An interview with Marcos Chaves for the Artebra collection
Rio de Janeiro, 26/11/2006
At the house of the artist
Interviewers: Glória Ferreira and Lula Wanderley
Others present: Luiza Mello, Marisa Mello and Débora Monnerat
Lula Wanderley: To begin with, I have a very personal and subjective question. What does it mean for you to be an artist? What does it mean to be Marcos Chaves?
Marcos Chaves: I was thinking about it today. Why did I become as artist? Everyone in my family is a lawyer and from very different areas from the arts. Since I was little I have tried to be where I felt most comfortable, and I think that this place an artistic environment, where I can make different interpretations of facts. Art is not a pragmatic arena; it’s a subjective one. I’ve always liked this area of subjectivity. And the closest I was to that was either architecture, through my sister, or the relationship with my uncles that worked with cinema. What if I hadn’t fallen into this path? I think I would get to it anyway. I would do something else, but always trying to think about diversity, about differences and poetry.
Glória Ferreira: But today you are an artist, with a work that is public.
Marcos Chaves: I really wanted to be out in the public.
Glória Ferreira: In the many critical analyses of your work, in their different methods of approach, we find tropes such as humour, intervention, the Duchampian affiliation and popular culture. How would you situate your work in relation to these critical analyses?
Marcos Chaves: I agree that these four points you have mentioned are part of my poetics. But in reality I don’t try to let any of them be more important that the others, but as instruments to reach a more subjective place. I might use humour, politics or humour that has a political attitude. I also think that to work with popular culture is also political. I’m interested in politics, psychology, in how the world can be apprehended by people and how we dilute this world. Because the artist has the function of a diluter, to decant and to propose. About the “being out in the market” joke, I would really rather be “out in public”, than being in a gallery. The more I am out in the market place, the better.
Glória Ferreira: And what do you mean by “public”?
Marcos Chaves: Public art. I don’t know how much I’m working towards that, but I keep thinking that I don’t want a dialogue with only the artistic system. I want more than that; I want works out in the streets, in public spaces, instead of being inside closed galleries.
Glória Ferreira: What’s your experience with this type of action?
Marcos Chaves: I’ve got little experience. But over the last five years I’ve produced some works with more public characteristics such as Eu só vendo a vista? on street clocks, which happened naturally and lead to an incredible response from the public. I felt attracted to that. I did a work last year with sounds1 that was part of my installation at the Biennial of São Paulo. It was a sealed container in a street in the city centre of Cardiff, Wales, which emitted sounds of laughter. This was very surprising, and the reactions were very varied. It made me very happy. I don’t think art is for closed circuits. Because of the amount of possibilities, of information and of communication we have nowadays, you can’t be restrictive, you have to expand it.
Glória Ferreira: As was said before, the Duchampian affiliation is one of the traits of your work. Your first collective exhibition was in 1984, a boom year for painting here in Brazil, for example the exhibition Como Vai Você, Geração 80? (How Are You, Generation 80?). How is your contact with these issues, because the Duchampian references are very diverse?
Marcos Chaves: Once I said playfully that there is enough stuff in the world for us to create more stuff. We can make use of what is already out there. I produce stuff, but actually very little. I’ve noticed that artists grow in the market and their works grow in equal proportion. They start to become important and to produce larger stuff. I don’t like this idea. The cool thing about large stuff in the middle of the street is that people really interfere, and if people don’t like it, it will vanish. It doesn’t matter who the guy is. It doesn’t matter if it’s Richard Serra. I don’t know if this is right or wrong but the city works in this manner, and organisms organise themselves. They can be erudite or popular. I’m also not interested in erudition for erudition’s sake. I’m not interested in popular culture for popular culture’s sake. I like the mixture and the salt produced by this mixture.
Lula Wanderley: I am accustomed to seeing your works and always expect humour. I see humour/irony even where you probably don’t intend them, because humour seems to naturally flow from you. For example, this impurity of yours, this mixture of languages (video, object, performance) does it have any ironic critical function? Is there irony behind this poetic impurity?
Marcos Chaves: The work constructs itself naturally, always looking for the fold, the path. Irony and humour make it possible to talk about something in a concise way and to talk about various things at the same time. Humour opens paths. Sometimes you might laugh at something, but it may not be that funny. Humour might make us stop and think.
Glória Ferreira: Did you ever paint?
Marcos Chaves: I actually painted when I came back from Italy, when I was Antonio Dias’ assistant. I made assemblages, I glued stuff on the canvas, I wrote. I didn’t think of painting merely as light and colour. It was an exercise of language. But I never managed to be content with the results of these experiments. It was a passing to something other.
Lula Wanderley: But was it a starting point?
Marcos Chaves: It was a starting point for me in that I realised it wasn’t that.
Glória Ferreira: Did your first exhibition have any relation to painting?
Marcos Chaves: My first individual was at Macunaima (Funarte, 1988). There were issues from painting, but not paint. I opened supermarket bags, folded them, marked them, placed stuff, perforated them. I still kept it flat but the arrangement reflected a spatial concern. It was my apprenticeship because I came from the study of architecture. Soon after that it was obvious, I moved on to 3-D and installations.
Lula Wanderley: During this period, did any exhibition or work have an impact on you?
Marcos Chaves: Of course, Fluxus at the Biennial of São Paulo. It came before painting.
Glória Ferreira: It was in 1981, I think, Julio Plaza was the curator of Mail Art.
Marcos Chaves: This Biennial was very important for me, as well as the books that Funarte published and the dialogues with artist friends. It was a period of formation for us.
Glória Ferreira: Although it is always mentioned, the presence of a rational dimension in your work, in an interview2 you say that intuition is always very important for you, that it’s more important than articulation. How is this relation expressed in your work?
Marcos Chaves: In reality they are distinct things, intuition and idea. I like to somehow put them together. I don’t know where. Because in reality to choose the path of chance or intuition can also be a good idea, it can be a process. Because when you read an intuition, you are rationally reading it as well, you are transforming a thing into idea. The easiest way to talk about this is by producing works. I can’t say where these two distinct, but proximate, things meet. One is an instrument of the other.
Lula Wanderley: Eu só vendo a vista is a work, for me that is very emblematic. Because it contains two aspects of your work that touch me and make me reflect. One of them is that you, in many moments, don’t appropriate/displace only everyday objects, for they bring within themselves a whole urban landscape. When you show the benches, immediately I’m going to remember of when I am walking around Engenho de Dentro and see the benches of the bicheiros gamblers and their improvised seats. The other would be the relation, which I think is very strong, that you make between word, image and object. If I were to put all of these urban landscapes in one exhibition (the benches, the holes, the police yellow tape), I would say that Marcos doesn’t walk on the streets like a pedestrian. The pedestrian nowadays walks with a very specific gaze. You walk with a completely different temporality to be able to notice the details of things. I would say that the walk is the real work of Marcos. Have you ever thought about a work where the walking would be the work?
Marcos Chaves: Yes and I don’t know how I resolve this question. All the videos I’ve made until today have been with a still camera. I’ve been thinking more about movement.
Lula Wanderley: Another question is, that in these urban landscapes present in your work there are many images where your appropriation of the discontinuity of the urban space is made clear. The hole in the street is a discontinuity. It breaks the natural sensation of totality that we feel in the city when we walk. The yellow tape is always a sign that impedes the progress of your walking. I remember also the photographs that you made of the subtleties of the features of the pavement and walls. That gives me the sensation that you, poetically, reconstruct the perception of totality that we feel in the city. In this sense, you are a constructor of cities – a builder?
Marcos Chaves: In this case there enters a procedure that has to do with the text in my work, with walking, that is to look for new paths all the time. It is absurd that we walk in Rio de Janeiro and don’t notice that the city is full of refrigerators with rolling wheels. But it took me a long time to notice this. The carts of the street vendors are the skeletons of refrigerators with wheels on them. We seem to be blind, not to see it. It is surreal but no one sees it; it’s not that I see too much. We are all seeing less.
Glória Ferreira: Do your political views go in this direction? The idea of humour as an economy that disobliges affection but also as an admonishment.
Marcos Chaves: With the work on benches, Lugar de sobra, (Spare seats/Enough room) I’m looking for a different interpretation of the city. It seems that we only see what we want to see. The artist is almost obliged to see more and invite people to look at these things. It’s my work together with yours, together with the work of other artists; each one looking at one thing, each one specialising and improving the gaze. This is what makes everything walk, evolve.
Lula Wanderley: There is this article that I like very much by Alex Varella3 in the magazine Errática4. He says (or at least that’s how I translate it) that the walk, aesthetically and temporally, that reveals the city, is transported to the sphere of art (the experience of the surrealists and the situationists) when the urban walk of today is made tense under the pressure of the urgencies of daily life.
Marcos Chaves: The work is built in a hurry, in the day to day, from observations about the relations between the inhabitants and objects and the relation between them in the urban environment.
Luis Wanderley: I want to ask a question about an aspect of your work, which is also present in Eu só vendo a vista that interests me a great deal: the fusion you make between words, objects and images. If I think of one of your series, Hommage aux mariages, the title (the word) determines the way in which we the observer look at the object and creates the possibility of many interpretations. What I like in this work Eu só vendo a vista or even more in Não falo duas vezes (I don’t say it twice) is that, in them you take an inverse direction, more subtle, stronger. In these works the title is the foreground. It’s an object (the mirror or the post-card) that determines the multiple meanings of the words. All as if they were books where the physical pages and cover not only contain the words, but also determines their reading. Do you pay attention to words? Do you have any experience with literature?
Marcos Chaves: Through my works. I think I speak more than I write.
Glória Ferreira: You say in an interview with Graça Ramos5 that your generation had to re-identify who was the enemy, since during the passage from the 1970’s to the 1980’s the enemy became more fluid.
Marcos Chaves: And it still is. Before it was easier with everyone united against something. The world was polarized between capitalism and communism and in our case dictatorship. And now the enemy can be inside us. It’s our lack of generosity, our selfishness. The artist as a critic of himself, looking to evolve in many aspects, spiritual and social. We stop thinking about Duchamp and start thinking about Beuys, which is another story. Because Beuys talks about the diseases of society, the way we position ourselves in relation to them, and how we are going to function. Then, if you begin by assuming this, you have to look for the virus inside yourself, in the social disease of which you are a part of.
Glória Ferreira: In a certain sense, we can even say that the relation with the tradition of art has changed.
Marcos Chaves: We started to mix up more art and life. From personal experiences we look for a collective resonance. Art is trying to reinterpret the world. In my case I use humour, deviation, folds, to present new gazes at the same things. To make perceptions more fluid, to make them less rigid and dogmatic. It wasn’t easy to show my work, especially because I work with these instruments. I struggled in order for my work to be seen with respect. Not for it to be taken seriously, because that doesn’t interest me, but with respect. Besides, I am not an intellectual. If I have any knowledge, any cleverness about the world I didn’t learn it in books, but from my own experiences.
Glória Ferreira: Your reference to Beuys is important because he removes the issue of tradition in art to the finality of art. Then it’s really not Duchampian anymore.
Marcos Chaves: It goes somewhere else; it gets over the aesthetic issue. Not mentioning the shamanic issue…
Glória Ferreira: In Ideógrafo (Ideograph)6 you say the critics and the artists were your best partners . How is your relationship with the critics?
Marcos Chaves: I speak about an almost ideal situation that happened to me because I had luck. I’ve exchanged ideas with my colleagues and some critics, like you, Ligia Canongia, with Fernando Cocchiarale and Adolfo Montejo. With you it started at the time of Helio Oiticica’s exhibition and at the time of the American scene when we worked together. Through this work I had contact with the letters of Hélio Oiticica and Mário Pedrosa that inspired me a lot.
Lula Wanderley: There was a debate before in the press. There was probably a reform of the newspapers. This made it possible for who writes about politics to write about football or art at different moments. Reviews became very loose, meaningless. Maybe nowadays these debates have changed to a more informal encounter. The artists and the critics make up a web of spontaneous information, because for a long time we haven’t had contact with the press.
Glória Ferreira: In fact maybe we are in the presence of a deep transformation of the art critic. When you say that the conversations with artists and critics have been an important element for you, maybe this reflects the transformation of a review based on judgement and supposedly neutral to a critique that is closer to the thoughts of the artist. I believe that Ligia Canongia and Fernando Cocchiarale, for example, had this important role in the 1990’s here in Rio. The plurality of the critic constitutes from my point of view, another kind of dialogue. It is said today that the critic lost its independence to endorse the work. This happens. But I think that from a more genuine point of view it is a dialogue.
Marcos Chaves: I agree, because you are looking for information in sources that I don’t have much access to or that I am not looking for. We only complete some ideas. At the time of the exhibition 7 (in 1989 at Solar Granjean de Montigny) Fernando Cocchiarale, one of the first people I had this kind of dialogue with, gave me information about the work that I didn’t know before. This made me think of things that enriched the work. The work is for everybody, it is to be improved whenever possible.
Lula Wanderley: Before, one of the functions of the critic was to situate the artist’s work. To reposition it to the public. Nowadays, since the times of great ruptures are past, a work like the work of Chaves already includes an interpretation, it positions itself, so that the position of the art critic becomes different, it becomes more of a dialogue.
Marcos Chaves: Are you saying that it can do without the art critic’s interpretation?
Glória Ferreira: I am not really certain, but I tend to think that the critic becomes, in a certain way, a constructive element of the work.
Marcos Chaves: To clarify the work?
Glória Ferreira: Maybe as a kind of interdependence with the conception of the work itself. Parameters have been lost; this generated a movement, a mutation in the relation with the critic. Why does every artist want a text in his or her catalogue? Is it just because of the market or are there other reasons?
Marcos Chaves: It has to be clear for the artist that this is only one way, but there are others. I had the opportunity of having a work written by four different people. And each person saw it differently.
Glória Ferreira: In your work there is a very strong relationship with Brazilian imagery. How has your experience on the international circuit been? You started very young. What types of changes do you see in the position of Brazilian art in the international context? How do you see yourself within this dialogue about the positioning in this circuit, of artists who are also from countries on the periphery?
Marcos Chaves: There are only a few references with the force and visibility of our production out there. Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Ernesto Neto, Vik Muniz, Tunga. But they are not enough. They can’t account for all our diversity. At the same time they are great art references. Lygia and Hélio were the founders of various things, of interactivity, of the public being inside the work of art. It’s very important because when we do collective exhibitions with artists from all over the world, with Chinese or Europeans, we have this incorporated. In a way we express vitality. In the European model, the periphery gains a voice because there is an interest. It’s easier for us to go to the United States or Europe today because they want to know more. But they also want to come over here to do exhibitions. There is a desire for amplifying the world. It’s not that they are giving it to us, but they want it from us. We are warriors; with very little we make a lot. And many of them with a lot make very little.
Lula Wanderley: You would go to the Biennial to see an American or a European and as an extra, you would see the folks from the periphery. Nowadays this has changed.
Marcos Chaves: I think so. Even the Biennial of São Paulo changed this criterion. Out there we are still on the periphery and are treated as such. But this has been improving a lot.
Glória Ferreira: Antonio Dias, in a text from the beginning of the 1980’s, recently republished in the book Crítica de arte no Brasil: Temáticas contemporâneas (Art critic in Brazil: Contemporary themes)7, when responding to the statement that Brazilian art carried stigmas, problems, etc, he said: “Brazilian” art doesn’t exist. This has changed.
Marcos Chaves: Yes, it did, and it has been changing for a long time. He was one of the ones responsible for it.
Glória Ferreira: How do you position your work in relation, let’s say, between the local/global? Works such as Eu não falo duas vezes (I don’t say it twice) or Eu só vendo a vista are untranslatable.
Marcos Chaves: Of course I’m going to choose which work to present in Germany, in the United States, or even Portugal. Eu só vendo a vista has nothing to do with money in Portugal. They don’t understand this expression. What I look for is a certain universal quality and it’s up to my common sense to know how to understand each different place. The work is the same anywhere; the way it’s seen is what changes. A work shown in a Biennial can be seen by six-hundred-thousand people and of course this is important. The contact time is different. I don’t want the work in Biennial to be seen like it was inside my studio, intimate, because a herd of people are going to see it. The contemporary artist needs to know how to communicate, to make his issue attractive. Publicity is very potent, it’s a big opposition.
Glória Ferreira: Changing the subject a bit: How is your relationship to photography, to what you call annotations, or to the work per se? And the question of partnership, how is it for you?
Marcos Chaves: All these three things, funnily enough, they are inverse procedures. Photography for me was something useful, practical, an instrument that I could make use of quickly, especially in regard to a series of works such as Buracos (Holes). Photography is useful for its capacity of immediate apprehension. With time I became more interested in the poetics of photography. In a certain moment it was important to look for the point of view and the technique of another photographer, a professional, to be able to materialise some kinds of work.
Lula Wanderley: When I came here I told a few friends I was going to make an interview with Marcos Chaves. They asked me: the photographer?
Marcos Chaves: I believe this book will maybe help to clarify this issue. Because amongst my works, the ones that are seen most often, are the ones where I use photography, because they can be printed. It circulates a lot more than an object, a video. I have an interest in different languages and photography is one of them. I have a great interest in space as well. The works I did this year were not photography. They were works related to spatial issues. The work Fontana in the exhibition Arquivo Geral (General Archive) and Benvindo (Welcome) in the exhibition Pylar. In a certain way I present new alternatives for interpretation. It can be a photo or an abstract tape. They are very ordinary things that I try to remove from their contexts.
Glória Ferreira: You were a pupil of Lygia Pape. The relationship with the city and with the popular universe that Lygia brought in a very strong manner, did it mark you? She introduced into our environment a teaching of art that is not academic.
Marcos Chaves: Yes. But besides this I’ve always been interested in her freedom, both in the use she makes of these popular objects as well as in her poetic construction.
Lula Wanderley: Lygia Pape had something sunny about her, which I also see in your works, even a shiny exuberance.
Marcos Chaves: This is what interested me most in her. She had liberty and vitality. Her works are timeless; they are not very dated, both the last ones and the ones from the middle of her career. And the freedom of working with technology or not. She was always experimental. Lygia is a great example for a young artist. She was responsible for the formation of many artists.
Glória Ferreira: And as a teacher, how is your experience?
Marcos Chaves: I try to stimulate the students to experiment, as Lygia did. She is a reference for me as a teacher, in the sense of not throwing a heavy load of erudite information on the students, to let the student work freely with his references, to let him flow and afterwards, open up for a dialogue, whether alone or in a group.
Glória Ferreira: The other day I heard you saying that you had made a cover for a publication and that as a designer you needed to send it for approval while as an artist you don’t need to do that. How much is the experience with graphic design present in your work?
Marcos Chaves: The graphic designer is a technician; he is helping to give a face to the work. As an artist the one to decide what face it has is the owner of the face. But my experience as a designer helped me to equalize a subjective concern with the issue of communication. When I work with the yellow and black tape maybe it’s an influence from having worked with design. I worked at the National Bank as a visual programmer, responsible for the part of communication, of signs. It was there that I started using adhesive tapes to organize bank queues.
Glória Ferreira: And music?
Marcos Chaves: I am very tuned in to music. Music inspires me, positions me in the world, in my time. What is being done in music now, in a certain way, has to do with what I am doing in my works. One thing reverberates on the other. I have many artist friends with this same vibration.
Glória Ferreira: This could be the title to our interview: In this vibration.
Footnotes
1 The laughing container, shown in the exhibition On Leaving and Arriving, organized by Contemporary Temporary Artspace, in Cardiff, England
2 Interview to Graça Ramos. “Temos que respeitar mais a alegria” (“We have to respect happiness more”) in Arte Futura e Companhia, Brasília, 2002.
3 “O pedestre e o passante” (“The pedestrian and the passerby”).
4 Errática, electronic magazine, www.erratica.com.br
5 Interview to Graça Ramos. “Temos que respeitar mais a alegria” (“We have to respect happiness more”) in Arte Futura e Companhia, Brasília, 2002.
6 A TV pilot program filmed in 2005, 25 min., NTSC color system. Directed by Giovanna Giovanini and Eduardo Calvet.
7 FERREIRA, Glória (Org.). Crítica de arte no Brasil: Temáticas contemporâneas. Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 2006.