Page 118 - ARTE!Brasileiros #38

ART AS RESISTANCE ENGLISH VERSION

of art, design, architecture, the industrial materials and If absurdity itself does not exist in nature but as the
its consequent lack of human presence, the construction symbolic expression of a sudden reason flaw, it becomes
project of a new world and the allure of surfaces. inherently human, produced by error, by excess, by significant
All these elements are simultaneously crossed by deviations. And also by dreams – the moment when all paths
uselessness, their inability to retain the indexes of time, on the ground close down and the exit is through the air.
by the emptying of meanings and the organization É como Dançar sobre a Arquitetura (It’s Like Dancing About
of bodies for a life with no autonomy. Architecture), an exhibition on Instituto Tomie Ohtake
The objective of the exhibition appears to be the detailed featuring Lia Chaia, João Castilho and Jorge Soledar,
withdrawing of those utopias and their permanence to date. present apparently less tragic topics of this animistic
In particular the set of pieces in the octagon, which provokes variation. And there are great chances that the word
an unannounced vertigo, appears to indicate exhibition “apparently”, in this specific case, is the tragedy itself.
projects by El Lissitzky and the Italian architects Edoardo The title, according to the show’s text, is a reference
Persico and Marcello Nizzoli, with grids that organize to the sentence “writing about music is like dancing about
the environment and reveal the historic elements architecture,” by an unknown author, but quoted by artists
of the place where it is installed. such as Frank Zappa. The selected artists will find in their
But what to these avant-garde artists was political activism works, as a common ground, paths between a certain language
(communist, in Lissitzky’s case and fascist in Persico’s and (writing and dance) and another (music and architecture).
Nizzoli’s) and dialogue between languages and different The mistake (or the absurd) will be one of interpretation, because
times, here, mainly through the use of mirrors, visitors the trace of an artistic expression on a neighboring field
are imprisoned in an updated Carceri d’Invenzione of expression is precarious in itself when the purpose is
(Imaginary Prisons), by Piranesi, showing the dual, to expose the vibration matrix. The first hall of the show houses
outstretched face of the modern project. Jorge Soledar’s work, presenting mannequins with severed limbs.
The exhibition’s axis is the installation Bico de Diamante Placed across the room are hands with no fingers, the torso
(Diamond Tip, 1990), acquired by Pinacoteca in 2014 and of man with no belly, heads lost in space. And also a warning:
which organizes the historical, institutional and conceptual the viewers may manipulate those prostheses that themselves
agenda for the entire new installation. Here we see the lack other prostheses to be complete.
reflexive taunting of the visitors, who surrender to the order The mannequins’ lack of refinement takes on a grim
and, simultaneously, to the allure of the visual elements. understanding about the relationship between what the industry
In his founding text of modernism, which later inspired uses as model to the human and the human itself. The show’s
Walter Gropius in his educational and architectural introductory text says that “the contemporary city has lost the
projects, Ornament and Crime (1908), Adolf Loos sentenced connection with the human body, whereas its streets, squares,
that “the evolution of culture is equivalent to the avenues and bridges were reduced to mere places of passage,”
removal of ornaments from objects of common use.” The immediate interpretation of the work is similar, although
By evoking the different modernist projects in which the it is also written that the interactivity with the pieces questions
structure prevails over the ornament and the presence of standards of institutional behavior (preposterousness, since
subjectivities, Ana Tavares engages on the organization of interaction has become a traditional code in museums).
a world of technologies and industrial materials, and indicates The previous excerpt about the city also reduces the complexity
that there is no affinity between technological progress of urban phenomena, so diverse and polyphonic.
and human evolution. The expression “at the place itself” Chaia’s work is not condescending with diagnoses, especially
may be interpreted both through the fact that the artist because it employs humor and lightness. In a video, she swims
occupies once more the institutional space in a totally in a pool with lanes that are not parallel (the scene is pictured
different way than in the 1980s and for showing with her above). The traces on the tiles form labyrinthine drawings, and
works that, contrary to what Loos (and all modernisms) floating aimlessly represents not only disobeying the rule, but
proposed – abolishing ornaments and therefore improving the only option. In another video, Chaia walks around the city
technological and organizational progress –, culture (now forced to follow the layout), but tied to clusters of balls,
was left at the same place and nowhere. what makes her some sort of walking anomaly, accustomed to
her own inadequacy. At last, Chaia shows works in canvases used
1 | SINFONIA TROPICAL VI, ANA MARIA TAVARES in civil construction and signs painted on the wall, highlighting
the chronic sense of her view on the iconography of cities
REVIEW EXHIBITION | PAGE 96 and their failed developments in the creation of logical senses.
THE CONFIRMATION OF OUR IMPOTENCE The final hall of the show is dedicated to a series of photographs
by João Castilho, with records of enactments (there is the
Exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake sinks on the everyday sense use of actors) which nominally refer to the work of Franz Kafka.
of absurdity It is the work that makes the most direct statement of the show
and which places it on the vortex of an ideological manifesto.
BY GUSTAVO FIORATTI Castilho enacts, in arid places full of concrete, the inability to
escape the most lethargic inertia on which we are thrown by
THE NOTION OF THE ABSURD is not only that of a break the codes of civilization and the idea of progress propagated
in the logical sense that surrounds us. When represented by by the capital. It appears to claim that the ability for humans
dadaism, a movement initiated in 1916, the absurd proposed to be resilient contains in itself the absurdity of having to accept
that we observe the vertigo of the excess of reality produced, the nightmare. When we survive the unbearable, or the
in that case, by the First World War (1914–1918). Soon after, illogical, without actually overcoming it, we become not exactly
there was a bolder unfolding in surrealism, encouraged helpless, but condescendingly helpless.
by the theories of psychoanalysis and Freud’s concepts
about the three spheres of the self. 1 | PHOTO OF THE SERIES COMUNIDADE (2017), BY JOÃO CASTILHO

Book_ARTE_38_POR.indb 118 3/3/17 9:52 PM