Keys for reading Chaves (Ligia Canongia)
“It’ is always desirable to have two ideas – one to destroy the other”.
Braque
“Form doesn’t follow the idea. Why?” (1) – blurted Cézanne one day to Joachim
Gasquet. Upset, he shouted and threw his brushes up in the air.
The incident had to do with the anguish to attain the perfect communion between plastic and mental images. The issue was how to form an intellectual image of the world that could show world’s shape, that would project a mental reflection of reality on the canvas, an image that, filtered by the personal vision, of the artist, would achieve a “true” perception of the world.
The question about the agreement o idea and form seems to have motivated Cézanne’s inquiries concerning a representation that was not based on data taken from nature, but rather on a speculation of the spirit, on simple intellectual creation. What Cézanne really wanted was to reach the inner structures of appearance, to reach the core of forms. He used to say: “to paint is not to copy the objective slavishly”. (2)
Before Cézanne, even the impressionists, who had started a process that would go through all modernity and up to the contemporary era, had tried to do away with the separation between what is seen and what is represented. For the modernists, naturalist painting was not naturalist because it was shown through a completely artificial convention of Euclidean geometry. The question was to translate what is seen, and how that may be accomplished. Impressionists like Cézanne chose to emphasize the logic of the subject over the object seen, which is one way to deny the object, a way of lifting the idea above form.
It was Duchamp, however, who took the question to the limits we know in our days. A quarter of century later he eliminated Cézanne’s question by abolishing form completely. By doing that, he was left with the idea. As he would say, there is no solution because the problem doesn’t exist. He then submitted the world of pure ideality, and he became the most platonic artist of modernity.
The materialization of the Idea founded the abstraction, founded the ready-made of Duchamp, founded Pop and it is on the base of a good deal of contemporary creation, a production that leaves aside the sensitive elements and chooses intellectual data as its foundation. And on this vein it was conceptual art that took the levels of that intellectuality to unsurpassable instances.
In our days, who could deal only with the immediately sensitive? Who would dare to abolish a conquest of conceptual logic over the material world? It is difficult to imagine that pure sensation can account for the complex reality we experience. Now, not only do manual ability and painting live together with objects already taken directly from reality but work supports have become more diversified. “Artistic” plasticity blends with daily life, the trivial life, a trend that is not new, as it goes back to modern times and to the emergence of industrial society. When Marcel Duchamp proposed the ready-made he dissociated the question of plasticity from the idea of art and labelled as outdated all practices that still nurtured any ideals of classical beauty. He reacted with indifference to beauty and good taste, and divided the world of art into two parts: before and after the ready-made.
What turns a work into a work of art? wondered Duchamp. For him, the sense of creation in which the artist holds full control over his craft was unnecessary. An act of selection would be enough to establish the chosen object in the sphere of art. He founded that the act of choosing was in and of itself a creative act, for that was where the Idea thrived. At that moment, Duchamp disqualified form inasmuch as he imparted it the character of an accident.
The work of Marcos Chaves belongs to that historical lineage – to a lineage of works that in prizing though over its sensible form, came to question the quality and function of the object of art; an object therefore, that turns out to be more an ethical than aesthetic one. In other words, the lineage of those works that helped to change the idea of what would be aesthetic. What then is left from the ready-made, other than enunciation? What keeps it anchored to the world of art, if it reneges on art as the sensitive formulation of the world? The ready-made carved its way out the impasse reached by the modes of painting that culminated in Malévich; it declared the end of the artistic process as a craft, of its accompanying skills and virtuoso performance. Manual skills no longer made sense in an universe of mechanical technology. And having defeated the issue of manual skills, art outlived as solely mental articulation, subject more to cleverness than to the senses. Duchamp would have said that if the machine is able to “make”, then, all we have left is to choose from what has already been made, with no longer any room left for contemplation or beauty. It was up to the artist to become a thinker who comments upon the world and who chooses his objects from a world that is already made, for the act of selection itself would be enough to interpret and unveil new meanings for reality. Such simple operation bore so much radical content that it changed the destiny of the history of art and is still fresh and present in our days.
Marcos Chaves certainly takes into account the potential opened by the ready-made, and he knows about its evolution in the contemporary period. He is not interested in the formal product, in the “artistic object”, in the aesthetics of it. He does not even think about the restoration of beauty or the mythic. To construct the work of art may be to withdraw an ordinary object from its functional environment, to merge it with other objects, to modify its logical context. This construction may very well call for addition of words or other media extraneous to the strict sphere of visuality. It could mean playing with mental associations, with humor, with chance. These are his “aesthetics” procedures.
Chaves’ work seeks the disjunctive character of objects tha leave their contexts and original functions behind. These are the objects that act on the institutional order by finding in simple objects values that had been camouflaged by conventional thought. His work performs unexpected shifts and builds up parody that distils his keen observations on the world he lives without sparing any segment, from technological products to garbage.
Most of time, the objects of which he appropriates himself are products of popular use. Part of his work involves observing not only the aesthetics that is directed and assimilated by the masses, but also the manifestations that crop up naturally from the common people, from the urban environment and commerce of bad taste. Paradoxically these products reinforce the power of highbrow commentary on the arts and help the artist to emphasize the humorous tone of certain correlations. Humor works here as a slender razor that questions the role of common sense, the uniformization and the lack of discernment associated to unrefrained consumption. Humor, however, is much more than that: it interferes on the original meaning of the object and adds other meanings through an unexpected move, a joke for instance. Humor makes room for an interpretation that antagonizes the banality of the object, and imparts originality to it. On the one hand, we have an operation that satirizes kitsch and mass consumption through the appropriation of the same products from which they thrive. On the other hand, we have a move that integrates them into the intellectual “refinement” of art. For Marcos Chaves, “Humor is a way of removing the tragic from things”, a way of looking at the world in another, less fatalistic, way. Duchamp, in turn, thought that only an “amusing” idea could interest him, because it allayed the sense of “responsibility”. These are the operations that in a way from its tragic density, trying to make it simply amusing. In Marcos Chaves, this connotation cans even reach tones of cruelty, but a cruelty that conceals itself and is diluted in a discordant humoristic note.
What also brings Marcos Chaves close to the great Dada master is impersonality. Al though the presence of the artistic-subject is manifested in the acts of choosing, in the articulation of parts and senses, in the attitudes of intervention on reality, he is not a lyrical subject with an existential drama. He is the intellectual subject guided by his thoughts. But it should be noted that his is an intuitive intelligence that doesn’t reduce thought to inductive Cartesian reason, but one that gives elasticity to thought through intuition. The subject tries to hide himself in the insertions of verbal enunciation that, at first sight, could seem to be mere opinions. In reality, these insertions, too, are mere common places, well-repeated sentences, such as
Não falo duas vezes (I do not speak twice), or business world sentences like
Eu só vendo a vista (I only sell for cash / I only sell the view) – insertions that are as ready-made as any object. Of course, when equated within the context of the work, such statements point to multiple directions. The work, in turn, remains within the field of the visual and corresponds to a visible set where other materials are also at play. It is interesting to notice that the impersonality of Marcos Chaves’ work finds correspondence in Duchamp’s in that the latter’s work also tries to deliberately objective, although never so “indifferent”. Works like Pharmacie, 1914 – name given to a popular engraving taken as ready-made by Duchamp – do not have any relation to their title. The idea was to exploit this non-sense, this obscurity. As for the verbal inscriptions are there to produce meaning. Basically there never was total obscurity, even in Duchamp, and he knew it. Although he tried not to establish possible relations or make them as metaphoric as they were, nearly unreachable, on his ideas about juxtaposition word/object, he stated: obviously, I expected that nothing would make sense, but, deeply, everything ends up having some”. (3)
Chaves exploits possible extensions of the meanings of objects and words. They juxtapositions, associations, approaches that aim to touch virtually the endless potential worlds in a single plastic element. He deals with object of art as Lacan dealt with the chain of verbal signifiers. A huge range of meanings may be opened out of a single visual signifier; the work of art will be its latent meaning. Something that exposes itself as an index, not as something that something hermetic, bearing limited something akin to Umberto Eco’s well-known idea of open work that influenced Chaves’ generation.
The work Não falo duas vezes (1996) is an example of how words can have multidirectional meanings and how the “plastic” activity can be only residual. The work consists of a transparent glass pane placed at a distance from a wall.
Written on the glass pane is: falo duas vezes (I speak twice); as for the wall, only the word não (do not) is written on it. Despite the minimal distance, and notwithstanding the illusion of even greater proximity created by transparency of the glass pane, this difference on the levels where the words are written is fundamental, and there lays all difference. When we look at the work, we immediately bring both parts together and read the whole sentence.
The projection of the sentence on the glass pane – falo duas vezes (I speak twice) – appears on the wall as a shadow that superposes a different statement, for in repeating falo duas vezes , the whole original statement as a lie because it induces the speaker to say it twice. The não (do not) is brought to a level where it isn’t, and we have the illusion that only on the glass pane do we read the whole statement, which, by the way, is a negative, while what is written on the glass seems to be what is on the wall, being this shadow projection a negative of the statement. With a great simplicity, the work articulates an extraordinary level of complexity. It also carries other implications. One of the hypothesis is already stated, that worn down clichés, as ready-made as objects are, may go through the domain of the unpredictable by the simple displacement from their context, or by changing their modes, of presentification. There is also a reference to “falo” (phallus) as a sexual symbol, and this not irrelevant in the work of Marcos Chaves, permeated as it is by sexuality. In this case, the sexual connotation of “falo” is not as strong as the connotation of power that it represents. Usually the sentence não falo duas vezes is used in situations where someone wants to display authority. The work of Chaves uses power as a target for his irony, and the idea of power may unfold into the idea of convention. In fact, the sentence has become so conventional that usually the one who says it doesn’t mean it. Thus the convention appears as a lie, as an artifice, something that veils the truth of things. Would then art have the power to guarantee the truth? The ambiguity of the work of Marcos Chaves moves uncompromisingly along this path. After all, Picasso had said in 1923 that “from the point of view of art, there are only forms that are more or less convincing lies “. (4)
Another kindred work that shows the cleverness of these articulations is called Come and watch me, 1997, and works in a similar way. The inscription of the sentence appears on a mirror and when the observer comes closer in response to the invitation, he only sees himself reflected on the mirror. He who issued the invitation is not seen, leaving the viewer gazing at himself alone in front of the mirror. Furthermore, sound similarities leads to additional semantic connotations and to the creation of ambiguities _ a constant in Chaves’ work. “Come” may be pronounced as “cum”, and thus the beckoning may unfold into the meaning “cum and watch me, in a situation where the voyeur and the narcissist meet each other, with a clear reference back to the mirror.
The attempt to relativize or to multiply meaning and decodification possibilities is one of the work’s materials. It is part of its structure. Already early in his career, in the mid 80’s, Chaves created complex situations for the reading of his work. Another example is The Hanged Man, 1987. This drawing/collage, is based on the words hanged man written on the upper part of the work, with the “A” of “man” upside down; an “O” is located on the left, in the middle of the page; the letter “L” is founded on the right, in a similar position; and the letter “S” at the bottom. In the center a slender, slightly tilted wooden splinter pierces through the sheet.
The hanged man is a tarot card, where a man is seen hanging by his feet. He is fated to live upside down, and never knows if it is him or the world that is upside down, or even if this is the normal situation.
Developing the idea, Marcos Chaves puts the “N” of the word hanged as the representation of the North and indicates the other directions with the other letters presented “O” (oeste-west), “L” (leste-east) and “S” (sul-south).
The tilted wooden splinter works as the hand of the magnetic needle that unites North to the South. It makes a reference to an international scientific convention that orients the sense of space, but in this work this relativized through the gaze of the observer who sees the directions clearly, and who, in seeing the world upside down, automatically inverts the system.
This timely work already displayed a multiplicity of possible connections that could be generated out of an extreme economy of information and a tendency to entrap the decoding process. It also reveals the mental vivacity of the artist, his capacity to articulate games of words and objects, showing the relations they establish in the composition of the image. The work also points to the semantic complexity that such images may engender in spite of its simple unassuming appearance.
The whole series developed under the title Hommages aux Mariages, (Homage to Marriage), 1989, follows this line, and in it we find multiple meanings. We will try to point out some.
Firstly, the title. The sound of the words in French is so similar that is as if we were repeating the same word twice. It is a unique sound chain. Two different words and two equal sounds emphasize the idea of marriage understood as the distinction lost in symbiosis. Through the word homage we are sent to “homme” (man) and in “mariages” we find the female name Maria. Hommages aux Mariages, with its indistinct sound chain suggests the indistinction between people and sexual indetermination. In this manner, pays homage to the impossibility of marriage, and on this point, it is a tribute to Duchamp and his Grand Verre.
Second, the color. All the works of this series, and they were not few, are yellow. The use of the same color in several “marriages” makes variety uniform; it blurs distinctions in couples and reduces the double to one. Third comes the nature of the chosen objects. Two plastic hair brushes, for instance, those round ones, very popular, linked by their own bristles; two baby-feeding chairs tied together with nylon strings; two disposable razors sown together. Everyday life objects, harmless, ordinary, acquiring a sense of unusual oddity that at once throws down the idea of union in “marriage”, simple because this union doesn’t make sense in this situation. In this “marriage” context, the objects don’t fulfil the function they were made to fulfil in the world. And marriage is revealed as a convention. A convention in principle bars judgement, and art is pure judgement, its decision depends on a will.
Fundamentally, as mentioned above, the work of Marcos Chaves antagonizes power, it is articulated to react against conventional authorities, be they of a psychological or a social nature, extensive to the conventions of art itself.
It is important to note, therefore, that everything is made to preserve the opacity of the object as well as the opacity of the subject who declares his “will” obliquely. Despite the plain and spontaneous appearance of objects, nothing has an immediate clearness. The objects protect themselves behind oddness, meaning escapes and, in the absence of lyricism, the subject slips away. The objective mental activity that goes beyond lyrical expression doesn’t necessarily mean an
a priori thought. There isn’t firstly a project and then materialization. The objects arise all together as in Cézanne. Indeed, it is the same action. Even if it isn’t an aesthetical form, the object appears when is ready, and the idea is superposed to it. Words and objects seek each other. The formal result is the one that appears in the mental conjunction of the act that founded the work as the attitude took place.
As for the non-aesthetical nature of these products or objects, in essence
anti-formal, we must go back to the old debate on the relation between art and industry, to the discussion about the process that tried to introduce art in real life and about the question on the substitution of the object of art for the idea of work.
In his 1970 text entitled “Disaesthetization” Harold Rosenberg wrote: “The principle common to all kind of “disaesthetic” art is that the final product, if there is any, is of less importance than its process of creation and of which it is signal“. (5)
This sort of art made of real materials and facts and inserted in everyday life resists artistic and traditional techniques. It is not directed to the satisfaction of the senses, but rather it proposes a fundamental question about it owns nature and the role it can play in the world nowadays. It is, using Rosenberg’s word, the “sign” of this investigation. And thus, when it, “disaesthetizes”, it goes against all formalist thought engendered by Clement Greenberg, and opposes the primacy of form, techniques and conventions. Instead of limiting it self to a strictly visual experience, it avails itself of other codes and abandons the realm of the visible. The mental act replaces aesthetical value; indifference in the place of taste judgement; the absurd instead of rationality; and instead of doing, choosing. The opposite of Greenberg’s rationale.
One of Marcos Chaves’ most radical works in the sense of “disaesthetization” was the installation Comfundo (with a bottom/ I confuse). It is composed of a series of brown paper bags with black plastic handles. The bags are vertically tied up one to another forming columns. These columns were hung on the ceiling from the handle and did not touch the floor. Only the first bag tied to ceiling had a handle, and only the last one had a bottom. The effect was that all the bags looked just like one Claes Oldenburg’s extremely long, absurdly giant sculptors. The gallery space was saturated with these columns outlined in straight lines but forming a labyrinth. Walking around in that space didn’t take the observer to any special place, and the experience consisted in lounging through the columns without destination. It is important to note that Marcos Chaves studied architecture, and that the support function of building pillars was being parodied with humor, highlighting the fact that they were suspended and would swing with the wind or with the dislocation of air caused by passers-by. The pillars uncovered an architecture subject to the frailty of bad engineering. Here, ordinary used grocery bags had an unusual signification that arose out of the unexpected logic of their use modified by effects of imagination, the precariousness of the material and the lightness of their weights – elements deployed to emphasise the non-sense of the operation. In fact, the idea of support itself was questioned: support of the ideal construction, support of the work of art, support of meaning, support of space, support of form. Inoperative, the columns didn’t hold weight; on the contrary, they were moveable, frail, agents of an inconsistent architecture supported by emptiness. And the frontiers between the gaps may be a sheet of paper or a paper bag with bottom. Thai is the meaning of the title when it makes the junction of the expression comfundo (with a bottom) and keeps an explicit double meaning (I confuse), The serial character of the work obsessively stressed a sense of duplicity, or even multiplicity. There is no room for the original, for unity, an idea that goes back, again, to industrial processes and the repetition on which American Pop Art based itself. The object becomes indistinct, a mere link in a processual chain.
A similar manoeuvre is used in another installation, Lugar de Sobra (room enough/ spare seats), 1995. Once more, the sense of this series points to uniformization, but now each object keeps some individuality. Again the material is extremely “disaesthetic”. They are pieces of furniture, more specifically, old little stools. The work points to different readings. To start with, it is not an industrial product, but hand-made little stools made of rejected wood, and mostly done in a simple and makeshift way. However, the handicraft doesn’t rise to the category of a well-finished production and doesn’t impart an aesthetic sense to the object. The object ends up possessing the spirit oaf Dada assemblage: a dissociative form made from an accumulation of pieces, by juxtaposing parts, an instance of anti-form.
It was said that each little stool keeps a minimum of individuality, as they are in fact different from one to another, but the precariousness of their construction, they worn down appearance and the no definition of their contours is so great that they don’t catch anybody’s attention, they don’t highlight any qualities.
Basically, they are as indistinct as the industrial products made in series, as “insignificant” as Duchamp’s ready-mades would like to be.
Another important fact is the little stools are used by the visitors. They replace the benches normally used in museums by visitors for viewing the art works. But in this case the stools themselves are they “art work”, and the object of contemplation is missing. The world is the object. “Lugar de Sobra” (more than enough room/ spare seats) includes the work, the public and the rest of the world in the same place, that is why it is “more than enough” also because there are many little benches and they occupy a large area. And it is “de sobra” (more than enough), moreover, because the objects are the world’s leftovers, the remainders. It is the place for refuses, for garbage, poverty, and for shortages, but paradoxally, it is also the place for abundance_ for shortage and abundance simultaneously.
Marcos Chaves has been producing out of photographs since of the 90’s. Something which is quite coherent with the nature of his work, considering that the photographic process may correspond to the manoeuvre of the ready-made. The operation of photography, the photographic act itself, follows very closely Duchamp’s logic of the act.
Phillipe Dubois states that photographic time is discontinuous, as the act of the photographer, the cut he operates in reality, suspends reality and isolates it from evolutive or chronical time. It is an operation that separates a slice of the world from the rest of it, which freezes this fragment on the instant, turning it into an everlasting, eternalized instant. The act of cutting out originates in “our time of human beings inside duration, and enters upon a new separate and symbolic temporality”. (6)
Photography is not made progressively as a painting is. On the contrary, the photographer performs a “cut” and this cut defines the image. The image is not composed; it comes in a whole, at once, taking a piece of the world in block, catching the whole object already absolute. This radical cut in continuity is the act in which photography is based. We know that Duchamp initiates the ready-made after his experiment in painting, after observing that the pictorial metier was unable to face the reality of a machine, including the camera. The ready-made just came to declare the failure of pictorial “making”, of the progressive exercise of this manual and compositional craft. Actually, the ready-made is the signal of the powerless of the painter in industrial society, and its advent is due to decline of painting and the redemption of art as an idea. The ready-made is also a choice that subtracts the object from continuity of its original medium, from its progressive chain; it also subtracts it from its natural pattern of functioning and meaning. The ready-made is another kind of “cut” that stops the flow of an object and displaces it to another symbolic order. And it is also the whole object caught by a subtraction operated in time and space. The shot of the photographic operation is the same shot that isolates a slice of the world in the ready-made.
It is important to emphasize that Marcos Chaves is not a photographer; he doesn’t intend the photographic images with which he works to be “artistic” images. For hi, a photograph is just the shot that immediately picks up the slice of reality he is interested in. The ready-made doesn’t need to be an object, a three dimensional element, a thing. In any given context, it can be a situation that has been already made. And this situation may be a landscape, a street scene, or it can be also be the photo of something special, an intervention of the artist himself. Yet, because it is taken in this immediatism of the shot, it is able to quickly give to the artist the image he is interested in. Furthermore, photography has the characteristic of multiplying the work, reproducing it in great numbers, accomplishing one of the main premises of the ready-made itself: to divest art of its sacredness and to abolish the myth of authenticity.
Marcos Chaves ‘ most notable photographic work is Eu só vendo a vista, 1997. It is an appropriation of our Sugar Loaf or, even better, of an icon of the city of Rio de Janeiro, an image that we see everyday and that suffers the wastage of this daily recurrence, as much as the United States flag did in relation to its country in the eyes of Jasper Johns. More than using the Sugar Loaf as a ready-made, Chaves appropriated the tourist image of the landscape that is sold by heaps as post-cards. The post-cards go so far as to make our eyes become “indifferent” to the “natural wonders” of the city. To displace the post-card from newsstands or travel agencies to the field of art doesn’t mean to re-qualify natural Beauty. The Idea must be, rather, to transpose the landscape or nature to the intellectual field of a thought that will act on it and change it. And this is where the sentence “Eu só vendo a vista” comes in with all its semantic ambiguity. The fact that the artist took out the crasis form the “a” in common business expression “a vista” (for cash) was essential for giving it a sense of ambiguity (a vista = the view, the eyesight). It opened its potential meaning to several interpretations. Inside it are the statements: “Eu só, vendo a vista” (with we added comma or pause, it reads as ‘the lonely subject seeing the landscape’); “Eu só vendo a vista” (the subject that only sells the photograph of the landscape or view, the post-card; or the subject-artist that only sells the work on the photograph with the view; or-again, without the crasis, the subject that sells only his eyesight); and, at last, “Eu só vendo a vista” (I only sell for cash).
This work had three versions. The first one, the one that gave Marcos Chaves the Travel in Brazil Award at the XXVI Salão Nacional, was filmed in video, imparting life to the “post-card”, although an absent-minded watcher might not notice the fact. The image seemed to be still but actually it was pulsating and in the distance of the urban texture a small car could be seen passing. Over this nearly still image, the title sentence runs through the screen as a neon light sign, and always in such a way that no word is missed during the projection. The study of this looping was carried out with mathematical precision in order to keep the integrity of the statement during its projection on the landscape.
The second version, an offset engraving, gave the work a character of multiplicity, marketable and affordable as post-cards are – made to be sold for cash. In practice, this second version structurally made the work into a natural continuation of the very questions it pointed out.
It led the ready-made back to the chain of its original status quo, even if intersected by a strange proposal. At this point it is important to notice that Cildo Meireles’ bottles of Coca-Cola, a work of the 70’s, also returned to the distribution market after the artist’s interference.
The last version, in digital process, was exhibited on electronics boards in several Brazilian cities, reaching, finally the mass distribution circuit and thus contributing to close the circuit of the work’s rationale itself.
A more recent photographic work by Chaves is called “Landescape” (1999), with an “e” in the middle of the word. By commenting on this work we come to the end of this text appropriately so.
“Landescape” consists of three large-scale photographs set up in perspective in a cabin, in a way that two side-photos are directed to vanishing point that is the central photograph. But first, it must be said that these are landscape photographs, that they are “beautiful”, and that they are technically very well done. Here starts the question. Based the classical standard of representation, the work intends to short-circuit that very same model of representation. It is composed so as to preserve traditional perspective, but, at the same time, it is articulated in isolated parts that can have a life of their own, each part being in an of itself a “window to the world “. The montage determines a cinematic perception of the work, with sequences articulated in the same way films frames are, which, in itself, was a modern operation that stood apart from classical procedures. Furthermore, when the observer enters the cabin he physically enters in the space of the work, thus performing a contemporary operation. This work is really a knot that tangles up different plastic spaces accepted throughout history, fusing and separating them at the same time.
The appropriation of the landscape as ready-made stands on its own, and also now the verbal inscriptions were already there, in that place, it being enough to click the camera from the best angle standing out its best. In each photograph there is a word corresponding to that image, as it was found, in reality. On the left side photograph a huge extension of bright blue sky is cut by an electrical wire holding a yellow sign with the word “stop” written on it. On the right side photograph, showing another sky, a cloudy and agitated one, the cloud movement draws a nearly straight line that looks like an arrow pointing to other words on a sign that was not entirely photographed and that says “dangerous place”. In the center is the photograph of a hole in the middle of the street with a wooden cross stuck in it, where one can read, “hole”. This makeshift cross made by unknown author is an innocent and spontaneous sign of someone who wants to protect others against danger. It is a comic and tragic image, light and heavy, critical and indifferent. In its innocence it awakens the feeling of fatality. It is a cross, it is a hole, and it is death. And death is the vanishing point of the “composition”, the point where the gazes, where the sky takes us, the sky that signalized the “dangerous spot” as well as the “stop”- the sky that caused so many concerns to naturalist painters, the “skies” that were truly hell in the universe of illusionistic representation. The perspective is the dead hole.
Death is also the ultimate symbol of the photographic operation. Dubois says that the action of photographic cuts over reality places the real outside experienced time, “freezing it in the endless duration of statues”. (7)
When it suspends chronical time, it cuts what is alive from this duration, isolating the fragment in an anachronic timelessness that is the unchangeable time of images. The photograph cuts what is alive and eternalizes the dead, at the same time that, paradoxically, it exhibits it forever. It is the image drawn from the living time chain that, by killing time itself, will allow it to endure. Marcos Chaves, intuiting Phillipe Dubois’ discourse, says: [after having clicked a situation], “I leave and the object continues there, normally as it always was, but in some way I have appropriated it.”
Chaves is making the same the French writer makes when the latter that
Photograph is like “a reminder of a stop, of a freezing, of an escape from the world that goes on without me.” (8)
As complex and prolific as the whole of Marcos Chaves’ work, Landescape also bears in its title the polysemous branching out of “escape” as “evasion” and points to the new ways opened by art to avoid Tradition and the Death of art itself. Indirectly, it harks back to the death of painting, especially that which is based on the illusion of depth. It also refers to the death of Beauty, as well as to the rebirth of art as an idea. It alludes and it practices. Yet on another front, by preserving the work’s intellectual framework, Landescape threads paths that lead into the human condition, condemned as it is to live under the yoke of the machine, of consumption, conventions, ambiguities and of death.
Ligia Canongia
January, 2000
References bibliographical:
1 – Elgar, Frank – in “Cézanne”, Editorial Verbo, 1974, Lisbon
2 – idem
3 – Cabanne, Pierre – in “Ingegnere del Tempo Perduto”, Multhipla Edizione, 1979, Milan
4 – Sypher, Wylie – in “Do Rococó ao Cubismo”, Ed. Perspectiva, 1980, São Paulo
5 – Rosenberg, Harold – in “A Nova Arte” (org. Gregory Battcock), Ed. Perpestiva, 1975, São Paulo
6 – Dubois, Philippe – in, “O Ato Fotográfico”, Ed. Papirus, Campinas
7, 8 – idem