Art/City

ART/CITY

by Lisette Lagnado

        Is it possible to arrest the contemporary subject's stroll through the city with even a fraction of pure unpredictability? This discussion, which dates from the paradigmatic interventions of Richard Serra, Robert Morris and Christo, inserted the work of art into the notion of an "expanded field"(1), where esthetic enjoyment occurs under the empire of nomadism.The structure of the contemporary image, distinct from modernity in its articulation of varied languages, placed the support of art on an urban scale. Today the work (notably sculpture) not only abdicates the privilege of a single point of view, but also invests in the attempt to pulverize the metaphors of vision in the reevaluation of the Greek notion that knowledge is linked to looking. A "phenomenology of perception," inaugurated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contests the distance between subject and object: other sensations, like touch, come to be mobilized as conduits for experience.

     Curated by Nelson Brissac, the production of the event "Art/City" brought forth all the theoretical nuances that punctuate the debate on postmodernity: the rupture between the work and the marketplace and its consequent insertion in urban space, the question of the displacement of the public through new technologies, the dematerialization of art and the construction of "specific objects." The old center of the city of São Paulo, where the activities of the commercial and financial sector intersects, accommodated 22 artists who created work based on their experience of the city. Three historical buildings and the surrounding neighborhoods of Vale do Anhangabau were besieged by artists, photographers, video artists, cinematographers, musicians and architects.

      But, independently of its site, the event was constituted as an interactive binary system. Any interpretation is thus situated within that logic. What kind of art was conceived for these sites? How does a piece installed in a passage or in a building of raucous architecture proceed to establish a relation with the urban landscape? And, morever, what is the dynamic of this metropolitan region? How do those that pass through it harbor foreign objects in their social body?

       Strong work from sculptors was present. Far from presenting a literal meaning of the city, Waltercio Caldas made work based on the loss of the referent, without establishing a mimetic link. He maintained a coherent dialogue within his trajectory as an artist. A Materia tem dois Coraçoes (Matter has two Hearts) consisted of the heart of a bull placed in a glass cylinder filled with milk. Over time, the liquids would reverse, causing a "precipitation from one state to the other." There was nothing to observe in this organic metaphor of the city. Within it, events would acquire a turbid and mute tonality. Of meditative essence, this work suggested a temporalization of the zone between life and disassociation.

      Other artists threw themselves into this pulsation of time, a cadence that determines the enjoyment of space. The poet Lenora de Barros, known for her refined language within the tradition of concrete poetry, attempted to register the movement of the liquefaction of time and the image. Àcida cidade (Acid City), presented in an aseptic city hall, a gigantic apparatus that allowed three thousand ping pong balls marked with the inscription "the city oxidizes..." to fall one by one. With an analogous poetic impulse, Artur Lescher printed images of the city on a photographic gelatin-like substance. This image, in the process of dissolution, remained floating in a cube of water, visible only in the submerged part of the surface: película d'aqua vítrea na lente mental (a film of vitreous water in the mental lens).(2)

       The task of establishing a relation between the two statements of the project, that is art and the city, raises a primordial necessity: the work and the space must facilitate the physical impregnation of one to the other. Not all the artists confronted the problem. Some works mimicked urban speed and interpreting them was as light and inconsequent as the analogy itself. "Gags" and "gadgets," or even the vain discourse of the participation of the spectator, could have disqualified certain works. Other pieces required a temporal dimension contrary to the pressure of consumption, betraying a romantic desire to resuscitate the rhythm prior to the Baudelerian city. The "installations" most attentive to the scale of the city were not produced by plastic artists. Such was the case with the photographer Rubens Mano, whose Detetor de Ausências (Detector of Absences) consisted of two 12-thousand-watt military searchlights. At night, the light of these powerful lights horizontally crossed the pedestrians on the Cha viaduct, projecting their shadows and multiplying the question of anonymity. The most prepared members of the public furnished themselves with a map in order to explore their unknown city. Following this route, the public actually got lost among the locations of the exhibition without being able to localize all the esthetic interventions, as the megalopolis avidly absorbed the signs inscribed in it. Divorced from the didactic work of set itineraries, the strategy of the event depended on the lack of a straight line. The curatorial intention attempted to transcend the mere presentation of works. For this reason, the difficulties of the trajectory should be understood as constitutive of the works: that is, various locations of the exhibition were set up in a pedestrian zone where cars are forbidden to enter. It was there where the works were seen, in the middle of the homeless, disillusioned mass that usually gathers on the sidewalks in front of the stores, fleecing the passers-by in the nervous traffic of the large avenues.

        In a contemporary way, "Art/City" reintegrates the esthetic of the city and its political manifestation an antithesis that is fundamental to discrediting the old idea of public occupation through monuments.

	`ART/CITY`
by Lisette Lagnado	Is it possible to arrest the contemporary subject's stroll through the city with even a fraction of pure unpredictability? This discussion, which dates from the paradigmatic interventions of Richard Serra, Robert Morris and Christo, inserted the work of art into the notion of an "expanded field"(1), where esthetic enjoyment occurs under the empire of nomadism.The structure of the contemporary image, distinct from modernity in its articulation of varied languages, placed the support of art on an urban scale. Today the work (notably sculpture) not only abdicates the privilege of a single point of view, but also invests in the attempt to pulverize the metaphors of vision in the reevaluation of the Greek notion that knowledge is linked to looking. A "phenomenology of perception," inaugurated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contests the distance between subject and object: other sensations, like touch, come to be mobilized as conduits for experience. Curated by Nelson Brissac, the production of the event "Art/City" brought forth all the theoretical nuances that punctuate the debate on postmodernity: the rupture between the work and the marketplace and its consequent insertion in urban space, the question of the displacement of the public through new technologies, the dematerialization of art and the construction of "specific objects." The old center of the city of São Paulo, where the activities of the commercial and financial sector intersects, accommodated 22 artists who created work based on their experience of the city. Three historical buildings and the surrounding neighborhoods of Vale do Anhangabau were besieged by artists, photographers, video artists, cinematographers, musicians and architects. But, independently of its site, the event was constituted as an interactive binary system. Any interpretation is thus situated within that logic. What kind of art was conceived for these sites? How does a piece installed in a passage or in a building of raucous architecture proceed to establish a relation with the urban landscape? And, morever, what is the dynamic of this metropolitan region? How do those that pass through it harbor foreign objects in their social body? Strong work from sculptors was present. Far from presenting a literal meaning of the city, Waltercio Caldas made work based on the loss of the referent, without establishing a mimetic link. He maintained a coherent dialogue within his trajectory as an artist. A Materia tem dois Coraçoes (Matter has two Hearts) consisted of the heart of a bull placed in a glass cylinder filled with milk. Over time, the liquids would reverse, causing a "precipitation from one state to the other." There was nothing to observe in this organic metaphor of the city. Within it, events would acquire a turbid and mute tonality. Of meditative essence, this work suggested a temporalization of the zone between life and disassociation. Other artists threw themselves into this pulsation of time, a cadence that determines the enjoyment of space. The poet Lenora de Barros, known for her refined language within the tradition of concrete poetry, attempted to register the movement of the liquefaction of time and the image. Àcida cidade (Acid City), presented in an aseptic city hall, a gigantic apparatus that allowed three thousand ping pong balls marked with the inscription "the city oxidizes..." to fall one by one. With an analogous poetic impulse, Artur Lescher printed images of the city on a photographic gelatin-like substance. This image, in the process of dissolution, remained floating in a cube of water, visible only in the submerged part of the surface: película d'aqua vítrea na lente mental (a film of vitreous water in the mental lens).(2) The task of establishing a relation between the two statements of the project, that is art and the city, raises a primordial necessity: the work and the space must facilitate the physical impregnation of one to the other. Not all the artists confronted the problem. Some works mimicked urban speed and interpreting them was as light and inconsequent as the analogy itself. "Gags" and "gadgets," or even the vain discourse of the participation of the spectator, could have disqualified certain works. Other pieces required a temporal dimension contrary to the pressure of consumption, betraying a romantic desire to resuscitate the rhythm prior to the Baudelerian city. The "installations" most attentive to the scale of the city were not produced by plastic artists. Such was the case with the photographer Rubens Mano, whose Detetor de Ausências (Detector of Absences) consisted of two 12-thousand-watt military searchlights. At night, the light of these powerful lights horizontally crossed the pedestrians on the Cha viaduct, projecting their shadows and multiplying the question of anonymity. The most prepared members of the public furnished themselves with a map in order to explore their unknown city. Following this route, the public actually got lost among the locations of the exhibition without being able to localize all the esthetic interventions, as the megalopolis avidly absorbed the signs inscribed in it. Divorced from the didactic work of set itineraries, the strategy of the event depended on the lack of a straight line. The curatorial intention attempted to transcend the mere presentation of works. For this reason, the difficulties of the trajectory should be understood as constitutive of the works: that is, various locations of the exhibition were set up in a pedestrian zone where cars are forbidden to enter. It was there where the works were seen, in the middle of the homeless, disillusioned mass that usually gathers on the sidewalks in front of the stores, fleecing the passers-by in the nervous traffic of the large avenues. In a contemporary way, "Art/City" reintegrates the esthetic of the city and its political manifestation an antithesis that is fundamental to discrediting the old idea of public occupation through monuments.