Spare Seats/Enough Room
The work begins on the street.
In 1995, after observing a considerable number of stools on the city’s sidewalks, used by drug dealers, doormen, street vendors, private security guards, etc., the artist began to collect them. Trading is part of the beginning of the work. They are exchanged for new wooden benches or bought directly from the owners. The value depends on the conversation. The work is organized as a series, but each piece has its individuality preserved. They bear the memory not only of spontaneous repairs over time, of particular inscriptions, but also of the owner’s body. It’s a living object. Each one has its own unique personality and architecture.
The title of the work already contains the paradox of exclusion and abundance. Lugar de Sobra includes the work, the public and the rest of the world in the same place, which is why it has plenty, it’s large. It’s also plenty because there are several of them and they occupy the space of the city. And it’s plenty because the objects are leftovers from the world, the rest. It is the place of refuse, adversity and lack, but paradoxically it is also the place of plenty. There is a lack and a surplus at the same time.
The exhibition space will define how they are organized. They can be seated.
Spare Seats/Enough Room
Ligia Canongia
Marcos Chaves surprises meanings and values that are immersed in vulgar things, dissimulated by habit or convention. He makes unpredictable displacements and produces assemblages in a tone of parody distilling his acute observations of the world, from technology to rubbish. The things which he makes appropriations of, in the majority, are products of the consumer society and of popular imagination. He observes not only the aesthetic that is directed to the masses and absorbed by them, as well as the manifestations of the people, the urban environment and of the poor tasting commercialism. It is these products that, paradoxically, accentuate the force of the commentary “high culture” in art and help to emphasize the playful tone of his associations. Humour enters here as a fine blade that satirises common sense, uniformity and the lack of critical judgement. Humour intervenes on the original meaning of the object and gives it another meaning, through an unpredictable movement, which is disconcerting and almost a joke. The acidity of his humour is opposed, verily, to the banality of the object, and gives to it, on the contrary, originality. On one side, we have an operation that makes fun of vulgarity and consumerism through the appropriation of the very products that create them and on the other side an operation that reintegrates them into the art world of intellectual “refinement”. The work sustains itself through ambiguity, through associating opposite movements, through blending dichotomies and pointing to meanings in many directions. With aesthetics removed, and being anti-formal, par excellence, the work of Marcos Chaves rejects the “aura” of the work of art and contaminates its “purity” with things from common life, substituting beauty for intelligence.
Lugar de sobra (Spare seats/Enough room), conceived in 1995, thinks about the idea of a “series”, as many of his works do, by returning to the discussion about industry and the processes of mechanical production. He confronts immediately both industrial progressive Brazil and miserable Brazil, by proposing a “series” of shabby objects precariously made by hand that are about to have their forms undetermined. A series that annihilates itself even as an idea of a series. In Lugar de sobra (Spare seats/Enough room), there is no uniformity, repetition, program, planning, and formality. Each object preserves a minimum of individuation. And again, the material used has all its aesthetics removed from it in the extreme. The objects old are furniture pieces and second-hand benches. It is no longer about an industrial product but about benches “arranged” by hand, by the work of “jeitinho”, that populist and creative Brazilian way of doing things, that produce instruments from rejected and leftover things. But here the artefacts are not elevated to the category of well made and finished products, nor does it lend to the object any “aesthetic”. The object ends up possessing the same spirit of the Dadaist assemblages: a dissociated form made by the accumulation of pieces, by the juxtaposing of disparate parts, an anti-form. Each bench maintains a minimum individuation because, in fact, they are different between themselves. But the precariousness of the construction, the worn out aspect and non-definition of its outlines, are such that they don’t retain our gaze, nor draw attention to their qualities.
Another important fact is that the benches are placed in the exhibition and can be used by the spectators to sit down. They substitute the benches that exist in museums for the public to contemplate the work. Only that they are the “work”, and the object of contemplation is missing. The world is this object. Lugar de sobra (Spare seats/Enough room) includes the work, the public and the rest of the world in the same place, for this very reason it is spare, it is spacious. It is spare also because there are many benches and they occupy a large space. It is spare also because the objects are left-overs of the world, the rest. It is the place of what was rejected, of trash, of poverty and of the needy, but also, paradoxically, the place of abundance. It’s lacking and it’s spare at the same time.