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Paiz Art Biennial focuses on cultural diversity and crises in Latin America

Por
Marcos Grinspum Ferraz
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bienal de arte paiz
“Rastros que dejamos sobre la cara de la tierra”, 2021, Edgar Calel. Photo: Hugo Quinto/ Courtesy Alexia Tala

Lost. In the middle. Together was the title of the 22nd Paiz Art Biennial, held in Guatemala City, capital of the Central American country, and in the small city of Antigua Guatemala. Inspired by a publication by Dutch artist Jonas Staal about a group of refugees in Amsterdam, the title gained new meanings when it was moved to the Latin American reality, especially in a country with almost half of its population of indigenous origin.

“What is generally seen in Latin America is not the denial of citizenship to minorities, but the denial of a dignified life”, says the curator-in-chief of the edition, Chilean Alexia Tala, referring to the original peoples who “have been denied their rights to live respecting their cosmovisions, their forms of medicine and community organization”. The title also refers to the many immigrants who leave Latin America for the countries of the North, as a result of unemployment and poverty, and who live as a kind of refugees in these countries.

Raising these and many other questions, the 22nd Paiz Art Biennial, which ended on June 6, brought together works by 40 artists – among them the Brazilians Ayrson Heráclito, Detanico & Lain, Jonathas de Andrade and Vanderlei Lopes – and spread to six institutions of the two Guatemalan cities. In addition to group shows, with a large presence of local artists, two solo shows completed the event: one by Guatemalan artist Aníbal Lopez and the other by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz (which will continue on after the end of the biennal).

In an interview to arte!brasileiros, Alexia spoke about the Biennial’s curatorship – done by her in partnership with assistant curator Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer -, about the Latin American political context, about the pandemic moment and a series of other subjects. Read excerpts from the interview below (the full version is available at artebrasileiros.com.br).

ARTE!✱ –  First of all, I would like you to tell us a little about how the curatorial project for this biennial was conceived and what are the main thematic axes that run through the exhibition. Within that, could also talk a little bit about the title Lost. in the middle. together?

Alexia Tala – I will start answering the second part. The title comes from a publication by Dutch artist Jonas Staal and the BAK project that focuses on a group of 200 refugees who were denied citizenship. This fact seemed to us a mirror of the situation of the indigenous communities of Central America and of the many people who are forced to migrate. People who, on the one hand, are recognized as citizens, but on the other hand, are deprived of their rights to live respecting their cosmovisions, forms of medicine and community organization. Furthermore, we also associate the title with all immigrants who we can also think of as refugees, in the sense that the main reason for migration to the North is unemployment, which is itself a form of economic violence.

“Universos de la materia” exhibition overview. Photo: Hugo Quinto/ Courtesy Alexia Tala

What is generally seen in Latin America is not the denial of citizenship to minorities, but the denial of a dignified life, of being able to live in peace. Then came the pandemic and the title gained strength of its own

Jonas Staal’s work, the way he approaches his research and projects, was an inspiration, a kind of base from which we started to consider the Bienal as a project. Their proposals for political formation, their discussion workshops, the different ways of working at the collective level and their particular ways of problematizing served as a starting point for discussing the local, regional and Southern hemisphere in relation to the North. And, within that, its basis in inequality.

The curatorial project is divided into three thematic axes: Universes of matter; Past. eternal. futures; and Perverse Geography/Damn Geographies. All three address issues that are interconnected and that touch right there, at that point where everything is out of balance both socially and politically, where ancestral history is confronted with contemporary history and where matter and ways of approaching objects and nature are opposed.

ARTE!✱ – In your curatorial text you talk about the concept of “presentism” to refer to a kind of disorientation that we live in the current moment in the world, also related to a difficulty in looking both to the past and to the future. Could you talk a little about this idea, about how it is approached by the curatorship?

This presentism that Reinhart Koselleck talks about led us to think about a question of temporality, of analysis of the capacity and inability to envision futures at a time when – even more so with the pandemic – this false idea of ​​interconnectivity was accentuated, which at the same time bombards us and blinds us. Within this temporality is the Mayan ancestral past, which in a multi-ethnic and multilingual country where 60% of the population is of indigenous origin, assumes crucial importance.

The curatorship sought to approach this, from our place as mestizo whites, speaking from the historical context of an overdose of the present and allowing us to enter into ancestral territories that belong to these artists from the altiplano – and to the other guests. The important thing was to do this through their own voices, the artists Kakchiquel, Tz’utujil, Garífunas and Afro-descendants from different parts of Latin America, as well as artists from Africa.

The works presented at the Bienal dialogue with each other and between the thematic axes. The decision to open a space for indigenous and popular voices, without intending to be a translator of anything, resulted in a collective perception by the Guatemalan public that everything that is exposed there makes sense in their lives. And that’s the biggest reward for the team’s work.

ARTE!✱ – Regarding the selection of artists, there is a predominance of Latin Americans (35 out of 40 participants). Is this look from the Global South, and more specifically from Latin America, the main focus of the exhibition?

Yes, the focus was on Latin America, both for curatorial and logistical reasons. Although many of the works respond to the Guatemalan context, the idea has always been to take Guatemala as the mirror from which we can see all these inequalities that historically afflict the Global South. Therefore, together with Gabriel Rodriguez, my co-curator, we also invited artists such as Nelson Makengo, from Congo, Emo de Medeiros, from Benin, and Heba Y. Amin, from Egypt. The works of these three artists have functioned as a kind of connector for realities often unknown to the Central American public.

bienal de arte paiz
Antonio José Guzmán’s work at Paiz Art Biennial. Photo: Courtesy Silvia de Tres

ARTE!✱ – But even if there is this regional cut, there is a production made within this vast region that is also quite diverse. How does this diversity appear in the show?

Yes, it is a very diverse and also very unknown production, as it is a very marginalized and invisible region for the global circuit of contemporary art. This circuit misses the opportunity to meet a multitude of incredibly interesting and talented artists and, furthermore, misses the chance to get closer to a phenomenon that is taking place with artists from the altiplano and their ways of approaching contemporary art from their own indigeneity – forms that, despite making terribly profound criticisms, are resolved in highly aesthetic and poetic ways.

Diversity also emerges in the exhibition from the moment we decided that 70% of the works would be commissioned, that is, new projects. We carried out previous research in order to provide artists with material that culminated in a publication entitled Paraíso (re)partido, which contains a series of themes relevant to the context, from historical issues to contemporary issues.

Foreign artists traveled to Guatemala, which resulted in a series of collaborations that emerged organically not only with local artists, but also with people from other areas, from spiritual guides and botanical healers, weavers with waist looms, poets, filmmakers, forensic archaeologists and lawyers. Ayrson Heráclito, for example, worked with Wingston González in the work Onagulei: Messenger of the ancestors. Finally, a series of other types of knowledge entered the biennale and, together with art, arrived at aesthetic solutions.

Leia a entrevista completa em português, clique aqui.

A book of many hands, minds and lives

Por
Redação
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Portraits of Benta Maria, Antonio Dutra and Manuel do Sacramento by Igi Ayedun. Courtesy Companhia das Letras and Pinacoteca de São Paulo
*Por Tiago Gualberto

Many will remember the encyclopedias composed of dozens of volumes and many kilos elegantly arranged on the highest point of the room’s bookcase. In addition to an investment in their children’s education, book collection was often interpreted as a sign of good financial condition and an appreciation for knowledge. An object that should be transmitted from generation to generation and consulted by the whole family and even by neighbors and schoolmates. The prints in golden letters on wide spines reinforced its importance and that of its contents. A source of unquestionable information and knowledge and a guarantee of good grades.

Part of the new generations used to Google’s search engine and so many other online platforms available on the internet may be unaware of the role encyclopedias and their Enlightenment tradition played in our way of interpreting the world and knowledge. By bringing together intellectuals and thinkers from the most varied fields such as philosophy, arts, economics, science, politics, among others, the French Enlightenment movement aimed to challenge the obstacles to freedom of thought and expression from the 18th century onwards. It is one of the most efficient Western tools for sharing accumulated knowledge and for formulating a social organization guided by the lighthouse, by the light of reason.

However, we will not need abundant examples to recognize the weaknesses and abuse committed in the name of this project of access to universal knowledge through “enlightenment” over the last few centuries. For now, just remember the hundreds of pictures that illustrated any encyclopedia of luxurious cover, sometimes sold door to door. Hundreds of white men, Europeans and Americans and their great achievements for “humanity”. A few decades ago, copying the contents of these encyclopedias and their indisputable stories were part of a school agenda based on reproduction at the expense of learning.

In this context, prior to the online sales market, bookstores were spaces of intimidation for a wide range of the Brazilian population who historically saw themselves included on their shelves only as research objects. One of the reasons for the success of old encyclopedia sellers.

“Enciclopédia Negra”, organized by Flavio dos Santos Gomes, Jaime Lauriano and Lilia Schwarcz

The book Enciclopédia Negra, by the historian Flávio dos Santos Gomes, the visual artist Jaime Lauriano and the anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, published in March 2021 by Companhia das Letras, presents itself as an alternative to confronting the structural racism present in far-reaching reference materials. It is a survey on the contribution and history of important black personalities in Brazil over the last 400 years, focusing on the broad period of slavery and post-abolition. Based on a collective investigation, marked by the collaboration of different researchers and specialists, the publication brings together 416 biographical entries, individual and collective, based on the Afro-Atlantic experience of around 550 deceased characters. For the authors, “If the criterion for being included in this book was death, the objective is life.”

However, these numbers should not be considered as representative of the scope and diversity of these stories present in Enciclopedia Negra. Instead, the book refuses the use of statistics in favor of affirming the singularities of these characters, highlighting the protagonism through the nomination, recognition of deeds, the updating of the social value and complexity of these actors’ lives in view of the conditions of the Brazilian past and present. The result is an organized, non-exhaustive narrative capable of circulating throughout all regions of the country, affirming an attention to the memory of LGBTQI+ women and people rarely present in publications dedicated to celebrating contributions to the formation of our society.

In this sense, in addition to confronting the colonial historiography responsible for denying visibility to the contributions of black people, the book plays an important role in the re-presentation, organization and dissemination of information usually kept in research centers, libraries and specialized centers. It is about offering this knowledge beyond the university spectrum. Researchers, teachers, students of different ages will find in the Enciclopédia Negra material that is easy to access and handle, in addition to indications of research references integrated into the entries.

For this, the authors are nourished by the fruits of social movements and the pioneering spirit of the intellectual achievements of different generations of black historians, social scientists, artists and researchers. Among the numerous predecessor publications used as a reference for Enciclopédia Negra, Fala, crioulo: depoimentos (1982), by Haroldo Costa, stands out, in which we have access to interviews with names such as Pelé and actor Milton Gonçalves, but also with anonymous characters, housewives, sweepers and hairdressers, sharing their trajectories and perspectives on Brazilian racism. In another significant example, A Mão Afro-Brasileira (1988), a book organized by the plastic artist and director of the Afro Brasil Museum Emanoel Araujo, we find black protagonism in the visual arts, dance, music, poetry and literature of several generations. Among many other titles, Quem é Quem na Negritude Brasileira (1998), by professor and poet Eduardo de Oliveira, and the Dicionário da Escravidão Negra no Brasil  (2004), organized by Clóvis Moura and Soraya Silva Moura, form, alongside the researches and publications by Nei Lopes, Oswaldo de Camargo, Conceição Evaristo, Fernanda Miranda, Lélia Gonzalez, ways to understand the contributions developed from Africa and its diaspora, the impacts of colonialism and the impossibility of understanding the world without this knowledge.

Therefore, Enciclopédia Negra, in dialogue with these intellectual achievements, is not restricted to approaches that associate black participation in Brazilian history with the economic cycles of sugar, mining and coffee during the period of slavery. Nor does it privilege prejudiced narratives that reduce black insurrections to simple rebellion. Added to the authors’ own experience in relation to studies on slavery, post-abolition and reconstruction of black profiles, trajectories and biographies, the book presents sensitivity in the compilation of this multiplicity of references observed here and that, in large part, in other publications on the subject, are observed only in the midst of censorship, inattention and negligence. This situation can, unfortunately, be observed in the restricted selection of authors present in the catalogs of major publishers dedicated only to responding to the demands for materials after the enactment of Law 10.639, of 2003, which makes the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture mandatory in schools.

Thus, the entries about singular and collective characters that describe both individualized and community experiences present themselves as gateways to different philosophies, religiosities, bodily practices, technologies, activism, mobilizations and entrepreneurships. They also seek to describe the daily battles and daily life of each period, as well as its limitations, complexities and contradictions. Soon, Chica da Silva, Madame Satã, Abdias do Nascimento, Anastácia, Geraldo Filme and Heitor dos Prazeres share narratives alongside Claudia Ferreira, Robson Cruz, Rosalina, Francisca Luiz and many other illustrious unknowns.

The exhibition

In this effort to change the imagination of Brazilians on the subject the realization of the Enciclopédia Negra project includes the assembly of the exhibition of the same title at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo museum. The Enciclopédia Negra exhibition, opened to the public from May 1, 2021, features 103 works by 36 contemporary artists. Among the three exhibition rooms, visitors can see mostly two-dimensional works, of small and medium format, including paintings, drawings, watercolors and objects authored by artists Amilton Santos, Antonio Obá, Andressa Monique, Arjan Martins, Ayrson Heráclito, Bruno Baptistelli, Castiel Vitorino, Dalton Paula, Daniel Lima, Desali, Elian Almeida, Hariel Revignet, Heloisa Hariadne, Igi Ayedun, Jackeline Romio, Jaime Lauriano, Juliana dos Santos, Kerolayne Kemblim, Kika Carvalho, Lidia Lisboa, Marcelo D’Salete, Mariana Rodrigues, Micaela Cyrino, Michel Cena, Moisés Patricio, Mônica Ventura, Mulambö, Nadia Taquary, Nathalia Ferreira, Oga Mendonça, Panmela Castro, Rebeca Carapiá, Renata Felinto, Rodrigo Bueno, Sonia Gomes and Tiago Sant’Ana.

Although all the commissioned works are not included in the publication, as only one work by each of the 36 artists is present in the image book of the Enciclopédia Negra, the set stands out as a collective portrait of the various propositions and attempts to compose an institutional presence of the black in the arts. Therefore, the donation of these works, mostly figurative portraits of the biographed characters, constitutes an intervention in search of representation.

Therefore, by recovering lives marked by death, the book Enciclopédia Negra aims to extrapolate the view of blacks as synonymous with enslaved, subaltern, where racism constitutes a mechanism for refusing their humanity and legitimizing their exploitation and extermination, both physical , political and symbolic. Philosopher and professor Achille Mbembe informs us that the recognition and repair of this violence takes place as we deconstruct colonial thinking and begin to identify black people in their universal, human and multiple dimension, far from a categorical dimension, responsible for the yoke that keeps black bodies as commodities. So it must be said: Black Lives Matter!

Leia em português, clique aqui.

Editorial: In mourning I fight

Por
Patricia Rousseaux
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"O mundo é nosso", 2018-2019, from "Pardo é papel", Maxwell Alexandre. Image: Gabi Carrera/ Divulgação

We mourn. In the past months, several thinkers of Brazilian culture died, after years of building a great work. The photographer German Lorca, the architect and urban planner Paulo Mendes da Rocha, almost centenarians, were part of the nobility of modern thought.

But, not enough, we are also crossed by the loss of friends, colleagues and family members, crossed by the death of close to half a million Brazilian citizens. Victims of Covid-19, a fierce virus poorly and wrongly fought in Brazil.

We are traversed by the inevitable awareness of the loss of values ​​in our society, which is collapsing. Divided in such a way, where violence only escalates.

It is no exaggeration to say, quoting the words of the writer Bernardo Carvalho, that we are living in a moment in which barbarism is insufflated. Large sectors of the population mobilized to deny the advance that research, study and science have brought us over the last few centuries only collaborated with the advance of diseases. Provocations against necessary care! Explicit provocations, in favor of “individual freedom” and, preferably, armed.

Public institutions razed by professional puppets, a gang in which everyone lies and defends each other. A country surrendered to a perverse project, where large sectors of the population still believe in a model of power, the power of exclusion. The punishment. Religious, political, physical, gender. People who kill people. Yes, with stray bullets and directed bullets… Aimed at women, at blacks, at those who resist.

We are naturally fragile. But this fragility is accentuated as large sectors of society are abandoned by this power project, which makes them increasingly dispossessed. The basics are being denied: food, education, health, culture.

In these, where is ART left? Where is it? Since it didn’t die. But not because what dies over time are movements, styles, avant-gardes; but because today, here, not all of us are dead. Or because, as the artist Jota Mombaça would say in one of her works, which was already on the cover of this magazine, “Us agreed not to die”.

We are in mourning, yes, but this, as in the history of all cultures, is a necessary process to honor what we have lost and, despite the pain, to be able to reinvest our energy and psychic strength to move forward.

Taking care of us and taking care of each other, being alive, listening and following where it is taking place, in the midst of this debacle. It is necessary to read, write, think, paint, install. It is necessary to produce art, to guarantee an instinctual body that, affected by its surroundings, is capable of screaming, affecting the other and the social body.

Thus, in our pages, the way to mourn is honoring the artists, researchers and editors of Enciclopédia Negra (Cia. Das Letras), who worked exhaustively to repair, in response to the classic Encyclopedias of the Enlightenment – which for more than 200 years only they reproduced and advocated white and European models of domination – the absence of hundreds of invisible black men and women.

We also deal with several exhibitions put on by artists and social groups who never stopped meeting virtually. Fabio Cypriano pays tribute to the centenary of Joseph Beuys, a central artist in the history of contemporary art, and observes how traditional exhibitions such as Kassel’s Documenta prepare to completely change their exhibition strategies.

There is also the report that is in the hands of the young journalist Miguel Groisman dedicated to researching artists who document conflicts.

Anyway, we are here and, in our mourning, we fight.

Leia em português, clique aqui.

Artist collectives reflect the spirit of the time

Por
Fabio Cypriano
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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.

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 cura a documenta quinze
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.

Leia em português, clique aqui.

José Damasceno and Mona Lisa’s smile

Por
Fabio Cypriano
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"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”.

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.

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.

Letter to Sidney Amaral

Por
Redação
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"Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós", Sidney Amaral, 2014. Foto: Coleção particular/Cortesia Sesc Jundiaí
"Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós", Sidney Amaral, 2014. Foto: Coleção particular/Cortesia Sesc Jundiaí
"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 exhibition Viver 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.

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”.

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.

DIÁLOGOS/ENCONTRO, de Sidney Amaral. Exposta em VIVER ATÉ O FIM O QUE ME CABE - SIDNEY AMARAL: UMA APROXIMAÇÃO
“Diálogos/Encontro”, Sidney Amaral, 2015. Private collection/Courtesy Sesc Jundiaí.

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.

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The transitory character of things

Por
Maria Hirszman
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"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.

“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.

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.

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A triennial in progress

Por
Giulia Garcia
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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.

“Nhíromi”, Denilson Baniwa. Photo: Courtesy Sesc Sorocaba

The affluents

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”.

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Joseph Beuys and the abandonment of art

Por
Fabio Cypriano
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Joseph Beuys, La Rivoluzioni Siamo Noi (1972). Foto: Cortesia Bergamin & Gomide.
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.

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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). Foto: Cortesia Bergamin & Gomide.
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).
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.

Leia em português, clique aqui.

Museum of the Portuguese Language is reborn in downtown São Paulo

Por
Maria Hirszman
-
Estação da Luz. Photo: Joca Duarte
Estação da Luz. Photo: Joca Duarte

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.
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.

Leia em português, clique aqui.

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