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“(…) there is a deep prejudice that sees tragedy as something more profound than comedy. But Socrates suggested an identity between comedy and tragedy, and I don’t see any reason why comedy can not, such as in The Divine Comedy (Dante), be profound and show us our limits and how to find happiness in them. The Divine Comedy, of course, is not very funny, but laughter is incited through the knowledge of our limits, our inability to remain erect when we slip over a banana skin. Or to sustain an erection in the act of love – which is both tragic and funny at the same time, but less tragic than funny, if we learn how to laugh about it. But a great part of contemporary art is brilliant and sagacious, be it funny, or not”

 

Arthur Danto1

 

“Humour is a way of taking the tragedy from things, of looking at the world in another manner, less fatal.”

 

Marcos Chaves

 

 

In a subversion of the common notion – which is connected to the game proposed by the work of Marcos Chaves – we are able to affirm that the guide of this work is deviation, deviation that promotes displacements. Chaves is the creator of artistic propositions that, through intervention or appropriation, displace current, conventional, “taken for granted” and banal meanings to generate the appearance of new meanings, unexpected, not yet seen, not yet scrutinized. It is about a precise view that dislocates itself from the habitual, that reflects and produces something new in language, produced through a mixture of acidic humour and irony. The choice for these resources is by no means casual; they are coherent and consistent, because they are carriers of a high degree of deviating potential: both humour and irony are devices that hit the target through less obvious means.

 

This typical procedure of Chaves’ work – that has been well evident and often happens using the vitality and novelty of the Duchampian matrix and his readymades, besides photography2 and video – can be seen as a tireless search for removing experience from banality; to give lightness to tragic circumstances via the use of humour; to take a sideways glance at situations and objects already framed by common sense; to criticise art itself and the condition of the artist through the use of refined irony; to enter into the established order of contemporary art with elements that are more commonly associated with urban trash.

 

As we affirmed, the aim here is to make the deviation happen: the displacement. In Chaves’ universe everything is the same but at the same time already not the same. Like the drawing of Wittgenstein’s duck/hare that, depending on your point of view, can be viewed as one or the other. Everything is altered yet at the same time nothing is altered. It is the same, but not the same anymore, due to a simple and light displacement of the gaze.

 

Within this construction of displacements is a type of clinical intervention in the world through art. Language plays a central role in this intervention. Having a witty and agile knowledge of the various meanings contained in each word and of the combinations of those words with other words, Chaves makes the titles of his works a fundamental part for the articulation of meaning. We must also remember the special and active role that the work of Marcos requires from the observer, because it will be the observer who will close the circle of meaning and enter into the game of associations and/or inversions proposed by the work.

 

But these various procedures found in the repertoire of the artist– that here we call deviations, displacements, interventions- what do they represent? What does this series of displacements produce and what are its effects?

 

To attempt to answer at least in part these questions will touch inevitably upon aspects of the old duality of life and art. But for those that tremble only by reading these two words so close to each other, saturated by the avalanche of auto-biographical works that the contemporary period has given us, you should not worry. The attempt here is not merely to understand art through life, but to see in the works of Marcos Chaves what kind of confrontation is occurring with life and the world.

 

Marcos’ own work doesn’t permit us to make a strictly biographical reading of them. It is not about a territory where the dramas of a lyrical subject are being constantly exorcised. There is an impersonal quality in his aesthetics with a strong intellectual and intuitive pulse that conducts his work and makes such an approach clearly wrong. The structural procedure found in this work – its arkhé3 – gives us a categorical indication of new possibilities and connections with life, with the things of the world and with the readings we make of our own destinies.

 

By realizing that his work deals with objects and images that already exist – both in the case of the objects themselves and the installations, as in the videos and photographs- we understand that in principle there is nothing really new being created here, it’s just about the creation of subtle and fine articulations that will create a new meaning for pre-existing things. This is the significant point. The deviation of the “same which is not the same anymore” is the possibility that at every moment, at each encounter with the beings of the world, we are capable of removing the experience of this encounter from its original banality, expressing through language new meanings not expressed before, not yet investigated, not yet seen, and not yet heard. When it is affirmed that Marcos Chaves “surprises meanings and values immersed in vulgar things, dissimulated by habit or convention”4 it is meant exactly this power of each of his works to detach itself from the paralysing webs of habit (which clouds thoughts, life and the gaze) and reveal surprising new meanings where before only one thing could be seen, or not seen at all. This artistic operation is what we understand as being the structural procedures of Chaves’ work and has humour and irony as its main devices, which guarantee the possibility of reversing what seemed irreversible; laughter may appear from where there could only be pain; multiple meanings appear where before there was only one meaning; the appearance of the third that removes us from the fatal double pendulum: good or bad, darkness or light.

 

**

 

In the work now presented by Marcos – Passarinho que come pedra sabe o cu que tem (The bird that eats stones knows what its arse is like), at the Darcy Ribeiro School of Cinema, providing the location for the CAPACETE entertainment company and allowing Helmut Batista to curate the exhibitions– we have a sample of the potent deviating force present in the work of the artist.

 

Passarinho que come pedra sabe o cu que tem (The bird that eats stones knows what its arse is like), bears many characteristic marks of Chaves’ productions. It is an intervention on a readymade and in this case it is the outside packaging of some cigarette boxes. In this work, a Ministry of Health warning sign is removed from the packets and replaced by the tragic and comic expression “The little bird that eats stones knows what its arse is like”. The object remains the same (but in a larger scale), the letter font as well, but the original warnings “Smoking causes lung cancer”, or “Children start smoking when they see adults smoking” are swapped with the popular idiom. In place of the original images we find the artist himself simulating, at the same time as making a parody of, the situation – such as the breathless man in front of the stairs or the adult smoking by his child, etc.

 

The adverts placed by the Ministry of Health first appeared on cigarette packages about four years ago. The invasion of this politically correct ideology into our daily life and also into the spheres of high culture, such as the universities and the art world, is one of the main cultural heritages of the 90’s. On the negative side of this movement, created in the U.S.A, are found aspects of neo-conservatism, repression of pleasures and intrusion into the dimension of the individual that should not be the concern of the government. The warnings on cigarette boxes constitute a symptom of this last form of political correctness, that is, where the government gives itself the right of telling others that which is right or wrong in an individual’s life. The extreme legitimacy given to this ideology empowers the government and allows them to act in such a manner.

 

Passarinho que come pedra sabe o cu que tem (The bird that eats stones knows what its arse is like), has as its specific target this form of bad tasting authoritarianism.  The idiom shows us the individual that affirms: don’t come and tell me what is bad for me, Yes, I eat stones and I am aware of the consequences. The good and the bad. I affirm both at the same time. This expression intends to provide a comic turn to tragic circumstances. It is about humour interfering with the original meaning of the situation and creating a new meaning. In place of the smoker overcome by guilt and ashamed of his smoking, there is the smoker that doesn’t repress his addiction, he knows the pleasure and the pain that it gives him. Finally, the individual that knows how to laugh at himself, at his own enjoyment and his own disgraces, that assumes the schizophrenia of life, the subtle line that separates pleasure and pain, recognising the pleasure of smoking, of drugs, of the pleasures of the flesh and refusing to repress them.

 

The presence of the artist himself in the photographs that simulate the warnings emphasises both the character of responsibility for his own actions within the sphere of private life – that the politically correct try to penetrate and censor – as well as making the situation more comical. We have the artist that laughs at himself, giving grace and lightness to the grave situation faced by the smoker who is warned on each cigarette package that if he maintains his habit he will die of lung cancer.  He introduces an ironic and playful tone that plays with the protected and highly esteemed “aura” that surrounds the condition of the artist in modern times.

 

In this work it is also made clear the approximation between life and a work of art. Being a smoker himself, Chaves knows what he is talking about. He is a bird, he eats stones and he knows his own arse. But it should be made clear that the relationship being made here, between life and a work of art, is not merely restricted to deciphering a condition of biographical order transported to an artistic sphere, it is about a sophisticated articulation that involves many layers of meaning. “The bird that eats stones knows what its arse is like” makes use of the deviating powers of humour and irony to critically comment upon both the symptoms/situation which is not only of the individual but also the human condition and more precisely this time which is ours.

 

If the words of a certain French philosopher are of any worth, if we are able to think like he thought, that a work of art is “everything you want it to be (…) as long as it works” and that “the work of modern art is a machine and works as such”5, then maybe we are able to take some effect from this attentive and careful encounter with the machine of Marcos Chaves. Perhaps this encounter may appear for us as a spark, a spark that carries in itself the potential of reminding us of the possibility, always open, of promoting deviations of the same. Even though, through deviation, it will not configure as the same anymore.

 

There it is, the ‘twist’ that finds in the work of Marcos Chaves a beautiful home.

 

Luisa Duarte

 

 

Luisa Duarte is an art critic and curator. This text about the work Passarinho que come pedra sabe o cu que tem (The bird that eats stones knows what its arse is like) was produced in Rio de Janeiro, September 2003.

 

 

 

Footnotes

 

 

 

1 This quote was taken from an interview given by Arthur Danto in the book Memórias do presente – 100 entrevistas do Mais! – Artes do conhecimento, organized by Adriano Schwartz, edited by PubliFolha, in 2003. Arthur Danto is an art critic and professor of philosophy at the University of Columbia, U.S.A, and author of After the end of art, Beyond the Brillo Box, Encounters & reflections – Art in the historical present, amongst others. He regularly writes for the New Yorker periodical The Nation.

 

2 Ligia Canongia in the text “Vazio e totalidade” (“Emptiness and totality”), 2002, called attention to an important aspect, that of the approximation between readymade and photography in the context of Marcos Chaves’ work: “The same logic that presides over the act of photography governs the Duchampian attitude. The readymade, like photography, suspends the object from the continuity of time and its original space, from the progressive and evolutionary chain, separating a slice of the world from the rest of the world. The readymade is a kind of cut that interrupts, as the photograph does, the normal flux of an object. The shot that is fundamental for the photographic operation, is the same shot that in the readymade isolates a portion of the world.”

 

3 This word originates from Greek and has two main meanings: 1) what is in front and because of this is the beginning of everything 2) what is in front and because of this has the command of everything that follows. On the first definition arkhé is a fundament, an origin, a principle, what is in the beginning or in the origin; a starting point; a source for actions and the final point where they arrive or return to. On the second definition, arkhé means command, power.

 

4 CANONGIA, Ligia. “Vazio e totalidade”. Text published on the occasion of the exhibition Come into the [w]hole, by Marcos Chaves, in the Nara Roesler Gallery (SP), in 2002

 

5 DELEUZE, Gilles. Proust e os signos (Proust and the signs) Translated to Portuguese by Antonio Carlos Piquet and Roberto Machado. Forense Universitária, 1987. p. 145.