PUTTING HINGES ON CONTEMPORARY ART Tadeu Chiarelli

'If you dream of clouds", 1991 Embroidery, 46 x 36 cm Museu da Arte Moderna de São Paulo Photo Eduardo Brandão

____A significant part of the international art produced since the end of World War II may be characterized by its progressive detachment form subjectivity and from the expression of the artist's self, as well as by its heading to a persistent appropriation of an artificial and anonymous productive logic typical of industrial and post-industrial societies, and its most evident sign. The use of modular elements, the serial nature and impersonal character of pieces and images transformed into icons are the trademark of these productions. This process can be observed in certain trends that first came up and/ or were developed in the United States before going international. In their endeavor to break with the notion of art as a way to recreate the world through self-expression and traditional composition rules, these artists conceived their works based on the structure proposed by the gestalt of the modules they employed. Post-pictorial abstraction, Pop Art and Minimal Art (and its more recurrent heirs) have in common the appropriation of a serial, modular logic. Therefore, juxtaposed color stripes are equivalent to Marilyn Monroe's photo repeated numberless times that, in turn, follows the same basic reasoning of a work consisting of bricks placed other beside the other, or of a vacuum sweeper placed nest to another. ____In opposition and at the same time cessation of this trend, a production was developed that sought to emphasize the physical and/ or chemical properties of natural or semi-industrialized materials with little or no intervention by the artist. Rope, rubber, lead and glass were investigated in terms of their endurance capacity in space and time. To tear, rupture, twist and throw - all of them precise and resolute actions inflicted on or against the material - were a must in this tendency. ____In the earlier trends (which for greater convenience could be classified as "Minimalist") as well as in the latter ("Post-Minimalism"), the artwork's authorship is subjected to an action that, despite being assumed by the artist, has not been delivered by him/ her. The tone of the work's structure is lent by the module or, in the case of Post- Minimalism, by the material itself. II ____Upon reflecting about a significant portion of the Brazilian art production, one realizes that the logic at its base is not the same that props the U.S. and international productions described above. If in the United States, Europe and Japan the industrial society provides the base for the artist's action on the world, in this Brazilian art production the elements of a pre-industrial logic are precisely those that assume the greatest importance. ____If works by Carl Andre and Jeff Koons render explicit an extraneous intelligence that they merely appropriate in an operation that ultimately recovers Duchamp's concept of ready-made, Luiz Hermano, Efrain Almeida, Shirley Paes Leme and Edith Derdyk experience the "handcraft" intelligence that backs their output. If Andre and Donald Judd place modules one beside the other, and if Richard Serra rolls up, creases, folds, accumulates, twists or cuts materials, then Maria Clara Fernandes, Jac Leirner, Monica Nador, Leda Catunda, Jose Leonilson…link one module to another by weaving, binding, sewing… ____While acting in the world and with the world, rather than on the world, these artists are equally appropriating an intelligence or rationality that precedes them and that they not only appropriate but also incorporate. Their output add to Brazilian contemporary art precisely a non-scholarly, handcraft tradition effective in the country - a tradition that has not been extinguished despite (or because of) the intermittent industrial process, full of gaps, that Brazil has undergone for decades. III ____Interestingly enough, despite being structurally very distant from the above-mentioned international production, the works of these artists present characteristic that is quite similar to the international works of Minimal Art and Post-Minimalism. Like in Post-Minimal works, they tend to obliterate the expression of the artist's self to the point of, in many cases nearly breaking with the concept of the authorship that are extraneous to their authors. However this is not accomplished through its opposite, i.e. "handcraft" intelligence, which historically precedes industrialization but that in Brazil is concurrent with it. This contemporary character, attained after rejecting one of the main props of contemporary international art, renders highly significant the output of these that artists inscribed in a sort of Brazilian tradition that developed in the past few decades (It should be noted that in her "Bichos", Lygia Clark employed a logic that is very similar to that of these artists). ____In the making of their objects, paintings and sculptures, Hermano, Paes Leme, Derdyk, Fernandes, Maiolino, Nador, Leirner and the others abide by patterns and the inherent intelligence of certain pre-existing techniques such as weaving, basket making, decorative painting and other immemorial handcraft. Only in a country such as Brazil, where industrialization has not broken with the manufacturing mode that preceded it in other nations, it would be pertinent to find artists who, while handling manufactured and/or natural materials, no matter which, have intensely and quite appropriately reinstated age-old craftsmanship. IV ____Within this context of conserving and/ or expanding the possibilities of appropriating "handcraft" logic in works of contemporary art, there is another group of artists who, despite the irremovable connections with the works of those mentioned above, produce another type of singularity. For example, besides the recovery of pre-industrial art-making procedures, Fernando Lucchesi and Emmanuel Nassar re-propose the Gestalt itself of certain objects and / or images yielded by the regional popular culture of their birthplaces. While assembling his building elements through makeshifts and improvisations that are quite similar to the Brazilian handcraft, Nassar remakes apparatuses readily found in the urban landscape of the state of Pará. In turn, Lucchesi reintroduces in the current art scene the voluptuousness of the Minas Gerais baroque style reinvigorated by a contemporary anguish. In this production the aggressive metallic material does not bend submissively before the imposing decorative spirit of his pieces, themselves re-readings of old portable oratories and other objects of everyday Minas Gerais life. ____The taste for decorative art, arrangements and enjoyable beauty is another characteristic of these artist's output, which bring together productions apparently as distinct as those by Regina Johas and Luiz Hermano. Whereas the first artist questions the masculine reasoning that articulates her work - she employs extremely feminine, sensual and lavish brocades and fabrics interwoven with golden threads -, the latter resorts to the structural simplicity of manual skills to take to its ultimate consequences the taste of a nutty goldsmith who enlarges the beauty of his adornments to make them more readily experienced by the viewers. V ____It should also be noted that, within this output that duplicates anonymous producers connected to ancient though effective traditions of several parts of Brazil, often the yearning for authorship beats these procedures, now because of the artists' selection of materials and processes, then because of the explicitly autobiographical content of their works. The fabrications of embroidery and sewing by José Leonilson, the paintings by Montes Magno (whose color fields remit to the popular architecture of northeastern Brazil) and the assemblages by Jac Leirner render explicit the artists' desire for self-expression, in a perfect and apparently paradoxical synthesis of the anonymous and the authorial. The sculptures by Shirley Paes Leme exude the nature of Central Brazil just as in her works Maria Clara Fernandes transforms urban scrap and the inland vegetation of Florianópolis Island. In the works by Edith Derdyc, Jac Leirner and Lia Menna Barreto, the physical culture of São Paulo and other major cities is resubmitted as a gestation process that takes place in time and space. In the sculptures by Ana Maria Maiolino, the age-old female labor heritage is revisited by means of an affective appropriation of the gesture that kneads bread and/ or clay… ____In opposition to the puritan, assertive and nearly always authoritarian rationality of international art, these fifteen Brazilian artists present a constructive logic guided by programmed art action, a taste for the decorative, an "immemorial" memory and an interest in the possibility of manipulation. Nearly always their works do not aspire to colossal dimensions - neither do they impose themselves on the observer; on the contrary, they seek to please and to contribute to changes in the life of anyone who views them or, rather, experiences them. ____Instead of rolling up, creasing, twisting and cutting, these artists have been sewing, embroidering, assembling and putting hinges on the non- scholarly Brazilian visuality and a few major issues of the international art produced in the last decades.