Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Ncleo Contemporneo
A (Re)inveno do Espao
Ncleo Histrico
Fronteiras da Linguagem
Exposio Especial
CDU: 73 (8=6)
7 (81) (091)
7 (8=6) (091)
Realizao
Fundao Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul
Patrocinadores Master
Gerdau
Petrobras
Santander Cultural/Banco Santander
Patrocinador do artista homenageado Amilcar de Castro
Refap
Patrocinador da Mostra Direes do Novo Espao e
da Obra Permanente de Mauro Fuke
Ipiranga
Patrocinador da Obra Permanente de Jos Resende
Lojas Renner
Patrocinador do Ncleo Contemporneo de Pintura
Nacional
Patrocinador do Ncleo Histrico de Pintura
Vonpar
Patrocinadores dos Artistas Convidados
MasterCard
Souza Cruz
Patrocinador do livro Uma Histria Concisa da Bienal do Mercosul
Habitasul
Patrocinador da Ao Educativa
Gerdau
Apoiador da Ao Educativa
RBS
Patrocinadores de Segmentos
Varig Cia. Area Oficial
Ferramentas Gerais Ferramenta
Apoiadores da 5 Bienal do Mercosul
Blue Tree Towers, Digitel, Engex, Fibraplac, Grupo Avipal,
ICBNA, Maiojama, Master Hotis, Nestl, Perto, Plaza Hotis,
Porto Alegre Convention & Visitors Bureau,
Randon e Tintas Renner
Apoio Governamental
Secretara de Relaciones Exteriores de Mxico Embajada de Mxico en
Brasil Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes / Mxico
Direccin General de Asuntos Culturales Ministerio de Relaciones
Exteriores Comercio Internacional y Culto/Cancilleria Argentina
Apoio Institucional
Governo Federal Ministrio da Cultura Lei Rouanet
Governo Estadual Secretaria da Cultura LIC
Governo Municipal Prefeitura Municipal de Porto Alegre
Projeto auditado por
PricewaterhouseCoopers
DA ESCULTURA INST
ESCULTURA AL AO - Ncleo Contemporneo/
INSTAL
FROM SCULPTURE TO INSTALLATION - Contemporary Nucleus 17
10
Os vetores
Da escultura instalao
Trata da passagem das obras tridimensionais portadoras de individualidade e autonomia quelas que se
estruturam como ambientes. Hoje, com freqncia, as fronteiras e diferenas entre uma escultura, aquela obra
que, independentemente do contexto e de sua forma, apresenta-se ainda como objeto autnomo e voltado para
uma relao contemplativa e as instalaes no so ntidas. A passagem das esculturas s instalaes , na arte, uma
das manifestaes das transformaes da noo de espao na vida contempornea. Encontra sua origem em trs
momentos histricos do incio do sculo XX: no cubismo e em seus desdobramentos no espao desde a segunda
dcada, na fora das experincias construtivistas na Rssia revolucionria e na Bauhaus, na Repblica de
Weimar. Ao lado, desenvolviam-se as manobras de Duchamp e do dadasmo e sua crtica da arte como um
sistema e uma instituio que estabelece novas fronteiras para o conhecimento artstico.
Entretanto, as instalaes, quando surgiram ainda na dcada de 1960 e eram chamadas de ambientes,
como Tropiclia (1967), de Hlio Oiticica, testemunharam uma nova relao da obra de arte com o espao e,
sobretudo, do espectador com a obra. Boa parte das vezes as instalaes so obras in situ ou site specific: so
projetadas e construdas para um determinado lugar, que pode ser tanto a sala de uma galeria ou de um museu
quanto um espao urbano ou local fora da cidade na qual vai interagir com a paisagem. Do espao
experimentado pela interveno da forma surgem as experincias que insistem na importncia do lugar. J se
observa a um importante deslocamento da noo tradicional do espao aquele vazio, extenso e neutro,
receptculo das coisas no mundo para uma noo que incorpora o contexto da interveno artstica. Do
espao passamos noo de ambiente como um dos elementos integrados prpria obra e um dos definidores
de seu sentido e de sua potncia formal.
11
12
13
A persistncia da pintura
A representao do espao para construir a iluso de profundidade em uma superfcie de duas
dimenses esteve no centro da arte ocidental desde a Antigidade Clssica e alcana, depois do interregno da
alta Idade Mdia, uma elevada sistematizao no Renascimento. A representao da iluso espacial manteve-
se at o sculo XIX, apesar das transformaes exigidas por cada poca dentro de certos parmetros, cujas
regras bsicas haviam sido lanadas no sculo XV.
A presso da vida urbana, acelerada pela Revoluo Industrial, a fora do formidvel progresso da
cincia e da tcnica, acarretando um novo mosaico na diviso social e tcnica do trabalho, assim como novas
experincias sensveis e cognitivas pem em xeque as normas centenrias. O sujeito da era da mquina j se
estruturava historicamente de forma diversa daquele do Renascimento e do Barroco. A pintura foi a prtica
artstica que esteve no centro dessa longa trajetria at sua crise, ocorrida no sculo XIX. A arte moderna abre
o Ocidente para uma incorporao crtica de outros sistemas culturais e artsticos cujos processos passavam ao
largo da pretensa universalidade da representao em perspectiva, como aqueles dos asiticos e dos africanos.
A soluo da crise encontrada na revoluo cubista desloca definitivamente o plano semntico para
uma relao interna com a estrutura formal ou sinttica que se estender at o Expressionismo Abstrato. As
experincias minimalistas, insistindo na noo de contexto, e as novas figuraes da pop foraram uma crise
das leituras puramente formais da obra pictrica e marcaram um redirecionamento da teoria. Em que pese
essa formidvel aventura do conhecimento artstico no Ocidente, a pintura persiste, neste incio de sculo,
como medium paradigmtico das experincias contemporneas, questionando, entre outras, as novas
espacialidades sugeridas pelas diversas ps-modernidades e suas narrativas.
Pelas razes j apresentadas nas consideraes referentes ao vetor Da escultura instalao, existe uma
mostra de obras histricas, intitulada Experincias Histricas no Plano, inserida no vetor A persistncia da
pintura e apresentada no MARGS.
Fronteiras da linguagem
A Bienal do Mercosul, desde a sua segunda edio, em 1999, abriu-se para artistas de fora do
continente latino-americano. Esse intercmbio importante para o pblico, sobretudo para que possa
compreender que o continente no um gueto cultural fechado sobre si mesmo e que suas manifestaes
artsticas interagem com as de outros centros e continentes.
Coerentemente com o projeto Histrias da Arte e do Espao, foram convidados para a mostra Fronteiras
da Linguagem, cujo ttulo diz respeito ao prprio mtodo de apresentao da 5 Bienal do Mercosul, quando
sobrepe as fronteiras da arte s fronteiras polticas e geogrficas, os artistas Marina Abramovic, Pierre
Coulibeuf, Ilya e Emilia Kabakov e Stephen Vitiello.
Essa mostra, estrategicamente posicionada no Armazm 7 do Cais do Porto, finaliza a leitura das obras
contemporneas dos vetores Da escultura instalao e A persistncia da pintura, convidando o visitante a
uma reflexo sobre sua experincia para fronteiras alm daquelas dos limites latino-americanos.
14
O projeto editorial
No lugar de um nico grande e alentado catlogo, Histrias da Arte e do Espao tem seu projeto
editorial em sete publicaes. Esto dimensionadas como livros de porte normal e, acima de tudo,
documentando efetivamente a mostra, com fotografias dos locais das exposies e das obras, boa parte
inditas, ali apresentadas. Por essa razo, esses livros/catlogos se transformam numa efetiva memria visual da
5 Bienal do Mercosul. O projeto original, que programava cinco livros os catlogos dos quatro vetores e o
dedicado a Amilcar de Castro, o artista homenageado , foi enriquecido por mais dois volumes. O primeiro
acrescentado, Uma Histria Concisa da Bienal do Mercosul, de Gaudncio Fidelis, no qual o autor se debrua
sobre o percurso j traado ao longo dos ltimos dez anos, e se transforma em referncia inevitvel para
qualquer futura pesquisa sobre a instituio; e Rosa dos Ventos Posies e Direes na Arte Contempornea que
rene ensaios da equipe de curadores sobre temas atuais.4
Notas
1
Ver Gaudncio Fidelis, Uma Histria Concisa da Bienal do Mercosul, Coleo Histrias da Arte e do Espao 5 Bienal do Mercosul, Paulo Sergio Duarte
(org.) (Porto Alegre: Fundao Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, 2005).
2
Paulo Sergio Duarte, A Rosa-dos-Ventos Posies e Direes na Arte Contempornea, In Rosa-dos-Ventos Posies e Direes na Arte Contempo-
rnea, Paulo Sergio Duarte (org.) Coleo Histrias da Arte e do Espao 5 Bienal do Mercosul (Porto Alegre: Fundao Bienal de Artes Visuais do
Mercosul, 2005), 10.
3
Paulo Sergio Duarte, Duas ou trs coisas que voc deveria saber sobre patrimnio cultural, Rio de Janeiro: Fundao Roberto Marinho, 1997/2000
[edio eletrnica reservada para uso da Fundao Roberto Marinho]. Ver igualmente Giulio Carlo Argan, El concepto del espacio arquitetnico desde el
Barroco a nuestros das Curso en el Instituto Universitario de Historia de la Arquitectura Tucumn, 1961, Traduccin, introduccin y notas: Liliana Rainis
(Buenos Aires: Ed. Nueva Visin, 1973), 64.
4
Nesse ltimo encontra-se meu artigo, que d ttulo ao volume, onde procurei, com a maior clareza que me foi possvel, transmitir o que penso sobre
o quadro geral do que vem sendo chamado de sistema da arte.
15
Gaudncio Fidelis
Em certo sentido, podemos dizer que a distino entre instalao e escultura nunca existiu. Toda
obra tem que ser instalada de alguma maneira. O que vemos hoje uma categoria culturalmente estabelecida
a partir de prticas radicais dos anos de 1960 e 1970, prticas estas construdas com o objetivo de tornar
visveis os artifcios ideolgicos que cercam a exposio do objeto artstico. A instalao viria a problematizar
definitivamente as relaes condicionadas pela existncia da obra em um local especfico, definindo seu
campo de ao como sendo fundamentalmente de uma poltica de interveno no campo da exposio.
Posteriormente, com o crescente surgimento de projetos curatoriais cada vez mais fortes, cuja interferncia
sobre a obra do artista e a criao de um campo contextual onde essa possa existir, tornados quase
hegemnicos em relao produo, restou pouco espao de ao sobre a qual uma poltica de interveno
institucional pudesse ser realizada por parte do artista.
A necessidade cada vez mais maior de que os artistas instalem seus prprios trabalhos em eventos de
grande complexidade, em que este participa efetivamente na construo da obra dentro do espao da
exposio, a dependncia de uma relao de conexes entre o significado que a obra adquire e a interveno
artstica, so apenas sintomas de que instalaes, site-specifics,1 e outras obras dessa ordem esto, de certa
forma, disputando um espao com os procedimentos curatoriais. So justamente esses procedimentos que,
ao tomar de assalto a colocao da obra no espao de exposio, viriam a definir a prxis curatorial como
eminentemente aquela de interveno na obra do artista, no espao de colocao da obra e em uma
estrutura simblica dentro desse espao. Progressivamente, o espao de exposio passa a ser definido
como aquele da ingerncia do curador e das suas prerrogativas de poder, e no tanto do domnio do artista
e de sua obra. No restaria, assim, a ele outra alternativa seno apropriar-se desse espao pelas vias do
prprio trabalho. Entretanto, tal condio s poderia ser construda pela presena efetiva de uma virada
estratgica nas prticas escultricas, pela retomada do espao de exposio com base em tticas pontuais
que se definissem na colocao da obra no local. Se esse local fosse aquele do cubo branco da galeria ou do
espao pblico onde se construiu grande parte da tradio do site-specific, essa no a questo mais
importante, j que sabemos que a relao entre a arte e sua vinculao com seus espaos de institucionalidade,
estejam eles dentro ou fora do museu ou da galeria, jamais seria desfeita, ainda que esta se constitusse de
modo alternativo em espaos abertos.
19
20
grega. A radical mudana operada pelo forte contrapposto da esttua AFotoobraGaudncio sendo destruida/The work being destroyed
Fidelis
Kritian Boy [Fig.8] um exemplo de como a escultura desenvolveu-
se em uma lgica formal que se constitui de modo indivisvel com a
inevitvel necessidade de manter-se vertical em uma posio paradigmtica ao seu centro de gravidade e todas
as modificaes impostas pela perda de caractersticas depois da completa dissoluo das formas a partir da
estaturia.
Esta a primeira vez em que, em uma escultura, a carne parece responder a uma estrutura interna de
msculos e ossos, em contraste com o estilo arcaico anterior. O joelho dobra-se, produzindo uma leve
contrao na musculatura no lado direito, assim como um rebaixamento do ombro. A cabea vira-se sutilmente
para a direita e todo o corpo parece responder ao contraposto. A frontalidade tambm desaparece, marcando
uma ruptura do perodo inicial do Estilo Clssico (c. 490-450 B.C.) em relao ao Estilo Arcaico anterior.
Talvez a ruptura mais significativa nesse caso, determinada pelo acentuado surgimento do naturalismo na
escultura grega, tenha sido a consolidao do que veramos como o futuro ponto de apoio da escultura,
representado aqui pela posio da perna da esttua que sustenta o corpo
da escultura, mantendo-a em sua posio vertical. Tal elemento vai [Fig. 8] [Fig. 9]
21
Um exemplo paradigmtico a obra Colunas (1994) [Fig.12], de Iole de Freitas, que migra
definitivamente para o espao, abdicando da relao de frontalidade.8 Cada uma das trs colunas que compe
a obra est disposta para um dos lados, e a obra s pode ser apreendida em sua totalidade se o espectador caminha
em seu entorno. Sem ttulo (1991) [Fig.13], por
outro lado, feita trs anos antes, embora j se realize
no espao, ainda guarda uma forte relao de
frontalidade. Alm disso, costas e frente da escultura
existem ainda de maneira clara e definida. Contudo,
essa distino entre os dois lados da obra s se
estabelece como um dispositivo que, ao se apresentar
como reminiscncia dessa migrao da obra da
parede para o espao, o faz como um singular
problematizador do olhar e ainda como um
mecanismo evolutivo, no no sentido de progresso,
mas de processo, pelo qual a obra vem passando
[Fig. 12] [Fig. 13] nessa trajetria de transio da parede para o espao.
[Fig. 12] Iole de Freitas Colunas,1994 - Bronze, ao inox, cobre e lato/Bronze, stainless steel, Mas a escultura, constituda ainda como
copper and brass - 450x 200 cm Coleo/Collection Museu de Arte Contempornea do RS, Porto
Alegre Foto Fernando Zago uma entidade autnoma, viria a ser envolvida pela
[Fig. 13] Iole de Freitas Sem ttulo,1991- Cobre, lato e inox/Copper, brass and stainless steel -
300 x 230 x 190 cm - Coleo privada da artista/Private collection the artist Cortesia/Courtesy integrao das obras ao entorno, como se pode ver
da artista/the artist e/and Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud Foto Srgio Zalis
22
23
24
que provoca atrito e estranhamento obra que antes Foto Fbio Del Re - Vivafoto
a escultura poucas vezes havia experimentado, que
aparece, por exemplo nas esculturas de Nelson Felix [Fig.16]. A tradio brasileira escultrica tambm soube
apropriar-se das lies histricas do Minimalismo, imprimindo-lhe um carter fenomenolgico com caractersticas
muito peculiares no s como na obra de Carlos Fajardo, Iole de Freitas e Nelson Flix, mas tambm de modo
diferente na obra de Jos Resende e Ernesto Neto para citar alguns exemplos. Refiro-me s produtivas investidas
do olhar emitidas pelo sujeito em uma posio de alteridade que viria a ser questionada ou por essas superfcies
ou pela desenvoltura que esse corpo teria de adquirir no espao quando posto diante do trabalho.
A obra de Carlos Fajardo, sem ttulo (2005) [Fig.17], uma plataforma de espelhos requer do espectador
uma espcie de postura performtica da qual este no pode abdicar. Caso o visitante decida no participar do
trabalho ao no caminhar sobre ele, ser colocado na posio incmoda de experienciar a obra de fora, em uma
posio contemplativa. Nesse caso, junto ao reflexo que se irradia de sua superfcie, o corpo ativado, colocado
numa posio intranqila de se ver refletido, ao contrrio de tentar alguma possibilidade de ativar esse espao
pela via da participao, obrigatria vale dizer. No caso da obra de Fajardo, a propriedade da obra foi deslocada
para fora de sua jurisdio, passando a residir
mais em sua funo como um dispositivo
que testa a especificidade do ambiente onde
quer que ele esteja, diante de uma perspectiva
da produtividade do olhar.
O sentido de especificidade, daquilo
que tem uma origem no tempo e no espao,
aparece claramente na obra da Jac Leirner,
intitulada Adesivo 44 (2004) [Fig.18], com
seus adesivos colados na superfcie de um
dispositivo criado pela artista que lembra
janelas em srie. justamente ali que se v,
por exemplo um elemento surpreendente: Carlos Fajardo
Sem Ttulo, 2005
Acrlico espelhado e madeira
um adesivo daqueles utilizados na Vista da obra na 5 Bienal do
identificao de embalagens de obras de arte Mercosul/View
Mercosur Biennial
of the work at the 5 th
privilegiado da exposio que faz dela o lugar nico e indistinguvel Foto Fbio Del Re -Vivafoto
25
26
Radicais aes modernas deslocaram a escultura de seu centro, fazendo-a abdicar de seus princpios
mais bsicos, entre eles a verticalidade, tornando-se fluida, tomando o espao e confundindo-se com seu
entorno. Ao lanar mos de materiais e procedimentos dos mais diversos, passou a requerer cada vez mais uma
relao produtiva com suas proximidades. O espao passou a ser pensado inicialmente atravs dessa verticalidade
ocasional e, posteriormente, de uma indivisvel relao com o entorno, que passaria a ser incorporada ao
trabalho. nessa profunda indiferena para com o local que a escultura ir tornar-se indistinta diante do
impuro e no-idealizado espao que ela encontrar ao abandonar o cubo branco da galeria. Essa virada
epistemolgica, com o objetivo da ressituar o significado fora do objeto artstico ao desvi-lo para o contexto,
estabelece uma condio especfica diferente daquelas ligadas s trocas simblicas de mercadoria presentes no
capitalismo moderno em que os objetos, ligados a uma funcionalidade, foram a sua adequao a problemticas
especficas. da que surgem os site-specifics. Se, por um lado, parte dessas construes declara sua
27
28
29
30
[Fig. 29] Elaine Tedesco Armazm A4 Porto 2, 2005 - Instalao/Installation - Vista da instalao na 5 Bienal do Mercosul/View of the installation at the 5th Mercosur Biennial Foto Fbio
Del Re-Vivafoto [Fig. 29a] Elaine Tedesco Armazm A4 Porto 2, 2005 - Vista da parte interna da instalao/View from inside of the installation Foto Fbio Del Re -Vivafoto
tomado de assalto o espao de exposio pela via Foto Fbio Del Re-Vivafoto
das relaes de poder institudas pela
normatividade dos projetos curatoriais, conforme suas prerrogativas polticas, cabe lembrar ainda que,
nesse processo, o espao museolgico foi estetizado pela incluso de proposies temticas via projetos
curatoriais. So justamente esses temas que impem quele espao uma perspectiva que podemos chamar
de carter decorativo exposio, em que as questes curatoriais so as que definem o padro esttico
que ela ir adquirir e atravs do qual uma srie de obras ser escolhida para comp-la. As obras, nesse
caso, podem ser vistas como mecanismos compositivos do espao de exposio. Sua relao com uma
perspectiva programtica, definida a priori pela curadoria, um calcanhar de Aquiles particular a essa
31
Notas
1
Site-specific surgiu a partir das prerrogativas estabelecidas pelo Minimalismo, no final dos anos de 1960, e baseou-se grandemente nas abordagens
fenomenolgicas do espao, principalmente aquela de Merleau-Ponty em a Fenomenologia da Percepo. Um grande volume de teoria tem sido publicado
sobre a questo. Entre os principais textos, cabe citar Miwon Knon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 2002) e One Place After Anoter: Notes on Site-Specificity, in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, rika Suderburg (ed.)
( Minneapolis and London: University of Minessota Press, 2000), 38-63 e Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, Alex Coles (ed.) (London: Black Dog
Publishing Limited, 2000), entre inmeros outros.
2
Trata-se de um trabalho diferente daqueles feitos sobre painis que sero eventualmente destrudos, j que eles podem, se for o caso, ser retirados e
remontados em outro local. No caso da obra de Maria Lcia Cattani, trata-se da nica parede de alvenaria construda para abrigar uma obra em todo
o espao de exposio.
3
A idia de evoluo em arte foi exacerbada com o advento da modernidade, em que o novo torna-se uma prerrogativa necessria existncia da obra.
Na produo contempornea, tal prerrogativa passou a ser um elemento do qual a obra no mais pode ser livre. Essa mesma idia de evoluo passou, ento,
a ser vista como significando a necessidade de deixar o passado para trs em oposio a uma progresso linear das mudanas formais ocorridas no trabalho.
Sobre a questo do progresso artstico, ver Olga Hazan, Le mythe du progress artistique (Montreal: Les Presses de LUniversit de Montreal, 1995).
4
Fluidos Concretos, Iole de Freitas, catlogo da exposio, Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, So Paulo, 12 de abril a 12 de maio de 1988.
5
Trata-se da resistncia que se faz necessria para construir partes da obra cujo material de difcil manipulao.
6
Inmeros textos tm sido recentemente publicados sobre essa obra de Canova, principalmente a partir de 1995. Um dos estudos mais significativos
o de H. Honour and A. Weston Lewis (eds.), The Three Graces (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1995), que inclui uma histria do tema, assim
como uma anlise detalhada da problemtica da escultura e sua execuo. Nesse mesmo volume, um texto de John Kenworthy-Browne fornece um
estudo sobre o local original da obra. Ver tambm Malcolm Baker, Canovas Three Graces and Changing Attitudes to Sculpture, in Figured in Marble:
the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum: 2000), 159-169.
7
Passages in Modern Sculpture, 12 edio (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), 26.
8
Essa frontalidade vai ressurgir novamente em suas obras mais recentes, Estudos para Volume e Flecha I e II (2005).
9
Pode-se discutir a autonomia dessas obras em relao interveno de Duchamp, na medida em que sua instalao incorporou as obras da exposio.
Entretanto, tal questo discutvel porque essas obras no pertencem instalao de Duchamp. Alm disso, justamente o fato de serem e permane-
cerem autnomas que atribui s obras de Duchamp seu sucesso como uma estratgia de interveno efetiva no espao onde se encontram e seu
envolvimento com a problemtica da individualidade atribuda obra artstica pelo espao de exposio. Nesse sentido, Duchamp assumiu um papel
claramente inscrito no mbito das prticas curatoriais. Ainda que o termo instalao no tenha sido estabelecido at os anos de 1960, obras como essa
de Duchamp podem ser consideradas como precursoras do que hoje conhecemos como instalao.
10
Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London, 1998).
11
Cabe lembrar que a confluncia de fatores acumulados em uma cidade como Nova Iorque, por exemplo onde essas prticas foram exercitadas e
ganharam visibilidade, fez com que, em uma espcie de progresso geomtrica, essa tradio fosse criada, elaborada e difundida para o resto do mundo,
mesmo que tais questes tambm estivessem sendo tratadas em outras reas geogrficas. O papel da patronagem foi um dos fatores mais importantes
nessa equao, visto que possibilidades nicas viriam a surgir de obras inditas e nicas serem comissionadas.
12
Cabe lembrar a exposio de Beuys nos Estados Unidos, realizada no Museu Guggenheim em 1979, considerada como uma ameaa hegemonia
americana sobre as perspectivas vanguardistas da produo artstica na poca. A exposio de Beuys naquele espao que era considerado uma das mais
importantes instituies americanas adquiriu simbolicamente um significado ainda maior diante da fora e das posies estticas da arte alem que
Beuys muito bem representava.
13
A relao entre razo e intuio adquire uma posio-chave no entendimento das aes de Joseph Beuys. O carter orgnico do pensamento intuitivo
inclui o pensamento racional, expandindo a sua dimenso sensitiva e sua conexo com os aspectos espirituais. Entender a obra de Beuys, freqentemente,
exige novos modos de interpretao. Suas obras esto preocupadas com a troca de energia do sistema escultrico para o ambiente, passando pelo
32
33
36
37
Sanctasanctorum, 2005
Vdeo instalao e
esculturas em chocolate
Coleo da artista
38
39
Instalao
Coleo da artista
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034a203_Escultura.p65
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21/6/2006, 05:55
47
Antonio Manuel
1947, Avels de Caminha [Portugal] Poucos artistas podem pertencer histria da arte de seu pas precocemente. Antonio
Vive e trabalha em/Lives and works in La- Manuel um deles. Mesmo tendo nascido em Portugal, um artista brasileiro. E,
ranjeiras, Rio de Janeiro, RJ. desde muito cedo, esteve presente em momentos cruciais da histria da arte e da
Exposies Individuais/Solo Exhibitions
2004 - Manoel Macedo Galeria de Arte, Belo
poltica no Brasil. Antonio Manuel encontra-se entre os raros artistas que souberam,
Horizonte, Brasil. com inteligncia, encontrar uma soluo formal elevada para o difcil problema da
2003 - Sucesso de Fatos. Centro Cultural So relao entre arte e poltica. Nos seus trabalhos das dcadas de 1960 e 1970, ele
Paulo, Brasil. forneceu uma demonstrao das mais elaboradas para essa questo. Seria muito longo
2002 - Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, falar de tal contribuio do artista neste espao.
So Paulo, Brasil. Nas ltimas duas dcadas, seu trabalho tem-se concentrado em uma pintura que
2000 - Museu de Arte Contempornea de estabelece um apurado dilogo com o passado construtivista e em instalaes. Estas
Serralves, Porto, Portugal.
1999 - Galerie National du Jeu de Paume,
so pontuais, s vezes muito refinadas, enquanto outras estabelecem um combativo
Paris, Frana. dilogo com a arquitetura, em que o elemento poltico est presente de modo oblquo.
Exposies Coletivas/Group Exhibitions A instalao da 5 Bienal do Mercosul mais uma verso de seus telhados, no qual
2004 - Beyond Geometric Experiments in o espectador chamado a pisar em um terreno instvel e frgil. bvio que a
Form. Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, arquitetura est presente. Mas no basta, somos convidados a pisar no telhado. Com
California, EUA. muito cuidado, devemos caminhar sobre esse territrio, que no deixa de ser um
Inverted Utopias. The Museum of Fines Arts, pouco o mundo que temos diante ns todos os dias, desde as ruas inseguras das
Houston, Texas, EUA.
2001 - Body and Soul. Guggenhein Museum,
grandes cidades at as armadilhas da vida profissional. Sobretudo a arte, este, sim o
New York, NY, EUA. terreno instvel que nos provoca e que nos chama a experiment-lo. Esqueamos por
Experiment/ Experincia - Art in Brasil. Oxford um momento o mundo e fiquemos na obra: a arte. Nessa instalao, Antonio Manuel
Museum of Modern Art, Inglaterra. reclama um dilogo intenso com o universo pictrico ao introduzir as bacias, em
2000 - Eterotipias. Centro de Arte Reina forma de ameba, cheias de pigmentos. Esses poos de cores, que interrompem a
Sofia, Madrid, Espanha. continuidade avermelhada do telhado, querem lembrar-nos de um mundo sensori-
1999 Global Conceptualism. Queens al, puramente tico, que s resiste pela persistncia da pintura. O artista recorda-nos
Museum of Art, NY, EUA.
Publicaes/Publications
que, mesmo na instalao, a morada da arte coberta, tambm, por pintura.
Antonio Manuel. Fundao Nacional de Paulo Sergio Duarte
Arte. MEC/Secretaria de Cultura, 1985.
CARNEIRO, Lucia e PRADILLA, Ileana.
Coleo palavra do artista: Antonio Manuel
entrevista., Lacerda Editores, RJ, 1999.
DUARTE, Paulo Sergio. Anos 60 Transfor-
maes da arte no Brasil. Ed. Campos Gerais,
RJ, 1998, pp.210-215.
SALOMO, Wally. Apocalipoptese. In: He-
lio Oiticica, Relume-Dumar/Rio Arte, Rio
de Janeiro, 1996, pp. 69-74.
48
49
52
53
Casa enyesada
Obras Temporrias
Dimenses variveis
56
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Carlos Alberto Fajardo
Fajardo
1941, So Paulo, SP [Brasil] Narcisismo e opacidade
Vive e trabalha em/Lives and works in So
Paulo, SP. O trabalho de Carlos Fajardo tem-se constitudo por uma insistncia constante em
Exposies Individuais/Solo Exhibitions
2005 - Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud,
tratar as superfcies como um mecanismo problematizador do olhar. Sabendo que
So Paulo, SP justamente com elas que o olhar se depara e confronta, o artista tem feito obras que
2003 - Potica da Distncia. Museu de Arte so, sobretudo, dispositivos para dar visibilidade natureza das superfcies. refle-
Moderna Alosio Magalhes, Recife, PE; tindo nelas que o universo se revela e, com essa revelao, o sentido das formas que
Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salva- nos cercam. Esse trabalho uma seqncia daqueles que o artista vem realizando com
dor; Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul espelhos em que o importante o entorno refletido sobre a obra. Podemos pensar
Ado Malagoli, Porto Alegre; Museu de Arte aqui no princpio lacaniano da fase do espelho quando o Narciso enfrenta o drama
Moderna, Rio de Janeiro.
2000 - Galeria Andr Millan, So Paulo,
de encarar a prpria morte. Trata-se de uma passarela que o espectador convidado
Brasil. a atravessar. Aqui, a relao do espectador como um pedestre que enfrenta a prpria
Exposies Coletivas/Group Exhibitions obra ao atravess-la e nessa trajetria torna-se consciente do prprio corpo, trazido
2002 - XXV Bienal Internacional de Arte de a uma situao de evidncia. Ao faz-lo, d-se conta de que esse trajeto no tem
So Paulo. Sala Especial. Fundao Bienal, objetivo definido e, se h de fato algum, ele reside exclusivamente na experincia da
So Paulo, Brasil. situao, seja aquela da arte, seja aquela de uma participao intil cuja responsabili-
2001 - Projeto Fronteiras. Ita Cultural, Es- dade de atribuir sentido exclusivamente dele. Como em muitos dos trabalhos de
cultura em Espao Pblico, Laguna, Brasil.
2000 - Mostra do Redescobrimento - Brasil 500
Carlos Fajardo, a superfcie torna-se, em determinado momento, congestionada pela
Anos. Fundao Bienal de So Paulo, So sujeira ou pelo desgaste de agentes externos cabe lembrar a esfera de glicerina
Paulo, Brasil. (1987), por exemplo, que desaparece pela perda da gua. A superfcie do espelho,
1998 - XXIV Bienal Internacional de So cristalina e em pleno estado de reflexo, com o passar do tempo perde seu brilho e sua
Paulo. Fundao Bienal, So Paulo, Brasil. capacidade de refletir qualquer coisa. Com isso, perde tambm seu carter mimtico
Publicaes/Publications e, assim, j no pode realizar seu potencial produtivo: o de refletir. Aberta a exposi-
FARIAS, Agnaldo. Arte brasileira hoje. So o, a obra rapidamente comeou a ficar congestionada pelas marcas deixadas pelos
Paulo: Publifolha, p. 42-45, 2002.
FAVARETO, Celso. Das novas figuraes arte
passos de seus visitantes, lembrando a todos ns que o mundo por natureza opaco.
conceitual. In Tridimensionalidade na arte Suas poucas superfcies brilhantes so construdas pelo desejo pervasivo de tornar o
brasileira do sculo XX. So Paulo: Instituto mundo um pouco mais transparente. Em estado de nova, a obra reflete tudo sua
Ita Cultural, p. 110-115, 118-121, 1997. volta, confunde-se com seu entorno, mas esse trabalho, ironicamente, torna-se mais
REA, Silvana. Transformatividade: aproxima- visvel quanto mais opaco ele se tornar.
o entre psicanlise e artes plsticas: Renina Gaudncio Fidelis
Katz, Carlos Fajardo, Flvia Ribeiro. So Paulo:
Annablume/FAPESP, 2000.
58
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59
Foto: Fbio Del Re - VivaFoto
Neuroeconomia Antropfaga,
2004-05
Performance
Esculturas de chocolate comestvel
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Foto: Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto Foto: Christiano Witt - VivaFoto Foto: Christiano Witt - VivaFoto Foto: Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto Foto: Christiano Witt - VivaFoto
63
Foto: Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto
Mamela I, 2005
Tecido
Coleo do Artista
Tecido
Coleo do Artista
66
67
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67
Foto: Carlos Stein - VivaFoto
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71
Foto: Carlos Stein - VivaFoto
74
76
77
78
79
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79
Foto: Carlos Stein - VivaFoto
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83
Iole de Freitas
Freitas
1945, Belo Horizonte, MG [Brasil] Entre linhas e planos
Vive e trabalha em/Lives and works in Rio
de Janeiro, RJ. A obra de Iole de Freitas resultado de um processo que a artista vem desenvolvendo
Exposies Individuais/Solo Exhibitions
2005 - Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio
desde a dcada de 1990, quando comeou a trabalhar com projetos em escala indus-
de Janeiro, Brasil. trial utilizando chapas de policarbonato e tubos de ao. Seu trabalho mais recente,
2004 - Museu Vale do Rio Doce, Vila Velha, exibido em parte na 5 Bienal, o que poderamos chamar de um desafio a uma
Brasil. lgica da escultura moderna, que advoga contigidade entre linha e plano. Em Estudo
2000 - Centro de Artes Hlio Oiticica, Rio para superfcie e linha (2005), como em um abrupto movimento, o trabalho sofre
de Janeiro, Brasil. um desajuste de suas partes e o plano aparece repousando sobre essas linhas sem se
1999 - Instalao permanente no Museu ajustar a elas ou coincidir com seus pontos de convergncia. No mais dependentes
do Aude, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.
1997 - Iole de Freitas: O Corpo da Escultura,
de um certo ajuste construtivo entre suas partes, a obra promove um encontro de
uma Retrospectiva. Museu de Arte de So entidades que sempre se pensou capazes de convergir para um nico propsito. Se a
Paulo e Pao Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. linha acaba por formar o plano, dependendo do caminho que percorre, aqui o que se
Exposies Coletivas/Group Exhibitions v que entre a linha e o plano h mais do que se esperava.
2001 - Experiment/Experincia. Museu de Nessa tentativa especfica de adaptar o local da exposio ao trabalho, e no ao
Arte Moderna, MOMA, Oxford, Inglaterra. contrrio, criam-se linhas de fora que ligam o piso parede do galpo, como que
1998 - XXIV Bienal de So Paulo. Fundao fixando esses dois elementos a uma situao que se poderia pensar determinada pelo
Bienal de So Paulo, Brasil.
1996 - Entretelas. Museu Alejandro Otero,
centro de equilbrio da exposio. Seu lado tnue capaz de alojar o sujeito em sua
Caracas, Venezuela. positividade cambaleante ao tornar-se um turbilho que parece extrair da arquitetura
Publicaes/Publications da obra um enfrentamento no qual imposio e alteridade colocam-se em um limite.
FILHO, Paulo Venncio. O Corpo da escultu- Pela autonomia da linha em relao ao plano, h uma certa desorganizao da arqui-
ra - A obra de Iole de freitas de 1972-1997. tetura da obra com vistas a uma mudana na estratgia de abordar o sujeito. Ao
In Sobrevo: Edio Cosac Naify, SP, 2002. colocar-se em relao obra a percepo de equilbrio, a velocidade e o deslocamento,
MAMMI, Lorenzo. Sobrevo. In sobrevo, a posio do espectador vai sendo constantemente questionada pela presena do
Edio Cosac Naify, SP, 2002.
NAVES, Rodrigo. Entre lugar e passagem. In
trabalho. Entre linhas e planos, tem-se mais do que uma simples convivncia pac-
Sobrevo, Edio Cosac Naify, SP, 2002. fica. O que a experincia mostra, nesse caso, que a instituio de um lugar seguro
SALZTEIN, Sonia. Uns nadas e O trabalho para o sujeito apenas uma viso utpica da objetividade moderna.
a respirao. In catlogo exposio Museu Gaudncio Fidelis
Vale do Rio Doce, 2004.
SALZTEIN, Sonia. Passagens. In livro exposi-
o Iole de Freitas, Centro Cultural Banco
do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 2005.
84
85
88
89
92
93
Amanuenses, 2005
Instalao
Cobre, cabo de ao, ventiladores e
camisas brancas
Coleo do artista
96
97
98
99
102
103
104
105
La carta, 2004
Madeira e acrlico
Coleo do artista
108
109
110
111
114
115
116
117
118
119
Masculino/feminino, 2005
Interveno com fotografias e
sanitrios ecolgicos
Coleo do Artista
122
123
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125
Foto: Fbio Del Re - VivaFoto
128
129
132
133
Illusion, 2005
Mveis e objetos forrados com pelcia rosa
Coleo da artista
Foto: Fbio Del Re - VivaFoto
134
135
138
139
Camping, 2005
Instalao
Coleo do artista
142
143
146
147
1 2
Rosetta, 2005
Escultura em ferro
Coleo do artista
Foto:Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto
Fotos: Carlos Stein - VivaFoto
[1]
Excentra, 2004
Escultura em ferro
Coleo do artista
[2]
148
149
150
151
xito, 2004
Foto: Fbio Del Re - VivaFoto
152
153
156
157
160
161
Amarelo ( ), 2002
Ao inoxidvel,
Exemplo, 2005 esmalte e vinil
Ao inoxidvel e vinil Coleo Gabinete de Arte
Coleo do artista Raquel Arnaud
[2] [3]
164
3
Fotos: Fbio Del Re - VivaFoto
165
O campo da arte tridimensional a escultura se estenderia alm da tradicional estaturia, desde o incio
do sculo XX, nas experincias cubistas no espao e nos construtivismos russo e alemo. Ao lado destas, as
experincias de Duchamp e do Dadasmo romperam todos os limites com que a arte ocidental cercava o objeto
artstico e forou a reflexo sobre o modo como se estabelecia o sistema de poder e de consagrao da obra de arte:
esta a funo transformadora de operaes e manobras vistas, ainda hoje, como simples boutades. A instituio
arte, no mundo laico da era industrial, havia produzido uma nova religiosidade com seus deuses e semideuses
os artistas , seus templos os museus e galerias , seus sacerdotes crticos, historiadores, comissrios (hoje,
curadores) e colecionadores e seus objetos de devoo as obras de arte.1
Era contra esse mundo, suas ideologias e suas relaes de poder, pela sua dissoluo em um universo
muito mais amplo em experincias estticas, que se dirigiam essas vanguardas. A essa dessacralizao de choque
do objeto produzida por Duchamp e pelos dadastas correspondia a estratgia construtivista, que posicionava o
artista como um produtor responsvel pela concepo de um projeto e por seu desenvolvimento, um trabalhador
intelectual a mais na cadeia produtiva, cuja misso era promover uma verdadeira simbiose esttica entre arte e
vida, colaborando para um mundo melhor. Em certo sentido, dadasmo e construtivismo atuam juntos de
modos diversos. Ambos tentam desconstruir como se diria hoje o conceito de arte e desloc-lo para orient-
lo em uma direo diferente da consagrao fetichista: o criador passa a produtor e o objeto de arte, deslocado
de seu posto sagrado, converte-se em agente terico e prtico contaminador de outros produtos como a arquitetura,
os objetos da vida cotidiana e outras atividades. Ao aparente irracionalismo das aes iconoclastas dad corresponde
uma postura racionalista construtivista. Essas investigaes modernas so responsveis por um formidvel
alargamento do campo da escultura e de experincias espaciais.
Aps a Segunda Guerra Mundial, os projetos construtivos ressurgem na Europa particularmente na
Frana, apesar de eclipsados pelo tachismo e pelo informalismo e fincam p na Amrica Latina. Em nosso
continente, esses projetos guardam alguns elementos ideolgicos de suas origens russa e alem: com eles vinham
certa aposta no racionalismo e a utopia de impregnar esteticamente a vida para contribuir para um mundo mais
feliz. Arte e vida estariam finalmente unidas nas obras de arte, na arquitetura, no design de produtos e na
programao visual, para tornar a existncia no apenas mais bela, como tambm mais prtica e despida de
elementos decorativos suprfluos. Nessa nova conjuntura, no apenas a psicologia da forma e a psicanlise
alimentavam a moderna teoria da arte, como as investigaes fenomenolgicas de Merleau-Ponty refletiam-se
em uma esttica que rediscutiria as experincias subjetivas da percepo, sobretudo aquelas espaciais.
171
172
173
174
Notas
1
O fetichismo da mercadoria, analisada por Marx em O Capital, penetrava fortemente no campo simblico de valores paradigmticos da cultura:
aqueles que designavam o que e o que no uma obra de arte. Era a contrapartida daquilo que havia sido identificado como a reificao das relaes
sociais. Porm, no se tome a oposio fetichismo da mercadoria/reificao das relaes sociais pela oposio subjetivao/objetivao. Uma dimenso
ontolgica mais complexa introduzida pelo par abstrato/concreto quando a prpria Razo submetida a uma anlise histrica por Adorno e Horkheimer
na Dialtica do Esclarecimento [Theodor W. Adorno e Max Horkheimer. Dialtica do Esclarecimento. Traduo Guido de Almeida. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge
Zahar Editor, 1985].
175
30x 20 x2 cm aproximadamente
Coleo: Sucesin A. Spsito
178
179
119 x 71 x 78 cm
Coleo Eduardo Janot
Pacheco Lopes
[3]
180
181
C1, 1982
Relevo em metal
sobre tapete de sisal
102 x 82 cm
Coleo Gabinete de Arte
Raquel Arnaud
Foto: Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto
C3, 1982
Tcnica mista sobre
tapete de sisal
102 x 82 cm
Coleo S. Jonathan M. Brand
182
183
184
185
186
187
1 2
52 x 77 x 65 cm
Foto: Carlos Stein - VivaFoto
188
189
Metaesquema, 1958
Guache sobre papel
34,5 x 55,2 cm
Coleo Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo
Doao Mil Villela
Metaesquema, 1958
Guache sobre papel
50,2 x 61,2 cm
Coleo Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo
Doao Mil Villela
L e c 10, 1958
Guache sobre carto
46 x 57 cm
Foto: Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto
Two, 1958
Guache sobre carto
50 x 58,5 cm
MAM RJ - Coleo Gilberto Chateaubriand
190
Bilateral, c.1959
Tmpera sobre madeira
86 x 149 x 1,8 cm
Coleo particular
191
Plano em superfcie
modulada,
1958-1984
Bicho, s/d Pintura automotiva
Metal sobre aglomerado
45 x 60 cm 41 x 82 cm
Coleo Joo Sattamini Coleo particular
Cortesia da Associao Cortesia da Associao
Cultural O Mundo de Cultural O Mundo de
Lygia Clark Lygia Clark
192
Casulo 84 B, 1959
Nitrocelulose
sobre lata
30 x 30 cm
Coleo Joo Sattamini
Cortesia da Associao
Cultural O Mundo de
Lygia Clark
Casulo 84 L, 1959
Nitrocelulose sobre
lata
30 x 30 cm
Coleo Joo Sattamini
Cortesia da Associao
Cultural O Mundo de
Lygia Clark
Contra-relevo, 1959
Pintura sobre madeira
40 x 40 cm
Coleo Joo Sattamini
Cortesia da Associao
Cultural O Mundo de
Lygia Clark
Espao modulado
n.313, 1959
Tinta industrial sobre
madeira
89,8 x 30 cm
Coleo Museu de Arte
Moderna de So Paulo
Cortesia da Associao
Cultural O Mundo de
Lygia Clark
Aquisio: Fundo para
aquisio de obras para o
acervo do MAM SP
Companhia Nipo-
Brasileira de Pelotizao
Ovo, 1958
Tinta industrial sobre
madeira
33 cm
Coleo Raquel
Arnaud
Cortesia da
Associao Cultural O
Mundo de Lygia Clark
[1]
Fotos: Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
Conjugations-Love Stories,
1973
Livro com 70 pginas
Cortesia Martha Hllion
Speeds, 1974
Estampa com selos sobre
carto
Dimenses variadas
Cortesia Martha Hllion
Sonnet(s), 1972
43 folhas
Dimenses variadas
Cortesia Martha Hllion
201
1
Pluriobjeto A-6,
1988
Tinta acrlica sobre
madeira
205 x 20 x 5 cm
Acervo da Pinacoteca do
Estado de So Paulo
Brasil
Pluriobjeto A-6,
1988 Sem titulo,
Tinta acrlica sobre dec. 80
madeira de cedro Madeira revestida
polido com folhas de cobre
200 x 15 x 15 cm 181 x 7 x 7 cm
Acervo da Pinacoteca do Acervo da Pinacoteca do
Estado de So Paulo Estado de So Paulo
Brasil Brasil
202
Estudo, 1957
Guache sobre papel
5,7 x 5,7 cm
Coleo Museu de Arte
Moderna do Rio de
Janeiro
Estudo, 1957
Guache sobre papel
5 x 3 cm
Coleo Museu de Arte
Moderna do Rio de
Janeiro
Fotos: Fabio Del Re - VivaFoto
203
Gaudncio Fidelis
No contexto desta Bienal, cujo perfil circunscrito a artistas da Amrica Latina e mais especificamente
ao Mercosul, repentinamente me soa estranho escrever sobre obras que no parecem, a princpio, pertencer a
esse universo. Talvez haja de fato, uma impregnao desse contexto para o domnio da escrita. Tenho dvidas
mesmo se a voz no passa a ter uma territorialidade distinta para alm da vontade de quem escreve. Vivendo
entre duas cidades por quase oito anos, minha sensao de territrio parece deslocada, desfeita na medida
mesmo da sensao de que estabelecer fronteiras embotar o pensamento, de que territorialidade , nada mais
nada menos, que a expresso das limitaes da linguagem, no sentido mais amplo do termo, e de que as
relaes que muitas vezes estabelecemos entre lngua, objetos e indivduos a expresso de uma poltica das
relaes, desnecessria no campo da arte, mas ao que parece tambm inevitvel na constituio de geografia
que construmos e da qual no podemos livrar-nos.
As obras dos quatro artistas dessa exposio, pela sua especificidade, formam campos de tenso entre
as noes de espao e territrio. Se o espao fluido e dinmico, o territrio limitado e poltico. A percepo
que temos de ambos , antes de tudo, mediada por nossas limitaes culturais, constitudas no mais das vezes
na formao das subjetividades. Os artistas reunidos nessa exposio so de diferentes geraes, e a concepo
de espao e memria posta na obra de cada um grandemente diferenciada. O ttulo deste texto refere-se
perspectiva de que as caractersticas topogrficas dessas obras e sua colocao em uma Bienal com perfil
regional sinalizam para a possibilidade de produzir um espao reflexivo especfico que venha a ter uma certa
perenidade, a despeito das caractersticas efmeras do evento. Explicando didaticamente, seu aspecto topogrfico
e como funciona, anos depois, ao lembrar-nos que aquelas obras ali existiram. E muito do que foi experienciado
com elas permanecer como um resduo na memria de quem as viu. Por ser mediada pela experincia cultural
de cada um, essa memria especfica e localizada conforme a relao de empatia e interatividade com esses
trabalhos em local e momento especficos.
Para muitos de ns que vivemos, interagimos e visitamos essa exposio durante a 5 Bienal, essas
obras, localizadas de maneira mais ou menos intensa em nossa memria, passam a integrar o imaginrio de
cada um. Mas no s isso. Essa especificidade localizada da memria existe tambm ligada a uma perspectiva
interna dessas obras e na razo de ser de cada uma delas em suas questes e potncia esttica, advinda de um
campo de fora determinado pelas relaes de tempo e espao, determinadas pelo trabalho. Se no The Empty
Museum o espectador transportado para um outro lugar, onde a referncia a um espao que no vivenciou
est posta fisicamente para ele de uma maneira que chega a provocar-lhe uma sensao fsica, na medida em
207
[Fig. 1] Stephen Vitiello A Slow Wave to Climb, 2005. 12 8 auto falantes/12 8 speakers - 6-chanel DVD-audio disc/DVD audio player 6-chanel amplifier
Vista da instalao na 5 Bienal do Mercosul/View of the installation at the 5th Mercosur Biennial
Foto Fbio Del Re-Vivafoto
208
uma categoria subjacente quilo que capaz de nos ajudar a Part of Treble curated by Regine Basha
Cortesia do artista e /Courtesy the artist and The Project Gallery, New York
relembrar determinados momentos, j que imagens so to
fortes quando imagens sonoras, por outro ele determinante, pois age de
maneira subconsciente, vindo superfcie quando ativado por mecanismos
dos mais diversos:
No caso do World Trade Center [...] eu achava que os sons j existiam
mas eram inacessveis o som do trovo, vento, avies, helicpteros, o
balano do prdio, tudo tinha sido sabiamente silenciado pelas janelas
grossas que no abririam. Se tornou minha tarefa trazer tais sons de volta
ao espao e de certa maneira traze-los a vida. 5
209
Ciente de que nosso cotidiano absorveu o som na forma de rudo, Vitiello parece acreditar nos
pequenos gestos ao trabalhar com o som manipulado e apropriado ao mesmo tempo, aqueles de nossa
experincia auditiva diria, chamando nossa ateno para sons em desaparecimento. O espao onde foi
montada a obra de Vitiello era cercado por sons advindos de seus colegas de exposio. Some-se a isso a
interferncia de rudos externos, que fogem ao controle do artista. Sem se sentir incomodada pelas interferncias
externas, a obra de Vitiello parece impor-se silenciosamente adversidade do local. O que se v uma pausa
justificada para a reflexo. A verdade em relao ao som ainda mais subjetivamente determinada do que em
imagens visuais. Ao criar trilhas sonoras, ou sons ambientais, frequentemente mais importante apresentar a
idia da coisa do que o prpria gravao.9
Marina Abramovic, outra artista cuja obra trouxemos para a exposio, tem sistematicamente
atribudo ao trabalho um carter autobiogrfico desde 1992, perodo a partir do qual ela vem
continuamente realizando Biography, um work in progress que reencena aspectos de suas performances
anteriores. tambm nesse contexto que Count on Us (2003) [Figs. 5, 5a, 5b e/and 5c] est situado.
Aps deixar a Iugoslvia por mais de 30 anos, Marina Abramivic decidiu voltar terra natal para
realizar a obra. O vdeo, feito em Belgrado com a colaborao de 280 crianas vestidas de preto que
cantam em coro uma msica sobre as Naes Unidas, , no por coincidncia, o nome de uma escola na
Iugoslvia.10 Em uma crtica poltica das Naes Unidas para o Terceiro Mundo e em uma referncia
clara s guerras dos Blcs, a obra constituda tambm por uma outra imagem em que a artista
encontra-se deitada no cho, cercada por um nmero de crianas que formam uma estrela. A imagem
210
[Figs. 5 e/and 5a] Marina Abramovic Count on Us, 2003 - Vdeo instalao/Video installation - Projees de vdeo sincronizadas/ Synchronized video projections - Vista da instalao
na 5 Bienal do Mercosul/View of the installation at the 5th Mercosur Biennial - Coleo da artista/Collection the artist
Foto Fbio Del Re-Vivafoto
211
[Figs. 5b e/and 5c] Marina Abramovic Count on Us, 2003 - Vdeo instalao/Video installation - Projees de vdeo sincronizadas/ Synchronized video projections - Vista da instalao
na 5 Bienal do Mercosul/View of the installation at the 5th Mercosur Biennial - Coleo da artista/Collection the artist
Foto Fbio Del Re-Vivafoto
212
filme e vdeo, mas tambm entre os gneros artsticos das artes plsticas, [Fig. 7]
Pierre Coulibeuf Vista da sala do artista na exposio, onde foram mostrados os filmes Rubato e Somewhere in Between/View of the artists space where the films Rubato and Somewhere
in Between were screened - Na foto o filme Somewhere in Between/In the picture the film Somewhere in Between Foto Carlos Stein - Vivafoto
213
Pierre Coulibeuf Vista da sala do artista na exposio, onde foram mostrados os filmes Rubato e Somewhere in Between/View of the artists space where the films Rubato and
Somewhere in Between were screened - Nas fotos o filme Somewhere in Between/In the pictures the film Somewhere in Between Foto Carlos Stein - Vivafoto
H algo de cinemtico tambm nas instalaes totais de Ilya Kabakov. A tomada radical que fazem
do universo dos objetos e das construes complexas de suas obras colocadas nos espaos museolgicos faz
com que o espectador seja imerso em um universo que o transporta para outros lugares, onde a suspenso,
ainda que breve das relaes de espao e tempo, fazem sentir-se de maneira abrupta.
A obra O Museu Vazio (1993) [Fig.8, 8a e/and 8b], de Ilya e Emilia Kabakov, representa nessa
exposio uma metfora misria institucional e, ao mesmo tempo, uma lembrana de que a arte muito
mais do que a materializao de uma objetualidade latente. justamente essa ausncia que se v reafirmada
em um espao vazio dado reflexo. Construir um museu sem obra , antes de tudo, pensar a arte como
uma lembrana em que a memria daquilo que est ausente adquire determinada especificidade. porque
damos lugar a ela que ela adquire localizao.
Falando sobre sua concepo de instalao, Kabakov disse uma vez que, para ele, a instalao teria
incorporado o universo da pintura. Nesse sentido, a pintura estaria no centro da instalao como um
objeto que no conseguiu evoluir para alm de suas limitaes lingsticas (planaridade, frontalidade e
superfcie). O conceito de instalao total criado pelo artista passaria, ento, a englobar o conhecido
universo da pintura. Ele disse:
214
Ilya e Emilia Kabakov The Empty Museum, 2003 - Instalao/InstallationConstruo de uma sala, auto falantes com som da obra Passacaglia de J. S. Bach/Constructed room
[Fig. 8]
with sound speakers playing the Passacaglia by J. S. Bach - Vista da instalao na 5 Bienal do Mercosul/View of the installation at the 5th Mercosur Biennial
Foto Fbio Del Re-Vivafoto
The Empty Museum consiste em uma sala que relembra o ambiente de um museu clssico do sculo XIX.
No centro, duas bancadas baixas de museus servem de acento. A msica Passacaglia, de Bach,19 reproduzida
por um sistema de som. O espao decorado internamente com cantoneiras de gesso e iluminado por spots
colocados no teto. Nas paredes, vem-se as reas iluminadas em forma oval onde supostamente as pinturas
devessem estar colocadas. A parte externa da construo permanece aparente, evidenciada por um corte na
parede. A instalao colocada estrategicamente a 1,50 m das duas paredes mais prximas do espao onde se
215
Ilya e Emilia Kabakov Desenhos para o projeto da obra O Museu Vazio em Porto Alegre/Sketches for the project of the work The Emty Museum in Porto Alegre
Cortesia dos artistas/Courtesy of the artists e/and Sean Kelly Gallery - New York
[Fig. 8a]
No espao interno, as pinturas que
deveriam estar nas paredes foram substitudas por
um som intenso. As ovais de luz podem ser
associadas s janelas de vitrais de catedrais. A msica
substitui pinturas clssicas, pois pertence ao mesmo
registro se pensarmos em sua sintonia com o
ambiente. Na ausncia das obras, esse espao torna-
se por excelncia aquele da visibilidade do espectador.
ele que tornado visvel no espao do museu.
Nesse espao vazio, nosso comportamento,
mascarado pelo som da msica ambiente, torna-se o
centro de ateno. Os museus sempre foram o espao
dos rituais que envolvem a contemplao da obra
[Fig. 8b]
de arte. Na ausncia dela, o prprio ritual e o que
resulta dele que passa a estar em questo. Aqui somos
deixados apenas com a alternativa de refletir e
contemplar, nada mais. A instalao de Kabakov
mostra-nos que o espao aparentemente incuo de
contemplao do museu um campo de batalha
onde o olhar posto em questo a todo o momento
como um mecanismo autoritativo capaz de dar
expresso institucionalidade que o espao do
museu tanto busca impor a toda e qualquer obra
que o ocupe. Este aspecto remanescente no torna
o museu em um espao de contemplao pacfica,
mas em uma arena de chama pelo olhar, na qual
[Figs. 8a e/and 8b]
Ilya e Emilia Kabakov toda estratgia possvel de auto-exposio e alto-
The Empty Museum, 2003
Instalao/Installation disfarce est envolvido.21 Nesse espao vazio, no
Construo de uma sala, auto falantes com som da obra Passacaglia de J. S. Bach/
Constructed room with sound speakers playing the Passacaglia by J. S. Bach
se pode exercer a autoridade do conhecimento nem
Vista da instalao na 5 Bienal do Mercosul/View of the installation
at the 5th Mercosur Biennial
os trejeitos comportamentais to tpicos aos espaos
Foto Fbio Del Re-Vivafoto ritualsticos de exposio, j que eles se tornariam
216
Notas
1
Personagem de David Byrne na cena final do filme True Stories (1986).
2
O memorial do 9/11, chamado Reflecting Absence, procura refletir no s a ausncia daquele stio arquitetnico, mas tambm a ligao estrita com seus
217
218
Gaudncio Fidelis
[As fotografias deste ensaio so da construo da obra O Museu Vazio, de Ilya e Emilia Kabakov, para a exposio da 5 Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul
Fotografias de Rafael Rachewsky/The photographs in this essay are of the construction of Ilya and Emilia Kabakovs work, The Empty Museum, for the 5th
Mercosur Visual Arts Biennial Photographs by Raphael Rachewsky]
Quando surgiu a possibilidade de trazer para a 5 Bienal do Mercosul a obra O Museu Vazio,
de Ilya e Emilia Kabakov, dentro da exposio Fronteiras da Linguagem, ocorreu-me que nada seria
mais significativo do que ter no contexto dessa exposio uma obra to emblemtica da situao
paradigmtica na qual a obra de arte tem sua existncia determinada. Sabemos que o museu que,
em ltima instncia, institucionaliza e canoniza determinados segmentos da produo artstica.
ele, da mesma forma, que estabelece os parmetros de institucionalizao. Sem passar em algum
momento pelas portas do museu, raramente uma obra chega a obter o lugar esperado no restrito
universo da legitimao institucional que implica
determinar seu status artstico em um contexto no qual
essa produo circula e acumula valor.
O museu a grande inveno institucional do
sculo XIX e, com ele, a disciplina da histria da arte.
Sob seu teto, segundo a concepo de Andr Malraux
em seu Muse imaginaire,1 a principal inteno seria a
de normatizar a produo moderna, reinscrevendo-a
em uma perspectiva autnoma na qual as obras, depois
de retiradas de seu habitat, seriam desvinculadas de
seu contexto, tornando possvel, assim, sua existncia
em uma linha lgica de desenvolvimento qual outras
obras pudessem ser agregadas. Para Malraux, essa Material de montagem utilizado na construo da instalao/Materials
primeira fase constituiria uma investida significativa and tools used for constructing the installation.
229
A estrutura da obra vista de fora, do lado onde foram feitas as aberturas das
portas/The structure of the work seen from outside, from the doorway side
230
Detalhe da portas j
colocadas/Detail of
the doors in place.
231
232
233
A instalao das luminrias. Luminrias especiais foram adaptados com vistas a produzir o efeito
desejado de uma luz suave que ao mesmo tempo projetasse um iluminao no formato oval. Como
as luzes no foram importadas o processo envolveu inmeros testes com vrios tipos de luzes
diferentes at se conseguir a soluo desejada/Installing the lights. Specially customized lighting was
used to produce the desired soft, oval shaped lighting effect. As the lighting was not imported, the
process involved many tests with different kinds of lights until the desired solution was obtained.
234
Na 5 Bienal, a obra de Sandra Cinto continha um elemento que quase a estilizao de um desses
mecanismos na forma de uma cama. Ele serve de repouso para contemplar a pintura, ao mesmo tempo em
que integra a obra como um elemento, fazendo parte dela. Em outros casos, o que temos so tipicamente
bancadas para breve descanso durante o percurso de visita exposio. A obra O Museu Vazio, de Ilya e Emilia
Kabakov, possui, ao contrrio, confortveis poltronas estofadas que permitem ao visitante descansar
agradavelmente naquele espao enquanto contempla o vazio. Um excesso de ateno acaba por tomar conta
do espectador, que a cada momento que ali se encontra torna-se mais consciente do impacto imposto pelo
espao museolgico quando confrontado com o oposto de sua fora de institucionalizao, ou seja, a ausncia
de qualquer coisa a ser institucionalizada.
Politicamente sob constante ataque por sua congnita cumplicidade com o imperialismo do
sculo XIX, o museu viria a se tornar historicamente um campo de batalha onde as mais diversas
plataformas e agendas constituiriam seus desdobramentos. Assim, O Museu Vazio chama a ateno
para a fora do museu em um sistema vido pela institucionalizao de suas produes. Refora a
conscincia de que tal institucionalizao feita no exerccio constante e sistemtico da circulao da
obra pelo espao museolgico e pelas investidas realizadas pelas estratgias de abordagem desta,
recontextualizando-a sistematicamente no prprio espao museolgico. O Museu Vazio , portanto,
uma obra emblemtica em sua abordagem das questes ideolgicas do espao museolgico e, ao
mesmo tempo, um trabalho de indubitvel fora potica.
235
Detalhe do mecanismo
que mantm a porta
fechada depois da
entrada de cada
visitante/Detail of the
mechanism for keeping
the door closed after each
visitor enters the
installation
Detalhe da maaneta
da porta, cujo modelo e
especificaes foi
previamente
determinado/Detail of
the door handle, the
model and specifications
of which were previously
determined.
236
Notas
1
(Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
2
The End of Painting, October N 16 (Fall, 1981). Publicado posteriormente em Douglas Crimp, On The Museum Ruins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993).
3
Essa questo abordada em Comments on Seating, in Tate Gallery Visitor Audit Mini Survey Report, Lord Cultural Resources Planning and
Management, 1994.
Agradecimentos/Aknowledgements
A todos os artistas participantes e seus assistentes. Esta exposio no teria sido possvel sem a colaborao de inmeras pessoas e galerias: To all the
participating artists and to their assistants. This exhibition would not have been possible without the collaboration of numerous people and galleries: Chantal
Dealano - Regards Productions/Paris, Cecile Panzieri - Sean Kelly Gallery, NY, Christian Tomaszewiski, Iran do Esprito Santo, The Project Gallery
NY, Sean Kelly Gallery NY, e/and Uwe Schwarzer. Agradeo ainda a todos os que desejam permanecer annimos/Thanks also to all the others that wish
to remain anonymous.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Curador/Curator
237
Presiding over the Mercosur Visual Arts Biennial Foundation and organising
the 5th Mercosur Biennial has been a challenge that we take up, above all, as a
collective project. The enormous legacy handed down to us by a still youthful
institution came accompanied by the responsibility of making the event into a
great exhibition. With a title of Histories of Art and Space, we have brought the
work of numerous artists from Latin America, and also Europe and the United
States to the public. Under discerning curatorship, we have brought together
work whose aesthetic value and innovative potential seems undeniable.
Furthermore, this has only been possible thanks to the generous collaboration
of our sponsors, municipal, state and federal government partnership, the
effective participation of our advisers and directors and the collaboration of all
those professionals who form the Biennial Foundation. As I have said, this is a
collective project. The shaft that drives it is precisely the participation and
work of everyone, without whom this magnificent exhibition would not be
possible.
The exhibition vectors The Persistence of Painting, From Sculpture to Installation,
Directions in the New Space and Transformations of the Public Space, central to
this Biennials curatorial project, together with the work of the artist of honour,
Amilcar de Castro, comprise an event with high level of professionalization.
They contain the current state of contemporary artistic production, which has
its foundations in the historical exhibitions that accompany it. In an exhibition
whose present is reaffirmed in each work, we cannot neglect to think of a future
in which the Mercosur Biennial is increasingly reaffirmed as an institution
directed towards the contemporary. If on one hand we stand out for the excellence
of our exhibitions, on the other we do not forget that relationships between
individuals are also carried out through art, in a process of continuous dialogue
in which ideas emerge through exchange and through exercising the complexity
of giving public visibility to so many works in a single event. We think of an
exhibition as a large group of works; and so, for us, organising a biennial is to
think about the individuality of the artists above all. The surprise held in store
for us at the moment of seeing them all together is only exceeded by the
certainty of a mission accomplished. In exhibiting the present, we reaffirm the
future in the belief that a society with more artistic and cultural values is
certainly a more just and equalitarian society, whose progress signifies not only
overcoming the past, but also, and fundamentally, the reaffirmation of a present
that is generously laid open for each of its citizens.
240
241
242
243
244
Notes
1
See Gaudncio Fidelis, Uma Histria Concisa da Bienal do Mercosul, Coleo Histrias da Arte e do Espao 5 Bienal do Mercosul,
Paulo Sergio Duarte (org.) (Porto Alegre: Fundao Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, 2005).
2
Paulo Sergio Duarte, A Rosa-dos-Ventos Posies e Direes na Arte Contempornea, In Rosa-dos-Ventos Posies e Direes na Arte
Contempornea, Paulo Sergio Duarte (org.) Coleo Histrias da Arte e do Espao 5 Bienal do Mercosul (Porto Alegre: Fundao Bienal
de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, 2005), 10.
3
Paulo Sergio Duarte, Two or three things you should know about cultural heritage, Rio de Janeiro: Fundao Roberto Marinho, 1997/
2000 [electronic edition reserved for the use of Fundao Roberto Marinho]. See also Giulio Carlo Argan, El concepto del espacio
arquitetnico desde el Barroco a nuestros das Curso en el Instituto Universitario de Historia de la Arquitectura Tucumn, 1961, Traduccin,
introduccin y notas: Liliana Rainis (Buenos Aires: Ed. Nueva Visin, 1973), 64.
4
In this latter can be found my article, which provides the volumes title, in which I sought to convey, as clearly as I could, my thoughts
on the general framework that has come to be called the art system.
Translated by Nick Rands
245
Gaudncio Fidelis
In a sense, we could say that the distinction between sculpture and installation has never existed. Every work has to be
installed in some way. What we see today is a culturally established category based on the radical practices of the 1960s and 70s,
which were constructed with the aim of showing the ideological artifices surrounding the exhibition of the art object. Installation will
come to definitively problematize the relationships established by the existence of a work in a specific place, defining its field of action
as being fundamentally a policy of intervention in the field of the exhibition. With the later growth of increasingly stronger curatorial
projects, whose interference upon the work of art and creation of a conceptual field in which it can exist have become almost
hegemonic in relation to the artwork, little space remained for the artist to develop a policy of institutional intervention.
The increasing need for artists to install their own works in highly complex events in which they effectively participate
in constructing their work within the exhibition space, the dependency of a relationship of connections between the meaning the
work acquires and the artistic intervention, are only symptoms that installations, site specific works,1 and others of this order are,
in a way, disputing space with curatorial procedures. It is precisely these procedures that, on suddenly taking over the placing
of the work in the exhibition space, define curatorial praxis as eminently that of intervention in the work of the artist, in the space
in which the work is placed and in a symbolic structure within this space. The exhibition space progressively becomes defined
as the space for the intervention of the curator and his or her prerogatives of power, and not so much the realm of the artist and
his or her work. The artist thus has no alternative but to appropriate this space with the actual work. However, this condition can
only be constructed by the effective presence of a strategic twist in sculptural practices, by reclaiming the exhibition space based
on key tactics that are defined in placing the work in the space. Whether the place is the white cube of the gallery or the public
space where a large part of the site-specific tradition has been built is no longer the most important question, since we know that
the relationship between art and its links with its institutional spaces, within or without the museum or gallery, will never be
broken, although this is formed in an alternative way in open spaces.
It seems to me that this reclamation of the modes of placing the work in the exhibition space represented a radical
strategic turn that resulted in re-appropriation of the curators authority by the sphere of the artist. This is not to ignore the bases
that have made installation and site-specifics into a culturally defined field based on historical prerogatives, but it can in no way
be ignored that these works have recently been changing their premises of exhibition, requiring and occupying an increasingly
significant space in what is defined as the sphere of curator in the ideologically defined territory of the exhibition. When we see
the artist working with great teams of assistants in the exhibition space today, what we are witnessing is a situation that is
becoming increasingly confused with the duties of the curators and the institutional administrative apparatus [Fig. 1, 2, 3 and 4].
The presence of the artist and his or her team, in most cases considered as a foreign body in the institutional structure, often
causes a degree of annoyance disguised in the performance of the production team that attempts to reclaim its subjective
characteristics into the sphere of administrative effectiveness. With these works, artists could curate their own exhibitions, and
installations are no more than this: a specific place within an exhibition where an artist organises his or her objects, actions and
strategies in order to cause a greater intervention within the curatorial sphere. This fact is even more evident when certain works
are produced for major exhibitions, often without projects defined a priori. Thus, it seems to me that the active presence of the
figure of the artist in the exhibition space is evidence of this nature of intervention in the sphere of the power of the curator. A
power that is part of the institutional environment that controls the rules established within the realm of the museum space.
In each of the vectors of the 5th Biennial there are many works that appropriate procedures from installation, and also
a condition of site specificity, that are often not applied to certain art forms. This is the case with Maria Lucia Cattanis A5-
P8, (2005) [Fig.5], for example, which could be called a site-specific painting. It was made as a kind of fresco on a masonry
wall built especially for the work, with the work appearing fixed to the architecture of the place, only to be destroyed at the
end of the exhibition [Fig.7].2 Being a site-specific painting, its condition appears to be paradigmatic in relation to the
portability that painting has always had. In this case the actual gesture penetrates the surface of the wall, automatically making
it become definitively part of that surface [Fig.6].
The idea of progress in art is questionable and highly dubious.3 It comes more from using the wrong terminology,
which has been vulgarised and applied in an attempt to clarify an evolutionary course of works within a narrative tradition
that emphasises the search for the new as a successive way of imposing aesthetic categories one after the other, with the aim of
canonising certain objects chosen by the mainstream. In this essay I am interested in considering this evolution only as a
development internal to the forms, without any value judgement, thus recreating an historical view that can make certain
changes and/or characteristics, which have appeared throughout the existence of the three-dimensional forms in their various
categories, understandable. These forms do not exist in a vacuum and are linked to a series of relationships and developments
that have been appearing in sculpture over a long period.
Modern sculpture would remove its lessons from the past as an historical frame of reference able to define
fundamental questions for sculptural production, as is seen in Brancusis integration of the base into the work, for example,
in defining a later point of support to replace this base that was lost, in the presence of an occasional verticality which would
enable sculpture to remain upright even in a variety of eventualities, and so on.
248
249
250
251
252
253
Notes
1
Site-specific emerged from the prerogatives established by Minimalism at the end of the 1960s, and was based largely on phenomenological
approaches to space, particularly those of Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. A large amount of theory has been published
on the subject. Among the principal texts that should be mentioned are Miwon Knon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and
Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002) and One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity, in Space, Site,
Intervention: Situating Installation Art, rika Suderburg (ed.) (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 38-63 e
Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, Alex Coles (ed.) (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2000), and many others.
2
This is different from those works made on panels that will eventually be destroyed, since they could be removed and reassembled elsewhere,
for example. In the case of Maria Lucia Cattani, this was the only masonry wall in the entire exhibition space to be built for a work.
3
The idea of evolution in art increased with the advent of modernity, in which the new became a necessary prerogative for the existence
of the work. In contemporary production this prerogative became an element from which the work could no longer be released. The same
idea of evolution came to be seen as signifying the need to leave the past behind in contrast to a linear progression in the formal changes
in the work. On the question of artistic progress, see Olga Hazan, Le mythe du progress artistique (Montreal: Les Presses de LUniversit
de Montreal, 1995).
4
Fluidos Concretos, Iole de Freitas, exhibition catalogue, Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, So Paulo, 12 April - 12 May 1988.
5
This resistance is necessary for making parts of the work whose material is difficult to handle.
6
Numerous texts have recently been published about this Canova work, particularly since 1995. One of the most significant studies is
H. Honour and A. Weston Lewiss (eds.), The Three Graces (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1995), which includes a history
of the subject and also a detailed analysis of the problematic of the sculpture and its execution. In this same volume a text by John
Kenworthy-Browne provides a study about the works original location. See also Malcolm Baker, Canovas Three Graces and Changing
Attitudes to Sculpture, in Figured in Marble: the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty
Museum: 2000), 159-169.
7
Passages in Modern Sculpture, 12th edition (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), 26.
8
This frontality will reappear in her more recent works, Estudos para Volume and Flecha I e II (2005).
9
The autonomy of these works can be discussed in relation to Duchamps intervention, to the extent that his installation incorporated
the works in the exhibition. However, this question is debatable because these works are not part of Duchamps installation. Furthermore,
it is exactly the fact of being and remaining autonomous that brought Duchamps works their success as a strategy of effective intervention
in the space where they are seen and the problematic of individuality attributed to the artwork by the exhibition space. In this sense,
Duchamp assumed a clearly written role in the realm of curatorial practices. Although the term installation was not established until the
1960s, works like this one of Duchamps can be considered precursors of what we know today as installation.
10
Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London, 1998).
11
It should be remembered that the confluence of accumulated factors in a city like New York, for example, where these practices have been
exercised and acquired visibility, means that, in a kind of geometric progression, this tradition was created, developed and spread to the rest
of the world, even if such questions were also being considered in other geographical areas. The role of patronage was one of the most
important factors in this equation, given that unique possibilities would emerge from the commissioning of new and unique works.
12
It is worth remembering Beuyss Guggenheim Museum exhibition in the United States in 1979, considered as a threat to American
hegemony over the vanguard views of artistic production at the time. Beuyss exhibition in that space, which was considered one of the
most important American institutions, symbolically took on a still greater significance in the face of the force and aesthetic positions of
German art that Beuys so well represented.
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Afonso Tostes
Like a metronome, the work of Afonso Tostes marks time between subtlety and raw presence. As a painter and sculptor,
the artist moves from the grey darkness of his melancholic canvases, enclosed in lead like a storm preparing to break, to
the elegant illumination of the sculptures of extended femurs hijacked from building props of a Brazil that still uses
timber, as a disposable material, for building tower blocks. We can imagine the enormous thighs that enveloped these two,
three, four metre-high bones, and the artist thus moves with astute fluency from the socioeconomic context of brute
capitalism to the erotic imagination of these enormous legs of which only the bones remain: all the flesh as been eaten.
The paintings bring to the world what is almost darkness, paradoxically distant from dimness. This dim light wants
to lighten, yet hesitates, preferring the dark shadow. It is that moment in the tropics when the day shuts down, not
because the night is coming, but because the day collapses, thrown into the abyss the atmosphere has prepared for it:
they are those sudden midday nights that are only known near the equator the storm. This is the sombre painting
of someone who, beyond the concept, has experienced landscape. The sculpture is clarification, a provisional structure
that aspires, because it is art, to transcend transitoriness. It wants to stay. As if this world needs props; since, the way
it is, it is collapsing.
At the 5th Mercosur Biennial, Alfonso Tostes has sculpted props. That formidable external skeleton of the buildings is
now far from the subtlety of the femurs. They are very strong, powerful even, and simulate support for two warehouses,
exactly between where the contemporary works in From Sculpture to Installation and The Persistence of Painting are being
shown. It is a work in situ, to support one side and the other of art, opening our passage to the Guaba river landscape and
the beautiful sculpture by Angelo Venosa nearby. The situation was forged in dialogue and the artists effort to be present.
But note well: on the painting side, another painting in timber is supported by the props, recalling Richard Serras lead
panel supported so that such a heavy picture could remain on the wall, at the end of the 1960s.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Translated by Nick Rands
Alejandra Andrade
The concept of this exhibition has been based on love. A search for love that becomes, obsessive, tortuous, repetitive and even
and exaggeration, and that somehow needs to be cured.
In chocolate I find momentary relief. An addictive sedative of pleasant effect, which simulates the sensations one feels when
in love. But when chocolate is matter that gives shape to saint sculptures or a heart, it becomes that which allows for multiple
readings. Chocolate is an ephemeral material, it can melt, break, it eventually becomes rancid just as love or faith. But that
faith or hope one has to find something such as, in this case, love, will only be possible through a mediator, a saint, such as
Saint Anthony or San Judas Thaddeus, the saint of impossible causes.
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Alessandra Vaghi
Can words be transformed into things? How can they not be damaged by being materialised? The word, almost always oral,
then written, codified, has been material for art. Visual poems have been made in which the word is the visual material,
something other than poetry. In the 1950s Brazilian concretists were involved in transforming the page into a visual and
verbal event. We all know of the precedent of Mallarm.
Alesandra Vaghi is not part of that world, however, she came later. Her intimacy with things and words is of another order.
She knew about Leonilson, who stitched words to tell his feelings.
In displacing Drummonds poem, she transforms it: it is almost a tombstone for the dress lying on the furniture. Cut out,
it produces syncopes, heresies. Alesandra is decidedly courageous, from an unrivalled innocence, with nothing ingenuous.
She is voracious in the right measure. Has any one ever heard of a modest voracity? That is what we have here. The case of
the dress is death, like all bodies missing from all dresses and, going a little further, the meanings of all the words sewn in
fragments on the wall; words and images as poetic things, of this other order, remain. Fleeting meanings, at the moment of
exhibition, do not support the presence of the visual power. In this flight of meanings, what remains is the visual meaning
of the presence of word things and image things and objects. The saturation of affects removes affection, with the symbolic
and the reality of the work remaining in the dresses, the images, the light, the words drawn on the glass, in the environments
carefully prepared for us to experience two moments: the one that prepares and the one that makes ready. Alessandras poetics
has no introduction or conclusion. It is a scene. And what a scene. Forget the rest.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Translated by Nick Rands
Angelo Venosa
The first Angelo Venosa sculptures I saw were strange bodies, as if they were in search of a form not yet found. They were,
however, vertebrates, showing a prominent wooden skeleton beneath a thick skin of darkly painted canvas, and no one would
doubt their empty insides. They were bodies without organs skin and bone , but rough. These strange animals had lost
that domestic nature that Rodrigo Naves speaks of in the beasts of Tarsilas anthropophagy anthropophagi we want to stroke.
Angelo Venosas sculptures took on a public dimension, like strange street animals to be looked at from a certain distance,
because who could tell if they had a lively streak if they moved? However, their actual anatomy required them to be protected
from the rain and sun they needed to be indoors.
Until the whale appeared, from the same family, but another species. Pure Cor-Ten steel skeleton, the whale, as it was
nicknamed, definitively captured the public space. It was firstly in Praa Mau in Rio de Janeiro, then moved to the start
of Avenida Atlntica at Leme beach in the same city. Like the carcass of the earlier animals, it now rose up from the ground.
The appearance is organic, but the mineral material is highly present. This contrast gives new tension to the form, which,
free from the canvas covering, is dematerialised in the voids and transparency to become very strongly present in the
elements that form it.
The sculptor pursues organic forms. More recent works are formed from successive glass cutouts stacked like sheets of a body
that has undergone a modern anatomy lesson. They are delicate and transparent, and at the same time aggressive. Once again
we find the opposition that energises the form produced by the active participation of the material, by the glass cutouts that
offer real danger in handling, contrasted by their delicate and ineffable presence. The qualities of the object work with this
ambivalence that introduces its concept based on the substantive logic of the materials: this equips the work and its parts to
impose no supplementary narrative.
Although the ovoid sculpture shown at the 5th Mercosur Biennial is distant from the works recalled here, it explores similar
procedures. It uses the flexibility of the metal to impose a curve upon which it will rest in unstable equilibrium: any strong
wind will impose a degree of movement. The thick sheet is crossed by numerous irregular holes that remain in the memory
from earlier works and interrupt the opaque surface. Masterfully positioned in the space that opens between the A4 and A5
warehouses on the Quayside, its background is the beautiful view of the Guaba river, the pride of Porto Alegre.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Translated by Nick Rands
256
Few artists can become part of the art history of their country early in life. Antonio Manuel is one who has. Although born
in Portugal, he is a Brazilian artist. And he has been present at crucial moments in the history of art and politics in Brazil from
a very early stage. Antonio Manuel is one of those rare artists who intelligently knew how to find an elevated formal solution
to the difficult relationship between art and politics. In his works from the 1960s and 1970s he provided one of the most
elaborate demonstrations for this question. It would take a very long time to discuss this contribution of the artist here.
In the last two decades, his work has concentrated on a form of painting that establishes a refined dialogue with a constructive
past, and on installations. These are pointed, often very refined, while others establish a combative dialogue with architecture,
in which the political element is always obliquely present.
The 5th Mercosur Biennial installation is another version of his roofs, in which the spectator is called to walk on an
unstable and fragile terrain. It obvious that there is architecture here. But that does not matter, we are invited to walk
on the roof. We have to walk very carefully on this territory, which is not very unlike the world we face everyday, from
the unsafe streets of the great cities to the pitfalls of professional life. Above all, art, this unstable territory that provokes
us and calls us to try it. We forget for a moment the world, and remain with the work: the art. In this installation
Antonio Manuel reclaims an intense dialogue with the pictorial world by introducing the amoeba-shaped basins filled
with pigment. These wells of colour, interrupting the reddish continuity of the roof tiles, want to remind us of a
sensory world, purely optical, that only resists due to the persistence of painting. The artist reminds us that, even in
installation, the home of art is also covered by painting.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Translated by Nick Rands
Artur Lescher
Artur Lescher acutely realised the contemporary appeal of public scale at the very beginning of his work. This calling to take
us from private intimacy, comfortable life in the mansion, or the collective poverty of the slave quarters, to a world of greater
relationships: to try a definitively urban space, an historical movement that Brazilian modernity found so difficult to confront
in various fields, especially in our painting. His response was not that of idle extroversion or the manifest cult of the
spectacular, astutely using the available enlargement devices for visual works, from billboards to pictorial circuses. Lescher
accepted the challenge of publicity, the confrontation with public scale, finally, preserving an enigmatic character, escaping the
temptation of immediate communicability anxiously demanded by the expectation of consumption of meaning. What he
enlarged was the strangeness of art in contemporary life.
He shows us one of those enigmatic machines. Sand combs or useless ploughs? A crazy pantograph or a future design in the
hope that someone will take it over? Chained brothers of giant spools that have touched down in the land of Iber Camargo.
Doubtless the artist thought of the pictorial force of Ibers spools when conceiving these reels that pull machines for scraping
the land, as the painters gouges scraped the surfaces of the metal plates in his print studio. The delimitation of the plot of
sand, the incorporation of the huge column, the empty areas, all leave space for the imagination to move the huge spools and
multiply them in possible disturbance after their calm appearance at the scene of the exhibition.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Translated by Nick Rands
Bettina Brizuela
Bettina Brizuelas work is urban intervention: the faade of a house ends up totally plastered. And that is such that the
materials smooth whiteness covers the front part of the building as a whole skin, leaving no free interstice or draft: the house
gets sealed, converted into a whole block a mute sculpture in the middle of the stridence of the street, a non-contaminated
and radiant object, grown protected from garbage and beyond pavement bumps.
In order to be able to inscribe a signal over the text overwhelmed by advertisement and traffic, saturated by visual and sound
pollution, disturbed by dissonance, Brizuela decides to resort to radical silence, to well-kept secrecy, to saying turned to itself,
walled up. She subtracts the house while leaving it present, and in such spectral operation she establishes a pause, a
counterpoint in the chaotic discourse of an out-of-control city.
The fact is that those who want to speak in the middle of a labyrinth-like scene crowded with signs have two options: either
screaming louder than environmental noise or lowering their voices, slightly touching silence until they perhaps stop speaking.
I do not know if that provocative work resorts to a gagged and vibrant scream or extreme muteness. In any case, the figure of the
plaster as a prosthesis that sustains the truth of the faade and the metaphor of the gesture that whitens the outside of the house
become images in the center of a story that seems to collapse undermined by masked deterioration and sealed truth.
Ticio Escobar
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
257
Carlos Fajardos work has been formed from constant insistence on considering surfaces as a problematizing mechanism
for the gaze. Knowing that these are exactly what the gaze finds and confronts, the artist has made works that are, more than
anything, devices that make the nature of surfaces visible. The universe is revealed by being reflected in them and with this
revelation comes the meaning of the forms that surround us. This work is one of a sequence the artist has been producing
with mirrors, where the important thing is the surroundings reflected in the work. Here we can consider the Lacanian
principle of the phase of the mirror when Narcissus confronts the drama of facing his own death. It is a walkway which
the spectator is invited to cross. The relationship of the spectator as a pedestrian who confronts the actual work by
walking over it and en route becoming aware of his or her own body, is here raised to a situation of evidence. In doing so,
the spectator is aware that this route has no defined objective and, if there is in fact one, it resides exclusively in
experiencing the situation, whether it is art or a useless participation whose responsibility of attributing meaning is
exclusively his or her own. As in many of Carlos Fajardos works, at a certain moment the surface becomes clogged with
dirt or wear from outside sources one should recall the esfera de glicerina (1987), for example, which disappears
through loss of water. Over time, the crystalline and fully reflective surface of the mirror loses its shine and capacity of
reflecting anything. With this, it also loses its mimetic nature and thus can no longer realise its productive potential: to
reflect. With the opening of the exhibition, the work rapidly started to become covered with the marks left by visitors
footsteps, reminding us that the world is naturally opaque. Its few shiny surfaces are formed by the pervasive desire of
making the world a little more transparent. When it is new, the work reflects everything around it, becomes confused with
its surroundings, but ironically this work becomes more visible the more opaque it becomes.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Translated by Nick Rands
Csar Martnez
Used to live in Mexico until he discovered Spain. Now he gazes at the horizon
Csar Martnezs way of opening for us the doors of perception is through perplexity. He resorts to explosives to create
paintings and sculptures that remind us, among many other references, of the traditional use of fireworks in Mexico, be it
to celebrate a saints day, to mark the mass, or to send a storm away. Through his collapsed, uninflated latex sculptures,
Martnez creates a continuous and dramatic dialogue with the viewer, whom he challenges to confront the dangers that wink
at us in these trans-modern times. And it is through his interactive performances, which he calls PerforMANscenes, that he
plunges us into the depth of cultural memories to fish cannibalistic pleasures. In his own words, reordained in a pastiche of
ideas assembled by the curator:
The artists role goes beyond Fabriano paper and Canson pasteboard. The artist as a religious entity, as a disciple of art, as
a transgressor of credibility, as villain of dogmas, as preacher of new forms, as a fisher of ideas, as a priest, as a creator of
madnesses that cure people, as an old and new witness, as a disciple of the masses, goes far beyond the disturbances of daily
life. The artist is an arrow in time that points nowhere, who is precise in his uncertainty, who consolidates in the imprecision
of certainty. Art is not realitys patron saint. Artists are a signal of history. Their role in society is to suppress the distances
between people The body is the only thing that is truly oursThe body is like an antenna between the universe and life
itself, something like an interpretive filter for the meaning of existence. While we are here we shall need our body to be us.
That is why we need to be alive to meet death.
I have made raspberry women, lemon, anis and chocolARTe men. Those are exquisite corpses. Paraphrasing Prez Prados
mambo, the heart is usually a melon... melon heart(eating my sculptures)it is a way to metaphorically digest art, to
transform it inside you into something different, beyond anything visual. It transforms the work into a real imaginative
enzyme, a chemical reaction that circulates in our interior as glucose, calorie, protein that will be part of a gradual food scale
in our life structure. It is an essential erotic detail to be able to eat, lick, taste, suck, savor the other, is it not? And because
the political economic structure that rules our everyday life is cannibalistic
Felipe Ehrenberg
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Dominique Serrano
Dominique Serranos pieces lack material support. They seem to be arranged in space in a relative state of levitation.
However, the doubt resides in the fact that such arrangement would not be able to say if it is really the levitation of a rising
body or the suspension of a lying, hanging one. The latter is certainly a body that challenges the law of gravity thanks to
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Live in Mexico, a few miles from the US border, permanently operating back and forth between both countries and others.
The great love that the ancient Eastern Roman Empire had for glass spread like gunpowder all over the world. When
Byzantium fell, in 1453, glass in all its transparency had already crossed the Adriatic Sea and rested in Ravena, towards
the 7th century, where the splendor of ceramics, tiles and mosaics delighted locals and foreigners. From there, the
transparent mineral spread throughout Europe, from France to Holland to England, and its artistic use only took on a new
boost at the workshop of William Morris, in the second half of the 19th century. I speak of stained glass windows, since
in this long journey the great creations were restricted to two-dimensional expression. However, even now in times of
electricity and neon, sunlight is still a key ingredient and glass keeps its ability to transform the spirit something that
John Piper, Marc Chagall, and Rufino Tamayo knew very well. Einar and Jamex de la Torres task is, in this context, twice
as praiseworthy. Living in the region of bucolic vineyards shared by Mexico and the United States (two uneasy neighbors),
the De la Torre brothers move easily in the uneasy space that separates the fine arts from the world of crafts. Einar and
Jamex enjoy the creative freedom opened by Duchamps Great Glass. They are wholly familiar as few people are with
Mexicos glass blowing tradition, from Tlaquepaques traditional blown and utilitarian glassware and its miniatures to the
heat-deformed bottles that turn Coke and Sprite even the Simpsons! into grotesque giraffes. Ours is a time of major
hybridizations. Here is the key to the crystalline achievements of the De la Torre brothers, whose objects represent an
unprecedented contribution to Latin Americas increasingly labyrinthian imaginary.
Felipe Ehrenberg
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Elaine Tedesco
Elaine Tedesco creates spaces that exist within other environments. But she also causes shifts in meaning by bringing
equal emphases to projected images and the material supports that enable them to exist.
In the installation for the 5th Mercosur Biennial, she built a dark room in which there is a wooden transit compartment
with doors at both ends. This passage leads to a bigger space whose rarefied atmosphere is tenuously lit by images
projected onto the huge steel door which is part of the architecture of that Quayside warehouse.
These fleeting and hazy images carry a strong pictorial weight, making us slowly perceive the existence of recognisable
elements. Upon the heavy door, which reveals its reddish colour in the white light, are presented photographic
reproductions of pieces of meat photographed at a butchers in the Ver o Peso market in Belm do Par. Transported
from their place of origin, these images acquire meanings that are connected to their new material existence: the
association between different things, whose origins are linked to the world of economy, of work and forms of social
organisation, receive a highly dramatic treatment.
This work undeniably evokes a highly important representational pictorial tradition in western culture (just think of
Velazquez). All the lack of depth in the images is compensated by the structure of the support, and also by the dense
atmosphere created by the mechanical reproduction of the sound recording of the opening and closing door. The
sensory experience of the environment is so throbbing and enveloping that the fleshless images seem to recover their
missing weight and volume within us.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Nick Rands
259
The usual relationships established between Ernesto Netos work and what is conventionally termed as coming from the
organic world, are well known. In this way we would tend to associate these works with a view defined by the relationships
of its contiguous agents; formless and tactile materials, organic elements and finally, the body as an entity that, in the end,
will give the work meaning through its relationships of proximity. I would, therefore like to propose another reading of
certain aspects of Ernesto Netos work that appear in Eu-corpo (2005). This is a view that can formalise strictly spatial and
temporal relationships from constructive elements, such as line and the planes it establishes. I would call it a specific
sculpture. Punctuated by its relations with space and time with which it establishes an organic relationship, to return to
a usual association, the works nature is specific. In this work the weight is supported by a line which in turn defines the
area of the work, which is also an olfactory element, filled with cloves, recalling its relationship with the organic world.
This rope, which clearly defines and occupies the space, is there to further emphasise the presence of that mass suspended
and supported in the construction. It is a soft and loose demarcation, distinct, therefore from the precision defined by the
rope that configures and forms the work.
The colour of the environment (part of the work, of course) makes it even more specific. By distracting the spectator,
making the intention visible, it liberates its constructive vocabulary in an opposite movement to the field in which Ernesto
Netos work originated.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Translated by Nick Rands
Fernando Lindote
Antinature
Transamaznico(s) (2004-2005) is made from three pieces reproduced several times and arranged in the space. Shown for
the first time in the 5th Mercosur Biennial, these pieces are articulated contingently in the exhibition space. Their formalisation
is mimetic, since they recall elements that seem, because of their organic nature, to belong to nature in one way or another.
Made in synthetic E.V.A moulds, these works cause a disparity between the relationships established by the canonical works
of high modernism in which the relationship between durability, nobility and truth to forms is linked to a contiguous
relationship between the material and its productive force. In this sense the works seem to belong to another world, linked
less to conventional hierarchies between materials and the construction of the objects they make. There is in these objects, as
the title itself suggests, a condition of fracture, in that its materiality is deceptive and its formal constitution acquires a
relationship with the artificiality of the difference between the natural and the artificial, a dichotomy that is never resolved
when brought into the field of art. Fernando Lindote entitled a previous work Mangue Real precisely as a reaffirmation of the
lack of the works connection with something recognisable in both the artistic world and that of nature.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Translated by Nick Rands
Iole de Freitas
The work of Iole de Freitas is the result of a process the artist has developed since the 1990s, when she started to work with
projects on an industrial scale using polycarbonate sheets and steel tubes. Her most recent work, shown in part at the 5th
Biennial, is what we might call a challenge to the logic of modern sculpture, which advocates contiguity between line and
plane. In Estudo para superfcie e linha (2005) the parts of work undergo an adjustment, as if in a sudden movement, and
the plane appears resting on those lines without adjusting to them or coinciding with any of their converging points. No
longer dependent upon a degree of constructive adjustment among its parts, the work causes a meeting of entities that were
always thought of as being able to converge in a single proposal. If line ends up forming plane, depending on the path it takes,
we can see here that, between line and plane, there is more than was expected.
In this specific attempt to adapt the exhibition space to the work, and not the opposite, lines of force are created that link the
floor of the warehouse with the wall, as if fixing these two elements, which can be considered to be determined by the
exhibitions centre of balance. Its tenuous side is able to accommodate the subject in its dizzying positivity, becoming a vortex
that seems to extract a confrontation from the works architecture in which imposition and otherness are pushed to the limit.
From the autonomy of line in relation to the plane, there is a certain disorganisation in the architecture of the work with views
of a change in the strategy of approaching the subject. By placing the perception of balance, speed and displacement in
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Absent light
Irans work shown at the 5th Biennial is a version of the work entitled Difuso em cinco partes, which consists of five opaque
light bulbs distributed in various places in the exhibition space. For Porto Alegre, the artist produced 24 sculptures of
polished bulbs, arranged on equally spaced cubes in one space in the exhibition. The oldest work in this series is called Abat-
jour (1996) and is part of a series of polished stainless steel light sources, such as candles, fluorescent bulbs and table lamps.
Ironically, these works no longer emit light. If on one hand this makes them into unsuccessful devices, failures one might say,
on the other, their material condition is perfected to the same extent as their dysfunction. Careful polishing of the surface,
raising it to the level of perfection, is combined with its idealised form. Although they have not become abstract forms, these
works aspire to an ideal condition of transcending their functionality, leaving only a vague memory of what they were before
becoming art. Beyond a Duchampian view of appropriation, these objects seek visibility through their optimisation. They
want to be more than objects.
The strategically positioned bulbs in an exhibition room, where it is light, par excellence, that should make the objects visible,
represent a constant reminder that light gives art life by illuminating the art object. A bulb, therefore, whose raison dtre is to
emit light, thus becomes a metaphor for the absence of visibility that art itself sometimes makes a point of making visible.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Translated by Nick Rands
Jac Leirner
In Jacques Lacans seminar XX, on female sexuality, he proposes a radical revision of the psychoanalytical interpretation of the
traditional character of Don Juan. The dissatisfaction of the legendary conquistador would not reside in a repressed
homosexuality, as certain Freudian conventions wished, but in the impossibility of completing a collection whose end is
infinity. Long after Tirso de Molina, Lorenzo da Ponte, a personal friend of the famous Casanova, gives form to this infinite
series in Leporellos solo in Mozarts masterpiece, in which he reads to the audience the numbers and geography of his
masters conquests. The gossipy servant tells us there are 91 in Turkey, and already 1003 in Spain. And repeats: 1003.
Jac Leirner treats the objects and images of urban life as Don Juan treats women, and she is her own Leporello: her immense
notebook of conquests is endless. The substrate is the resistant skeleton of the collectors obsession; the model is the
mathematical series of integers, by definition, infinite. She has already shown all the empty packets of cigarettes she smoked
during a specific period, a huge wall of bags from museum shops, and also hundreds of visiting cards from people related
to the art world, artists, critics, curators, directors of institutions, producers, museologists, etc whom she had met on different
occasions, in a work entitled Nice to meet you.
The difference between the simple pathology of collector obsession which has already been fully caricatured in the pair of
idiots in Flauberts final novel and artwork is found in Jac Leirners visual organisation and conceptual rigor. Each of her
collections is a unique plastic event: sculpture, object, installation, it matters not. It is present not only through the force of
the theme, but also in the sensitive power that emancipates the mere bringing together of objects. Here are the windows from
the bedrooms of those teenagers who collect stickers, extending in a corridor, as if a section of the city had been rebuilt in the
exhibition space. This work also demonstrates the intense dialogue that Jac Leirners work maintains with the pictorial world,
a painting object after the end of pop art.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Translated by Nick Rands
Jos Resende
If there is work of heightened power developed with extreme discretion in Brazil, it is the work of Jos Resende. To someone
who has lived within the art world for some decades, the rigorous sense in which aesthetic research is conducted without
concessions, always linked with a rare ethical propriety, is impressive. The powerful discoveries and artistic invention that
have unfolded since the 1960s are realised within a strategy that always evades the spotlight, avoids the opportunisms of
career, and is not silenced by theoretical divergences.
In the first Arte-Cidade event, the artist showed a sculpture that could only exist in motion, in a kinetic question in which
what moves is not precious constructive games for the retina. They are huge blocks of stone piled up and constantly displaced
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Laura Vinci
Laura Vincis Mquina do Mundo, is an installation consisting of a conveyor belt transporting sand from one side of its
space to the other.
Nothing is more formless than sand. Its particles do not adhere to each other and in addition to being spread easily in the
space, they contaminate the environment with their minute fragments. Art has always given priority to form, or rather, to the
productivity of form. In this work, Laura Vinci displays two important aspects of the world of art: the process of formalisation
and symbolic productivity. Both are necessary for the existence of the art object, but the machine the artist has created only
moves dust from one side to another. Despite demonstrating time as a category related to productivity, one seems disconnected
from the other in this work. With no apparent purpose or logic in moving sand from one side to the other, the work does
so in pursuit of a minimal formalisation, which is never attained.
The art object has long aspired to movement. At least to function, whether by the actual representation of the moment, or by
the image in movement or by kinetic works. In its productive functionality, this work realises this desire. Its great poetic force
is materialised in the subtle and fleeting possibility that something will result from the accumulation and transport of sand.
In a world in which we are incapable of producing uncommitted movement and actions, Laura Vincis machine is a
perplexing reminder that art is constructed from gestures more symbolic than productive and that artistic experience is a
symbolic re-accommodation expressed in the materiality of things.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Translated by Nick Rands
Leandro Tartaglia
Leandro Tartaglias work is let loose in public space and then finishes its construction with the viewers active
participation. That characteristic, in principle applicable to any work of art, becomes more literal in the case of
Tartaglia: it develops as a short fiction piece the artist offers for individual experience through a sound player and
earphones. The street of shadow is a mix of urban scenario, an account proposed by the artists, and a receptor to whom
it is allowed to find his own assimilation of both space and account. The story, narrated through words, noise and
music, acquires new life every time someone listens to it with open or closed eyes, walking or circulating, selecting a
country to look at or several, or none.
The two immediate antecedents of The street of shadow are the works Felicia in the kingdom of Elocuants and Bloom!. The
former was intended to be a itinerary for a single passenger and consisted of a bicycle ride where the viewer was invited to
look at certain landscapes while being told a story on the earphones. In the second one, the individual listening system was
repeated but now it was an inner trip. There was no physical transportation of the audience involved; the spectacle rather
required their temporary permanence sitting on an armchair, located outside, in front of what was presented as scenography.
Nurtured by multiple interests that mingle in his creations literature, music, movies, theater , Tartaglia time-orients
observers space inviting them to a small poetic situation.
Eva Grinstein
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
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Uncertain colours
To make Degrads Porto Alegre (2005), Lucia Koch covered three entrances to one of the Port Quay warehouses with a
translucent vinyl screen printed with a gradation that filters the natural daylight, altering the perception we have of the
internal space of the shed in some way. Placed facing the river, the screens are interposed between our view of the landscape,
replacing it with its artificial equivalents. Nothing is more emblematic than replacing nature with an artificial experience of
it. Art is not nature after all, and its existence depends on a recreated view of the world. In this way, the work makes an
exchange between the sublime of the landscape we would be able to glimpse through the entrances to these sheds and the
feeling we have of the colour. Specifically installed for the place, the work forms a dialogue with the architecture, imposing a
contemporary view upon it in which the space, through these three openings, receives a luminosity that enables diversified
perception by virtue of the colour differences.
Lucia has been working with light filters placed in conjunction with architectural elements for some time, with the aim of
causing colour changes to indoor environments. It is known that colour alters our perception of time and space. The
placement of three different filters creates a distinctive experience from a single situation. Perception will thus be recovered
through an experience of dispersal of colour in the environment, and not through seeing it materialized on the surface of the
screen. The artists work can be associated with a typically contemporary condition in which we find more art where we less
feel the presence of nature.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Translated by Nick Rands
Marcelo Callau
Callau was born in Santa Cruz, 57 years ago. In his first years, he walked among the footprints left by his father when the
old man did woodwork in his large workshop. Between one game and the other, while he mounted rough-built toys, he took,
almost imperceptibly, his first steps as a sculptor.
At 14 he entered to the Fine Arts School in his town and learned drawing, painting, and molding. He continued his studies
in Paris and Brussels, graduating with the La Plus Grande Distintion granted by Belgiums La Cambre Higher School of
Architecture and Visual Arts.
He knew other European cities and lived transcendent political, technological, artistic, and social changes such as the hippie
movement and the May 1968 movement. In 1974, he returned to his remote village not only in terms of kilometers, but
also in the ways of thinking and living when compared to those in Europe. He found a conservative and prejudiced society.
Just as he had left it, only that Callau had now a distinct consciousness.
He once again encounters wood, and with high enthusiasm, he gives shape to female torsos of great sensuality and vigorous male
torsos. As Callau used to say, even though sex was crucial for Santa Cruz residents lives, those works were not met with approval.
He kept on creating on wood, besides painting, doing collage, and drawing. The themes that moved him included hands,
coca leaves, skin wrinkles. Many years were dedicated to the construction of geometric figures in precious and aromatic
Eastern woods. His work moved among organic and geometric figures where the pieces highest value lies on the possibilities
it offers. Besides beautiful pieces, he leaves us ideas.
His last works are made on closed envelopes, done in white wood and nearly all in small scale. We certainly have a lot to read.
Would this be a farewell?
Cecilia Bay Botti
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Marcelo Silveira
What would a world that distinguished itself from advanced consumer society and its moral and aesthetic values be like? How
would this world be formed if, to be differentiated, it had no need be disconnected from the contemporary world and its
conquests via one of the paths of the various fundamentalist fanatics, and could allow difference to appear without obscurantist
and manifest opposition? How would this world present its things to be looked at, appreciated, enjoyed, consumed, without
uneasy voracity or ostentation? How would the things and works of this world be available to all eyes without any
preconceptions? How would these things manifest themselves without the clamour necessary to awaken eyes anaesthetized
and brutalized by everyday life in the civilisation of the image.
Marcelo Silveiras work and poetics seem to ask these questions and test some of the answers. We have to approach these
possible solutions, their procedures and materials to better understand what this other world would be like. Marcelo is no
fool. He well knows that it is impossible to compete with the strangeness of the actual world without, to a degree, being
confused by it. This world has been produced in art from Dadaism to Giacometti, Beckett and Beuys and, in politics, gave
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Mariela Leal
Mariela Leals works remark pulsation limits that draw a blurred and unstable line. The plush alters the notion one can have of
familiarity. Closer becomes an access to stranger an otherness that, while it is close and does not show, it acts as the paradigm
of threat. It is the sinister, the Freudian Unheimliche, the close/distant that is more imminent while it cannot be located and
identified. It is the warning of a placeless and nameless danger, always deferred in its impossible presence: timeless.
That spectrality dimension the sinister occurs always in a phantasmagoric space prevents the work from closing as a single
meaning. Soon, the dolls, disproportionately enlarged in their scale and mutilated in their soft bodies (turned into parts, desires
of themselves), precipitate and trigger uneven questions. It opens to the theme of social, family, human violence; to the confused
domains of micropolitics, of power that crosses the everyday, of what vaguely inspires from the insignificant to become public
inscription and ethical mark. It points to the obscure issue of memory and its vague itineraries, its tramp operations, its partial
results. It always supposes that the perverse blurring that awakens the object when it answers and escapes the demand of desire.
It gets entangled with other visual, written, and sound discourses that complicate and postpone its ways.
Ticio Escobar
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Mario Sagradini
Sagradinis proposal consists of a selection of short sentences belonging to texts by Uruguayan and Brazilian writers painted
on a sidewalk nearby bus stops in distinct parts of the city of Porto Alegre. Again, this works discusses the space-text
relationship, dragging scripture out of the literary and aural space of the book in order to insert it into a public context, in
an act that provides for associations towards (re)creation of place in face of the written word.
Sagradini is an artist who has been acting in the last two decades as a uniquely important reference in local context, not only
for being the pioneer to review certain myths of Uruguayan society in face of allegorical installations and conceptualist
resources that were not restricted to any technical or disciplinary prejudice in art, but also for having had a strong influence
over several young Uruguayan artists in the 1990s.
Gabriel Peluffo Linari
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Nelson Felix
A contingent north
It should be recognised that the world of an exhibition as a territory is strongly politicised by disputes between works and
between them and the context. One might say there is no impartial exhibition policy. An exhibition is first and foremost an
arena for various contributions to the problematic of articulating the work and its productivity in the field of art. Sculpture
has demonstrated the ideological disputes about use and optimisation of space more than any other art form.
The work Nelson Felix is showing here is part of the rabe series (2001), initially consisting of three sculptures (Malha, Placa and
Quadrado). Like many of the artists works, the simple articulation of the parts in this work only makes it become more complex.
Much Islamic art can be seen as an internal game between abstraction and organic forms. Prohibited from using figurative images,
it carefully considered the surface, using repeated patterns that suggest absence of time and the nature of infinity.
The position of the steel girder pointed northwards, together with the other components, is shifted in relation to the wall planes,
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Osvaldo Salerno
In order to deconstruct the male/female antagonism, this work starts from the codes employed by public restrooms to
establish a separated place for each sex. Salerno disorients that categorization, declassifies it, and names third spaces that
render the limit between irreducible positions undecidable. By doing that, he complexifies the rhetoric of representation
appealing to totemic icons that fill todays public space with rubbish: outdoors, posters, etc.
Advertisement cartels obscenely show everything and its other side; in order to better offer the product, they brutally
withdraw the resources that employ form to chastely warn some figure, some leftover of meaning subtracted from image.
Salernos work disturbs such mechanism: it surrounds the figure of the male sex, exhibiting, displacing, and hiding the
phallic center-scepter and, for the very black place of absence, calling upon the invisible zone where the figure of what cannot
be shown and has been exposed is sent. Burnt in the act by light, the unnamable is divided between its image exhibited a
thousand times and the objects a thousand times subtracted and supplanted.
Ticio Escobar
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Pablo? Pablo? Are you there, Pablo? Where are you, Pablo?
Pablo Vargas Lugo was born on the very threshold of globalization (1968 was the year of the strongly repressed
Students Movement in Mexico). He is a part of what is known as the Generation X (those born between 1964 and
1979), in their teens in the 80s, when colonialism became globalization, a fact which could help us ponder when
viewing his work. Just as this surprisingly multifaceted artist argues, his art is hybrid, difficult to classify. My work
deals, from its beginning, with the practice of drawing, Vargas Lugo has said, shifting to other areas such as sculpture,
installation, video-animation, and digital media. My core concern is to translate the instability of images and scales,
weaving together various themes, references, and media capable of weakening each other in order to create a floating
field of meaning and perception.
Another key to understanding the space Vargas Lugo operates can be found in the conference presented by Rubn Gallo
in 1999, in Wroclaw, (Orientalism in Mexican Art), when he proposed a unique and novel idea: The 1900s a
period that will be marked in Mexican history by the countrys joining NAFTA (The North American Free-Trade
Agreement) have not yet produced an art that records the recent intensity of Mexicos dependence on US economy.
Instead, the arts of the 90s are characterized by an intense fascination with the cultures of China, Japan, and other Asian
countries. Gallo wrote: We should remember that Latin America was born out of a frustrated Orientalist project. It
is a historical jest that for years Europeans believed Mexico was the East Christopher Columbuss logbook is full of
wonderful descriptions of lands that he assumed were Cathay and Cipango (old names for China and Japan), which
were in fact the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba From the perspective of Mexicos national identity, the Orientalism
of the 90s could be seen as a critical response to 80s Neo-Mexicanism In their search for a basic cultural reference,
Orientalist artists have done much more than merely counter Mexican traits in art . Gallo continues: if the art
of the 80s was nationalistic, that of the 90s is internationalist. While their predecessors emphasized painting, they
rejected it in favor of media such as sculpture and installation; if the former were figurative, the latter preferred
abstraction. If the former sought a firm anchor in Mexican historical continuity, the latter offered images and figures
in a completely ahistorical space. If Neo-Mexicanism sought a cultural essence as its main expression, Orientalism sees
identity as a game of masks in which there are no essences, just appearances.
Felipe Ehrenberg
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
265
For a long time, the work of Patricio Farias consisted of machines with no specific function. Objects that do nothing, do not
say what they are for. In this work the artist goes further. He produces a deliberate parody of the presupposed functions of
the art object. The artist advertises the work using a variety of resources. Placed in an exhibition of this scale, in which the
politics of relationship between works is a debated term in the institutional relationships of circulation of the art object, the
situation becomes, let us say, appropriate. Biennials are descendants from the great art fairs, a residue that remains in their
institutional psychology. Calling attention to itself, this work becomes emblematic of the narcissistic nature of contemporary
art. In producing a surplus value of visibility it is a work that seeks to be more than it would become. It is enough to ask,
however, which the contemporary object does not.
Gaudncio Fidelis
Translated by Nick Rands
House of cards
In House of Cards, Paz Carvajal works on Chapter 12 of Alice in the Wonderland, when Alice faces the Queen of Hearts in the
trial over the tarts. For that he uses the text: You are nothing but a pack of cards in letters made as large-scale houses of cards
in order to render their lightness extreme. A house of cards does not collapse because a card is withdrawn but rather because
it is a house of cards doomed by its nature. The large card text is located on the rooms floor and has ten clocks are arranged
on the walls, which moved counterclockwise, pointing out our reverse nature.
The work approaches temporality and geographic configuration in Mercosur member countries, which are open to new ideas
and innovations in face of the might of great powers in the Northern hemisphere. According to Paz Carvajal, this work puts
forward a critical reflection on power circles and the weakness predominant in the last corner on the south of the world
which decide if they keep us dreaming or end us like a dream.
Justo Pastor Mellado
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Raquel Schwartz
Illusion
The installation illusion appeals to the senses, going through memory, sensations, and child play, in plush.
Through this installation, I want to bring up the dilemma of the 20th century family: the opposition of values and violence
in the same space; the work seeks a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear, illusion and reality, by
recreating the house, but as play, in pink plush, as an object of illusion and desire.
The house represents our refuge, our home, where we feel protected, welcome, and warm. The intimacy of the home
incarnates an individual world that is independent and different in each one of us. It shapes us and creates us within the chain
of our societys imaginary; the house is the family, societys basis and the natural space where our life takes place. At the same
time, that natural and idyllic space turns into just illusion for many people, specially women and children that live and grow
within in-family violence, injustice, lack of love, and therefore, of home. The displacement of home and the search for it
in the streets is one of the several problems of our society today. I want this work to question the subconscious of those of us
who do have a home and to appeal to our consciousnesses.
A constant element in my work is recreating concepts and ideas through visual images that invite to reflection. In order to
make those ideas visible, I seek to produce spaces rich in detail and scale.
Raquel Schwartz
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Rivane Neuenschwander
In the polarized universe of a globalised world, Rivane Neuenschwander acts on a double periphery, being apart from the
mainstream of the art system. Firstly, going against the flow of the spectacular and praise of new technologies, she chooses
subjects and materials laden with meaning that contrast with the setting of the global theatre. She thus seeks out the margins
of the art system, at the limits very distant from works that submit their poetics to the mask of merchandise. There, far from
all that, is Rivanes territory.
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Romn Vitali
From the beginning of his career in the mid-1990s Romn Vitalis work has cultivated both abstraction and
figuration, but what has remained unchanged is the medium and the technique he develops with really notable obsession
and thoroughness. Vitali puts acrylic faceted beads and weaves his pieces using math that tells him how and where he must
diversify the nylon yarns that link the colored beads. The result of that peculiar system translates into brilliant sculpture
pieces that can be presented individually or as a group, generating little scenes of high metaphorical and narrative reach.
With Camping, an installation made for the Mercosur Biennial, Vitali develops a story of love and terror that takes place
in an apparently bucolic context trees, a carp, two people and their sleeping bags but where there is also room for
envisaging the collapse of that thin line between beauty and awe. The installation is conceptually derived from his 2004
exhibition Mists, or at least from fragments of that exhibition in which he alluded to the danger of some woods. The
reflection over the fearful and the sick is a constant in his work. Based on the considerable formal attraction of his objects
and characters, Vitali screens some concerns that in principle are hard to link to the splendor of figures. But the sinister
lurks as wolves do, cutting off any possibility for comfort.
Eva Grinstein
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Rosa Velasco R
In La Marcacin del Deseo, Rosa Velasco puts up a sculpture made of bags (super)imposed that form an empty column.
Everything is pure container detached in surface. The edifying solidness is a result of accumulation of flexible matters. That
suspends the notion of erection that is the basis of statuary. Now we are in the dissolution of classifications, entitled by the
postcoital flatness of statuary. Nothing is sustained as before. There, where the symbol is no longer able to sustain itself up, the
attachment, the scattering of formless, disseminating, and elastic matters take place. That implies the intent to regroup the works
according to another type of category much closer to the activities of hanging, piling up and tying up. That implies the
development of an art without certainties that employs unstable, uncertain, flexible materials that set into operation within the
art field, notions such as reversibility, permeability, relativity, etc. In order to sustain the column, it was necessary to pierce each
bag over a pole as a condition of parody-like statuarization of the piece. What is asserted here is the notion of storage as a condition
of recognition of the place whose configuration solves a crisis of provision. A single column would have been enough to indicate
the purpose, that is, provision and especially crisis provision. Given the unmistakable erectablility of statuary, the image of
Courbets The Origin of the World emerges. The point of friction was located in the apparent junction of the image of the
painting and the sound image of the sewing machine. How can we think of re-sewing sex? In direct proportion to sewing the
bag? The mouth has been sewn, by extension. That is the politics that affects the very principle of provision.
Justo Pastor Mellado
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Rulfo
These works appropriate conventional sign used in urban signaling. The first one is an orthogonal plate of the sort used in
traffic for a STOP sign, which instead features a reproduction of the hieroglyph of the Rosetta stone. The other one was
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Sandro Pereira
A great deal of Sandro Pereiras sculpture works materialize their meaning by subverting scale, reducing what we expect
to be huge, enlarging what we expect to be small. The effects of those manipulations over the sizes of his pieces are
hilarious and tender: with Shadow and boxer, a work he made specially for this Biennial, the exaggerated weight of the
figure painted on the wall is what that makes the tiny epoxy boxer visible, just a few centimeters above ground. The
threat is totally fictitious and emerges from the contrast between the sculpture and its beyond, in this case, a black-
painted shape.
Other works by Pereira (the irreverent Tribute to the milanesa steak sandwich; its series of tiny self-portraits in modeling clay
dressed as a superhero or a bather; The groom, a very said character wearing a cutaway suit with rice grains on him; the
elephant in the bazaar, which he installed at arteBA 2005 occupying almost the entire stand of the gallery representing him)
also used the interplay with size, a resource almost unique of a poetics that eludes all mental torsion, all ostentation of genius,
all formalist whining. Pereiras universe feeds on simple shapes and ideas he develops and adjusts as if they were elements of
a sentimental tragicomedy, often loaded with humor and self-references.
Eva Grinstein
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Sergio Meirana
Meirana accedes to the codes of art and installation without the cultural prejudice that traditionally conditions those
representation systems. Trained in a woodcarving workshop at the Industrial School, he was able to transcend the strictly
handcraft possibilities of his trade, creating narrative spaces in which human scale is given by small characters inserted in
contexts of varied nature (usually carried out with recyclable materials).
Meirana operates on a playful attitude and a strong conceptual dose at once, even though the latter is diluted in the allegorical
readings of the distinct scenes.
The language of the little graphic tale materializes sculpturally, making way for the mix of humor and small everyday tragedies.
Gabriel Peluffo Linari
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Siron Franco
Even those who do not recognise the references at the source of Siron Francos installation can immediately see that they are
faced with a dramatic situation: in the presence of the shadows and remains of tragedy. The mattresses on the beds are made
from reinforced concrete. In principle they hint only at the discomfort of those fated to lie on them; knowing its origin,
we shall see they have a more brutal presence. The concrete carries moulds of human bodies, the figure of a dog, sculpted
arms, a hammer and other objects: nine beds from a sinister hospital room. The unhappy scene is multiplied by the
mirrors reflecting the spectators and including us in the drama. Only the bright lighting contrasts with everything
materialised in this room, and allows some distancing dim the lights and we would be in the excess of some kind of
theatrical scene. The light prevents deeper involvement and forces attention to the details. This work already supports
itself alone and already speaks of the misery to which our existence could be condemned, even if we were among the
chosen, through the simple fact of being witness to all the disasters paraded in front of our eyes throughout our lives. And
we do not need to know what this tragedy refers to unfortunately because there are so many each day that we are
anaesthetised and no longer pay attention to them.
The force of this cursed room takes on greater potency when we know the story behind it. In the city of Goinia, in
1987, a humble family of scrap metal dealers were confronted by the criminal and murderous irresponsibility of the
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The multimedia installation entitled Memorial V: Pau Brasil or Uma Cmara Ardente para as rvores Brasileiras concerns a
dramatic subject for contemporary society: the progressive deforestation of the planet. Although this subject has inspired the
creation of numerous ecological groups and civil organisations in recent decades, carrying out actions for protection of species,
the work of this Brazilian artist, who divides her time between Porto Alegre and Barcelona, reasserts the evidence that the
problem of irrational exploitation of nature is not only global, but getting worse.
The first of the three compartments comprising the installation has internally-lit showcases along the sides containing
numerous images of trees and treated timber on transparent backgrounds. In the second room, small marble plaques, similar
to those in cemeteries, present the names of Brazilian trees. In the third space, projected images announce the consummation
by virtual fire of not only virgin nature, but also the cultural products that continue, implacably, to be moved by the patterns
of capitalism. The song of a distant tribe further accentuates the melancholic atmosphere established by awareness of the
irreversible nature of a fatal process.
Divided into three times, this installation also has an historical quality of reusing images from the artists archive collected
over the years, revealing concerns that have been with her since the start of her career. The transparencies of the first room are
in fact old photoliths carefully kept since the 1970s. The work refers equally to the different ways of reproducing images,
including those formed mentally. It thus emphasises the fact that, however de-contextualised they may be, images carry their
historical load, and their material characteristics (such as the support, transparency, thickness, tonality) will always be a
witness of when they are/were produced.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Nick Rands
Waltercio Caldas
The activity of the work of Waltercio Caldas in the sphere of post-constructive Brazilian art history, incorporating the
contribution of neo-concretism and re-discussing its axioms and postulates through a conceptual dialogue, is a side
recognised by everyone who has followed the development of his work for more than two decades. In addition to the cognitive
interrogation of concept, knowledge of this work carries an existential dimension.
In 20th century art, the expressive tendency represented by social criticism, anguish and melancholy, whose masters here
include Segall, Goeldi and Iber Camargo, monopolized the attention of critics and historians on the existential aspects of
contemporary art, and operations like those of Waltercio Caldas are often associated with a purely intellectual approach to
artistic practice. This polarisation was further reinforced by the neo-expressionism of the 1970s and 1980s, when a frequent
pastiche of the powerful expressionist art of the first half of the 20th century was disseminated in a successful manoeuvre on
the European and American markets.
In the project of expanding the field of sight, exploring a purely optical intelligence Waltercios art rarely carries any
embedded rhetorical accompaniment , there is always a residue of scepticism, in which questioning is presented as
something new: the happy doubt. Perverting the positive logic that supports temporal rationality and its paltry praise of what
is customarily called results, these exercises insist on contradicting common sense. Negating the cult of the image and false
generosity in this world sated with figures and poor in reasoning, Waltercios sculptures, in their asceticism, carry a subtle
dose of humour from which comes pleasure. This existential dimension is realised in a chain reaction, in successive enigmas
for the retina, with the promise that if we do not cease to use intelligence it is possible to live with the real, despite its brutality
and apparent absurdity.
Revised extract from Interrogaes construtivas. Published with the title Entre o clssico e o contemporneo in O Estado de
So Paulo, Caderno Cultura, So Paulo, October 24, 1994, and in December of the same year in Waltercio Caldas, So Paulo:
Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Translated by Nick Rands
269
The three-dimensional field of art sculpture would extend beyond traditional statuary from the start of the 20th
century, in the cubist experiments in space and Russian and German constructivism. Alongside these, the experiments of
Duchamp and Dadaism broke all the boundaries with which western art surrounded the art object, and forced reflection on
how the system of power and reverence for the artwork had been established: the transforming function of operations and
manoeuvres still seen today as simple boutades. The institution of art in the secular world of the industrial era had produced
a new religiosity with its gods and demigods the artists , its temples the museums and galleries , its priests critics,
historians, representatives (today, curators) and collectors and its devotional objects the works of art.1
These vanguards were directed against this world, its ideologies and power relations, and towards its dissolution in
a broader world of aesthetic experience. Duchamp and the Dadaists shock desecration of the object corresponded to the
constructivist strategy, which positioned the artist as a producer responsible for conceiving and developing a project, another
intellectual worker in the production chain, with a mission of promoting a true aesthetic symbiosis between art and life,
collaborating towards a better world. In a certain sense, Dadaism and constructivism acted together in various ways. Both
attempted to deconstruct as is said today the concept of art, to displace it and point it in a different direction from fetishist
reverence: the creator becomes the producer and the art object, displaced from its sacred place, is converted into a theoretical
agent and practical contaminator of other products like architecture, and objects from daily life and other activities. To Dadas
apparently irrational iconoclastic actions, there is a corresponding rationalist posture of constructivism. These modern
investigations are responsible for an impressive broadening of the field of sculpture and spatial experience.
Constructivist projects reappeared in Europe after the Second World War particularly in France, despite being
eclipsed by tachism and informalism and took root in Latin America. On our continent, these projects retained some
ideological elements from their Russian and German origins: with them came a certain support for rationalism and the utopia
of aesthetically impregnating life to contribute to a happier world. Art and life would finally be united in works of art, in
architecture, in product design and graphic design, to make life not only more beautiful, but also more practical and free of
superfluous decorative elements. In this new conjuncture, not only would the psychology of form and psychoanalysis feed
the modern theory of art, but the phenomenological investigations of Merleau-Ponty would also be reflected in an aesthetic
that would re-discuss the subjective experiences of perception, particularly spatial perception.
In the Latin American case, it involved materialising in art, and in a project of beautifying life, the concerns of
societies aspiring to industrialisation and entering definitively into the machine age, breaking with their agrarian past and
present founded on a primary-exporting economy. We exported primary products like meat, fruit, tobacco, sugar and coffee,
and imported manufactured or industrialised goods. From the 1930s, in the case of Brazil, we were impeded by replacement
of imports at a higher level of exchange; we exported these primary products, some manufactured, to import factories and
equipment that, little by little, could liberate us from importing consumer durable and no-durable goods. This was the
product of a self-sustaining autarchy developed through protectionist strategies appropriate to a different period from that of
todays free trade. This process was achieved at different levels and intensities in the Latin American countries and is
responsible for the respective differences in the industrial plant in those countries. In the same way, with no direct causal
relationship, the spread and presence of constructivism in the continent differs from country to country, and particularly
marked the artistic production of Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
Constructivism aspired to being a kind of visual Esperanto, in which, independent from national, ethnic or
linguistic boundaries, art would be open to universal understanding based on the abstract vocabulary of geometric forms. It
implied a cosmopolitan awareness in adopting an internationalist vision that would oppose not only adherents of figuration,
but also those who believed that true universality would only be won by valuing local icons: depiction of regional types taken
directly from the human and natural landscape. This confrontation between two diametrically opposed views of art was
highly present in the pioneering period of the 1940s and 1950s, and, incredible as it may seem to a young person, has been
continued to today, often erroneously, by sectarian intellectuals and laypeople supporting populist aesthetics.
If modern works forming true archipelagos, modern islands surrounded by an academic ocean, appeared from the end
of the 19th century, this scenario would change with the constructivist experiments. Their own programmatic character would
cause the projects to sediment a territory more cohesive and consistent to our modernity, upon which would be erected different
Latin American contributions to post-second-world-war art. We therefore have unprecedented, fundamental sculptural experiments
in this (Re)invention of space. The 5th Mercosur Biennial shows some moments from this chapter in Santander Cultural: a way
of examining the continuities and discontinuities that exist in contemporary art in relation to this recent past.
The show includes works by Argentinean, Uruguayan, Brazilian and Mexican artists (list of artists on the first page),
in a selection of works whose conceptual base is the constructive leanings of the 1950s and their developments in Latin
America. They are historical marks that comprise both an important link with contemporary work and can also indicate the
discontinuities. That is, they indicate both the ties that can be traced with recent tradition and the demonstrations of the break
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Notes
1
The fetishism of merchandise, analysed by Marx in Das Kapital, strongly penetrated the symbolic field of paradigmatic values of culture:
those that designated what is and what is not a work of art. It was a counterpart to what had been identified as the reification of social
relations. However, the fetishism of merchandise/reification of social relations opposition is not covered by the subjectivisation/
objectivisation opposition. A more complex ontology is introduced by abstract/concrete when Reason itself is historically analysed by
Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment. [Theodor W. Adorno e Max Horkheimer. Dialtica do Esclarecimento.
Translation by Guido de Almeida. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1985].
Translated by Nick Rands
Amrico Spsito
Montevideo, Uruguay, 1924 - 2005
Five artist books (1966-1985) have been selected that document a theoretical and formal thinking of great graphic and
conceptual density about space and color.
Spsito was a direct disciple to Torres Garca for some time, but soon dropped constructivists formal assumptions,
advancing his masters theoretical reflection from a very personal point of view. In 1995 he received the So Paulo Art
Biennial Arno Award and since then he has redirected his activity towards a theory of geometrical rhythms and towards
the search for a spatiality intrinsic to the weave and the luminiferous nature of color. Based on such theoretical
speculations he develops geometric painting absolutely outside precepts dominant in that movement, while adding to his
painting reflections annotated in notebooks conceived as a sequence of images that attempt to explain his own theory as a
conceptual sequence. The books would be exhibited opened inside special showcases, and they could be gone through
by visitors on a series of screens where all their pages are displayed in digitized form.
Gabriel Peluffo Linari
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Amilcar de Castro
Paraispolis, MG, Brazil, 1920 Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, 2002
Destined to follow his father chief judge career, Amilcar de Castro got his law degree from Belo Horizontes Law School
in 1944. For some time, he worked as a lawyer and held public positions. He had his first contact with art when he
attended classes given by Alberto da Veiga Guignard, who taught at the just-created Free Drawing and Painting Course
in Belo Horizonte. In the same city, he was one of the organizers of an important modern art exhibition, the 1945 Painting
Exhibition. Together with Mary Vieira and Leda Gontijo, at the same school of art located in one of the citys parks, he
studied figurative sculpture with Franz Weissmann.
Under the influence of Max Bills Tripartite Unit, which he knew in 1951, he made his first concretist piece in bronze, which
was eventually selected for the 2nd So Paulo Biennial. In 1955, he started his experiences with steel plates. He took part in
the 1st National Exhibition of Concrete Art in 1956 at So Paulos Museum of Modern Art. From that year on, he worked
as a page designer at Manchete magazine, becoming well known in the area of graphic design. In 1957, he was one of the
members of the team that carried out the important graphic renewal at Jornal do Brasil. He was also one of the signatories of
the Neoconcrete Manifesto, published on Jornal do Brasils Sunday Supplement in 1959. In 1967, having received a travel
award at Rio de Janeiros Modern Art Competition and a scholarship from New Yorks John Simon Guggenheim Foundation,
he went to the United States for a four-year stay. He returned to Brazil in 1972, settling in Belo Horizonte, where he started
working as a visual designer and teacher, even serving as director of the Guignard School from 1974 to 1977.
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Arthur Luiz Piza started his artistic education in 1943, when he studied painting and frescoes with Antonio Gomide.
Living in Paris since the 1950s, he developed an interest in informal art, at the same time that he sought to improve his
techniques of metal prints, aqua fortis, recess printing, aquatint, and dry point. Gradually, his paintings started to be
more geometric and the same procedure was transposed to painting.
After 1957, an association between informalism and constructivism generated works where the wish for ordering and the
plastic power of materials established highly productive conflicts. Then he started to build reliefs based on the association/
arrangement of three-dimensional elements that produced changing sensations in the observer, due to the changes in light
and shadow effects. Associating materials of several natures, he made reliefs with paper, mosaic, sandpaper, sand, plaster,
metal, wood, among others.
His pictorial works have a tactile and vibrant characteristic determined by its irregular surfaces, composed by a large
amount of small geometric elements juxtaposed and superimposed. On the other hand, the changing character provoked
by the incidence of light stresses the volume effects of those geometric shapes that agglutinate over surfaces that are not
always perfectly receptive. In his compositions with small metal triangles on thick and voluminous irregular supports
made of sisal, the dense expressiveness of the support seems to challenge the rationality of geometric elements.
In some cases, smooth surfaces in his works seem to erupt, bringing up a formless mass of geometric constructions that
struggle to keep their own identity. In others, the elements attached to the support work as visual signs that agglomerate
and then draw apart, like living beings that seek their place in a certain space. Some are touchingly delicate and show their
fragility, as though they were challenging their own existence. In his work as a whole, therefore, the paradox persists
between order and chaos, as well as the conflict established by the opposition between distinct constitutions. In sum,
Arthur Luiz Pizas work always shows a situation of instability between natural systems and rational systems, which are
present both in art and in life.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Besides being highly acknowledged for his twisted-frame paintings, which were very bold at the time, Arden Quins
investigations were developed within the sculpture field as well. The Argentinean and Latin American art overview in the 20th
century at MALBA-Costantini Collection dedicates him a preferential place, nurtured by eight pieces produced between
1945 and 1949. The mobile La boule noire (1949), exhibited in this edition of the Mercosur Biennial, is part of that
carefully chosen collection.
A member of the abstract-concrete art movement that fructified in the mid-1940s in Buenos Aires, Arden Quin was one of
the main promoters of the Mad vein, a division of the initial group that had welcomed both the more lyrical and the more
geometrical abstract art. As historian Adriana Laura properly pointed out, that wooden mobile as well as another one called
Mobile or Spheres, in the same collection responds to Quins taste for sci-fi literature and his premonitions on space trips.
In effect, one of the postulates of Mad art, widely publicized through the groups several manifestos, ushered in a new era in
which technological change would substantially transform human life and therefore aesthetic consciousness. In that context,
the mobile can be construed as his colleague Gyula Kosices Hydrospace City for the fantastic exercise of concrete art in its
struggle against non-representation.
Eva Grinstein
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Enio Iommi
Rosario, 1926
Together with Toms Maldonado, Ral Lozza, and Alfredo Hlito, Iommi was a member of the Argentinean concrete art
movement founded in 1945 under the name of Asociacin Arte Concreto-Invencin. That pioneer stage in Argentinean
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Franz Weissmann
Knittelfeld, Austria, 1911 Rio de Janeiro, 2005
Franz Weissmann arrived in Brazil in 1921, settling with his family in the state of So Paulo. He worked in cotton plantations
at the border between the states of So Paulo and Paran for six years. In 1927, he moved with his family to the city of So
Paulo. By the age of 16, he supported himself by teaching Portuguese to immigrants.
Settling in Rio de Janeiro in 1933, he had a brief passage by the Escola Nacional de Belas-Artes. However, he learned
traditional sculpture techniques at the free studio of Polish sculptor August Zamoyski, who gave him lessons from 1942 to
1943. In 1945, Weissman moved to Belo Horizonte. Three years later, after an invitation by Guignard, he started working
at the first school of modern art in town, Escola do Parque, where he remained until 1956. His students included Amilcar
de Castro, Farnese de Andrade, and Mary Vieira.
Radically changing sculptures traditional procedures, Franz Weissmann started dealing with structures, creating continuous
spaces where emptiness was a constitutive part of the works. For the 1st So Paulo Biennial in 1951, he presented a piece that
was rejected by the selection committee: it was the first version of Cubo Vazado, the first concrete sculpture made in Brazil.
In 1955, back to Rio de Janeiro, he became a member of Grupo Frente. In 1958, he received the award Travel Abroad for
his work Torre at the 8th National Modern Art Competition. He was one of the founders of the Neoconcrete Group in 1959.
In the same year, he traveled to Europe where he remained until the end of 1964. In the 1960s, he created the series
Amassados, which had an expressive content never revealed before in his work. He returned to Brazil in 1965 and in the
following year he resumed his experiments with geometric and modular forms.
The work of Franz Weissmann is a crucial chapter in the history of the development of constructivist streams in Brazil,
marking the transition from concretism to neoconcretism in Brazilian art.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Hlio Oiticica
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, 1937 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, 1980
Hlio Oiticica started his art career as Ivan Serpas student at Rio de Janeiros Museu de Arte Moderna in 1954, later becoming a
member of Grupo Frente in 1955-56. He would eventually be one of Brazils most important artists, not only for his creative
ability, but also for his strong tendency to reflective thinking. He was, so to speak, a true artist-thinker, since his practical work and
theoretical analysis were not dissociated.
At the beginning of his career, he worked diligently in exploring the possibilities of the two-dimensional plane, as can be seen in
his metaesquemas. When he became a member of Grupo Neoconcreto in 1959, a series of changes were seen in his work, not only
at the plastic-visual sphere but also at the political and ideological one. Gradually, the issue on the statute/authorship of the work
of art, associated to the publics more active participation, became crucial in Oiticias work. As a result of the expansion of his pictorial
explorations, his spatial reliefs emerged paintings that gain mass and take on thickness that could not be seen before, and show
themselves from all sides.
As an artist who was very attentive to the typical artistic processes of his time, Oiticica created works with distinct materials, including
ephemeral and less noble ones. In the mid-1960s, he introduced the environmental manifestations forerunners to todays
installations, where he used elements of distinct natures, always closely related to Brazilian culture, without ever losing touch with
the languages of international artists. In Tropiclia, from 1967, he used earth, plants, and live birds. In 1968, he carried out the
collective demonstration Apocalipoptese. A few years before, he had already subverted the artistic milieus social practices by
presenting, at an art museum, (MAM/RJ), his Parangols coats worn by members of the Mangueira samba school, which only
existed as artistic objects as they were animated by the dancers steps.
277
Lygia Clark
Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, 1920 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, 1988
Lygia Clark was born in Minas Gerais and moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1947, where she started her artistic apprenticeship
with Burle Marx. In the period 1950-1952, she lived in Paris, when she studied with Fernand Lger, Arpad Sznes, and
Isaac Dobrinsky. Back to Brazil, she was a member of the Frente Group and one of the founders of the Neoconcrete Group.
At the time, her work developed from the organic line to the modulated surfaces and from virtual to real space. Casulos
(Cocoons), from 1959, made of bent metal plates attached to a wall, announced the desire to expand plane into space.
Bichos (Animals), from 1960, are metal sculptures made of plates joined by devices that granted mobility to the pieces.
Two important notions were thus introduced into Brazilian art: the idea of viewers participation in the work of art and the
concept of work of art as a living organism. In 1963, she started Trepantes (Climbers), spiral-shaped sculptures in metal
or rubber that, because of their malleability, could be attached to distinct supports such as wood stems. Her Obras-Moles
(Soft-Works), made with flexible materials, are from 1964, as well as Caminhando (Walking) an individual proposition
that did not incite contemplation, but rather reflective experience, and consisted in cutting a paper strip according to the
principle of Moebius strip.
From 1968 on, she developed an interest in body experiences, in which the senses were activated by the contact with
distinct objects and materials. In those works, the artists role was that of proposing or channeling experiences. That
gave rise to the objects in the 1967 series Roupa-Corpo-Roupa (Clothing-Body-Clothing), and the 1968 Luvas
Sensoriais (Sensory Gloves). The installation A Casa o Corpo: Labirinto (The Home is the Body: Labyrinth), and the
ritual propositions Canibalismo (Cannibalism) and Baba Antropofgica (Anthropophagic Drool), both from 1973,
took the idea of participatory work to the extremes and introduced symbolic data into sensory experiences. In 1976,
there emerged the first Objetos Relacionais (Relational Objects), which led Clark to work on therapeutic practices
towards recovering body memory.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Max Bill
Winterthur, Switzerland, 1908 Berlin, Germany, 1994
Swiss-born Max Bill was a painter, sculptor, and art theoretician. Between 1924 and 1927, he studied at Zurichs School of
Art and Trades, starting his work as a goldsmith. He studied architecture at Dessaus Bauhaus where he had lessons with Klee,
Kandinsky, Schlemmer, Albers, and Moholy-Nagy. In 1932, the encounter with Arp and Mondrian influenced him deeply.
He joined Paris group Abstraction-Cration and was a founder of the group of modern Swiss artists Allianz.
After the 1930s, inspired by Van Doesburg, he developed reflections based on Concrete Art, which was theoretically distinct
from Abstract Art since it did not depend on external phenomena (in concretism there is no process of abstraction from
reality). Based on rules established for each work, he created an impersonal method to make his painting and sculptures. In
1949, he published O pensamento matemtico na arte de nosso tempo, where he proposed the replacement of the artists
imagination by mathematical conception.
In 1944, Max Bill organized the 1st International Exhibition of Concrete Art (Konkrete Kunst, Kunsthalle, Ble). Other
similar exhibitions took place in the following years. In 1951, with Unidade Tripartida, he received the Acquisition Award
at the 1st So Paulo Biennial. The work now belongs to the MAC/USP collection. The presence of Max Bill in Brazil was
decisive for other people to join Concrete Art, such as the important Grupo Ruptura, led by Waldemar Cordeiro, which
worked in So Paulo in the 1950s. Neoconcretism developed in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the same decade was a dissidence
that countered the exacerbated rationalism employed by So Paulo artists.
Max Bills work with educational institutions was also very important. From 1951 to 1956, he served as director of the
renowned Ulm School (Hochshule fr Gestaltung), founded after the Bauhaus model, where he projected buildings that are
masterpieces of international architecture in that period. He was replaced in the position by Argentinean concretist artist
Toms Maldonado. For the importance of his work as a whole and for the numerous exhibitions he organized all over the
world, Max Bill exerted a major influence in disseminating an artistic thinking associated to mathematical thinking.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
278
Ramos belongs to the generation of Uruguayan artists trained at the National School of Fine Arts of Montevideo during the
1950s, who suffered the strong impact of the first So Paulo Art Biennials. In 1959, Ramos even studied in Brazil with
Friedlaender and Iber Camargo.
In the early 1960s, he makes paintings and drawings whose calligraphy can be associated to abstract-expressionist works typical
of the late 1950s. His paintings made since 1965 seem to respond to the representation of Sartrean Nothing, since they are built
on the experiences of formal renunciation, of the desertification of plane based on the predominance of white surfaces.
Still life, dated 1967 and exhibited for the first time at Montevideos General Electric Institute, might be considered a
landmark in terms of sculpture object installation, regarding Uruguayan contemporary art at the time. The work consists
of the paraphernalia of a dinner table, all in one-color. The objects it includes and the table itself are crossed by a white line that
links them, through the floor, to the exterior of the museum space. The sensitive geometry carried out by Nelson Ramos in
his 1960s painting reemerges along his work alternating between plane and space, painting and object. Still life is a typical
reference to spatial conception in 1960s art: critical denial of the visible and nihilistic emptying of everyday universe.
Gabriel Peluffo Linari
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Srgio de Camargo
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1930 1990
Srgio Camargo started his art education when he was still a teenager, at Academia Altamira in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he
studied from 1946 to 1948. There he took lessons from Emilio Pettoruti and Lucio Fontana. Even though he did not take part in
any vanguard group, his interest in Argentinean constructivism started at that time. At the end of the same decade, he traveled to
Europe, where he studied philosophy and knew the work of several sculptors, especially Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian artist
that made a strong impression on him. Back to Brazil, he made his first sculptures: round-shaped figures made in bronze.
He went to live in Paris in the early 1960s. Soon his first works of the series relevos, started. They established a tension
between plane space and volumetric space, with the crucial effects of light over matter. Indeed, those white reliefs and
sculptures are aimed at capturing light. Originated from the combination of several elements whose form is repeated, those
pieces seem to be ordered according to natural laws (as those that make organisms grow). Wooden cylinders arranged over
a plane surface engage a dynamic geometrism that destabilizes the fundaments of constructivist reality. Some of those reliefs,
which even acquire dramatic characteristics, include only two large cylindrical elements that are projected onto space.
The pieces that grew in volume generated those that were projected from the wall, definitely assuming their sculpture
character. Many of them were made in marble a noble material per excellence. Therefore, the artists would once again be
dealing with sculptures more traditional procedures and materials. But he did it by taking the technical challenge associated
to each pieces formal rigor to extremes. The numerous public pieces Camargo made in Brazil since his return in the 1970s
are expansions of smaller pieces exposed to natural light.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
Ulises Carrin
Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1941- Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1989
In spite of being a visual poet barely known by the Mexican public, Ulises Carrin has managed to develop a unique
set of ideas, from the very first artist books he published at the Beau Geste Press (England) in the early 70s. Martha
Hellion, Carrins lifetime friend and keeper of the most substantial part of his legacy, writes: Ulises Carrins activities
developed beyond lineal literature and focused on the spatial possibilities of language, the results of which flowed into the
production of Artist Books. His work as a coordinator and editor led him to develop his concept of art as an activity within
society, as opposed to art as the creation of an artistic work. In this context, he published El Nuevo Arte de Hacer Libros,
(The New Art of Making Books), a theoretical text in which he sums up ideas and concepts that have established the
foundations of a contemporary artistic production that has led to international prominence.
Adolfo Ramrez, a constant blogger, hits the mark when he writes: (His is) a reflection on writing and the forms it takes,
about author and reader, language and literature. The style is aphoristic. The approach is in the best sense of the word
phenomenological The clearness of his ideas was historically ahead of what his conclusions seem to anticipate:
digital literature. It starts with a few axioms. Like all axioms, they seem obvious, but they lighten the horizon:
A writer (Carrin ponders), differently from popular opinion, does not write books. A writer writes texts.
And then he dwells on postulates that make me think of the post-Gutenberg era: In the old art, writers do not judge
themselves responsible for the true book. They write texts. The rest is done by servants, craft people, workers, others.
279
Willys de Castro
Uberlndia, MG, Brazil, 1926 - So Paulo, SP, Brazil, 1988
Born in Minas Gerais, Willys de Castro was one of the most versatile Brazilian artists: a painter, printer, designer,
scenographer, and costumer, and one of the pioneers of graphic design in Brazil. He moved to So Paulo in 1941, when he
started his drawing studies with Andr Fort. Between 1944 and 1945, he worked as a technical designer. In 1948 he
graduated in Industrial Chemistry.
In the early 1950s he made his first geometric paintings and drawings, close to the concretist aesthetic. With Hrcules
Barsotti, he founded Estdio de Projetos Grficos, working strongly as a graphic designer. He took part in the movement Ars
Nova and worked on theater stages settings e costumes. He was a co-founder of the magazine Teatro Brasileiro in 1955.
In 1958 he became one of the most notable members of Grupo Neoconcreto. Between 1959 and 1962 he produced the
series Objetos Ativos, which, like other neoconcrete works such as Oiticicas reliefs and Lygia Clarks modulated surfaces,
challenged the use of the canvas surface as a support for pictorial language. Constituted by narrow wooden pieces orthogonally
attached to the wall (whose sides are larger than the front plane), force the viewer to look for a long time, who is never able
to see the whole at once, with all its parts.
In the 1960s he worked in graphic design for the textile industry, creating patterns for fabrics. He was one of the founders
in 1963, of the Novas Tendncias Art Gallery, when the interests of concrete artists were diversifying. In the 1980s, he
created Pluriobjetos constructions made in wood, metal, stainless steel, and other materials, which explored the tension
between instability and stability, creating challenging situations for the viewer. Pluriobjetos are certainly pieces that belong to
the repertoire of Brazilian contemporary art and establish a connection to the works of younger generations.
Neiva Bohns
Translated by Roberto Cataldo Costa
280
Gaudncio Fidelis
In the context of this Biennial, with a profile restricted to artists from Latin America and, more specifically, Mercosur,
it suddenly seems strange to be writing about works that, in principle, do not seem to be part of that world. Perhaps this context
in fact impregnates the realm of writing. I even wonder if the voice does not develop a distinct territoriality beyond the wishes
of the writer. Living between two cities for almost eight years, my sensation of territory seems dislocated, undone, to the same
extent as the sensation that establishing boundaries stifles thought, that territoriality is no more or less than the expression of
limitations of language in the broadest sense of the term, and that the relationships we often establish between language, objects
and individuals are the expression of a politics of relations unnecessary in the field of art, but which also seems inevitable in the
constitution of the geography we construct and from which we can never be freed.
The specificity of the works of the four artists in this exhibition causes them to form fields of tension between notions
of space and territory. If space is fluid and dynamic, territory is defined and political. Our perception of both is, above all,
mediated by our cultural limitations, most often constituted in the formation of subjectivities. The artists brought together
in this exhibition are of different generations, and the conception of space and memory in the work of each is highly
distinctive. The title of this text refers to the view that the topographical characteristics of these works and their placement in
a Biennial with a regional profile point to the possibility of producing a specific reflexive space which will acquire a certain
permanence despite the ephemeral nature of the event. Put didactically, its topographical aspect and how it functions years
later when remembering the works that were there. And much of what was experienced though them will remain as residue
in the memories of those who saw them. Being mediated by the cultural experience of each person, this memory is specified
and localized according to empathy and interactivity with the works in a specific time and place.
For many of us who experienced, interacted, and visited this exhibition during the 5th Biennial, these works enter
our minds and are situated more or less intensely in our memories. But that is not all. This specificity located by the memory
also exists linked to an internal view of these works and the raison detre of each in their aesthetic questions and power coming
from a force field determined by the relationships of time and space, determined by the work. If, in The Empty Museum the
spectator is transported to another place where the reference to a space they have not experienced is physically placed before
him or her, causing a physical sensation, to the extent that space is in fact sensed physically, the excessive emptiness positioned
a posteriori is exactly the evidence that the memory of what existed there is as strong as its actual presence.2 It is difficult for
this memory not to be politicised, however. If not through formal relationships then through the references of the space to
which it refers. Sound, image and the physical space are, in this case, just elements that collaborate to imprint a specific
impression on our memory of the objects and the space around us.
Sound, which exists in each of these installations, albeit differently, has rarely been seen as an autonomous form for
artistic practice. Similar to video art, which although recent, now has a more established history, sound still remains a form
dependent on supposedly related fields, often being a tool applied to other areas of practice. The inexistence until now of a
history of sound as audible art has relegated its importance to rare moments of inclusion in the history of art, its existence
remaining restricted to sparse insertions that give it a marginal position in relation to other art forms.
In 1913 the Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo, created a series of instruments aimed at reproducing the sounds made
by the process of industrialisation. This event produced a change in the way sound was considered. Music could no longer
exclusively articulate the experience of modern life. Today however, noise reigns triumphant in the field of contemporary
mans sensibility. For his part, Russolo initiated a complete subversion of musical tradition and established what would,
some years later, allow for the autonomy of sound in the field of art. Forty years later, John Cage produced a work entitled
The sounds of the world. This piece is the dividing mark that definitively erases the line between music and noise. For 4
minutes 33 seconds, a performer sits at the piano and does absolutely nothing. The sounds of the world were definitively
incorporated into the work of art. Sound is intimately linked to memory. Exactly because, seconds later that is where it will
remain on dissipating into its immateriality.
Between 1999 and 2002, Stephen Vitiello recorded the sound of one of the World Trade Center towers in New
York.3 As the windows could not be opened, the artist fixed microphones to the glass to hear the body and soul of the
building. Taking part in the WTC study programme, he underwent the isolation imposed by the place from where the city
could be seen through thick glass windows. The history of the World Trade Centre after 9/11, it could be said, became an
archive of gigantic proportions. However, it is exactly in this immeasurable volume of information that the existence of this
record of the memory of the building seems to acquire significant importance. I am always interested in bringing
background sound into the foreground, in bringing an awareness to a sound that you might not otherwise hear. And to
change the way you perceive a space based on the presence of sound, said Vitiello in an interview.4 So we know that the artist
seeks to emphasize the physical and material presence of sound. In works like WTC, the pervasive characteristic of the site-
specific of memory, as I refer to it in this text, seems clear. If on one hand we cannot think of sound as a category underlying
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Notes
1
David Byrnes character in the closing scene of the film True Stories (1986).
2
The 9/11 memorial, entitled Reflecting Absence, seeks not only to reflect on the absence of that architectural site, but also on the close
link with its occupants who died in the tragedy. The absence, or presence two sides of the same coin can be represented in radically
different ways. Invariably, even in purely formal works, this representation is always laden with a strong political nature. In part because
the absence or presence of things is always established in a contiguous relationship with the materiality of the body. If on one hand a
memorial like 9/11, promotes the memory of a number of people affected by the tragedy, on the other we should not forget that it involves
significant argument about the type of history we really want to remember, and whom, in the final instance will be remembered. No
memorial can be separated from a background of political disputes around who and how it represents its subjects.
3
The work, entitled World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, was produced when the artist was taking part in an artist
in residence programme on the 91st floor of Tower One in 1999
4
Interview with Brian Boucher, The Things BBS, July 1, 2002.
5
Stephen Vitiello, quoted in Xavier Erkizia, On the Trail of Hidden Sounds, Stephen Vitiello, Zehar, n 50 (2003).
6
Inaudible frequencies sent from the loudspeakers, which thus vibrate with physical energy so that this energy can be seen instead of heard.
7
Statement by the Artist, unpublished, August 30th, 2005. E-mail to the author.
8
Stephen Vitiello, Tetrasomia, Interview by Sara Tucker for the Dia Center, September 2000.
9
Idem.
10
Until 1991, Yugoslavia was a nation consisting of six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and
Macedonia. Serbia was subsequently divided into two autonomous regions: Kosovo and Vojvodina. Today each republic of the former
Yugoslavia speaks its own language, but they are all Slavic languages.
11
Marina Abramovic: interview with Mary Jane Jacob, in Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob
(eds.) (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2004), 188.
12
The article by Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, first published in 1975, based essentially on a Freudian and
Lacanian standpoint, was criticised for not leaving a space for the female spectator. It was however the first to reveal the implications of
a patriarchal perspective in which cinema was implicated. Published in Feminism and Film Theory, Constance Penley (ed.) (New York and
London: Routledge, 1988), 57-68.
13
Pierre Coulibeuf, Transversalit et film-simulacre: Le cinma dans le champ des pratiques artistiques, unpublished.
14
In addition to these films, Pierre Coulibeuf s, Balkan Baroque (1999), Les Guerries de la Beaut (2002), Lost Paradise (2002), Demon
du Passage (1995), Klossowski Peitre Exorciste (1987-1988), Michel Butor Mbile (2000), Amour Neutre (2005) and Cest de Lart
(1993) were shown in the Directions in the New Space vector in the Sala P.F. Gastal at the Usina do Gasmetro.
15
In Between, in Pierre Coulibeuf: Le demon du passage (France: Ministre des Affaires trangres e ditions Yallow Now(Blgica)), 105.
16
Boris Groys and Ilya Kabakov: A Dialogue on Installations, in Ilya Kabakov-Das Leben der Fliegen (Kln: Edition Kantz, 1992), 259.
17
Idem, 258. Boris Groys and Ilya Kabakov: A Dialogue on Installations. Kabakovs work began to attract international attention from
1988, when he moved to the west. Kabakovs partnership with Emilia, whom he would marry in 1992, started in 1989. Since then they
have both worked on several installation projects.
18
Ilya Kabakov, Public Projects or the Spirit of a Place (Milano: Charta, 2001), 23.
19
Passacaglia, by Johann Sebastian Bach, was composed in C minor for the organ in 1717 and it is catalogued as one of his great organ
preludes and fugues. The passacaglia format developed as a keyboard genre at the start of the baroque period.
20
Ilya Kabakov, On the Total Installation (Germany: Kantz Verlag, 1995), 245.
21
Boris Groys, The Movable Cave, or Kabakovs Self-memorials, in Ilya Kabakov (London: Phaidon, 1998), 63.
22
Rob de Graaf, Antje von Graevenitz, The overwinniing op hep materialisme: Vraaggesprek met Harald Szeeman, Archis, 3 (1988), 9.
23
Boris Groys, The Movable Cave, or Kabakovs Self-memorials, in Ilya Kabakov (London: Phaidon, 1998), 74.
24
Published on www.iberecamargo.org.
Translated by Nick Rands
286
Gaudncio Fidelis
When the possibility arose of bringing Ilya and Emilia Kabakovs, The Empty Museum to the 5th Mercosur Visual
Arts Biennial within the Frontiers of Language exhibition, it occurred to me that nothing would be more significant than
having, within the context of this exhibition, a work so emblematic of the paradigmatic situation in which the existence of the
work of art is determined. We know that, in the final instance, the museum institutionalises and canonises certain segments
of artistic production. In the same way, it is the museum that establishes the parameters of institutionalisation. A work that
does not pass through its doors rarely manages to find its hoped for place in the restricted world of institutional legitimation,
which implies determining its artistic status in a context in which this work circulates and accumulates value.
The Museum is the great institutional invention of the 19th century, and with it, the discipline of art history. Under
its roof, according to the conception of Andr Malraux, in his Muse imaginaire,1 the principal intention would be to
standardise modern production, re-inscribing it into an autonomous view in which the works, having been removed from
their habitat, would be disconnected from their context, thus enabling their existence in a logical line of development to
which other works could be added. For Malraux, this first phase would constitute a significant attempt at constructing a series
of paradigms from which art would never be released, defined as a significant attack on its constitutive nature. The works
would later return to the public domain, not just because of their visibility in the space of the museum, but fundamentally
through reproduction of their images through the various resources of historiographical dissemination, of which the main
ones are art books. In the final instance, as Douglas Crimp wrote: [The] museum consists of all those works of art that can
be submitted to mechanical reproduction and, thus, to the discursive practice that mechanical reproduction has made
possible: art history. 2 We know today that this entry of the works into the museum space was shown to be extremely
problematic and an example of the inescapable condition of artistic production, whose legitimation depends on what we
know as museological institutionalisation.
Before being centres for production of knowledge, museums are places of passage. The attempt to bring spectators
into the museum space, capturing their attention, has long been one of the objectives of museum institutions. For no other
reason has it been a popular tendency in museums to put benches in front of the works of art. In most cases they have no
backrest, which makes them into places for temporary rest.3 However, the benches are not there only for the visitors comfort:
they are there fundamentally to call attention to the fact that it is a space for contemplation, thus being signs to act upon the
will of the spectator. In the 5th Biennial, Sandra Cintos work included an element which is almost a stylisation of these
mechanisms in the form of a bed. It served as a resting place for contemplating the painting, while at the same time being an
integral element of the work. In other cases what we typically have are benches for a brief rest on the route of the exhibition
visit. Ilya and Emilia Kabakovs The Empty Museum, in contrast, has comfortable, upholstered sofas that enable the visitor to
pleasantly relax in that space while contemplating the emptiness. An excess of attention begins to take over the spectator, who
becomes more aware each moment of the impact imposed by the museum space when confronted by the opposite of its
institutional force, or rather, the absence of anything to be institutionalised.
Under constant political attack for its congenital complicity in 19th century imperialism, the museum would historically
become a battlefield where the most diverse platforms and agendas would be unfolded. The Empty Museum thus calls attention
to the force of the museum in a system eager for institutionalisation of its works. It strengthens the awareness that such
institutionalisation takes place in the constant and systematic practice of the works circulation in the museum space, and by the
attacks made by the strategies of approaching it, systematically re-contextualising it in the actual museum space. The Empty
Museum is therefore an emblematic work in its approach to the ideological issues of the museum space and, at the same time, a
work of undeniable poetic force. It is a work the exhibition entitled Histories of Art and Space could not neglect to include.
Notes
1
(Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
2
The End of Painting, October N 16 (Fall, 1981). Later published in Douglas Crimp, On The Museum Ruins (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1993).
3
This question is dealt with in Comments on Seating, in Tate Gallery Visitor Audit Mini Survey Report, Lord Cultural Resources
Planning and Management, 1994.
Translated by Nick Rands
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288
Vice-Presidente/ Vicepresidente/Vice-President
Justo Werlang
Diretores/ Directores/Directors
Ana Maria Luz Pettini
Andra Druck
ngela Baldino
Beatriz Johannpeter
Carlos Henrique Coutinho Schmidt
Joo Osmar Hoffmann
Jos Paulo Soares Martins
Maristela Bairros Schmidt
Renato Nunes Vieira Rizzo
Rodrigo Vontobel
Srgio Antnio Saraiva
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Artistas/ Artistas/Artists
Artista Homenageado/Artista Homenageado/Artist of Honour - Amilcar de Castro (Brasil) Da Escultura Instalao/De
la Escultura a la Instalacin/From Sculpture to Installation - Afonso Tostes (Brasil), Alejandra Andrade (Bolvia), Alessandra
Vaghi (Brasil), Angelo Venosa (Brasil), Antonio Manuel (Brasil), Artur Lescher (Brasil), Bettina Brizuela (Paraguai), Carlos
Fajardo (Brasil), Csar Martnez (Mxico), Dominique Serrano (Chile), Einar de la Torre e Jamex de la Torre (Mxico),
Elaine Tedesco (Brasil), Ernesto Neto (Brasil), Fernando Lindote (Brasil), Iole de Freitas (Brasil), Iran do Esprito Santo
(Brasil), Jac Leirner (Brasil), Jos Resende (Brasil), Laura Vinci (Brasil), Leandro Tartaglia (Argentina), Lucia Koch (Brasil),
Marcelo Calla (Bolvia), Marcelo Silveira (Brasil), Mariela Leal (Chile), Mario Sagradini (Uruguai), Nelson Felix (Brasil),
Osvaldo Salerno (Paraguai), Pablo Vargas Lugo (Mxico), Patricio Faras (Brasil), Paz Carvajal Garca (Chile), Raquel
Schwartz (Bolvia), Rivane Neuenschwander (Brasil), Roman Ariel Vitali (Argentina), Rosa Velasco R (Chile), Rulfo
(Uruguai), Sandro Pereira (Argentina), Sergio Meirana (Uruguai), Siron Franco (Brasil), Vera Chaves Barcellos (Brasil),
Waltercio Caldas (Brasil) A (Re)inveno do Espao/La (Re)invencin del Espacio/The (Re)invention of Space - Amrico
Spsito (Brasil), Amilcar de Castro (Brasil), Arthur Luiz Piza (Brasil), Carmelo Arden Quin (Argentina), Enio Iommi
(Argentina), Franz Weissmann (Brasil), Hlio Oiticica (Brasil), Lygia Clark (Brasil), Max Bill (Sua), Nelson Ramos
(Uruguai), Srgio Camargo (Brasil), Ulises Carrin (Mxico), Willys de Castro (Brasil) A Persistncia da Pintura/
Persistncia de la Pintura/The Persistence of Painting - Adriana Varejo (Brasil), Antonio Dias (Brasil), Benjazmn Ocampos
(Paraguai), Bernardo Krasniansky (Paraguai), Boris Viskin (Mxico), Camilo Yez (Chile), Carlos Colombino (Paraguai),
Carlos Pasquetti (Brasil), Carlos Vergara (Brasil), Carlos Zilio (Brasil), Clia Euvaldo (Brasil), Daniel Feingold (Brasil),
Daniel Senise (Brasil), Dudi Maia Rosa (Brasil), Eduardo Cardozo (Uruguai), Eduardo Sued (Brasil), Elizabeth Jobim
(Brasil), Fbio Miguez (Brasil), Franco Aceves Humana (Mxico), Germana Monte-Mr (Brasil), Gisela Waetge (Brasil),
Jos Bechara (Brasil), Juan Tessi (Argentina), Karin Lambrecht (Brasil), Maria Lucia Cattani (Brasil), Mariano Molina
(Argentina), Niura Machado Bellavinha (Brasil), Nuno Ramos (Brasil), Patricia Israel (Chile), Sandra Cinto (Brasil)
Experincias Histricas do Plano/Experincias Historicas del Plano/Historical Experiences of the Plane - Abraham Palatnik
(Brasil), Alfredo Volpi (Brasil), Alusio Carvo (Brasil), Dcio Vieira (Brasil), Geraldo de Barros (Brasil), Hrcules Barsotti
(Brasil), Iber Camargo (Brasil), Ivan Serpa (Brasil), Juan Mel (Argentina), Luiz Sacilotto (Brasil), Manuel Espnola
Gomez (Uruguai), Maria Leontina (Brasil), Maria Luisa Pacheco (Bolvia), Matilde Perez (Chile), Milton Dacosta (Brasil),
Mira Schendel (Brasil), Rubem Ludolf (Brasil), Waldemar Cordeiro (Brasil), Washington Barcala (Uruguai) Direes no
Novo Espao/Direcciones em el Nuevo Espacio/Directions in the New Space - Adriana Bustos (Argentina), Alessandra
Sanguinetti (Argentina), Alonso Yez (Chile), Bia Medeiros (Brasil), Carlos Amorales/Nuevos Ricos (Mxico), Claudia
Casarino (Paraguai), Claudia Missana (Chile), Daisy Xavier e Clia Freitas (Brasil), Diana Domingues (Brasil), Elcio
Rossini (Brasil), Elvira Santamara (Mxico), Enrica Bernardelli (Brasil), Enrique Aguerre (Uruguai), Enrique Zamudio
(Chile), Ensamble Cumshort (Chile), Erick Beltran (Mxico), Fernando Llanos (Mxico), Fernando Melo (Chile), Fredi
Casco (Paraguai), Geopolio m7 red (Argentina), Gonzalo Mezza (Chile), Grupo Logo (Uruguai), Guillermo Gmez-Pea
(Mxico), Jacqueline Lacasa (Uruguai), Jalton Moreira (Brasil), Javiera Torres (Chile), Joaquin Sanchez (Bolvia), Jorge
Francisco Soto (Uruguai), Laura Erber (Brasil), Lazo (Chile), Lenora de Barros (Brasil), Manuel Rocha Iturbide (Mxico),
Manuela Viera-Gallo (Chile), Marcelo Grosman (Argentina), Marcos Chaves (Brasil), Mariana Castillo Deball (Mxico),
Mauricio Guillen (Mxico), Michelle Letelier (Chile), Miguel Rio Branco (Brasil), Milton Marques (Brasil), Narda
Alvarado (Bolvia), Natascha De Cortillas (Chile), Nelbia Romero (Uruguai), Nstor Olhagaray (Chile), Oscar Miguel
Bonilla Lasalvia (Uruguai), Pablo Leon de la Barra (Mxico), Paola Caroca (Chile), Patricio Crooker (Bolvia), Paulo Jares
(Brasil), Paulo Vivacqua (Brasil), Paz Encina (Paraguai), Rainer Krause (Chile), Renato Heuser (Brasil), Ricardo Migliorisi
(Paraguai), Silvia Rivas (Argentina), Sol Mateo (Bolvia), Thiago Rocha Pitta (Brasil), Tunga (Brasil), Yael Rossemblut
(Chile) Transformaes do Espao Pblico/Transformaciones del Espacio Pblico/Transformations of the Public Space -
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Administrao/ Administracin/Management
Coordenao/ Coordinacin/Coordinator
Volmir Luiz Gilioli
Assistente da Coordenao/ Asistente de Coordinacin/Assistant to Coordinator
Joo Boldori e Waldyr Martins Messa
Tesouraria e Contabilidade/ Tesorera y Contabilidad/Treasury and Accounting
Luisa Schneider e/and Teresinha Abruzzi Pimentel
Compras/ Compras/Procurement
Suzana Marques
Secretria Executiva/ Secretaria Ejecutiva/Executive Secretary
Adriana Stiborski
Equipe/ Equipo/Staff
Bruno dos Santos Ortiz, Cristiano Martins B. Schutt, Dborah Denise Braga, Diego Poschi Vergottini, Everton Santana
Silva, Hamilton Martins Jardim, Tanira Lessa Flores Soares, Tatiana Machado Madella
Coordenao de Captao de Recursos/ Coordinacin de Captacin de Recursos/Fundraising Coordination
Marta Magnus
Assistncia Operacional/ Asistencia Operativa/Operational Assistance
Brbara Moser, Daniela Lopez Alves, Marta Petry Volkart
Ncleo de Documentao e Pesquisa/ Ncleo de Documentacin e Investigacin/Documentation and Research Centre
Coordenao/Coordinacin/Coordination
Fernanda Ott
Assistente/Asistente/Assistant
Ana Paula Freitas Madruga
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292
293
Equipe Parceiros V
Parceiros oluntrios/ Equipo de Colaboradores Voluntarios/Volunteers Partners Staff
Voluntrios/
Desenvolvendo a Cultura do Trabalho Voluntrio Organizado no Rio Grande do Sul
294
Publicaes/ Publicaciones/Publications
Coordenao e Produo Editorial/ Coordinacin y Produccin Editorial/Editorial Coordination and Production
Rafael Rachewsky
Apoio/ Apoyo/Support
Liza Szabo e/and Iara Freiberg - Arte 3
Design Grfico/ Diseo Grfico/Graphic Design
ngela Fayet e/and Janice Alves
Reviso para o Portugus/ Revisin de Portugues/Portuguese Proofreading
Elisngela Rosa dos Santos
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Agradecimentos/ Agradecimientos/Acknowledgments
Autoridades/ Autoridades/Government Authorities
Luiz Incio Lula da Silva
Presidente do Brasil/Presidente de Brasil/President of Brazil
Nstor Carlos Kirchner
Presidente da Argentina/Presidente de Argentina/President of Argentina
Eduardo Rodrguez Veltz
Presidente da Bolvia/Presidente de Bolivia/President of Bolivia
Ricardo Lagos Escobar
Presidente do Chile/Presidente de Chile/President of Chile
Vicente Fox Quesada
Presidente do Mxico/Presidente de Mxico/President of Mexico
Nicanor Duarte Frutos
Presidente do Paraguai/Presidente de Paraguay/President of Paraguay
Tabar Vzquez
Presidente do Uruguai/Presidente de Uruguay/President of Uruguay
Celso Amorim
Ministro das Relaes Exteriores/Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores/Minister of Foreign Relations
Gilberto Gil
Ministro da Cultura/Ministro de Cultura/Minister of Culture
Fernando Haddad
Ministro da Educao/Ministro de Educacin/Minister of Education
Jos Henrique Paim Fernandes
Presidente FNDE - Fundo Nacional de Desenvolvimento da Educao/Presidente FNDE - Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo de la Educacin/President of FNDE - The
National Fund for the Development of Education
Mrcio Augusto Freitas de Meira
Secretrio de Patrimnio, Museus e Artes Plsticas/Secretario de Patrimonio, Museos y Artes Plsticas/Secretary of Heritage, Museums, and Arts
Anglica Salazar Pessoa Mesquita
Secretria de Fomento e Incentivo Cultura/Secretaria de Fomento e Incentivo a la Cultura/Cultural Incentive Secretary
Germano Rigotto
Governador do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul/Gobernador del Estado de Rio Grande do Sul/Rio Grande do Sul State Governor
Jos Fogaa
Prefeito de Porto Alegre/Alcalde de Porto Alegre/Mayor of Porto Alegre
Roque Jacoby
Secretrio de Estado da Cultura do Rio Grande do Sul/Secretario de Estado de Cultura de Rio Grande do Sul/Rio Grande do Sul State Secretary of Culture
Jos Alberto Rus Fortunati
Secretrio de Estado da Educao do Rio Grande do Sul/Secretario de Estado de Educacin de Rio Grande do Sul/Rio Grande do Sul State Secretary of Education
Sergius Gonzaga
Secretrio Municipal de Cultura de Porto Alegre/Secretario Municipal de Cultura de Porto Alegre/Porto Alegre Municipal Secretary of Culture
Maril Fontoura de Medeiros
Secretria Municipal de Educao de Porto Alegre/Secretaria Municipal de Educacin de Porto Alegre/Porto Alegre Municipal Secretary of Education
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Embaixadas/ Embajadas/Embassies
Juan Pablo Lohl
Embaixador da Argentina/Embajador de Argentina/Argentinean Ambassador
Edgar Camacha Omiste
Embaixador da Bolvia/Embajador de Bolivia/Bilivian Ambassador
Osvaldo Puccio Huidobro
Embaixador do Chile/Embajador de Chile/Chilean Ambassador
Cecilia Soto Gonzlez
Embaixadora do Mxico/Embajadora de Mxico/Mexican Ambassador
Luis Gonzlez Arias
Embaixador do Paraguai/Embajador de Paraguay/Paraguayan Ambassador
Pedro Humberto Vaz Ramela
Embaixador do Uruguai/Embajador de Uruguay/Uruguayan Ambassador
Agradecimentos Especiais/ Agradecimientos Especiales/Special Acknowledgments
Tarso Genro, Cecilia Soto Gonzlez, Gloria Raquel Bender, Mrcio Souza, Raul Randon.
Diretores de Espaos Museolgicos Associados/ Directores de Espacios Museolgicos Asociados/Directors of Associated
Museological Institutions
Ana Maria Luz Pettini
Coordenadora de Artes Plsticas - SMC - Prefeitura de Porto Alegre/Coordinator of Visual Arts/Director
Liliana Magalhes
Diretora do Santander Cultural/Director/Director
Luiz Alberto H. Gusmo
Diretor Adjunto do Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul/Director/Director
Manoel Cludio Rodrigues de Borba
Diretor do Museu de Comunicao Social Hiplito Jos da Costa/Director/Director
Marli Amado de Araujo
Diretora do Museu de Arte Contempornea do Rio Grande do Sul/Director/Director
Paulo Csar Brasil do Amaral
Diretor do Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli/Director/Director
Ricardo Coelho
Diretor da Usina do Gasmetro/Director/Director
Voltaire Schilling
Diretor do Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul/Director/Director
Agradecimentos Gerais/ Agradecimientos Generales/General Acknowledgements
Alexandre Brasil, Alfi Vivern, Alfredo Aquino, Ana Maria Godini Germani, Andr Luiz Oliveira, Beto Felcio, Carlos
Alberto Abbud, Cezar Prestes, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes CONACULTA, Mxico, Coordenao de
Artes Plsticas da Prefeitura de Porto Alegre, Discurso Editorial, Empresa Pblica de Transporte e Circulao/EPTC, Porto
Alegre, Ferreira Gullar, Franz Manata, Franklyn de Mattos, Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, Gesto Grfico Galeria de Arte,
Imprensa Oficial de Minas Gerais, Instituto Cultural Ita, So Paulo, Joo Vargas Penna, Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro),
Jornal Folha de So Paulo, Jornal Estado de Minas (Belo Horizonte), Jornal O Estado de So Paulo, Jornal Zero Hora (Porto
Alegre), Lemos de S Galeria de Arte (Belo Horizonte), Lus Edegar Costa, Manoel Macedo Galeria de Arte, Marilia Razuk
Galeria de Arte, Mrcio Teixeira, Mariza Machado Coelho, Milton Meira do Nascimento, Museu de Arte Contempornea do
Paran, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro,
Museu de Comunicao Social Hiplito Jos da Costa, Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, Newton Silva , Nuno Ramos,
Renata Rizzotto, Rodrigo Mitre, Rodrigo Moura, Santander Cultural (Porto Alegre), Secretaria de Estado da Cultura do Rio
Grande do Sul, Secretaria Municipal da Cultura de Porto Alegre, Secretaria Municipal de Meio Ambiente de Porto Alegre,
Secretaria Municipal de Obras e Viaes de Porto Alegre, Silvia Cintra Galeria de Arte, TV SENAC/SP, Usina do Gasmetro
(Porto Alegre), Victor Almeida, Vtor Liberman e/and Yanet Aguilera.
Colees/ Colecciones/Collections
Instituies/ Instituciones/Institutions
Esplio de Amilcar de Castro Instituto Amilcar de Castro e Fundao Iber Camargo (Porto Alegre), Museo de Arte
Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Argentina/Malba), Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre), Museu da Comuni-
cao Social Hiplito Jos da Costa (Porto Alegre), Museu de Arte Contempornea de Niteri Coleo Joo Sattamini,
Museu de Arte Contempornea da Universidade de So Paulo, Museu de Arte Contempornea do Rio Grande do Sul, Museo
de Arte Contemporneo de Rosario (Argentina), Museu de Arte da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte), Museu de Arte do Rio
Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, Museo del
Barro (Paraguay, Museu Mrcio Teixeira (Dom Silvrio-MG), Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro), Museo
Provincial de Bellas Artes Emilio Caraffa (Crdoba, Argentina), Pinacoteca do Estado de So Paulo, Prefeitura Municipal de
Brusque-SC.
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