By LUIZ RENATO MARTINS*
Commentary on the exhibition “Almost Circus”, with works by Carmela Gross, on display at Sesc-Pompeia.
One eye here, another there
Before continuing, a glance at the entire exhibition allows us to see that acts of historical comparison and critical overcoming of the enthroned visual tradition are not isolated along the route. For example, the stairs highlighted by red tubular lamps (Red Stairs, 2012/ 2024), and apparently without function – leaning against beams, beams or the wall, or simply open and supported on two legs –, at the same time as they parodically evoke the silent and anodyne minimalist structures (which claim to only deal with relationships of language) allude to a collective climb; joint movement upwards, highlighted both by the serial content of the steps and by the number of stairs, arranged side by side. Image of a totalizing collective reflection, the pieces seem tailored for the ancient function of the ladder form, as a war machine (or critical struggle), bet by invaders against high walls and equivalent devices (that the offensive against bastions and palaces is now in the hands of the ultra-right is another problem). Almost always visible in the background of other pieces and installations around the watercourse, the stairs remind the observer that ascending and totalizing, incorporating another point of view, is a decisive part of the art of seeing.
A few steps further along Ferris wheel, the invitation to read Marx is made explicit and urgent. In fact, anyone who raises their eyes to the strings that facet and remove splinters from the visual field, thus suspending any illusion of immediate or natural depth, soon notices large red letters sprouting in the middle of the strings. Parading on a billboard LED In the background, the characters demand the passerby's reading, interspersed with the rigging. “Cooperation or subjection of one discourse to another?”, some people will ask. However, let us remember that, discarding any premise of purity of the visual domain, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Brecht – contrary to Konrad Fiedler's (1841-1895) doctrine of “pure visibility” – insisted on the indispensable cooperation between images and captions .
One way or another, if Ferris wheel presents in natural size, as in a kind of macro model, the mental architecture of the first paragraph of The capital (1867), these red and luminous letters, in turn, reproduce an excerpt from the 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in which Marx outlines the ethos social support base of Louis Bonaparte (1808-1873), Napoleon I's surrogate (1769-1821). The numerous list – in itself illustrative of a society already increasingly atomized by the capitalist process – highlights samples of the political and social scum that made up the Bonapartist political machine and sustained the coup d'état that implemented the Second French Empire (1852-1870).
At the time, the same mixture was caricatured by Daumier (1808-1879), from whom Marx borrows satirical procedures to dissect it better. The striking similarity between the typology described and the one that recently took over palaces and official bodies in Brazil is striking; the recomposition based on mystifications of a pulverized social formation is of the same order.
In this way, reading the excerpt from the 18 Brumaire…, by proposing a change of discursive level, immediately invites the passerby who until then was possibly occupied with other issues, or out of step with the proposals for Almost Circus, to retrace his steps, keeping one eye on the works and another on the general historical course. Similar operations, of rupture and articulation of distinct temporalities, have their own tradition in avant-garde art.
Thus, Serguei Eisenstein (1898-1948) used editing to interweave heterogeneous narrative flows; Similarly, Godard's cinema (1930-2022) practiced the insertion of texts and excerpts from literary works in some of his films from the 1960s, as well as making use, in the positioning of the camera and in the course of editing, of point ruptures. view or “axis breaks”, as they say in cinema jargon. On the agenda, the purpose, now as before, of simultaneously providing distance and a reflective leap in the face of the ongoing narrative flow, enriching it with the heterogeneity of other times and points of view.[I] In some way, the incorporated text is like a ladder, helping to see the whole thing from above.
Then, in Almost Circus, the visitor is in fact urged, in one way or another and with a certain insistence, to dialectically combine two domains, apparently heterogeneous and stagnant. You can bring them together in syntheses and totalizations so that, by objectifying them, going beyond the pure domain of the arts, explore with greater synergy the aesthetic-critical exercises proposed by the pieces and installations. It is essential that you go through reflection and criticism yourself. In this direction, the program written by Oiticica for the exhibition New Brazilian Objectivity (MAM-RJ, 6 – 30.04.1967) constituted a decisive chapter.
In fact, since the first exhibition of New Figuration, Opinion 65 (MAM-RJ, 12.08 – 12.09.1965), several experiences after 1964 participated in the process of struggle and critical resistance that generated a vast front of resistance in the arts and universities[ii] to the recently implemented business-military dictatorship. So it was the New Brazilian Objectivity program[iii] which gave historical and political significance to such dynamics in the field of visual arts. This is what demonstrates, in terms of reflection and the proposition of synthetic forms linked to a class perspective, for example, the work Tropicalia (1967), by Oiticica – in its incorporation of language elements conceived in favelas and hills.
Class zones: exclusion, work and opportunities for spontaneity
The fate and the habit of traveling through corridors are worth in themselves as an indication of exclusion and belonging to the mass. In fact, for the majority of urban workers, corridors constitute the means of access and connection to mass transport. It therefore has a clear sensorial meaning, the proposition in Almost Circus of a narrow corridor, about 30m long, to lead from the first wing (where Ferris wheel e Extras are installed), for the second. There are at least 60 steps, if not more, for each visitor, within the perception regime of someone who regularly uses mass transport to travel between home and work. The other elements that make up the corridor accentuate the experience of reconstructing the universe of sensations linked to the experience of exclusion and work, at the same time that they dialectically provide (we will see) the momentary overcoming of subjection and embarrassment.
The side walls are made of wood siding[iv] which bring the bright color of phenol pink (chemical protection of the plywood). In the usual function of fencing construction sites, the fences reveal the precariousness of the other semi-rural materials and means of work adopted. In the corridor that joins the two wings of Almost Circus, they bring printed animals (the series Call for applications, 2016 / 2024) through screen printing on zinc sheets, generally used for the construction of gutters and service pipes. The two materials are as present in the worker's perception as brick and cement. “Zinc shed/ Tradition of my country”, sang (the “Divine”) Elizeth Cardoso (1920-1990).
Over the last 50 years, construction sites, evoked by sidings, have represented the gateway to the desired city life for the immense workforce of peasant origin, emigrated to urban areas since the accelerated expansion of industry and construction. civil, triggered by tree Captained by iron and fire in the early 1970s by the business-military dictatorship.
The population expelled from the countryside by new land tenure regimes that intensified the concentration of land ownership – formerly by large estates, today by agribusiness – clustered on the outskirts of the cities they constitute, however today – with precarious access to basic sanitation services, paving , transport and electrification – inhospitable areas, completely devoid of rural appearance. As in traveling cinema along the fences, the audience of Almost Circus In this way, you have the opportunity to cross and experience, at least for a moment, the clogging and tightness, the molds of life devoid of its own time in the mass transport ducts.
However, in the urban corridors rebuilt in Almost Circus, the position of subjection and constraint is momentarily left behind, suspended or even denied and actually overcome along the way. Visitors come across figures of animals or somewhat undefined shapes that suggest them, rather than the normative and standardizing command of desires governed by advertising in the corridors of connections and stations. In effect, animals constitute common figures in the imagination, forms ready for projections of varied desires and fears.
On the zinc sheets that cover the sidings, the animals do not appear fully defined, some are nothing more than figures and motivate discussions about them; many vomit – or do they ingest indistinct things? In any case, the state of uncertainty and indefiniteness, oscillation of judgments and affections readily stimulates prospection and spontaneity of imagination.
It doesn't matter where, in the end. The images of Call for applications, in the uncertain appearance they have, are worth reversing the course of disciplinarity into spontaneity. They operate contrary to the advertising images that surround the comings and goings of users in mass transport corridors. The subway has guards and cameras that constantly monitor the flow and actions of passengers. The advertisements and advertisements installed in the corridors perform a similar task in relation to the psychic life of travelers, seeking to guide and shape it.
In short, the pink siding corridors of Almost Circus, at the same time as they reconstruct and evoke the limited space of mass transport ducts, they allow, on the other hand and inversely, that the imaginary, dammed up and guided by the time of the vehicles, finds support and flows into catharsis. Faced with the magnetism of images of animals, suffering and passivity (in the daily to-and-fro of the majority who work) are transmuted and escape mnemic crystallizations; they saw experiences, activating other possibilities.
Furthermore, the corridor, providing relaxation and pleasure, leads, as on an initiatory journey, to another level of Almost Circus. In this, the premises and vast scales of the historical processes alluded to in Ferris wheel e Extras, gain specification and concrete circumscription, by explicitly referring to the exclusions that distinguish the destiny of classes and that haunt, with the ferocity typical of scourges, the daily lives of the majority of Brazilians.
Madeira River (1990 / 2024), drawing attention to the soil – but not in ahistorical terms as the so-called Land Art as well as some works of the aforementioned (by the stairs) minimalist art –, it brings to the scene the abbreviated evocation of a territory. Imaginary projection of the visitor – triggered by the experience of crossing the walled corridor –, is it or is it not what it suggested it to be?
Who should decide? Seen in full, from bottom to top or vice versa, the profile outlined by the mass of battens, or set of slats that constitutes Madeira River, reconstructs, as a stain or uncertain portion – therefore, such as the national configuration of a dependent country, always undefined or defined by default – the suggestive form of a territory somewhat spread out, in anamorphosis, and which has a large coastline on the eastern margin. Prepared by the route taken, the visitor, freed from his bonds, then adapts to whatever comes and goes in his own way of seeing.
What makes this or that different? “Free imagination is just imagining”, someone said… – is it Millor Fernandes (1923-2012) or Kant (1724-1804)? An uncertain and fortuitous outline (some will emphasize), but everything here – seen, reread and revised – resurfaces, at the same time intertwined and distributed, as we have seen, as a closed system of senses and meanings.
The other works, in interaction with Madeira River, appear located around the bed or water mirror that governs and rhythms the course of steps around the works (installed, it is clear, always in connection with the architecture). At issue, the mode of occupation, or the habitat, popular Brazilian, to insist on the terms of the architect (who, in the 1950s, edited a magazine with that title).[v]
Thus, in constellation, not only with Madeira River, but with the pink siding hallway, you have a sloping house (Uma Casa, 2007) – object of desire (pink) or skewed and inclined dream, about to roll down the slope? – the cart smeared with lipstick, with mirrored doors, and which sells wishes on the sidewalk (Red, 2018), the colorful and urban lights, typical of popular shopping streets, the poignant hanging and sharply lit cloths, evocative of the habitat popular Brazilian style, culminating with the screen, a kind of instant mural, of fire light (2018/ 2024): crater or gush of images collected from press photos, in which the des-cities or open hells populated by the great masses of the Third World, gain tragic expression through scenes of fires that erupt like cyclical crises.
See and review: a synoptic look is not enough – walking and seeing in syntax is necessary
Em Almost Circus, seriality, discontinuity and proposal for totalization are associated with collective scales and forms. Added to this is the watercourse that leads and induces, the architecture that encourages coming and going, the non-linear path of the steps and the unforeseen trails that can open up to the taste of thought: it can happen that the visitor, renewed with ideas, spontaneously return to where you have already been. Indeed, the extensive dimension of Madeira River, distributed along a good part of the watercourse, appeals and asks for more time, a new look, by interacting simultaneously with different pieces, as if it constituted the arena of Almost Circus, providing the place and perspective that the other pieces cannot do without.
In effect, the set of approximately 10 thousand slats, bringing together 15, 30 and 45 cm wooden rods, works somewhat hypnotically, inducing syntheses. Multiplying stimuli, it suggests the weave of a fabric or a text, due to its typology based on uniform lines and varied arrangement, constituted like a braid. But how can we explain this immense flow of small wooden rods or lines subsumed in a large shape arranged on the floor, like a didactically hatched blackboard?
In the sudden and dramatic light of The Red Black – an incarnated figure of living work and its volcanic, demiurgical and transformative potential, which bursts into the field of vision of those who look up – how not to think about the issue of work as a theme of Madeira River? If so, Ferris wheel e Madeira River, sharing aspects, although bringing different angles and materials, compose in a way a dialogue in counterpoint, like two variations around a common theme. The installations, whether neighboring or not, are interconnected in the imagination of the passerby, who has not stopped being there, he now sees another one over there. Intuition and perception converge and drag everything like a torrent.
What is it worth, before Madeira River, is that crisscrossing or friction, between the sublime and immense mass of slats or small rods and the uncertain shape obtained, comes in handy to evoke (in this work of soil, like plowed and furrowed earth) the hours of work and the collective metabolic force which, sold in their abstract and invisible form, feed the modern production process. If so, hours of work and the related metabolic force (i.e., work in its living form) – currently considered from top to bottom, in such a way that the metabolic force becomes silent, disappears or is made invisible – both pass into Madeira River by radical transformation; that is, from the abstract state (evoked by the uniformity of the rods) to the concrete, resulting from the aesthetic synthesis.
In this, the live work in the work, starting with acting, in the preparation scene, on the ground floor in the distribution of the slats across the floor, ends up exerting plastic power and generating forms, whatever they may be. That is to say, work and metabolic action in Madeira River, when seen from below, in perspective close to the ground, seen as a board or table, they regain a concrete dimension, in the visitor's view.[vi] They thus reverse – in the process of invoicing the work – the spell of metamorphosis and abstraction, which the exchange currently operates (money x merchandise).
objective form
In summary, to conclude, the slats interviewed in light of the emblematic figure of the Red Black they highlight or even underline the anonymous flow of abstract working hours that turn the turbines of the current production process. In addition to the vampiric suction of working hours, there is the voracious consumption of nature. From this angle, the ten thousand slats can be read graphically as a diagram, namely: – in red, the state of the work, seen in an abstract way; – in green, the state of vegetation and other natural resources in the devoured territory; – viewed, one and the other (work and natural resources), as inputs.
The crux of the equation (unless I judge better) lies in the exposure of the tension between opposites, in this case, between the state of abstraction of the parts (uniform slats or rods) and the living dynamics of concrete transformations, mobilized by the aesthetic synthesis, which, going and coming between the point of view on the ground and that from above, it distributes the parts and constitutes them into a whole.
The whole, amphibious form and sui-generis, with one foot in matter and the other in history, in criticism and reflection – made up of both the uniformity of the pieces (slats or rods) and the negativity inherent to the synthesis or aesthetic totalization –, composes, in the irreducible heterogeneity of its tense mixture (which refers to the heterogeneity of the historical and social whole), an objective form – “social nerve of artistic form”, in the precise definition of Roberto Schwarz.[vii] The latter, once interviewed as such (objective form/aesthetic form), returns – thanks to the negativity that is inherent to it – in a critical flight above the given forms of the state of concrete inequity, which presides over the abstraction of work through erasure or invisibilization of living work.
The Choir, the parangolé and the clipboard
A show as theatrical as Almost Circus, intertwining traits of two creative personalities as steeped in theater as Lina and Zé Celso, not to mention the structural relationship between Oiticica's work and choreography, could only result in the culmination of a Choir entering the scene.
Highlighted in a crescendo against the sky and condensing many of the elements used in the exhibition (panels, lights and colored letters, collective scale and porosity to the urban surroundings, etc.), the Choir's scenic function will in fact be exercised by the installation Cat (2024), which scenographically appears before the visitor at the end of the tour through the old factory. So, in a kind of grand finale in circus fashion, and, who knows, like a titan preparing an “assault on the sky” (height: 34m, approximate total area: 540m²), the Choir perhaps, in fact, parangolize, as requested by Zé Celso (see note 2), the national colors.
In fact, the installation Cat, says the newsletter, was created based on words taken from one of the initial sketches of the SESC Pompeia project. So he lends the architect his notes, originally written in Italian (giallo, rosso, blu, green). The title evokes an animal, but it also designates, with greater emphasis, in popular speech, the diversion and widespread appropriation of electric current and signal cables (telephone, internet, closed or pay TV).
Visible mainly to those who, at the end of the tour, arrive at the solarium (a long wooden mat) which also serves as an observation platform for the concrete architectural complex, where the light panels are installed, the visitor is in for a surprise. The architect's drawing on the drawing board – by completing the dialectical transition from handwritten notes on the sketch to the form (surprisingly enlarged to the scale of large letters) of urban lighting – involves the visitor in a sudden oscillatory state, which unfolds from the sketch drawing to the real and from reality to drawing. The sensory-mental back and forth, the stretching and shrinking of the scales, in the imagination, has a unique flavor and makes the public experience the pleasure of imagining the project, which is characteristic of architecture, in the face of the exuberance of the conception of architectural conversion of the factory into community leisure and training center. The emotion – of being at the drawing board and designing – jumps out and takes shape – or even becomes objectified – in the air, gaining height.
The panels of luminous letters, placed on the concrete walkways, highlight (in contrast to the profiles and shapes of the urban landscape in the background) the meaning attributed, due to the architect's courage, to the dialectical inversion of the factory environment into its opposite and historical paradigm. , for the future. The red, said red in Italian, it requalifies and dialectizes – with its vibrancy and in the role of the show's tonic color – the liberation or even emancipation of other colors, today condemned and reduced in the usual reception to the use of official symbol or national heritage.
Thus, along the route, and also within each visitor, in tune with their own steps, a second kind of square is created – this time linear and open-air (the solarium), but always a place of discovery and coexistence –, like the first mentioned where are the other parts of Almost Circus. Thus, from square to square, we arrive at what the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) predicted, when he conceived what republican festivals would be, as opposed to those of the court: “But what, finally, will be the objects of these [republican] shows? What will be shown there? Nothing, if you want. With freedom, wherever affluence reigns, well-being also reigns. Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square, gather the people there, and you will have a celebration. Do even better: give the spectators a spectacle, make them actors themselves; make everyone see and love themselves in others, so that everyone is more united.”[viii]
The scene is set in this way for a popular republican party and developments: let the height of the jump of the Cat and the dialectical transformation of the factory into its elastically potentiated opposite.[ix]
*Luiz Renato Martins is professor-advisor of PPG in Visual Arts (ECA-USP). Author, among other books, of The Conspiracy of Modern Art (Haymarket/ HMBS). [https://amzn.to/4e9w3ba]
To access part 1 of this article click https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/passeio-publico/
Reference
Almost Circus, by Carmela Gross (São Paulo, SESC Pompeia, March 27 – August 25, 2024).
Notes
[I] In architecture, a similar procedure was achieved, for example, by flights of stairs or access ramps that offer another perspective at another level – see, for example, the effect on the visitor's gaze of coming and going between the different levels of the MuBE terrace (Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology), according to a project in 1986 by Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928-2021), for the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (MuBE).
[ii] See Roberto SCHWARZ, “Culture and politics: 1964-1969/ Some schemes”, in idem, The Father of the Family and Other Studies, São Paulo, Paz e Terra, 1992, pp. 61-92.
[iii] See H. Oiticica, “General Scheme of the New Objectivity”, New Brazilian Objectivity, Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Modern Art, pref. Mario Barata, Rio de Janeiro, Gráfica A. Cruz, 1967, psn (later republished in several catalogs and subsequent collections about the work of Hélio Oiticica).
[iv] For the significant proliferation of uses of these coverings, characteristic of the fencing of construction sites, in the country's urban spaces, see the instigating article by Miguel del Castillo, available athttps://migueldelcastillo.org/post/55275093542/a-vida-privada-dos-tapumes>.
[v] Initially called Habitat/ Brazilian Arts Magazine, the title underwent adjustments over the course of the eighty-four issues, over the 16 years that publication lasted, and ended as Habitat/ Brazilian Magazine of Architecture, Fine Arts, Internal Decoration, Landscaping, Environment, Mosaic and Industrial Design (1950-65). For a detailed examination of the publication’s trajectory, see chapter 2, “Habitat (1950–1965): reasoned passion for form”, from Patrícia Amorim’s thesis: Editorial Crusades in Brazil and Argentina: Industrial Design from the Perspective of Magazines Habitat e Arts Lookout, etc., New Vision e PRICE (1950-1969), doctoral thesis, PPG in Design-UFPE, orient. Prof. Dr. Virginia Cavalcanti, Recife, UFPE, 2015; available in .
[vi] Coincidence or not, a crucial text in the young Marx's trajectory deals with the collectors of wood chips around sawmills and scraps around clothing factories. See Karl Marx, The Dispossessed: Debates on the Law Regarding Wood Theft, trans. Nélio Schneider, São Paulo, Boitempo, 2017.
[vii] See note 10 above.
[viii] See J.-J. Rousseau, Lettre à d'Alembert,Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1967, p. 233-4, apoud and cf. trans. by Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes, in idem, Paradox of the Spectacle/ Politics and Poetics in Rousseau, São Paulo, Discurso Editorial, 1997, p. 183. See also LR SALINAS FORTES, «The formation of the citizen», in Paradox…, op. cit. pp. 181-4.
[ix] I am grateful for Gustavo Motta's comments and sharp review, Maria Lúcia Cacciola's observations, Jorge Grespan's recommendation, Sérgio Trefaut's surgical critique and Carolina Caliento's collaboration in editing the images.
