Collective Exhibition
São Paulo, Brasil
18/06/2019 - 30/01/2020

Time and Contemporary Art

To perceive in the dark of the present that light that seeks to reach us and cannot do it, that means being contemporary. That is why contemporaries are rare. That is why being contemporary is, above all, a question of courage: because it means being able not only to keep one’s gaze fixed in the dark of the time, but also to perceive in that dark a light that, directed towards us, distances itself infinitely of us. (Giorgio Agamben)

1. Temporal reflections on scarce glimpses of the future

It is common sense to criticize the expression “contemporary art”, since all works of art are supposed to be contemporary with the time and society in which they were produced. The question becomes more interesting when we realize that the work of art that impacts the history of humanity in general was not properly appreciated in its time and in the society in which it was produced. And this is because the question of taste, which defines judgment about a work of art, has a strong relationship with familiarity. Common sense likes what is familiar. Common sense does not like to feel uncomfortable, prefers gregarious, the language already known, for basic communication, sufficient for self-preservation. It is also common sense that, in 2019, we live in a society that likes common sense very much, and the difficulty that is imposed is that the contemporary is precisely the experience of living in discomfort with their time. As long as a society remains in common sense, it loses the chance to be contemporary with itself.

It truly belongs to its time, it is truly contemporary, one that does not coincide perfectly with it, nor is it suited to its claims and is, therefore, in this sense, out of date; but, for this very reason, exactly through this displacement and this anachronism, he is able, more than the others, to perceive and apprehend his time. (Also, p. 58)

This definition by Giorgio Agamben refers to people and how they lead their lives. Could it be used for works of art? Let us consider the (existentialist) hypothesis that to live is to constitute a work of art formed by everyday moments, a life-work. In this case, each one is the artist of his own work. Let us now consider the (neoconcrete) hypothesis that a work of art is a “simile of a living organism”. In this case, each work of art is open, has time as one of its dimensions (as well as color and spatial dimensions) and constitutes a space for interaction with other living organisms. Do you lack the ability to reproduce to be alive? In fact, only a work of art that generates other works, including works in the form of thought or everyday acts, deserves the status of “simile of living organism”. Then, following Agambem’s definition, we can conclude that both our lives and works of art will be contemporary when they “adhere to their time and take distances from it”.

The exhibition Linha Atemporal, at Dan Galeria, is a space for the exercise of contemporaneity, in which viewers take distance from the common sense of our time. Resuming the experiences of the late 1950s in Brazilian art, the exhibition establishes the coexistence between great names of Concretism and Neoconcretism and artists of today, who lodge in that contemporaneity and, defying the current predilection for the ordinary, escape, making life possible in the present of the untimely: they open a tunnel of access to what remains as a project and projectile. Living requires some idea of the future.

2. Concrete lessons on contemporaneity

The exaltation of geometric abstraction at the awards for works at the 1st São Paulo Biennial, in 1951, establishes for the first time the official refusal of Brazilian art to figuration. Max Bill, who receives the maximum biennial award that year for the Tripartite Unit (now part of the MAC-USP collection), discloses in Brazil the foundations of concrete art, as established in 1930 by Theo van Doesburg:

“1 – Art is universal; 2 – The work of art must be entirely conceived and formed by the spirit before its execution. She must not receive anything from the formal data of nature, nor from sensuality, nor from sentimentality […]; 3 – The painting must be entirely constructed with purely plastic elements, that is, plans and colors. A pictorial element only means ‘himself’ and, consequently, the painting has no other meaning than ‘himself’; 4th The construction of the painting, as well as its elements, must be simple and visually controllable; 5th The technique must be mechanical, that is, exact, anti-impressionist; 6th Effort for absolute clarity ”. (apud. Amaral, 1977)

As Max Bill’s work proves, the mechanism proposed by van Doesburg’s manifesto does not imply rigidity. The Moebius tape, the basis for the construction of the Tripartite Unit, is dynamic and, sensual in itself, intrigues the mind, causing the body to move to encompass multiple views of the work. Likewise, the granite sculpture by Max Bill presented at the Dan Galeria exhibition, with its rounded base, suggests the unusual and provocative possibility of an oscillatory pyramid. The explosion of possibilities from the beginning of the 1950s reverberates in this way: with the precision of concrete art, a path opens up for the invention of what never existed in the country. Several works in the exhibition show a healthy temporal back-and-forth by joining the restless past with the apathetic present.

The absolute clarity required by the Concrete Art manifesto is present in the painting by Maurício Nogueira Lima, from 1956, who was at the exhibition Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte, organized by Aracy Amaral in 1977 at MAM-RJ. On a black background, Nogueira Lima spirals two triangles, gradually decreasing its edges and joining vertices of consecutive figures. The result, planar, suggests the three-dimensional shape of pyramids. It is interesting to compare the systematic method of Nogueira Lima, who painted the Spiral Triangle by hand, with the work Meta-aura, by Pascal Dombis, a print on paper made from an algorithm that, according to the artist, “repeats excessively” a rule (for example, drawing a line in a certain way). Made between 2015 and 2017, this work obeys all the principles of concrete art, even though what was conceived before its execution (the second point of the concrete art manifest) was the algorithm and not the visual result. The digital nature of Dombis’ work is almost imperceptible, which makes us think that excessive repetition is not the prerogative of the machine. Human behavior is repetitive.

The art produced from computer programs was part of the research of the organizer of the concrete art movement in São Paulo, Waldemar Cordeiro. Founder of Grupo Ruptura and author of the 1952 Manifesto Ruptura, Cordeiro was also the introducer in Brazil of art made with the help of computers, a research that began in 1968 and whose results were presented in 1971 in the Arteônica exhibition. In the 1980s, Miguel Chevalier became involved in art produced from algorithms, following the history of computer graphics and interactive digital games. Today Chevalier builds immersive environments, sculptures produced by 3D printers and two-dimensional images using digital or, as they say in French, numerical resources.

Mathematics is the basis for the repetition of geometric modules in works manually prepared by François Morellet who, in the 1950s, came into contact with concrete art when visiting Brazil. Morellet elaborates two-dimensional plots that are at ease both in contemporary concrete art and in the era of digital rhizomatic networks. In fact, this exhibition raises fruitful doubts about what is mechanical and what is manual, as if the state of technology was not enough to differentiate the time of each production. The same precision of the lines, drawn manually on a black background of the painting by Nogueira Lima, from 1956, occurs in the Structural Constellation of Josef Albers, from 1962, which, challenging the observer’s mind with a game of intersection of lines and planes, opens hand of color to emphasize the line, the structure of the composition and the illusion of three-dimensionality. The palette is also restricted in selected works by Luiz Sacilotto – white, black and gray – however, here, color is the structure of the composition because it establishes the dynamics of overlapping opaque layers in the two-dimensional plane.

Before being a compositional element, the line is a subject in the works of Teodoro Dias. With no other intention than to put something that did not exist in the world, Dias today uses the tempering technique, frequent in Brazilian art of the 1950s, composing vertical strings. Linked to the popular and native imagery production, the timeless lines of Lygia Pape’s weavers refer to the possibility of a time to come, which will synthesize development and tradition, Ulm school and forest.

A student of Josef Albers at the Higher School of Form in Ulm, Germany, Alexandre Wollner assimilated the foundations of concrete art and applied them in compositions that serialize geometric modules in an almost algorithmic way, prioritizing, throughout his career, graphic design, and developing logos that we all know. It is important to remember that the origin of concrete art is Mondrian’s neoplasticism and his desire to integrate art in everyday life. Thus, Wollner’s movement towards visual communication is not surprising. Other artists, such as Almir Mavignier and Lygia Pape also dedicated themselves to graphic design, bringing art and life closer together.

Geraldo de Barros, who was part of the Ruptura Group, participates in the Dan Galeria exhibition with a work in the series of cut-out plastic laminates, in which the white and the three primary colors suggest three-dimensionality, as if the work were advancing into the real space occupied by viewer. To see more works from this series mixed with the daily life of the city of São Paulo, it is worth visiting the Clínicas subway station, where three of these large colored reliefs have been accompanying the lives of those who have been passengers for decades.

Questioning the difference between art and life was another way of responding to Neoplasticism. In 1959, the signatories of the neo-concrete manifesto – Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim and Theon Spanúdis -, proposed the conception of the work of art “as a quasi-corpus, a being.” For them, it would be necessary to replace the idea of a work of art as ontologically belonging to the category of objects or machines. The Neoconcrete work of art was close to the category of living organisms. In 2019, a time when individuals seem to force their way into the category of objects and machines programmed by algorithms, we have a lot to learn from artists who opposed the “dangerous rationalist exacerbation” of those who “still see man as a machine between machines and seek to limit art to the expression of this theoretical reality. ” (Neoconcrete Manifesto, 1959)

What the Neoconcrete Manifesto proposes has extremely important consequences both in Brazilian art and in the possibility of constituting a future time. By defending a work of art close to a living organism, the manifest allows for the emergence of works of art that interact with other living organisms, that is, participatory works of art, which invite the viewer’s body to act ethically and politically. More than an aesthetic discussion, the neo-concrete manifesto is the artistic seed of a country project, which will become clear in the unfolding of Brazilian art in the late 1960s, in its character of combating common sense and conditioning thought to status quo Is this not the great lesson that contemporaries of 1959 send to contemporaries of 2019?

The transition from the Neoconcrete Manifesto to the involvement of artists in social issues began with the idea of the work of art as a “quasi-corpus”. One of the ways to give it the characteristics of a living organism was to free the work from the wall, even more radical than to create, with lines, the illusion of three-dimensionality. In the Modulated Space No. 6, by Lygia Clark, the frame is used as a compositional element and not as a border between art and the world. By shifting the frame, presenting it in one part to eliminate it in another, the work is no longer limited to a fictional space and starts to occupy everyday space. Hercules Barsotti’s painting n.9 seems to inflate to the point of generating a yellow crack in an effort to leave the plane of the wall. Willys de Castro’s pluriobject actively installs on the wall, sharing space with and the viewer, while Amilcar de Castro’s sculptures refuse the pedestal to simply exist on the floor, as living organisms. Agile to escape the plane, the works that Macaparana currently produces have the playful lightness of living organisms that play with time, aware that the moments dance without drawing a straight line. In the exhibition, Macaparana’s work is a drawing of lines in a fold of the plane.

Referring to cocoons or hives, Sérgio Camargo’s works manage to unite geometry with the organicity of the clusters, as if trying to give birth to an animal, something new that did not exist in the world, like the soft beings of Tony Cragg, playful and extended time of wet sand dripping little by little, until growing in sculpture. In time, the origins of LAb [au] also live, a dignified time, without haste. These machines, half alive, seem to collect time on their colored tabs, feeding on it. Also alive in relation to the flow of the moments, the work of the Finnish duo Grönlund-Nisunen is an hourglass of water that oscillates close to the wall, running the seconds from side to side.

3. Strengthen time

In the same year that Ferreira Gullar wrote the Neoconcrete Manifesto, he invented the Buried Poem, presented in the exhibition in its book version. In the installation version, it is a room in a sub-floor, in the center of which there is a hollow red cube, half a meter in edge. Raising that cube is a green cube, with 30 centimeters of edge. And under the green cube is a white, solid cube. Raising the face of the white cube that faces the floor, it reads “Rejuvenate”.

Rejuvenation is related to the return to a previous, better, more powerful and hopeful state. The return to the past, therefore, is not necessarily retrograde. It can be innovative at the same time when the return is for a moment that propels inventions. In fact, just read the newspapers of 2019 to realize that this “change of everything that is there” has no commitment to the invention of the new. Hélio Oiticica, one of the artists who most affected the threads launched in various directions by concrete and neo-concrete art in Brazil, wrote that the new remains new. The new thing is to give existence to something that was not there before. This invention of the new, however, cannot come out of nowhere. On the contrary, to invent is to open up, on a day-to-day basis, ways of realizing possible futures, which exist in the state of not yet realized, waiting for us, as if they were the sculptures of Jong Oh’s fine lines, hanging by a thread , waiting for our gaze to make them become embodied, making them well defined.

It is as if an idea has emerged, from the present, for the future.

Paula Braga, 2019