals of translucent fabric that make up the scene in Sum of days), it creates a kind of place outside time, in which the sensations of belonging and absence overlap. Something that Lorenzo Mammì defined as a “non-place”. Or, in the words of Marta Mestre, a situation that is extremely ambiguous, “because it permanently vacillates between contemplation and experience, between distance and approximation, between optical and haptic”. In other words, Carlito Carvalhosa’s work goes beyond challenging the viewer with thought-provoking temporal and spatial provocations. Over more than three decades, he problematizes the relationship between the work of art and the public, incorporating himself into the best tradition of contemporary Brazilian art.
Thiago de Paula Souza, Diane Lima e Beatriz Lemos, the triennial’s curators. Photo: Indiara Duarte
In the midst of a pandemic and political crisis context, what are the curatorial and exhibition possibilities? This was one of the questions that guided months of work in The river is a serpent, third edition of Frestas – Art Triennial. Organized by Sesc São Paulo, based at its Sorocaba unit, it is curated by Beatriz Lemos, Diane Lima and Thiago de Paula Souza.
The invitation to the trio came before the pandemic, enabling the first activities in the construction of the project. On a trip across Brazil, the curators visited locations in the North and Northeast: “The most important thing for us was to create a curatorial body from this moving body in conflict with other territories”, explains Beatriz. It was in this movement that The river is a serpent began to take shape, not as a theme – which would be insufficient for the current moment -, but as a cosmovision that brings together the learnings of its process and aims to discuss the contemporaries movements, their geographies and colonial structures.
But how does Frestas ended up happening in Sorocaba? From a sequence of listening meetings with local artists, producers, managers and educators, the team sought to understand the region’s needs and made education one of the central axes of curatorial thinking. “It has always been a great concern for us not to be like a spaceship that lands in the city ‘bringing knowledge’ and then leaving”, explains Renata Sampaio, educational coordinator. If the general context seemed so vertical, the proposal here was to change this dynamic. “We didn’t want to reproduce the colonial vision of those who just want to teach and not build together”, she adds.
With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, the entire art world saw the need to rethink their programming. With the triennial it was no different. The exhibition was postponed several times and is currently scheduled for August 2021. For the curators, this decision brings up a discussion about their professional functions: “perhaps the curatorial practice is not limited to an exhibition organization”, explains Thiago de Paula. With that in mind, they changed the direction of the project and decided to focus even more on educational practices. If “the river is a serpent because it hides and camouflages, and between the unpredictable and the mystery it creates strategies for its own movement”, as the curatorial text summarizes, it is with a focus on the course and curves of this river – and on the dialogues that these promote – that Frestas decides to build itself. “This image has helped us to think about this cosmovision and has enabled us to find strategies and possibilities to face what it means to cure an exhibition of contemporary art at this moment in Brazil”, explains Diane Lima.
It was in this context that the idea of the Study Program took shape. Fifteen artists whose lives and practices are directly connected to colonial violence were invited to participate in a series of virtual meetings with the triennial’s curatorship, production and educational teams. “We had intense meetings discussing projects, poetics, practices and life”, says Thiago. In this meetings, the artists were able to elaborate their own artistic projects, which will make up the exhibition.
Based on the experiences and ideas of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Davi de Jesus do Nascimento, Denilson Baniwa, Denise Alves-Rodrigues, Ella Vieira, Gê Viana, Iagor Peres, Jonas Van Holanda, Juliana dos Santos, Laís Machado, Luana Vitra, Pedro Victor Brandão, Rebeca Carapiá, Sallisa Rosa and Ventura Profana, the meetings brought focus to several of the discussions that permeated curatorial thinking. With this, not only did the artists leave video calls with new provocations, but the curators could rethink the exhibition possibilities. The river is a serpent: topics for difference and social justice, an online teacher training program, held in weekly meetings between October and November 2020, was also taken in this direction. “The approval was so great that the training became an county official course, offering career progression to the participating teachers”, says Renata Sampaio, who led the program.
At each meeting, one or more speakers would join the group to discuss strategies for working in the classroom. “The idea was not to show the teacher how to teach, but to raise awareness about issues that we think are of paramount importance, so that the debate can continue, in a horizontal way, at school”, explains Renata. “The educational in this edition of Frestas is working from non-hegemonic perspectives, agents and concepts, seeking to build relationships with other areas of knowledge”, she adds.
Online, however, expanded Frestas’ geographic borders. In the Training Program, it enabled the participation of educators and guests from different places in Brazil and the availability of this material online so that more people could be impacted. In general terms, it allowed for an even more intense exchange with the international scene, based on the partnership established with the Ayllu collective, a group of artistic-political action and collaborative research formed by migrant, racialized and gender and sexual dissidents from the former Spanish colonies, headquartered in Madrid.
Seeking a critical space for collective thinking and creation, Ayllu developed the Program Oriented to Subaltern Practices (POPS), which brought together around 40 people from eight Latin American countries to question rationalism, scientism and the false objectivity of Eurocentric thinking. The discussions generated a collective fanzine that will be part of the show The river is a serpent and added another discussion to the project, bringing the debate to migration issues.
The participation of people from 25 of the 27 federative units in Brazil in the expography course also sets the tone for this expansion of Frestas. Conducted by Tiago Guimarães, exhibition architect of the triennial itself, the course aimed to contribute so that more people had access to information about the area. Anti-analysis, a mentoring project by Pêdra Costa, assisted 45 artists from all over Brazil when it happened online, which would not have been possible if it had tooken place in Sorocaba, as they had initially thought.
“Os Parixaras”, de Jaider Esbell. Courtesy Sesc Sorocaba
Reaching the mouth of the river
If the initial objective of The river is a serpent was to take the discussions of the Brazilian and world contemporary art circuit to Sorocaba, finding less violent paths, it seems that the educational practices not only created these points of dialogue with the city, through the Training Program , but proposed discussions at other points in the circuit. These discussions will flow into Sorocaba in the face-to-face and virtual exhibition proposed for the second half of 2021.
Along this river, not only were artists and educators able to rethink their processes and the absences and possibilities around them, but so did the Triennial team and Sesc itself. “I’m rooting for the institution to review itself in some practices, because it is still very white and this is something that needs to be thought about”, points out Thiago. The focus on the process, education as the main pillar of the project and the joint construction of knowledge seem to have been important tools for this, because, as Renata Sampaio concludes: “The path of this river was made in the meetings, and the meeting is a two way street, everyone leaves modified after it”.
Joseph Beuys, La Rivoluzioni Siamo Noi (1972). Foto: Cortesia Bergamin & Gomide.
the artist Joseph Beuys was born on May 12, 1921 in Krefeld, Germany, near the Netherlands. In this pandemic year, therefore, his 100 years of birth are celebrated. A precursor to issues that we are systematically debating in these months of confinement, such as the defense of nature, his figure also stands out for rethinking the art system. This theme was addressed by me in a lecture at the Goethe Institut in 2011, in the Third Cycle of German Thought, which turned into a chapter of a book with the same name of the event the following year. The actuality of the debate is maintained and we consider it appropriate to now republish the text, without major modifications.
***
One of Beuys’ most significant works is The End of the 20th Century (Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts) (1982-83), exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin, an installation composed of 21 basalt rocks that can represent numbness, solidification or even a collective cemetery. Basalt, it is good to remember, contains crystals that are not seen with the naked eye. On each rock, the artist made a circular hole and from there removed a cone, reintroducing it again, this time glued with felt and clay, as signaling that even the most solid and immutable can undergo transformations through human action.
According to Peter-Klaus Schuster, curator of the exhibition The 20th Century: A Century of Art in German – which took place in three major museums in Berlin in 1999, and which placed Beuys as the central artist of his selection on German art in the 20th century -, The End of the 20th Century deals with the “ambivalence of the enormous catastrophes of the century and at the same time , as a positive image of the value of human life.”
It is this essentially humanistic vision, which elects every man not only as a revolutionary, but also as an artist, responsible for contributing to the construction of a new society, defined by Beuys as “social sculpture”, which places him as one of the leading thinkers of the 20th century and whose ideas I intend to address in this text The abandonment of art – inspired by a postcard from 1985 , entitled With this I abandon art – to reflect on the absolutely radical character of its propositions.
The original title of this work, moreover, is Hiermit trete ich aus der Kunst aus and the translation I adopted is that in the book Joseph Beuys, by Alain Borer. Literally, it may not be the most appropriate translation, but conceptually, as we’ll see below, it’s totally pertinent.
1. Beuys: the myth
To understand Beuys’ thinking it is essential to know his own biography. This is not about justifying his work as an illustration of his life, but of the very interrelationship he sought between art and life, a link that became essential in the way art was conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, a period that has in Beuys one of its main figures.
This particular moment of the 20th century caused artists such as Andy Warhol, Hélio Oiticica or Beuys himself to create around him a series of legends, as a symbolic sample of his conceptions of art. Each, in his own way, has created upon himself a series of legends that, whether true or false, it doesn’t matter, are the way they embodied their own conception of art.
In Beuys’ case, his uniform was always that of a simple type: the felt hat, the fisherman’s jacket, the jeans and the heavy shoes, as someone ready to work in one of the oldest professions. The construction of his public figure, a kind of fisherman of souls, still relates directly to the legend that the artist built around his biography. As Borer says, in the quoted publication:
A legend is neither true nor false, it is, in Latin, what must be read and said, what is narrated about the work and its author, “the point at which the biography ceases to be extrinsic”: all that with which the legendary figure contributes and collaborates to the extent that the artist himself watches zealously, and this in every work, what will be said about it. (BORER, p. 12)
It is thus, therefore, that we should read the mythological story of Beuys and his plane crash in Crimea: as a preamble to his work. It is narrated, in his biography published by Heiner Stachelhaus, as follows:
At a young age, he began the study of medicine, intending to devote himself to the humblest. This desire, however, was destroyed when flying his Stuka, after joining the Luftwaffe [the Nazi air force] in 1941. In 1944, at the age of 22, he miraculously escaped death in Asia. His plane, a JU 87, crashed in a snow-covered region called Crime or Crimea. Joseph was unconscious for several days, semi-frozen, was taken by genuine Tatars, who took care of his wounds. The people, born in the place, soon took him for one of his own: “You don’t German, you Tatar,” and brought him back to life, wrapping him in his traditional felt blankets and heating him with animal fat. After his return, having found shelter on a farm, Joseph faced a deep crisis, familiar to all great artists, which allowed him to elaborate the basic principles of his art. (BORER, p. 13)
We must not forget that Beuys assumes there that he participated in the Nazi squadron and his martyrdom thus becomes a kind of redemption, as if he were transformed so vitally with this episode that he had a genesis from the help of the Tatars, with his fraternal and primordial means of rescue.
It is from this story that Beuys justifies not only the character of his artistic propositions as a field that must save the human being from his crises, giving them a therapeutic character; but it also explains the materials involved in his works, especially felt and animal fat, elements that represent a form of protection, through heat, as organic materials that enable a vital relationship to nature, remembering how the human being is an integral part of it.
Art should not be limited to the retina – so I am engaged with substance, as “a process of the spirit (soul)” (HARLAN, p. 14).
It is how Beuys justifies the use of natural elements in his work. In the 1981 version of Chair with Fat (the first was performed in 1964) or in Felt Suit, 1970, we see how the artist is not concerned with creating a sculpture in a traditional way, but in provoking a reflection on the role of the artist, building a narrative from these materials. Thus, Beuys is concerned with reorienting the meaning and function of art.
During Nazism, modern art was officially fought through the Degenerate Art exhibition, a kind of manifesto against modernist movements such as the Bauhaus, Cubism and German Expressionism, which preached in art a new way of observing the world. What the Nazis defended, then, was the return of fine arts, in classical forms as the most appropriate to Aryan society that was intended to erect itself as sovereign.
Degenerate Art, the exhibition that began at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 1937, and then moved to 11 more cities in Germany and Austria, brought together 650 works by 112 artists, including Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Marc Chagall, Mondrian and Lasar Segall. In four months in Munich, the show gathered more than two million visitors.
Almost twenty years later, in 1955, Arnold Bode created in Kassel an exhibition, Documenta, whose central objective was to reintroduce to the German public the modernists censored in the Nazi regime. This exhibition, which would happen every five years, and today functions as the great beacon of contemporary art, was one of the great platforms used by Beuys for his ideas. He participated in four of his editions – in 1964, 1972, 1977 and 1982 – contributing to the reconstruction of German artistic thought decisively. And what was that way? In Beuys there is an essential question: “What is the need that justifies the creation of something like art?”. And your own answer is pretty clear:
If this question does not become the central focus of such research, and is not resolved in a truly radical way that actually sees art as the starting point for ducing anything at all, in every field of work, then any thought of further development is just a waste of time (HARLAN, p. 10).
When Beuys argues that art is the starting point for producing something in any field, he is in tune with those who, in the 1960s and 1970s, saw in art the only possible space for new practices that would discondition the human being from at least two then hegemonic visions, faces of the same civilizing process, as described by Norbert Elias: the rationalist thinking and the conditioning of the body through forms of behavior then seen as civilized, but which opposes it to the forces of nature, as if man were excluded from them.
One of the central points of Beuys’ thought is precisely the “defense of nature”, as he preaches in a work, a photograph from 1984, in a holistic conception, which is largely related to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy (1861-1925), that is, the need for integration between man and nature. It is from there that, explains the artist, his work must be understood.
My objects are to be seen as the stimulants for a transformation of the idea of sculpture, or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what’s culture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone:
Thinking forms – how we mould out thoughts or spoken forms – how we shape our thoughts into words or
SOCIAL SCULPTURE: how we mould and shape the world in which we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone artist (HARLAN, p. 9).
In this way, we come here at the heart of Beuys’ conception of art: to use art as a platform for the transformation of society as a stimulus for the reconstruction of the world. As Harlan states in another publication:
The main concern of his artistic work is the reformulation of the social field. He calls the social body social sculpture (FARKAS, p. 27).
However, it is not a purely political platform, Beuys is not only a militant of transformation in the social field, but also a revolutionary of plastic forms, so his discourse and artistic practice cannot be separated: “Art is a type of science of freedom” (HARLAN, p. 10), says Beuys, in a conception very close to that advocated by Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa , for whom “art is the experimental exercise of freedom, its idea best known and prowed”.
Beuys used various means as instruments for disseminating his ideas. He was the author of a monumental production, dozens of works, but especially multiples, which by their democratic character, another of the flags of the 1960s and 1970s, were more suited to his proposals. Between 1965 and 1986, he produced no fewer than 557 multiples, some with a circulation of 12,000 copies, such as the wooden box written “Intuition!”. He also produced about 300 posters, still appropriating propaganda as one of his means of expression, the same as the Nazi regime did, but obviously with totally different goals.
Joseph Beuys, La Rivoluzioni Siamo Noi (1972). Photo: Courtesy Bergamin & Gomide.
When Beuys created the poster The revolution are we, in Naples, in 1971, he explained, in an interview with Giancarlo Politi, of Flash Art magazine (n. 168), the meaning of the use of this medium:
To communicate, man uses language, uses gestures, writing, spray a wall, picks up the typewriter and extracts letters from it. In short, it uses means. What means to use for political action? I chose art. Making art is therefore a means of working for man in the field of thought. This is the most important side of my job. The rest, objects, drawings, performances, come second. Deep down, I don’t have much to do with art. Art interests me only while giving me the possibility to dialogue with man.
Here, then, we see a little of the meaning of his postcard, which gives title to this speech, With this I abandon art. The art, for him, was not reduced to conventional spaces, the gallery and the museum, even though he also regularly occupied these places.
2. The places of Beuys
2.1 The academy
To defend his proposals, Beuys used and problematized several fields: the academy, art institutions such as museums and galleries, political institutions, and became one of the founders of the German Green Party in 1980. His presence at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, for example, was remarkable. There he studied, became professor of sculpture in 1961, and remained for ten years until 1972. For him:
It’s my most important function. To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to explain yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important for me anymore. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it (Artforum, 1969).
In this sense, Borer states that in Beuys, “speech is sculpture”, as if his thought materialized in the dialogical relationship with the students.
His classes were very disputed and this facet is the motto for the exposition Beuys and well beyond – Teach as art, organized by Deutsche Bank from its own collection, on display at the Tomie Ohtake Institute [in 2011], which also features works by students such as Blink Palermo, Katharina Sieverding and Lothar Baumgarten, in a somewhat formalist approach, which I intend to address later.
In Düsseldorf, “traditional and strongly hierarchical forms of class were replaced by collective debates, in which both art and social issues were discussed.” In 1971, Beuys came to occupy the secretariat of the Academy of Art, to protest the restrictions on the admission of students, then founding the Organization for Direct Democracy by National Referendum.
A little earlier, that same year, he had already admitted in his class the 142 candidates who were turned down by the Academy, but this set of protests ended up costing him the job and a lawsuit, which he won in 1978. Fundamental here is to reinforce the libertarian character of his activity as a teacher, which represents enabling each student to develop his own work, regardless of their jobs, as he stated in a 1972 interview:
It is often said that in my classes everything would be conceptual or political. But for me it is very important that it results in something sensually palpable, with broad epistemological foundations. My main interest there is to start with the language and let the materializations follow as a correlation of thought and action. The most important thing for me is that the human being, through his products, experiences models of how to co-act in the relationship with the whole; and not only produce articles, but become a visual artist or architect in the entire social organism. The future social order will be formed according to the principles of art (CHRISTENSEN, p. 12).
His belief in the power of institutional education does not end with his departure from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in 1971. Three years later, he founded the International Free University (F.I.U. – Freie Internationale Universität), which served for the development of many of his projects, such as Seven thousand oaks in the Documenta de Kassel in 1982.
In Documenta itself, but in 1977, in its 6th. Edition, The F.I.U. was responsible for organizing Honey Bomb in the workplace, a room in which Beuys and his collaborators spent a hundred days – the usual time of duration of the show, debating the “social sculpture”, that is, the new model of society. However, the F.I.U. was not created as simply an alternative to the German university system. As Beuys declared in 1985:
The International Free University is an international research community. Its circle of collaborators is relatively small. It is not possible to attend the F.I.U. It is simply the project of a new society, beyond capitalism and communism. To accomplish this task, each has to find support in himself. (FARKAS, p. 45)
As in all of Beuys’ work, F.I.U. also did not constitute a conventional structure of established standards, but proposed a new possibility to disseminate the artist’s thinking in a pragmatic way. To think, in Beuys, is to realize.
2.2 The political system
In 1979, the F.I.U. was one of five organizations that created the Green Party in Germany, making Beuys one of its founders. Before, in 1967, he had already created the German Student Party (Deutsche Studentenpartei) on the eve of the revolutions of May 1968.
Then, in 1970, he created the Organization of Non-Voters – Free Plebiscite (Organisation der Nicht Wahler, Freie Volksabstimmung), and in 1971, because of the crisis at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, the Organisation for Direct Democracy by Plebiscite (Organisation fur direkte Demokratie durch Volksbastimmung). All these organizations demonstrate how much Beuys believed in transformation by institutional means, at a time when Germany was shaken by associations that also sought change, but by illegal means, such as the far-left guerrilla group Baader Meinhoff, which existed between 1970 and 1988. The use of instruments of direct democracy also points out the importance of the thought of each individual, against the principles of representative democracy.
Even so, Beuys went on to run for the European Parliament in 1979 for the group Other Political Association (Sonstige politische Vereinigung), which the following year would become The Greens. On that occasion, he launched the manifesto “Call for the Alternative”, published in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on 23/12/1978, and reprinted in 1979 for the first election to the European Parliament. The text advocated non-violence, the transformation of the use of money and the organization of the State, questioning the escape from reality and even the use of drugs. This manifesto became the poster that integrated its participation in the 15th Bienal de São Paulo, with the title Call for a global alternative, in 1979.
From 1980 to 1986, the Greens maintained, under the direction of Johann Stüttgen, a coordinating office in room 3 of the Academy of Dusseldorf, the former Beuys room.
2.3 The art system
On December 11, 1964, Beuys presented the performance Marcel Duchamp’s silence is overrated (Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird uberbewertet), an action broadcast live on German TV ZDF, as a member of the Fluxus group, using in addition to speech, its typical materials such as fat and felt.
Duchamp was an indolent who created beautiful and interesting provocations for the bourgeoisie and made the affronts brilliantly in the aesthetic typology of his time. (CHRISTENSEN, p. 32)
This anti-Bourgeois spirit in Beuys’s speech is exactly one of the main characteristics of the Fluxus group, created in 1961 at the ag gallery in New York by Lithuanian artist George Maciunas. With an international character, Fluxus was not characterized by a formal style among its components, but by a common principle: to abolish the objectual question of art as the primacy of its existence and to value the process in its constitution.
Beuys joined the group through colleague Nan June Paik, a Korean artist who was also a teacher in Düsseldorf. In addition, also participated in the events organized by Fluxus artists such as the American musician John Cage, whose experimentations were decisive for the group, and the Japanese Yoko Ono. At Fluxus festivals, Beuys performed especially actions, anticipating the idea of performance, which had not been characterized as a language.
Fluxus is linked, in general, to the anti-art character of the Dada movement, which also used everyday elements and ephemeral actions, questioning the commercial value of art. Maciunas, for example, created several multiples, such as the Fluxus Boxes, an idea that would then be used by Beuys. The use of the video, especially due to the influence of Nan June Paik, was also recurrent in Fluxus, not only because of the emergence of the new medium, but because of the characteristics it provided, that is, the possibility of its retransmission, which would also be widely used by Beuys. However, while the Dada had a negative character, as Giulio Carlo Argan defines, by “demonstrating the impossibility of any relationship between art and society”, Fluxus had a more positive view, which sought to link life and art.
It is remarkable that Marcel Duchamp’s silence is overrated occurred just inside a Fluxus event, because its members had great appreciation for the french artist creator of the ready-made. Beuys’ connection to Fluxus was intense, but it did not last long, and the performance shows how the german artist’s critical character was in the confrontation, within the very space of the institutions where it worked.
This capacity for criticism also occurs in the performance I like America and America likes me, in May 1974 for three consecutive days, eight hours each day, on the occasion of the opening of the gallery of the German René Block in New York.
Beuys arrived in the U.S. by plane and, from JFK airport, set off in an ambulance, going straight to a cage built in the gallery, where he lived with a coiote, an animal considered sacred by the native peoples of the usa. According to the myth of the performance, after three days, the artist would have been taken back to the airport, without having stepped on American soil.
Beuys had been working with Block for a long time. It was in his gallery that he once covered the corners with fat, rounding the rigid shape of his architecture, bringing to it an organic character, which was transformed over the days when the fat was exposed. Here one can see how Beuys cares about the plastic issue, but it is a vehicle for his ideas.
In I like America… their action is more radical. He lives with an animal, wrapped in felt and, leaning on a cane, approaches the interactivity with nature, so important to the idea of “social sculpture”. The performance, in fact, points out how the artist lived his own utopia in his work, showing that the realization of his proposals is feasible, besides pointing out a character of non-objectual art, non-commercial, anti-representational. This is because Beuys, who called himself “a reincarnated caveman” (BORER, p. 30), was living his proposals, was not creating mere illustrations for them. Experience is an essential part of your actions.
This action is also a good example of how, in Borer’s conception, Beuys can be seen as a pastor:
The pastor leads his disciples to a place only he knows – a promise of a higher state; he is the man looking for a path, a path more extensive and vast than him: he opens passage.(BORER, p. 23)
This occurs in a great way in his project Seven thousand oaks, which the artist started in 1982, on the occasion of Documenta 7, created from F.I.U. Its goal was that 7,000 such trees be planted throughout the city, always next to a basalt column. Again, one sees here the insightful ability of Beuys to work with images: to this day, those who visit Kassel face the oaks planted by Beuys and his collaborators.
The symbolic beginning of the vital reforestation of the Earth must take place in Kassel. […] This is a rational action; in this case, tree planting. […] One must first create a global understanding to – wherever possible – make such processes sustainable. (FARKAS, p. 41)
In Seven thousand oaks, Beuys concretizes his idea of “social sculpture” transforming the environment. And it does so with the collaboration of those who are willing, so that each person who lives on Earth can become a creator of forms, a sculptor, a designer of the social organism.
However, all the radicality that marked the period of consolidation of Beuys’ work in the 1960s and 1970s, with the exercise of extensive dialogue with other artists and groups such as Fluxus, and Arte Povera in Italy, and the strong presence of performance artists such as Marina Abramović and Ulay, will transform in the following decade.
Joseph Beuys. “Hiermit trete ich aus der Kunst aus” (1985).
The 1980s are marked by the idea of the “return to painting”, especially in Germany, with the emergence of so-called neoexpressionists such as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer. This new context was certainly very discouraging for Beuys, which probably led him to create the multiple postcard With this I abandon art, on November 1, 1985, almost three months before he died, on January 23, 1986, due to a heart attack.
This postcard is part of a series of nine sentences, all handwritten, in chalk, on a dark background, just like a blackboard, material he so often used in his works, related to his teacher facet. It should be noted that, knowing himself ill – Beuys had long been weakened as a result of his plane crash – he leaves this last set of works where there is no image, no color, only text. Another of the texts written in this series of postcards is: “The error already begins when someone prepares to buy a screen”(der Fehler fängt schon an, wenn einer sich anschickt, Keilrahmen und Leinwand zu kaufen)
Therefore, the message of the postcards is clear: Beuys no longer saw the possibility of conveying his ideas in the field of art, nor taking part in it. Just as he was fired from the Academy, and never elected by his political associations, the artist found that neither in art his message achieved the necessary repercussion. An emblematic artist of an experimental period in art history, which begins in the post-War period, Beuys arrives pessimistic in the 1980s, when the art market gains strength and power again and the experiments move into the background. It is the decade of the end of history and, according to Arthur C. Danto, the end of art.
Beuys participated in all the important shows of the art circuit: four times in Documenta; once at Skulptur Münster in 1977; represented Germany in Venice, in 1976 with Tram stop- Monument to the Future; and in 1980, with Das Kapital Raum from 1970 to 1977; he also represented Germany in three Biennials of São Paulo (1979, 1985, 1989) and was consecrated with a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 1979, which earned him great prestige in the United States.
His epitaph, however, points out that, in fact, these great exhibitions represented little for Beuys, and that he already envisioned an unpromising future for art. Sad observation for who argued that:
Only art, that is, art conceived at the same time as creative self-determination and as a process that generates creation, is capable of freeing us and leading us towards an alternative society (BORER, p. 28)
Bibliography*
CHRISTENSEN, Liz (org.) (2011). Beuys and well beyond. Teach as art. Frankfurt: Deutsche Bank.
BORER, Alain. (2001). Joseph Beuys. São Paulo: Cosac Naify.
FARIAS, Agnaldo. (2001). Bienal 50 anos. São Paulo: São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de SP.
FARKAS, Solange (2010). A revolução somos nós. São Paulo: Associação Cultural Videobrasil/Sesc.
HARLAN, Volker (2004). What Is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys. East Sussex: Clairview Books.
SCHUSTER, Peter-Klaus (1999). Das XX. Jahrhundert: ein jahr hundert kunst in Deutschland. Berlin: Nicolai.
*Some of the bibliography was translated from Portuguese to English, therefore, the present text may differ from original.
Fully ready to be reopened after six years of renovations, the Museum of the Portuguese Language has already started to warm up its engines in anticipation of finally being able to open its doors, which should happen in late July or as soon as the pandemic allows. In addition to the physical reconstruction, which reassembled the structure destroyed by fire in 2015, the institution took the opportunity to conceptually reorganize itself and update content and communication strategies with the public. Overall, the project concept remains the same, based on an anthropological, historical and social perspective on the language, as outlined nearly 20 years ago.
As this is basically a virtual collection, the archives were not destroyed by fire and it was possible to reassemble a large part of the original exhibition. The possibility – and need – of redoing the exhibition from scratch brought, however, the opportunity to improve the permanent exhibition and update important aspects, incorporating transformations the language underwent in the period and proposing a reflection on contemporary debates related to identity issues, which has been intensely mobilizing the debate in recent years.
The institution also opened space for a more intense dialogue with various fields of culture, in addition to its intimate relationship with literature, incorporating new ways of thinking about language also based on everyday elements and other forms of expression, such as the arts. visuals. The result of this new approach is the museum’s first temporary exhibition, already accessible to small groups of visitors, entitled Língua Solta. “Since back then, we wanted to bring objects crossed by the language”, explains the institution’s special curator, Isa Grinspum Ferraz. After all, as Mozambican writer Mia Couto says in an online talk organized by the institution, “the Portuguese language does not work in the abstract”.
The installations “Palavras Cruzadas”, in the foreground, and “O Portuguesa do Brasil”, in the background. Photo: Joca Duarte.
Among the novelties brought by the museum in this new guise are also the increment of the timeline, which runs through the history of the Portuguese language from Lazio, in ancient Rome, to the present day, with the problematization of fundamental moments in this trajectory, such as the year 1500 – in which testimonies of indigenous leaders such as Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak were included, questioning the idea of discovery and explaining the process of invasion of already inhabited lands. In an almost opposite sense, the installation Nós da Língua Portuguesa (“we” both in terms of intertwining and of a pronoun that indicates a collectivity) highlights the importance of Portuguese as a language of liberation for African countries, allowing for a confluence of different peoples and dialects in a common project, experienced in countries like Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde. Finally, among the novelties, Isa Grinspum highlights the new installation Falares, curated by Marcelino Freire and Roberta Estrela D’Alva, which creates a forest of canvases in which it is possible to take a walk, watching a web of testimonials, of iconic speeches, Portuguese accents and tribes.
When it opened in 2006, the massive use of virtual technology was one of the museum’s strong marks. Today, with a greater familiarity of people with this type of resource and the improvement of equipment, its protagonism seems more diluted. “The technology came to the service, to tell a story. As the language is impalpable, images and sounds are very useful. We do not seek interactivity for interactivity”, points out the curator. According to her, what matters is to stimulate the visitor’s interest as much as possible, making them leave the museum with more questions than they entered.
Faced with the challenges posed by the pandemic – which has been delaying its reopening and imposing the need to find new ways of contacting potential visitors – the museum has also been taking the opportunity to develop new forms of virtual interaction with the public. It took advantage of the international day of the Portuguese language to show a little of its new face, conducting a series of conversations and online presentations, which have already been seen by more than 15,000 viewers, with figures of great relevance in thinking about the role of language, such as Mia Couto, José Eduardo Agualusa and José Miguel Wisnik. It also launched cycles of virtual lectures and intends to establish cycles of debates, teacher training, film screenings, soirees, and other activities capable of spreading this production beyond the physical space.
Going outside is, in fact, one of the museum’s mottos, either in terms of content (to which digital communication can contribute a lot) or in spatial terms, connecting more intensely with the surroundings of its headquarters at Estação da Luz, through which hundreds of thousands of people walk every day.
Overview of the "Língua Solta" exhibition, in the foreground "Olha Minha Lingua", by Alex dos Santos. Photo: Ciete Silverio.
The widespread presence of the word in the world of things, so evident and so little portrayed, is the theme of the Língua Solta exhibition, installed at the Museum of the Portuguese Language until the next month of October. Purposely mixing watertight categories, such as high culture and popular culture, contemporary art and mass culture, the exhibition combines in the same space and in an unordered manner a broad and significant set of contemporary works of art – already endorsed by the market and the circuit – and a wide selection of objects, posters, packaging, commercial or protest banners and other elements of everyday life. In both, the focus is on the language enhanced as a sign. “Looking at the surroundings, we try to recognize that it is the language that animates many of the objects around us”, describes Moacir dos Anjos, who signs the curatorship together with Fabiana Moraes.
1 de 2
Meme by the Instagram account "Saquinho de Lixo"
Banner by Marta Neves
There is no universalizing or encyclopedic claim to the selection made by the pair. After all, as Moacir says, “curatorship is always a part of the world”. The choices derive from the experiences – objective and subjective – of the couple in the field of art and culture. The result is an exhibition in which the word seems to rebound, indicating different paths of apprehension of the world. One of the most evident aspects is the clear presence of a political demand discourse.
“These are words that express desires, identities, complaints”, explains Fabiana, emphasizing that there is no kind of hierarchy in the exhibition between a language aimed at entertainment, political suggestion or poetic elucubration. The spectator is often presented with manifests that express the urgency of the present day. There is, for example, a set of letters and drawings sent by children living in Maré to the Court, with reactions to the police repression. Or a plaque in honor of councilor Marielle Franco, whose murder goes unpunished. “They are like screams”, explains Fabiana.
Even non-linear and organized in order to promote sparks between different ways of dealing with ideas, forms and words, Língua Solta is articulated around six main cores: media, resistance, home, street, religiosity and pedagogy are the words around which the various objects coalesce together. Many of the selected works belong simultaneously to several of these categories. And they establish enriching dialogues with each other. There is, for example, an interesting reverberation between the slides used by Paulo Freire in the 1960s for literacy and the work ABC da Cana, by Jonathas de Andrade, or the painting Esperança, by Leonilson, which also uses the alphabet as a raw material.
In the exhibition “Língua Solta”, the work “ABC da Cana” (2014) by Jonathas de Andrade. Photo: Ciete Silverio.
Slides used by the Paulo Freire method of adult literacy in the 1960s.
The omnipresent word sometimes gives way to less explicit poetic approaches. This is the case of the group formed by the works of Lygia Pape, Lenora de Barros, Lia Chaia and Anna Maria Maiolino, in which the focus shifts from the written symbol to the physicality of the language. The idea of cut, stain or impossibility of controlling one’s language, something common to the work of these artists, makes the approach between them very powerful.
The list of artists represented in the exhibition is large, with very rare and deliberate gaps, as in the case of São Paulo poets linked to concretism. “We tried to avoid a literary character, privileging the presence of the poetic word in the artistic field”, explains Moacir. These exceptions aside, the great masters of art who appropriate the word are there. Authors such as Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Mira Schendel, Cildo Meireles, Paulo Bruscky, Antonio Manuel, Leonilson, Élida Tessler, Vânia Mignone, Marilá Dardot, Ivan Grilo, Jaime Lauriano, among others, appear, often with more than one work.
“Você me dá sua palavra?”, by Elida Tessler, in the exhibition “Língua Solta”. Photo: Ciete Silvério
There is a permanent effort, in terms of editing, to undo categories, to demonstrate that artistic expression often derives from an attentive look at the world of the street and things, whether maracatu banners, dish towels, cachaça labels or signatures of pixo. A clear example of this hybridity is the work Você me dá sua palavra?, by Elida Tessler, which promotes sewing throughout the exhibition. Thousands of hanging clothespins zigzagged, supported by drying ropes. On them, a number of people invited by the artist wrote a word that was special to each of them. In a presentation made on the occasion of the international day of the Portuguese language, Tom Zé revealed his: “Disobedience”.
Originally, the exhibition was thought of as another nucleus of the museum’s permanent activities. But the difficulties arising from the pandemic, the lack of technical conditions at the institution – which does not have any collection of works of art, so it does not have equipment such as a technical reserve, conservation team, etc. – and the wide presence of works loaned by private and public collections meant that the selection had to be displayed on a temporary basis. On the other hand, it gained a space three times greater than previously planned. It is the only museum activity that can already be seen by the public, being accessible to specific groups by appointment until the end of June. Then, at the end of July, it will reopen together with the entire museum.
The impact caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic has caused unimaginable changes. The perplexity of the present, arising from the protocols of confinement and temporary closings of galleries, museums, fairs and biennials, has shaken the art system since the beginning of last year. In this context, the challenge of overcoming the crisis and finding a way out of the unexpected collapse led to the creation of the collaborative platform Galleries Curate: RHE. The idea came from a group of gallery owners linked to the committee of the three Art Basel fairs – Miami, Hong Kong and Basel – with the idea of promoting simultaneous virtual exhibitions in galleries all over the world, in support of the community.
1 de 3
"A Rift Valley Crossing" video still. Photo: Reprodução
"A Rift Valley Crossing" video still. Photo: Reprodução
"A Rift Valley Crossing" video still. Photo: Reprodução
The first exhibition has water as its theme and was suggested by the gallery owner Chantal Crousel, from Paris, one of the first to embrace the idea. The group highlighted the undeniable limitations that their spaces were experiencing at that time and decided to change the scenario with a dynamic virtual dialogue between the individual programs of each gallery, whether in Jakarta, Brussels, Singapore, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, or Paris.
The only Brazilian gallery that is part of this international pool is A Gentil Carioca, from Rio de Janeiro, directed by Márcio Botner, one of its owners. Engaged in the Art Basel Miami committee, he is a globetrotter on the circuit, connected to several projects around the world and one of the most animated with Galleries Curate.
“The idea was born from the virtual contacts of a group of 12 people and it impressed me when we soon reached 21 participants”. Involved in so many projects, he believes in horizontal collaboration between artists, gallery owners and critics, uniting people who think closely to the group’s goals. Each gallery proposed what they wanted to show and they started the exhibitions earlier this year. “What is happening is something special. While we have established dealers, we have young enthusiasts with less time in the market. The platform began to be publicly thought of this year and people are now getting to know the project better.”
French Clément Delépine, young coordinator of Galleries Curate: RHE and co-director of the Paris Internationale fair, also mediates part of the project’s lives. For him, since the first negotiations, these conversations are constituted as group therapy. “The project has in its title the enigmatic symbol RHE, a measure of unity and impermanence, defined by two Greek words: panta rei, which means ‘everything moves”. Delépine draws an analogy between the water element, fundamental in our lives, and their effort to create alternatives in the global crisis. The work transcends hosting online exhibitions, a digital platform, as there is also a concern with archiving materials related to the works on display. When new content is added, past and current projects are mixed.
The exhibitions have multiple themes and most talk about the environment. In the Tempest group show, at the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin, the artist Monster Chetwynd stands out for shaping the figure of a huge octopus made of latex, painted and lasciviously placed on the floor. The installation is completed with the woodcut – enlarged in xerox and fixed to the wall – of a copy of the erotic series The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (Kinoe no komatsu), by artist Katsushika Hokusai, executed in popular shunga printing in the 19th century. Monster Chetwynd’s life touches on the poetic, performance she identifies with. In a game of identities, the Glasgow artist changes her name from time to time, as did Hokusai, the artist she reveres and who throughout her life has had more than 30 names. The water here presents itself as a metaphor, dream or mythical delirium of an unexperienced jouissance.
From a more programmatic perspective of the ecological movement, Galleria Franco Noero, from Turin, shows Simon Starling’s film Project for a crossing of the Rift Valley. The still, composed of paradisiacal images, poetically registers a canoe, built with magnesium extracted from the Dead Sea waters used in 2016, in an attempt to cross it, departing from Israel to Jordan. The experience advances in several directions and reveals that in this stretch, located in the Rift Valley, the water is highly salty and that the place stands out for being the lowest on the planet – it is 427 meters below sea level. He also warns that the region is heavily exploited for keeping special mineral wealth: a liter of water contains 45 grams of magnesium.
There are works philosophically engaged in the symbolism of time and its duration. The Jean Mot gallery, in Brussels, shows the video Canción para Lupita, by Francis Alÿs, from 1998, an animation in 16mm. The water moves in Alÿs’ poetic itinerary throughout the film. A woman pours water from one glass to another repeatedly. The action of doing and undoing is accompanied by a song whose phrase Mañana, mañana és breve para mi can suggest an extension or continuous hope for the future.
The gallery A Gentil Carioca, in Rio de Janeiro, harbor of astral fantasies and renewing experiences, shows Descompasso Atlântico, by Arjan Martins, which takes place in two places and with different poetics. Inside the gallery, the paintings maintain a narrative focus on both the slavery heritage and the current situation of the black population. In the open air, right on Ipanema beach, Arjan Martins creates a colorful installation of geometric inspiration that converses with the Atlantic Ocean, an old route for slave ships. Composed of five windsocks, objects commonly used in airports to control the wind, the installation brings in each one of them a symbol of maritime warnings: man overboard, dangerous cargo, etc. The gallery purposely opened the exhibition on April 22, the day on which, in 1500, Portuguese colonizers landed in Brazil. The ideology of survival traversed by Galleries Curate: RHE makes the declarations of intent of this group an expanded space to see and register the new normal.
Windsocks installation, 2021, Arjan Martins. Photo: Fagner França
the old Certainties, still present in the Brazilian art system, are gradually being erased with initiatives such as Transarte, a pioneer gallery in the presentation of artists with the LGBTQ+ theme and which is now becoming an institute. Since appearing on the art circuit, it has been experiencing physical and conceptual transmutations. Now it leaves the bohemian Vila Madalena and settles, in permanent headquarters, in Gabriel Monteiro da Silva, stronghold of the upper class in São Paulo, with other challenges.
“Ritual Memories”, Iwajla Klinke. Photo: Courtesy of Transarte.
Any new situation, which is added to others, is enough to oxygenate a sense of the future. Conceived by Maria Helena Peres Oliveira, Transarte opened its doors in 2012 showing what it came for. It exhibited works by the enigmatic North American artist Timothy Cummings, the result of a one-year residency held in São Paulo. No traveling backwards or forwards will be able to unravel his tormented work, and not even the self-portraits leave a clue. For Catharine Clark, a San Francisco gallery owner, “Cummings’ work is both classic and subversive, formally beautiful and thematically creepy.” For Maria Helena, the photographer Iwajla Klinke, from Berlin, has an unsuspected quality and that is why she was also invited. She works the beam of natural light as a narrative instrument. The series Ritual Memories, with naked backs of young people, mixes strangeness and sensuality with sequential takes: man alone, man mirror, man narcissus, man faggot. The operation is fluid, but opposite to spontaneity. Klinke adorns them sometimes with rats and frogs hanging around their necks, sometimes with light plastic shuttlecocks or delicate lace.
On the other side of the ocean, the young Brazilian Bia Leite discovered very early on that dreams and perception are built hand to hand with life. She learned to disarm her attackers with a telltale paint job. Awarded in the Transarte LGBTQ+ edict for the canvas Born to ahazar, which became known as Criança Viada, she gained notoriety for having graffiti prejudiced insults (suffered by homosexuals since childhood) on the painting. Bia tries to get rid of the monster that grew inside her, due to the bullying she suffers. The painting participated in the collective Queermuseum, at Centro Cultural Santander, in Porto Alegre, when it was the target of protests, censorship and became one of the vertices of the insane cultural alienation of the moment. Delicacy can also be an act of resistance. Silva M works with objects found by chance and randomly builds sculptures whose surface resembles woodcuts. The young woman invents an active response to this dispersed and abandoned world, weaving fragments with a disconcerting delicacy, replete with fine sutures that reach the edges and recesses, like a dermal aid.
Transarte reinvents itself, but the residences remain in the future perspectives that will occur in the new headquarters, the house that Maria Helena got from her grandfather when she was just 12 years old. Since its creation, Transarte has operated with its own resources, without the support of incentive laws, which is why Maria Helena and her partner Maria Bonomi did not think of a foundation.
The art landscape is urban and marked by surveillance. In order to guarantee a definitive and legitimate space for the artists, it is planned to organize a long-term private initiative so that the Institute can survive after the death of its owners, and there is already money for that. “We had a moment of progress with the approval of same-sex marriage by the stf, but now it has become much worse”, says Maria Helena. Expanding the range of actions, they will form partnerships with residences such as Casa Florescer and other institutions that also welcome LGBTQ+ people of all ages with trauma.
The artists’ reports have terrifying social and psychic intensity. “Many people run away from their place of origin, others leave their parents’ homes because of threats or leave the streets because of beatings, all with nowhere to go”. Maria Helena also wants to propose something like art education as a distraction or as a support for traumatized people. In this way, art seems to have no meaning in itself, but in fact it is crossed by other powers, knowledge, affections, discoveries, which will be part of the Institute’s content. A council will be formed with people from different areas, not only to introduce artists and works in the exhibition circulation, but also to think about the plurality of projects to be generated. Instituto Transarte will continue to include exhibitions, public notices, book publications and artistic residencies. “We are talking about an Institute, but it would be a non-profit NGO. Our proposal is anti-market, we start selling at a low price between three and five thousand reais, divided into up to 10 times, and the artist can still receive it in advance, except for works by foreigners.”
“Pyre of Persona”, Timothy Cummings 2012-13. Courtesy: Transarte.
Maria Helena’s boldness in adolescence, living in a conservative society, seems to be the foundation of her strong and determined personality today. Born and socialized in an elite family, she has always been involved in art, influenced by her close relationship with her uncle Arthur Luiz Piza and by her marriage to Maria Bonomi, both emblematic engravers in the history of Brazilian art. Maria Helena remembers the time of delusions, of love deprivation, when a kiss with another teenager was only possible inside an elevator. She talks about her part of a void that was only filled after she left São Paulo to settle in San Francisco, a city with loose social rules and where she got even closer to art. Graduated in chemistry and with an MBA from FGV, Maria Helena completed her studies in the United States with Masters in Marketing and in Arts Administration, working at SFMOMA, at the San Francisco Opera House and at the Catharine Clark gallery.
She returned to Brazil in 2002 and, since then, produces and coordinates exhibitions in several museums. All this learning was leveraged with other initiatives permeated with social and political issues. Last year, with the Covid-19 pandemic advancing, Transarte sought an art response to the matter, producing the quarantena edict, which totaled 400 entries and distributed six R$1200 prizes. Artists responded to the call with works about this cruel time of physical exclusion. The Transarte Institute appears at the time of the dismantling of culture in Brazil. The prognosis is that this pioneering, challenging project, with an artistic and social impact, will survive in the direction of long-requested transformations.
