Emptiness and Totality (Ligia Canongia)
When Marcel Duchamp proposed the ready-made he completely dissociated the issue of plasticity from the notion of art, and those practices that still preserved any ideal of beauty in classical terms became a thing of the past. For him, it wasn’t necessary this sense of creation in which the artist has total control of what he does. An act of selection was enough to institute the selected object as part of the sphere of art; in the selection was the “creation”, for the Idea already resided there. At that moment Duchamp gave form the character of accident, disqualifying it.
The work of Marcos Chaves belongs to this historic lineage. The lineage that gave to objects, each time, increasingly the value of thought and less the value of sensitive form: an object, therefore, more ethic than aesthetic. Chaves is certainly aware of the potential that was opened by the ready-made and knows of its unfolding in the present moment. He is not interested in the formal product, in the “artistic” object itself, nor in its “aesthetics”. To construct a work of art can be, for him, nothing more than to extract a common object from its logical context, to add to it words and other mediums stemming from outside the narrow scope of what can be seen, to play with mental associations, with humour and with chance. These are his “aesthetic” procedures.
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.
The photographic series Buracos (Holes), following the example of the benches, also has two targets: the artistic and political. Marcos Chaves appropriates creative “solutions” of the people by moving playfully through public areas of “urban signs”. With a Dadaist soul the Brazilian people of the metropolis invent arrangements and juxtapositions both ironic and hilarious in order to dribble around the lack of investment in public services; like the spontaneous assemblages constructed to indicate holes in the street. Chaves sees in these “constructions” real urban ready-mades ready to be snapped, by a quick and efficient appropriation of these popular anti-forms, full of humour. And the act of taking a photograph, in radical opposition to the virtuoso painting of the pre-modern, is the perfect instrument for the capture, necessarily hasty, of these “creative accidents” which we see in our day to day lives. The ready-made appeared to declare the bankruptcy of “making” pictures, of the progressive and slow exercise of manual compositions. Verily, the ready-made was the sign of the painter’s impotence in industrialised society and its appearance came about due to the decline of painting and the redemption of art as an idea. The metier of painting was impotent to confront the reality of the machine, including the photographic camera.
The same logic that presides in the photographic act governs the Duchampian act. The ready-made, like photography, suspends the object from its original continuum in time and space, from the progressive chain of evolution, separating a slice from the rest of the world. The ready-made is another type of cut that interrupts, as a photograph does, the normal flow of an object. The shot, that is fundamental to the act of taking a photograph, is the same shot that isolates in the ready-made a portion of the world. It is important to emphasize that Marcos Chaves is not a photographer; he doesn’t intend for his photographs to be “artistic”; the photograph is merely the cut that assimilates immediately the slice of the real in which he is interested. The ready-made doesn’t need an object, a thing, it can be a landscape, a street scene, or something the artist appropriates as “already made”. The real holes, in the way that they are assumed by popular intervention, have a temporary life and are the result of the incisive and satirical action that can only be “eternalised” with an action, that is equally temporary but eternal, that of the photographic shot. By aiming his gaze over these interventions, by harvesting and turning them into works, Marcos Chaves prolongs the duration of these events by contradicting their accidental luck. Frozen in the perpetual time of photography, the interventions are produced only in order to last the required time until their collection by a rubbish truck and then are transformed into urban “monuments” suspended “in the everlasting duration of statues”.
The hole is the lack, the emptiness, the place that solicits from us an immediate occupation in order that we don’t have to deal with the unbearable fact of absence. The hole is still the unknown, the threat, the place where we fall, the danger and death. The popular interventions alert us to these fears, protect us, indicating imminent disaster, and they do it with the irreverent humour of those that elude the traps of fatality. They react to death with a sense of humour that, as Chaves puts it, “is a way of removing tragedy from things”. The hole reappears then, as a space of creation, of life, of pulsation; exactly the qualities that photography as a medium freezes, but that the art of Marcos Chaves, as an expression of ambivalence, retains and animates. “Come into the [w]hole!”
Ligia Canongia is an art critic and curator. This text was produced on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Arte Futura e Companhia, Brasília, 2002.