On the visual traps of Marcos Chaves (Adolfo Montejo)
“[…] an object that, differently from any object of consumption, before it fills up, before it satisfies our libido vivendi, it would, on the contrary, remove, erode, divide, perforate holes in us.”
Gérard Wacjman
“Not to situate the message entirely on the side of one of the two, image or text”.
Marcel Broodthaers
1 (Intro as a map)
To want to stipulate a unique key for the poetics of Marcos Chaves, at this moment of his production, would be to intend to construct a shortcut looking for a one-dimensional hermeneutics that could be employed to the different voices entering the game. Therefore, since we refuse to take a reductionist path, we opt for a greater plurality of views and simultaneity of languages, that far from being only the standard heritage of the epoch (also a recurring receding line fashion) is before anything else the real territory of our contemporary identity, to which this Rio de Janeiro-born artist belongs, and whose production initiates at the end of the 1980’s, a period when “return to painting” was the dominating tone. Even more when these leaps between supports (or ex-genres) manage to construct a real texture that responds more to the continuous concerns of the artist than to some congenital whims of post-modernity, of our time.
In any case, in a preliminary synthesis, we recognize some forms of approach that structure his trajectory until now. They present themselves in four dimensions: through explicit objectuality, as a first source of aesthetic work, afterwards metamorphosed, made more implicit; through textuality or work with verbal/visual games, where the semantic component of the words is allied to images, objects and photographs to arrive at another signical meaning; through spatial intervention derived in part from an increasing concern with architecture and above all with the urban space, always socialized and contaminated by generic elements turned inside out; and, finally, through the dimension, ever more prominent, of the use of photography as a conceptual and installational instrument, that sometimes closely borders his almost static last videos.
Objectuality should not be recognized only as a staring point, for it has a fundamental importance, since the artist sees in this sphere a field of perceptive researches and a search for other meanings. Even more so when it is mapped and obtained from the coordinates of everyday life, that is, the humus of human contamination. The objects by Marcos Chaves flee from excellence, from the manufacture of an elitist precedence (in a Brazilian society that practices exclusion and makes a myth of privileges as a poisoned origin even in the very consideration and material precedence of the objects) and inscribe themselves – appropriation is always a two way process– in a nearby, close, daily horizon in unsuspected alliances with the world. Actually, this everyday character appears as an antithesis in order to prevent polished discourses disconnected from life. It is curious that, even when objectuality is set in motion in installations, it gains a more public nature; it is usually domestic and intensely experienced by everyone Comfundo (Confuse/With bottom), Buracos (Holes) and Lugar de sobra (Spare seats/Enough room) are works that distil a sense of collectivity through their permeability).
A map of the objectual that is inscribed in the expanded cartography that from the 1960’s and 1970’s pass from object to concept, and that are tuned in part with a Neodadaist profile, as well as with the same Duchamp who “finds a new thought for the object”. It is, therefore, with the neovanguards that the object as a morphological element points to the creation of new repertoire and that objectual art acquires the consideration of a new form of sculpture. From then on, far from any univocal or one-dimensional meaning, it opens a period of exploration of the objects or of their fragments with all its richness of associations. An unlikely field of expansion – like a new genre – that offers a greater traductibility and multipurpose condition. And that, as a sign of the appropriation of a reality that it wishes to contest, above all in the sedative sea of objects of consumption of our society of merchandise-images, it still wants to place the artistic gesture in a territory of responsibility in relation to the world1.
A good example is the series Hommage aux mariages (a first apparition of the color yellow in 1989) that ironically celebrates distinct couplings of a whole gallery of objects, whose symmetry converts everything into a hermaphrodite nature. The redundant sound of the title, of a doubled visuality, forces everything to be faced with an invisible mirror (where the meaning of the double, as well as the meaning of the replica, will be constantly worked on by the artist). A subtle irony runs through the first works, announcing a distancing weapon that matches well with the trivial, popular and even vulgar origin of the elements chosen for the assemblages. A whole field of conventions that is dealt with in one direction or another, through re-contextualisation, leaving the conventional part adrift. In this same vein, Simón Marchán Fiz has already pointed out that “the maximum intensity of the objectual or thingness provokes an apparently contrary effect: the conceptual, in as much as it sends for something beyond itself and deviates into an instrument of amplification and extension of consciousness.”2
Even then, this omnipresent objectuality – especially in his last works – moves towards a transformation, as it acquires a greater presence in photographic works, thus allowing a play of scales – another form of denaturalization of the image – and another presentation, more flat, more unreal in its supposed hyper-objectivity. Despite a certain visual proximity to the definition used by publicity when employing images, here the opposite is celebrated: ambiguity, paradox, a semantic/iconic turn (that until now presents itself as the last frontier that marketing was not able to cross).
But what can be further from objects than objectivity? Besides a close verbal origin, the certainty here is that the use of objects is the starting point, word-zero, as Marcel Broodthaers would say (“I use the object as a word-zero”), especially when it is recognized that gravitating around them are symbolic dimensions that a determined use has been turning ideological. In this symbolic imagery, in which Duchamp, the Dadaists and the Surrealists hit the “mercy bullet” shot, transits a great part of the artistic practice of Marcos Chaves. In fact, following on with the question announced earlier, Galder Reguera anticipates that “objects are not a guarantee of objectivity, because they are not depleted in their material dimensions”3 (by the way, something that publicity also knows for its instrumental ends, for its commercial fetishism).
If every object, like every image, keeps its signified translation in our socio-cultural imagery, it is a task of deconstruction to play not only with its formal physical appearance, but also with the appearance given to it. The lifting of this license under suspicion takes to differentiation between reference and meaning (something that Gottlob Frege emphasized as a distinct semantic trajectory). Leaving this universe of the philosopher’s logic, we are able to say that reference finds itself leaning on denotation, in the same way that meaning is supported by connotation. Because the effective interference of the artist functions on the associative realm. Actually, in the poetics of Marcos Chaves, this dedication to relations, to connections already established and those to be inaugurated by an opening of meanings, fulfils a dialogical condition.
On the other hand, a significant part of his works belongs to a visually manifested textuality. Something that, by the way, could be inscribed as well in the heritage of a certain expanded visual poetry, the experimental poetry that attained a plastic condition outside the parameters of paper as an original support (in which Brazil has a predominant place with its mid-century neovanguards). In this sense, it is interesting to situate related poetics such as the experiment-actions by Paulo Bruscky, the popconcret equations by Waldemar Cordeiro, where the alliance between text and image created ambivalent pieces; or the increasingly borderline intersigns experiences by Lenora de Barros. In the case of the Rio de Janeiro artist, it is present since the very beginning, be it with The hanged man (1987) or with the objects that intercalated the presence of words: there is a series of mirrors with words as written reflections that set in motion a continuous circularity in Não falo duas vezes (I don’t say it twice) (1995) – the text mirrors itself in its materiality – or Não falo articulo (I don’t speak I articulate) (1994) – where the line of interpretation crosses image and text – for example, making from the iconic-verbal symbiosis another writing, every piece acquiring a condition close to that of the poem-object.
This familiarity with word playing, with the virtuality of written or spoken language and with the “unfaithfulness of images” (in the language of Magritte, always a reference) achieves a new semantic of the objects, as well as of the photographs, in an universe of relation that puts the origins in check (already markedly classifying or worn-out by excessive or normative use). And this allows room to work with other semantic turns: clichés, slang expressions, words with ambivalent possibilities, double meanings… verbal registers where a supplementary tension can be developed, an inter-semiotic condensation that also inherits experiences from Joseph Kosuth, a certain taste for translations, tautologies, etc. In a double transit “from idea to image, and from form to idea”, as Nicolas Bourriand says, because it is about offering/recognizing the “traps of language” (according to the expression by L. Wittgenstein), and then to place an unstable condition, whose meaning is not so easily imprisoned in any side of the discourse. Not dialectic images, which believe in the possibility of synthesis, but a work that offers its own analyses, its contradictions “exacerbating the tensions that exist between them”4. (A good example is Come into the [w]hole, an ironic invitation where the work is the title, leaving out the canonical participation of the white cube, qualified as a hole, but on the contaminated boundary of the word whole between emptiness and totality.)
All of a textual materiality that is inscribed in diverse forms: in contradiction or ambivalence of the object or of the photograph with the verbal part inscribed, or on the role it fulfils in the ambiguity of titles – always with a hidden conceptual charade – which is the case of Registros (Registers), photographs that show documentations of bathrooms, Hommage aux mariages (with its redundant sonorous game, ironically cacophonous) or this hybrid of watches and photographic image called Death (written in the fashion of a calligraphic remembrance not to forget our greatest fear, here amplified “in stereo” as the artist would say.) Or as well with the creation of appropriate verbal constructs: photographic installation with the title LandEscape (neologism that includes the idea of escape, escape from the horizon, in tune with the triptych of the images of the sky, the signs and the improvised cross of a hole in the middle), or in the homage to Mapplethorpe (where the apple inserted in the name is read), or in a photography of a metallic apple that re-connects the origins of desire and death.
In fact, in the trajectory of Marcos Chaves there is a firmly established pulsion of poetic order, away from stylistic standards (poetry is not a previous thing) that combines perfectly with the interpretative concentration and amplification of his works, where the process of strangeness looks for an original perception outside the habitual territory of our automated gaze. This poetics, this system of signals, as an old Spanish poet would say, appeals to the concept of crossing semiosis, languages (in which Schwitters was a pioneer and is our legacy). In his own way, doesn’t Marcos Chaves study “the life of signs in the interior of social life” (as promised by Ferdinand de Saussure)? Even more when, as we have seen, the exploratory precedence of the artist is based in a universe connected to a more plural, daily and even simplistic reality.
There are not few artists who write images, who use the resource of writing as a structural and conceptual part of their works5. In the case of Marcos Chaves, the precise balancing point is at this happy interval quite common in his poetics, which is the finding of a hybrid nature, the turning of any constructed aesthetic iconicity into a contextual critique of its representational nature (symbolic, visual). Besides examining two conditions of language, which often means to read the signal characters that the images and the words hold in their conventional and standardized codification, and to create other codes whose reality is not only the one we see, because, deep down, it is about escaping from visual and conceptual linearity, about creating a connection that will be the interstice, the determining element of a new articulated meaning. To name the emptiness between the signal characters and, paradoxically, what has been constructed for this nomination. Let us not forget that these two areas, verbal and visual, when they become a combined image they favour another perceptive phenomenology, very different from the one that works as over-iconicity and the verbal insufficiency of our mediatic world. The presence of text and image in art, as has happened before in the most daring visual poetry, declares itself in favor of a critic intervention, deconstructing the obligatory manual of staunched compartments where reality administers our participation.
The installations in various exhibitions spaces, the site-specific installations and interventions correspond to another territory of action. In most cases of these spatial interventions, objectuality fulfils a transcendental role, in the sense that it is situated in a central place, where the materiality of space is interpenetrated by the objects. Producing thus some forms of modification: “space/object, object/object, object/space” (like Estrella de Diego defines for a close artist, Ana Prada), in which the sync between them – objects and environments – is often the same thing. Therefore, the configuration of Comfundo (Confuse/With bottom) is the objectual delirium of a bag transformed into a space of columns, an architected emptiness which confuses, the object making the space, such as in Sem título (Untitled) – an installation made with metal signalling posts – or in the projection of a hand’s shadow that re-dimensions the ceiling of Solar Grandjean Montigny; in Eclético (Ecletic) it is the architectonic sculptures that receive visual adjustments, the space is redefined by the object, despite the subtlety of the micro materials used (eyelashes, lipstick, metal, glass, foam); and in Logradouro the object and the space are the same thing, as also happens in Lugar de sobra (Spare seats/Enough room), another installation that works the series, in a way which is not at all minimalist, it’s relaxed, and relies on the contaminated experience of the objects/popular benches and their indiscriminate public use, at random.
Corresponding to an attention toward exteriority (departing from the bourgeois and self-centered statute where form has to be autonomous and exempt) the various works intend another form of legitimacy, outside of themselves, away from their condition of artistic exclusivity. It is also the place where a sense of authorship immerses into more inhabited waters. Logradouro, Comfundo (Confuse/With bottom), Lugar de sobra (Spare seats/Enough room), and Eclético (Ecletic) are an invitation to this contamination. And it’s very symptomatic that the materials (or spaces converted into materials) are of collective, social, mundane nature. The factors of reception and production, as well as the one that finalizes the works, present themselves contaminated, closer to an open work that allows entries and exits than to the self-sufficient work-entity. This public interaction has nothing to do with old interventionist conceptions, with ideological derivations, but with another perspective, not at all contemplative, of art.
Another sui generis spatial intervention, on a non-urban landscape, the result of a workshop in England (CYFUNIAD, 2001), denounces the intromission of road signs featuring animals (deers), that stop being warning signs to inscribe themselves in the very mark of (wild) nature, from where these animals come from. The strangeness of the out of place road signs places the codified semantics in the middle of another flow, which is not the one of the road, in the woods, to release images from an imprisoned imagery. And from which we can also extract some homoerotic fables. On the other hand, the intervention works the paradoxical side of a visual image constructed as a strange proposition of land art, or of an art object in the context of nature, exploring the increasingly tension between culture and nature.
Besides the stated characters, the use of photography has been growing in the last years, receiving a noticeable increase, though it is still not inscribed in the strict universe of classic photography. Marcos Chaves is associated to contemporary artists who recognize this medium (photography) as a space for results, for image experimentation. The issue is not so much anymore the act of photographing, but to make photographic works, that is, to use the image and insert it in other supports or objectives different from canonical contemplation, two-dimensional, flat. It’s the idea as form, a conceptual heritage that rules the aesthetic destinies of these works, in the measure that a similarity between ready-made and photography is evident through innate operations of descontextualization. We should remember that Duchamp had already praised the fictional character of this medium, which increasingly challenged representations of reality as the 20th century unfolded.
However, after making these considerations, this photograph (with or without a stamp of autonomy) that leaps from its own generic shadow, in the background appears as an extension of the interests previously exposed, because at times it’s about a convergence of registers with a preferential objectuality, inscribed in specific spaces, and that in any case is powered by another field of activity, always with an interdisciplinary connection. Despite the recognition of such hybrid condition of the photographic work it is also certain that technical accuracy is considered in all the offered possibilities: be it light-boxes, photographs with objects (Death) or images transferred to other physiognomies and supports Água viva (Jelly fish/ Live water), 1/1, Eu só vendo a vista. As an emancipatory aesthetic program, photography questions its representational value, in favor of a more flexible image, between appearance and its contestation.
In line of thought, it is curious that for Marcos Chaves it is increasingly more seductive to encounter the motive for photographic appropriation in a raw state: Buracos (Holes), Próteses (Prosthetics) without the need for any exterior addition, without inscribing or adding something in the stage/condition of “editing”. They are works connected to their own principle of visuality, concerned with a research about the replica (or double/magnetic image), whose first intervention is definitive and conceptual in all instances it sets in motion. However, this doesn’t stop questioning the immateriality of the real, of objects and of photography at the same time.
II (4 brief notations)
It’s usually insufficient to number the practices or strategies of creation that have been used in contemporary times. These gestures that respond to figures of appropriation, of displacement, of intervention/interference, of the search for a paradox etc are part of the list of operations that deal with the real quid of the aesthetic issue: the invention of “places” for another representation which is not yet reified. Or putting it another way: how distant can we stay from the real? Due to the problematic of this question, we decided to choose instead a few neighboring points, more important in the work of Marcos Chaves, since this is not the place for going into such depths. Some points are the value acquired by daily life as a territory, the flâneur character present in many of his actions, subjectivity as a critical map and humor as an artistic moral. Using these references the artist works his entire imagistic plot, through the simultaneous use of genres, as well as through the obsession for some ideas (constituting an imagined pathos). In fact, no aesthetic concern can promise to be innocent, superfluous, and interchangeable.
A daily quality so recognizable in his work (through elements and spaces of intervention) represents a determined relation with the world, not teleological, nor based in any transcendental character of a metaphysical order. In all of the operations of the artist, life’s pulsation is present as a grounded connection, an earth wire that is also the horizon. As it happens with Joan Brossa (poet and artist with whom he shares a few characteristics), from daily life almost everything can be obtained, mysteries included. However it’s not about a daily character interpreted as reality converted into realism, but a territory, even “ethnographic”, for glimpsing the uncommon of day-to-day life. The microscopic gaze of Marcos Chaves resides in the task of distinguishing the power of the minute, simple things, and its sensorial and reflexive connections, in sum, of the things that refuse being the Thing.
The exploration of subjectivity is placed on the foreground: as cause, as construction, as a dialog, as a part of a critical map, that serves as a starting point for the establishment of questions about personal and interpersonal identity, new contextualizations and agencies of the image itself (new forms of self-portraits or new contexts of collective inscriptions). A very productive resource for a certain generation of artists since the 1990’s (João Modé, Brígida Baltar or José Rufino) who reinterpret the biographical or personal situation inserted in the empty space left by the still recent maximizing explanations. Actually, we could make a trajectory of the work of the artist based on this aspect, which would take us to his last videos, where its presence is offered in a cryptic way. Not in vain, there is whole corporeal quality implicit or explicit in the work of Marcos Chaves (a certain reflected and subliminal Eros), because subjectivity has its autobiographic narrative and exploration field in the body (far from the dualities of other times), as an intimate, but also relational territory, that thinks about the common (community) represented by the other, besides our incompleteness.
His flâneur (walking-by) aspect fatally connects the limits of identity (subjectivity) with the walk/displacement in contemporary daily life. Besides the visual speed almost aphoristic of many of Marcos Chaves’ works, his apprehension of a space so symbolically public is recognizable by its ubiquitous character and movement. The holes, the prosthetics, are part of this wandering, aimless encounter – as some Surrealists such as Breton or Aragon would systematic do – that feeds a multidiscipline quality of the gaze, an appropriation and removal from context almost continuous, ad infinitum. Therefore, many works empower the sense of location, the process of passage, like Lugar de sobra (Spare seats/ Enough room) and Logradouro, respectively: glidings and subjective/objective constructions of the urban space and of subjectivity are under way (the cases of Gabriel Orozco and Francis Alÿs develop this same parallel in their own way, between the limits of objectuality, nomadism and the territory).
To arrive at Marcos Chaves’ humor means to touch one of the epicentres of his artistic syntax, due to the degree of relations that can be established from there. This recourse works a leveling down of all or any ontological importance, like an antidote, it offers leggereza (term animated by Italo Calvino, in the sense of lightness), because it’s not about exchanging one truth for the other, but about reducing the area of any truth felt as oppression or turned into its instrument. The conscious removal of weigh can be recognized in the reading of his objectuality, not concerned with functionality, but with reversibility, mutability. The critique of representation made by humor is aimed at the circumstances and conditions that make the air we breath heavy. Many works of art give themselves an excessive solemnity in their overwhelming, mythical exhibition – to which the poetics of the artist replies with visual imposture6.
The Cuban critic Ivan de la Nuez recently pondered: “when art laughs at itself, it appears as a first step for later taking on the demolition of all the rest”7. The defense of comical as something ephemeral or of short duration, that can’t be repeated, gives an idea that it should be considered as “state of exception”. Despite Duchamp’s humorist gesture with the ready-made, it is recognized that modernity was incapable of laughing at itself (Arturo Fuentes), and only in our time did it attain a guiltless nature to face pomp, circumstances and religiosity that even art exhales in so many cases, in order to maintain the idolatry of the white cube or its institutional system of gratifications mediated through objective totality. Humor can be considered as the “touching stone” in the poetics of this Rio de Janeiro artist, taking in consideration that it is not about manifested contents but about a conceptual, analytical, formal strategy. This rhetorical figure reveals also a kilometric distance from its pair, irony, even if sometimes he calls for it in his work, because of its oblique strategy (irony is never frontal) and critic empowerment on facing the conventional identity of things. The application of humor, far from being an act of escapism, is a source of semantic instability, installing different relations with the object/aesthetic goal.
Essentially, humor always facilitates otherness, with its cuts, fissures, incisions, interstices and deviations. Not only does it discover banality (naked or not) as a annulment of the perception of differences in things; and as a limit of how far comedy in art can get to with its bourgeois configuration: of concept, place, mediation… It is by its “seeing in between” that categories and structures are put under suspicion, and lack of harmony is discovered, interchanged. Humor “as a syntony in disharmony”8 must be perceived in Marcos Chaves as an antennae that connects the fragments previously referred to: daily life-subjectivity-flaneurie, in an art-life relation that approximates these terms, but does not confuse them, because he does not let them fall into the trap of becoming phagocytes.
Therefore, and to continue activating the earth wires that we mentioned before, nothing better than a detailed analysis of three emblematic works of the artist: Logradouro, Morrendo de rir (Dying of laughter) and the series Buracos (Holes).
III (Black IRONY yellow)
The lack of piety of irony determines that only that deserving being saved will be saved, according to an old annotation by Cioran. We can say that, for a large majority of contemporary art, irony is an esteemed expressive resource, perhaps in sync with our present time, which is heavier that it seems to be. In Marcos Chaves’ vocabulary, it is not only a constant presence, but also a structural one, in the sense that it allows a veil over that which it is really uncovering. The result always is something with a transparent disguise, where almost everything is visible, but it is necessary to look.
The visual irony continues, now in the gallery (Laura Marsiaj Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro) in the same semantics of yellow, a color once considered as the color of madness, and a corporal color by Kandinsky, but also chosen for the codes of urban traffic, as a sign of attention and isolation. A plastic black and yellow ribbon that, as one can see, is the starting point of this daring exhibition that begins visual and ends up amazingly physical. In fact, the installation carries a doubt that occupies the whole gallery: a doubt about color as sensation, as information: “color is not on things, but on the relation between things and us” (Félix de Azúa). The intention is clear: the work is the venue. Marcos Chaves knows this when dislodges meanings of the communication process in this work, which is a black and yellow “language play”.
In the same way that a light memory of yellow in the artist remits us to previous works of similar kind – a series of objects of Hommage aux mariages, the single line of poles of Sem título (Untitled) – whose dominant tonal is recognizable, the choice of the ribbon as a working material reminds us of an appropriation connection to those buckets with red light by Hélio Oiticica, of Rio de Janeiro’s streets. But is, above all, the inner dialogue with Raymundo Collares that stands out in this work named Logradouro, due to the pop/constructive inclination aired by the composition of this installation. Truly, one can hear things in common: a certain melody of a large city and signs of an urban chasm, although the nature of the works come from diversified sequences: more temporal in Collares and more spatial in Chaves. The installation is also a kaleidoscope in which pop/op/kinetic/Neoconcrete elements are articulated in the always Neodada eye of the artist.
This site-specific work – actually, more ‘specific’ than ‘site’, since its generic frontiers are more ambiguously located: it’s an installation whose content is its shape, and whose substance is both inner and outer – is based on the social communication of this traffic element, on visual codes and their readings. It’s at the same time a gallery work and a public work, never knowing if its fluid is coming in or out – the same energetic point shared by all images, in this case, is located on a wall as sheaf or drain.
Although the raw material chosen in this work never leaves the plane, it is a work of pure surface, which is nothing but volume, turning the gallery into a box, a container of conceptual resonance. If this Rio de Janeiro artist is well known for his appropriation of objects and photographs, as well as of words, in this case the object being appropriated is a space of art. The exhibiting venue is the work. If in a previous occasion, in this very same space, Marcos Chaves had brought to a new dimension an installation made at Castelinho do Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, now, in another turn around, he brings up a different condition for the unrecognizable white cube. It is magnetized for our presence, making us a part of the work.
A work that rescues a previous installation trend, always concern with representational de-naturalization. Somehow, Logradouro is a pictorial work without painting. The installation’s composition keeps as well as visual discontinuity or, better saying, it respects the geometry of chance, this another philosophical stone of the Dadaist French master. The sequence of this geometrical randomness has its own dose of humor, an indispensable element in the artist, both as language and as substance (see the audio work presented at the 26th São Paulo Biennial).
In Logradouro, street signals guide us to the gallery in order to find out that the work is precisely these very signals. Material, support and also the gallery enter in a certain de-constructive wheel: the ribbon suffers an intervention and it also intervenes, it’s the owner of the sequence and of the space: the gallery’s space becomes sequential.
The artist’s operation continues being combinatory: it is the convergence of the intervention and of appropriation at the same time: through signs it moves our references. The inherent exercise dismantles a system of traffic representation with another use of the language of the same image: the “un-conventioning” of an urban ribbon. Marcos Chaves’ “un-sublimating” strategy gains yet another paradox, especially when the artist himself is not afraid to recognize that “the sublime may arrive through humor”. This happens with Logradouro. And let’s not forget that irony loves to foresee representation crisis, even our most enrooted visual and ideological conventions.
The gaze that follows this work is dilated. It’s a visiting glance or, better saying, the visit of the glance. These are the artistic keys of Marcos Chaves9 (already in the name, as Ligia Canongia pointed out). To find paths where there are holes, to find holes where there are objects, pieces, fragments, figures where there are colors. Or as a Licthenberg aphorism goes: “New glances for old holes”.
IV (When the eyes laugh, or vice-versa)
“Too much sadness smiles. Too much smiling weeps”.
William Blake
For those who don’t know, but also for those who know well the previous works by Marcos Chaves, always built on the parameters of appropriation and intervention, the arrival of this work to the Biennial is a matter of surprise, for the notorious humorous element of his work, as a resource synonym to language, here is not presented only as an element, but as a fundament, as an aesthetic declaration. Vis-à-vis the seriousness of a great portion of recently produced art – sometimes of a conceptual holiness that makes difficult even the movement of air – this is a more than welcomed event, which makes this work more relevant than ever.
Morrendo de rir (Dying of laughter) – it couldn’t be otherwise – is a borderline work; not only due to its mixture nature and the creation of a hybrid space, but also because of its non-delimitated semantic of images: pain, scream, joy? Marcos Chaves has been hearing this intrinsic paradox of laughter – whose extreme is a burst of laughter – so “essentially human” and “essentially contradictory”, as Baudelaire pointed out, in order to make a true collage-installation, in which parts of the work are juxtaposed, tied to each other as if they were layers, and also taken to the extreme: silence, image, space and laughter.
If one of the recognizable aspirations of installations is closeness to life, to the issues of human condition, here both parts are joined into a third one which is the public, as if it were an “earth wire”. In fact, the balance/diapason of this audio-visual or visual-audio installation, depending on the order that the visitor activates it, rests on this triangle: the images of the artist-the laughters-the visitors. Due to this structure of the work, visitors become mediums, since they are the ones who tune the audio and visual laughter, quite possibly adding their own. The spectators are the ones who activate the work and its sequence. A sequence, by the way, that is never stopped, whether in the movement of the image of the laughing mouth or the sound that collaborates as movement: the image sends for a soundtrack and sound becomes image.
The official silence of art may be broken with the work, when laughing people transgress its auditive space, and even narration itself, for this is not a static work, as the photos shown here may lead us to believe, it is continuous: it renews itself with each new visitor, with each new laughter or burst of laughter, as an ongoing motto of the work, in which one can discover a heterodox and alive minimal component, for even if the motif is repeated, the form rarely is – sometimes effect and cause may be changed in it. In this way, if half of the work is public domain, it is because the public has the last word, or, better saying, the last laughter, since the work has indeed the intention of being an open essay; it has this wit.
Morrendo de rir (Dying of laughter) is part of an artistic vocabulary like Chaves’, whose main figure is still irony: of art, of the space of art and of the artist himself; and here there are the play of forms one can derive from laughter and its extreme, as the precise contrary of the squareness of the room and the even the puffs, or the pilled-up images of the artist’s face, as the greatest example for equating the field of tension of a work that nears the trend of acoustic art, but that, above all, creates a short-circuit in some of our aesthetic believes, through the ironical union of ear and eye under a title that also promises its own piece.
V (Of the inside-out of a hole, or another frontier)
There are works that create their frontiers, or, better saying, make them converge, not eliminating but re-dimensioning them with – it goes without saying – no customhouse spirit. Especially within a context where the culturally correct borderline discourses of our time celebrates it in its commercial appearances. With the word hybrid usually comes a mystification at any cost of the term, of this condition, as if yet another item of globalization. In the case of Marcos Chaves’ series Buracos (Holes), this same paradox takes place, but in a critical, attentive, lucid way, for instead of knowing we are before a defined and codified thing, we are always on the move, in a reflection that is never fixed to a place, where the very ground of the frontiers move, in several of their meanings. Maybe because the series, already from its starting point, invite us to this, to share different points of view, displacements that change their strategies, conceptual operations already implicit in the chosen, worked on and transposed visual matter.
This very same borderline condition is also explained by the several converging limits, by the fact that the series Buracos (Holes) is at the same time several indistinct things: it is a collective sculpture, a public installation, a popular intervention, and also a conceptual appropriation, a urban ready-made, a photography and, last but not least, a political work, and not necessarily in this order, for here what matter is multiplication and not sum. Nevertheless, each hole in a Rio de Janeiro street raises not only a tri-dimensional warning for pedestrians and, specially, for street traffic, but registers as well an unquestionable improvisation that lays further beyond the horizon of arte povera or the Dadaist discourse, perhaps in its wildest trend.
Like true urban phantasmagoria, then, Marcos Chaves has been rescuing local street interventions in the fashion of Kurt Schwitters-like apparitions. For each hole is a liability in the city’s public power, a symbolic fissure that is opened, a popular homage to the dangers of faulting politics that the social imaginary represents as a fracture. Each hole is an intervention that plays with presences and absences (of ground, of emptiness, of structure, of signs) and that is read with an accomplice and sardonic irony. It is not the first time that the artist approaches the urban imaginary of his city with a transversal and humorous gaze, but this time the aesthetic itinerary is different. As one can sense, in the Rio de Janeiro cartography there is no territory unity, for it is alleatory, mundane, nomad. To the high sum of circumstances, we must add the juxtaposition of elements that contribute for the work and that should as well be part of Paul Virilio’s Accident Museum: accident, chance, traffic, collage, improvisation.
The other dimension explored by the artist is found in the play of language – echoing Magritte – established in the title, which is simple, and in which hole is an inside-out representation, and a representational iceberg, whose meanings reach beyond the visible space. Here, put in the style of colloquial Portuguese, “the hole is further down”10. Once again, verbal and imagetic images are crossed; draw their abyss. As Mel Bochner once said: “There is a large abyss between the space of the statement and the space of the objects”11. Ever more so when the object aims to have other goals, to leave its logos, and the statement reaches another discursive space, where they can’t fit comfortably or categorically. For instance, photography itself – increasingly used by Marcos Chaves as a support – carries this division, this oblique glance that allows raising suspicions about reality and its fiction, about the nature of image and its irony, about its codes. In this way, the poetics of this work is born from a rupture that is explored between the real word, the sculpture that modifies it and its photographic documentation. The photos of the holes are self-representations, in which object and idea couple in their raw material (the piece lifted in the street) and in its category of thought (the photographic and conceptual registration), but in order to arrive at perverse tautologies, which never stop incurring on several levels of understanding. There are other signs on the road. Thus in this collection of holes one can see much more than one thinks.
VI (Unfoldments, resonances, becomings)
After dealing with three paradigmatic works in Marcos Chaves’ career, we resume that conductive thread of larger scope, in order to follow some of the paths opened by its several unfoldments (never given as remakes, but as becomings), in an artist to whom the sense of series proliferates as a conceptual continuity, but also as a gift of imagetic ubiquity with which he works. In this way, about the installation Logradouro, inaugurated in several exhibition venues (Rio, Vitória, São Paulo) always with different metabolizations and acquiring new dialogues with architecture, it is necessary to document the existence of other significant parallel experiences, quite distant from the original matrix. Such is the case of the version made in Switzerland, where the continuous black and yellow line crosses the inner/outer space of the building, wanting to reveal another sinuosity of visual reading, away from the codification of urban traffic that has the very chosen plastic ribbon as the sole leitmotiv. This happens as well in a succinct way in the work presented at the group show Arquivo Geral (General Archive) (2006), in the form of an installation, where the metalanguage obtained by the separation of the colors of the ribbon reaches another imagetic suspension, a further unfoldment since the first Logradouro.
Another quite different register belongs to the scenic collaboration for a ballet, Teorema (Theorem) 2006, where ample kinetic-visual transformations are still produced, and that relocates the equations of the ribbon/binomial of colors in a different amplification, in interaction with the dance, with the possibilities of the movement – a double dance: the dance takes place on the very black and yellow choreography of the work. Because the stage scenery done by the artist participates of a visual nature in state of dance, whose shapes are granted different dimensions due to the participation of light, the interaction of the urban dancers (something that somehow already takes place since the beginning of this work in all its configurations, in the close dialogue it establishes with our passage, our inscription). Actually, the idea of passage, so much dear to Benjamin, is inscribed in Marcos Chaves’ poetics with great authority (and some of this we already saw applied in the condition of his flâneur and “ethnographical” work that documents his artistic-mapping action). A topographical and visual reading of the city when it is no longer a domesticated landscape but favors an “allegorical glance” (Nelson Brissac) wandering towards other signals.
In the same sense, if we search a resonance with another previous work, we find the abundant offspring of Morrendo de rir (Dying of laughter). There are some works in which the image of the artist once again comes out demystified, in which the function of the portrait reaches characteristics of a critical map of a subjectivity in dance. In this category we include the video with reference to Mapplethorpe, Sem título (Untitled) 2005, whose irony overcomes any apparent self-worshiping discourse: in it the artist appears standing seriously holding a cane – in an accomplice reference (winking an eye) to a known image of the American photographer – crowned by a skull. Soon after this cane is transformed into a child doll/rattle with a macabre laughter-horn. A video in which its temporal concentration is close to a cinematographic gag (the conceptual dilation rarely is narrated in Marcos Chaves, it’s – forgive me the fashion – more concentrated), and in which one feels as well a certain Mexican touch (let’s say José Guadalupe Posada), where death can always laugh of itself, and the title Morrendo de rir (Dying of laughter) points to this very same combustion. The same happens with another minimalist video, where the artist’s mouth, hidden by a smiling mask, floats between its transformations and the relationship established with the upper part of the face. Here, the gesture/smile turns into its own antidote. Such partition subverts our tranquility, and once again places the comical vies in the front line, in a corrosive fluency of our contemplation. The number of faces/scary masks exhibited by the artist is in sync with an intrinsic condition of humor: to display the maximum of interpretations, in the same way that his partial facial mask is in sync with the gag’s etymology, which is to shut the mouth, to put something inside it so to prevent someone from speaking.
In this sense, the importance of the mask (already pointed out by Ligia Canongia12) is employed in a literal sense in these last works (that carry a certain dose of unprecedented dark humor and an Eros/Thanatos tension). On the other hand, it also remits to the theater personae, the pantomime that likes to eliminate de limits of presence, the alter ego figuration that runs through many of the artist’s works. There is a heteronimical/ of alterities profile within a same subjectivity that affects this whole series of works in which identity is questioned, taken down from its pedestal, analyzed sotto voce, contrasted.
Once again, humor is not unaware of the terrible (and it is worthwhile to remember another departing point, more specifically the one of the holes, in the photographic installation LandEscape). In that work, the almost lugubrious irony pointed to the fugacious destiny of our existential path, transformed in memento mori by photography.
Now, the photographs of Próteses (Prosthetics) (an ongoing project) keep a certain echo of the holes and the registers. They once again situate us in a doubtful visual territory, where ambiguity is reworked as ambivalence. They are photos that appropriate/build an urban situation of architectural patches, urban “still-lifes” that play with the impossibility of beautiful forms, in spite of being, on the other hand, constructed compositions. Urban findings that defend his visual thesis of prosthetics (the importance of titles for the artist), in amplified details that dream with the chimera of sameness. It is resumed here the intersection between public work, appropriation and photographic ready-made, which includes a popular and manual intervention and a conceptual register.
The series, partially never shown before, is related to the appearance of images – that is, with its disguise –, the play with a double (and with double meaning) through an ironical (and loving) gaze, on the character of mimesis, applied or transported to a field as utilitarian as the forms that escape from falsehood without ever arriving to the truth. To laugh of the well-made is also to laugh of this mimetic intention – an absolutely fundamental element in the artist’s poetics. Because, besides the aseptic lyrical tone present (as it happens in Geraldo de Barros’ intervened images), here there is no line dividing the fiction and the real of the image, since the photographs show, precisely, the exact play of this conceptual convergence.
Finally, one can take the inverse route, against the tide, and remember then that, in the derivation of the photos displayed in Sem título (Untitled), there is the site-specific Eclético (Eclectic) (Castelinho do Flamengo, Rio), which is its true root. To the collection of photographs that serve as register of any non-permanent artistic action, the previous step is added, once again empowered. The imagetic game produced between both works, the photographs and the intervention in the building, is of an intense inner circularity, made effective by the affinity between the photographic condition (its frozen state makes the memory of images turn) and the accomplished action, as well as by the very difference of the activities. The fixed temporal configuration of the photos seems to offer back to eternity both the intervention and its results.
One should considerer as a transversal characteristic of this work – and of the artist’s poetics – its aura-dissolving function. (By the way, according to the artist Rubem Ramos Balsa, art is only laughable at when it loses its aura). Here, the consecrated aura of the building, in its eclectic condition, is played with, and for it a carnavalization of the architecture is developed: a site-specific that affects a space and a time carnavalized in their new visual attributes. In this way, Marcos Chaves reanimates a tired decoration with another visual phantasmagoria. The minimal, subtle and different intervention on the faces – a sharp art with fine witz13 – grants to the statuary inscribed in the building an irreverent Macunaíma14 – like tone, in which the masquerade of references/denotations denounces the lack of a predominant and systemic central axis. And it’s not difficult to recognize in this another poetic vocation of the artist: concentrated by detail, it installs works to function as systemic errors. It is not by coincidence that he belongs to the lineage of Brazilian artists who recognize this Macunaíma side of metamorphosis, irreverence also present in Nelson Leirner, Marepe, Artur Omar and Vik Muniz.
As if we had traveled in an elliptical orbit within the aesthetic poetics of Marcos Chaves, our perspective change, and perhaps now we became more aware of the short-circuit produced by the images.
VII (Exit with coda)
If there is a demand in the whole work of Marcos Chaves, in its own dispersion and hybridism, it is that which requires a greater exercise of visual attention, that is, that which orders us to lower the volume of aesthetical monumentality, precisely in an epoch when visual maximalizations are not only an emblematic part of the spectacuralized society, but also of the requirements of a certain political scene that needs images, specially architectonical ones, in order to deceive citizens by using other visual games. To reduce, therefore, visual contamination, which is so officialized by systematic propaganda, and to be attentive to the game in plastic semantics deals with its more open signs, allows us to replace it by the impoverished image that is presented and sold to us as our unequivocous and perverse present. Art and life continue their combat, distances and approximations, whether strategic or mystifying. For it’s not by dreaming with the territory of communication, or with production and property de mere objects/pieces/works – as Mario Perniola points out – that art can be mingled with life, or simply to dissolve into it. In this sense, the mediatic and economical simplification is a major one, both naturalistic and mimetic. Thus the lateral pertinence of the artistic practice of Marcos Chaves; his working at the margins of banalizing operations. As another aesthetic ecology, the very choice of humor as a linguistic resource is no joke at all, but an oblique strategy far from the grandiloquence and the mystifying apparatus of the very artistic object. It is an anchor in the terrain of the necessary, and also a call for the irreverence (which is never cruel) of another kind of reading. And this is related to the new horizon and statute of the new work of art which is or should be in course in the imminent contemporaneity, taking on a different anthropological role, becoming a more public work, more interactive, more critical of its own symbolic representation… In this, the poetics of this Rio de Janeiro artist knows to choose its deserving targets.
The work on codes, signals and alphabets bets on language plays, in messing with the side-scenes full of cultural obligations that compose our vital warehouse. (As did another Marcel, perhaps the closest to us at this point, Marcel Broodthaers). In this way, “through the arrangement and alteration of the relations among alphabet, code, denotation and object, Broodthaers comes close to a radical utopian rearrangement – the one of the very oppositional and binary world as we know it”15. It is this level of interference that is always on the move, except in the artistic work that aims to become a statue of salt. The work of Marcos Chaves is, therefore, an artistic seismometer that deals with visual perplexity, always departing from a daily-life and assumedly near situation. As a last consonance, there is the almost pocketsize site-specific Benvindo (Welcome) (2006), composed by a door in the ceiling that disarrays our visual and sensorial expectations, generating a conceptual vacillation in our apprehended semantics (even more so when it is about the architectonic appropriation of a hole between floors). Or a kinesthesia in the sensorial wheel lately produced by videos and installations, in which the acoustic part is the structural part, and of which the “purest” example is Laughing container (2005), the urban installation in Wales of a locked container hiding all kinds of laughters /noises in its hermetically closed inner space (also related to that secret noise introduced in a Duchampian object in 1916). In some way, what is worthwhile in both is the ciphered enigma of something being sealed, whether in the obscure ready-made (by Duchamp) or in a created situation (by Marcos Chaves), in which the container and the content (laughters) become the same thing, and a rare objectual situation becomes an installation.
Marcos Chaves’ imagetic corresponds to another window of perception, worn from these credits and legends that seriously preach over the obligatory correlate with the objectivity most tied to the oldest reasoning. Even art’s pomposity and circumstances are seen with an oblique glance, whether lucidly observing the adoration of the works’ former aura and authorship or its omnipresent translation as an almost exclusive market product. Marcos Chaves’ trajectory presents considerable latitude, its own creative wave: a production of visual paradoxes, in favor of a critical negotiation with reality. It is an invitation for the establishment of new cognitive relations that are always ruled by a diversity of approaches, all of them marked by singularity as the best strategy for this ever more necessary struggle between visual signifiers and conceptual significations, if the idea is to escape from the latest version of universality. Thus his visual traps work as suspects of that which lives in the empire of the suppressed.
Like that intervention/photographic appropriation of the artist in a revolving door of Liverpool’s Tate Modern, changing its semantic coordinates (TUO/OUT, 2001), the work conducted by the artist on signals and codes does not only makes explicit his self-reflexive metalinguistic poetics and critical interventionism in the layers of representation, aware of situationist contingencies, but also announces, as the best fair play, our place in this accomplice conjugation, whose exit could as well be the entry.
Rio de Janeiro, February 2007
OBS.: The present essay was fed by three texts written about the artist’s work (III, for Logradouro, January 2002; IV, for Morrendo de rir (Dying of laughter), March 2002; and V, unpublished, for the series Buracos (Holes) April 2006), incorporated with light changes in this seven-part mobile for Marcos Chaves.
Footnotes
1 Another irony that weights over this field is the complaint made by Duchamp himself about the institutionalization of his irreverent ready-made gesture (done in 1962, without yet seeing the operations of the Simulationists) already converted into an “aesthetic value”: “I threw on their faces the corkscrew and the toilet bowl as a provocation, and now they admire it as the aesthetic beauty.” Against this mimetic machine art does not free itself from its combat, since “it’s certainly about an ideological machinery, that makes pressure, that attracts by its redundancy, repetition and rhetoric; being it cultural, to the common places of culture, being it aesthetic, to the disciplinary or interdisciplinary canons of the various artistic supports”. (NAVAS, A. M. La maquina mimética. Revista Lapiz, Madrid, n. 230, feb. 2007). This means for any artistic activity to assume the conflict with language, and also with the cultural environment and the legitimating agencies.
2 FIZ, Simón Marchán. Del arte objetual al arte de concepto. Madrid: Ed.Akal/Arte y Estética, 1986. p. 169.
3 REGUERA, Galder. La cara oculta de la luna. Revista Lápiz, Madrid, n. 218, p. 50, dec. 2005.
4 BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. Joseph Kosuth entre les mots. Artstudio, L’Art et les Mots, Paris, n. 15, p. 99, 1989.
5 If in the field of photography in the last forty years such photo-text became a habit, the extension of this practice has been surpassing previous limits: Robert Frank, Duane Michals, John Baldessari or Jochen Gerz, Bárbara Kruger, Victor Burgin, Sophie Calle, Rogelio López Cuenca, Gillian Wearing, Leonel Moura, Hamis Fulton, Kem Lum, Jorge Macchi, among others.
6 Marcos Chaves, with his generation partner Barrão and Eduardo Coimbra, or like Guto Lacaz, Nelson Leirner, in Brazil, or Joan Brossa, the Chapman Brothers, Martin Parr, Sarah Lucas, David Hammons, Maurizio Catellan or Erwin Wurm, belong to a family of artists that laugh, that use humor as an efficient praxis of their work, as a resource and register. It is symptomatic that two international publications recently dedicated essays to this theme ([W] Art, Porto, n. 001, 2004; Exit, Madrid, n. 13, 2004).
7 DE LA NUEZ, Ivan. La risa del arte. El País, Babelia, Madrid, p. 16, 17 feb. 2007.
8 FUENTES, Arturo. El ready-made como produto dum estado humorístico. Revista [W] Art, Porto, n. 001, Humor, p. 57, 2003/2004.
9 “Chaves” in Portuguese means “keys” (Translator’s note).
10 “O buraco é mais embaixo” (Translator’s note).
11 BOCHNER, Mel. Considerações em torno da reinstalação de A theory of sculpture. Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, 1999. p. 25.
12 CANONGIA, Ligia. Marcos Chaves – Arte como máscara. Rio de Janeiro: Laura Marsiaj Arte Contemporânea, 2005.
13 Term meaning wit, smartness, intelligent insight, used by Gloria Ferreira in the folder of Eclético (Ecletic), Centro Cultural Oduvaldo Vianna Filho, Rio de Janeiro, 2000. Irony itself usually works as an effect granted to the meaning.
14 Macunaíma is an anti-hero (irreverent, lazy, sensuous) character created by the Brazilian Modernist author Mário de Andrade in the book of the same name. (Translator’s note)
15 VIDAL, Carlos. Democracia e livre iniciativa/Política, arte e estética. Lisbon: Fenda Edições, 1996. p. 105.