Modernism brought to Postmodernism

When visiting the Museé D'Orsay last week on the last day of my stay in Paris something really stroke me apart from the extreme renewal in the architectural organization of the spaces that the museum had gone through since my last visit to the city in June 2011. The museum, entirely dedicated to visual arts specially from the end of the 19th century and begining of the 20th, had entirely remodeled most part of its exhibition spaces and the curations that there are now taking place. Special attention must be given to the post-impressionist section such as the ones dedicated to Seurat, Luce and Cross and another one to Van Gogh and his "surrounding" artists such as Gauguin. Another special high point is the entirely new, and well deserved, section for the impressionists ranging from Manet to Monet (if the reader kindly permits the slight joke), and ending in a charming new café designed by the Campana Brothers. And, what could obviously not be forgotten, is the amazing symbolist collection: a touching range of works from the most relevant names from that movement such as Redon, and speacially Moureau.
Although it was all a very rich and exciting experience to see such an important museum almost completly renewed, this is not a blog about modern art, to which mostly this museum is dedicated to. Although it may seem I am doing so, I am not speaking about modern art nor a modern museum but yes, I am speaking about a modern art museum in the post-modern realm. It was exactly that what thrilled me in that visit. Appart from the astonishing and relevant individual works, the entire museum had a new feeling to itself.

A lot has been discussed about the new museums of the new century: its modus operandi, its appearance, its role in contemporary society. Most of the discussions lead to those new media museums that reach into abstract concepts via new technologies as a way to educate and touch a wider public with lots of videos, flashing lights and interactive teaching methods. Although all that is very relevant to speak to the contemporary public, and appart from it being very recent in its wide establishment, I have a stange feeling of it already beeing dated, almost as if it was some sort of the Emperor's new robe.
The wonderfull feeling that the Museé D'Orsay proposed to me was something more profound, and apparently more related to the museum's role in society (and specially in a post-modern one) than flashing lights and interactive touch screens, without taking away the relevance of the viewer/work interaction (and making it even stronger) the museum found a very precise and coherent way of coming into the new times.
However this may sound extremely conservative, it is just an attempt to "correct" this concept of the "new museum": for hysterical times, hysterical museums? I don't believe that's the most coherent of the ideas. Who needs a touch screen beside a Van Gogh?
The most exciting thing about the D'Orsay was how they brought that institution into the new times without appealing to the new-mediatic-hysteria-in-museums. And they did that by one of post-modernisms strongest powers and paradigms: curation!

There were no architectural screams, no scenographic pantomines, no flashing lights and projections, "just" the power of works relating to each other in a very precise and studied manner even, sometimes, relating to complete oppositions to themselves.

Susan Melrose speaks about this shift witihin the curation, almost as from a conserver, and that I read unfolding from her writing, to being a proposer:

"A key issue raised in the mid-1980s, with regard to the archive, was that of the archive as 'mnemotechnic device', focused on the attempt to preserve 'signs of a life' that are already lost (Lyotard 1988/1991). According to that tradition what is 'lost' is the artwork's constitutive enigma, its particular struggles with "resistant materialities (Hayles 1999); and what is retained is a synoptic re-ordering of the artwork's similarly constitutive technique, its technical aspect, its technicity. Faced with that loss, the archive as mnemotechnic device, it was argued in the 1980s, would tend then to provide not so much a record of expert practitioner product, as a 'testimony to the power to conserve of the curators' themselves.

The most shocking signal of that was what I saw within the new Symbolist section and what openned my mind to this delicate and silent way of approaching postmodernity. Inside that section, in the middle of it, held place a curation named "Nocturnes". The wall text started out in the following way: "This display aims to shake up the sacrosanct classifications of traditional art history. In fact, in the centre of the Symbolist gallery, Nocturnes presents a dialogue between works of art that stylistic cross-refferencing has usually kept appart".
Isn't all that so very postmodern? Just by seeing the key-point: "to shake up the sacrossanct classifications".

And the show indeed did range from a wide variety of tendencies, but allways speaking about the idea of "nocturnes". As can be seen in some images below, taken in a somewhat subversive postmodern way because the museum didn't allow photographs (what isn't in some way post modern at all. In these times of image, how can you avoid it? But that is too much of a big discussion for this already large scaled on), the works go from Rousseau to André Devambez.

The wall text goes on with its powerfully engaged postmodernist way of proceding:

(...) By bringing together in this way and without any contextualization works that are, on the face of it, as dissimilar as Manet's 'Claire de lune sur le port de Boulogne' (1869) and Alexander Harrison's 'Solitude' (around 1893), for example, we hope to move outside the intellectual framework that determines the way we see art, in order to approach it more openly."

The power of the works are within themselves. The institutions don't need to dress themselves and the works in fancy new expensive clothes, just accept the propositions made by the works themselves and let them create naturally new relations between them and the public. That is indeed bringing a historical institution into postmodernism without being vulgar or losing its most precious duties: to educate and to conserve, although understanding the new times.

Louis Français - Orphée (1863)

Paul Dardé - Éternelle douleur, ou Remords (1912)

George Hendrik Breitner - Clair de Lune (1887-1889)

Jean-Léon Gérôme - La Nuit (1850-1855)

Henri Rousseau - La charmeuse de serpents (1907)

André Devambez - La Charge (vers 1902)

The reading knots

At the beggining of my trip to Paris, two weeks ago, I went to the Centre Pompidou. For my surprise, at the contemporary art collection, a Zilvinas Kempinas work was on show as a recent aquisition. I've been interrested in him since the moment I saw a video of one of his works on the internet a bit more than a year ago, than, after that, at SPARTE (São Paulo's Biggest art fair).

Zilvinas is an emerging artist and the fascination that his works created in me, and as I see creates in other observers, comes from something very simple and, probably because of that, it is so fascinating in our so overwhelming times. The works consist of placing rings made out of vhs tapes on front of fans, and they simply dance on front of it, floating in thin air, creating a fascinated and somewhat skeptical position from the viewer when trying to understand how something that is so simple, although so breathtaking, can work without any hidden tricks. It is probably the magic of truth, and maybe that is what makes these works so amazing. So truly fascinating without the spectacle and without "tricks".

On another occasion, about a week ago, I went back once again to the Centre Pompidou and saw again Zilvinas work. For my surprise there were, apart from a lot of other people seeing this sculpture, three brazilians behind me telling to eachother: "wow, I don't believe this! This has to have some strings or something to keep it floating in the air", "I hope it falls!", "I think it will fall off at some point!". And to my surprise, the ring didn't fall but it started to produce a knot within itself. I could clearly see this "event" creating strong manifestations in people around me. Some cheering for it to fall, some cheering for it to remain floating. I could clearly hear the "uhh" and "ahh" when the ring at some times, already with the knot, almost fell down, almost as if I could see people watching a football game, the passionate cheerings from each side.

I started than thinking about this point being some sort of a culmination in the work. Almost as if it had suddenly, from a work which was clearly suspended in time, turned into a narrative, unfolding all the different vectors of action into that moment.
Although, as I believe, this was not in the artist's intentions, not only the readings of it, but the work itself produces situations and new significations that not even the artist himself is entitled to go against.

When the woman from the Centre that was working close to the piece saw what was happening she called another colleague to help her solve the "knot problem". So they pulled down the ring to the floor, sat down, and started trying to undo the knot. No suspension of time, no aesthetic fruition, no magic: just two girls trying hardly to undo a knot. But, for my surprise, people around me were, for some time, fascinated by that little rare spectacle of Zilvina's work's failure! And a new layer of reading was than added to the piece in my mind: it had become performative. Almost as a stage without courtains, you could see the prosaic matters of this theater taking place, and at some point it spoiled the magic, but to another it made the work even more breathtaking. I couldn't stop watching that scene, as the people around me, and I never thought I would be in Paris just seeing two girls undo a knot.

This made me think a lot about, not just the performative aspects that a work can assume by itself, but the limit to which the artist stops having power over the reading of his works.

Unbecoming what was becoming

Yesterday the studio had to be cleared out for the holiday break.

When clearing the space and storing my things a series of questions came to me in a wave of instant reflections, giving me specially a notion of the performative aspect of this undoing process of a place constituted itself to be a space of process and of construction.

The whole question of having a studio has been, I wouldn't say a burden, but an uncunfortable and thinkative question in my process. The idea of having a space in which the gap of my processes, originally just mental, materializes in front of my eyes revealed a profound sensation of insecurity towards with I am not used to, making unclear, what used to be very clear, of what constitutes a work, and what, on the other hand, may be an experiment, a material thought about proces or just a necessary mistake. And I have felt, understood and am starting to accept, that probably I am not the type of artist to be confined in the silent protocols a studio presents, and probably I may feel more free in the realm of the mind, as I have allways worked, first as a lack of acess to a physical space and now, understanding that I've learned to think differently by it, by an option. What brings me to Sol Lewitt's 29th sentence on conceptual art:

"29. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works." (Lewitt, 1969)


All these questions came together by the performative act of "unfolding" a studio into one single box. Almost as constituting a Pandora's box, creating this object of reduced dimensions with the vibrating latency of works that were, are, and shall be. And the strange feeling that drowned my thinking was that of unconstituting works. It was all as if I was depriving those objects from their auratic aspect of art. If at least not of art, but of their almost-artistic state. Or as if they were reduced once again, or now even more distant from that possibility of becoming art than before. In a way of now being almost-almost-art, having been turned into the latency-of-the-latency of a thought as they, even when they are fully enbodyed, are seen by myself as latencies-of-thoughts, or simply mental-propositions.

These process of unmaking what was and what was to be remind me very much of some methods used by argentine artist Marta Minujin, speacially in her work "Partenón de Libros"(1983) in wich she constituted in the middle of Buenos Aires a scaffold replica of the Parthenon covered with books prohibited in the time of the dictatorship in that country. The work was itself in some way in the manner of this "pandora's box" as I mentioned in the way that it is a vibrant, contained space with the latency of these mental propositions, ephemeral and even more powerfull as may exist only in memory or as in a fragment, one of the books carried out by one of the people passing by. So it wasn't just about the sculptural process, but also, and mainly, about making these books, that were silenced for so long, go around and make the changes that were so feared by the oppressing former governments in that country.

And Sol Lewitt grants me this beautiful and convenient thought from his "sentences on conceptual art":

"12.For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not." (Lewitt, 1969)

... And I would say that there are even others that become unphysical, although even more powerful sometimes, after being fully physical...

Marta Minujin's "Partenón de Libros", 1983

Exhibition "On Becoming"

Text of the Exhbition: Felippe Moraes - On Becoming

The action of becoming, in itself, is a gap, a latency, it is nothing in absolute terms, and that nature can be assorted in the situations in which it is detected. Something that is becoming is neither one thing or another, it is the transitional becoming in its fullness. That suspension of time, existence and difficulty of conceiving is powerfully spiritual in the way that it speaks metaphorically about our own conditions as humans, scientifically, historically, culturally: all a process of becoming something else since the moment it started.

All the works in the exhibition bring with themselves, and by the relations they establish between them, a complex notion of conceptual abstraction and also their clumsy relation with the world of the experiences. Although mentioned as works of art, that indeed they are, the pieces are all experiments between the tangible materiality and the ideas we make of it. They construct and destruct concepts, put to the limit the wideness, and sometimes the narrowness of our understanding to propose a poetical point of view over our existence as rational entities in the realm of matter.

The works all come across this process of being something else. There is a tension between the fullness they have as works, but an incompleteness in their becoming. Although they are by themselves, they are physicalities that are to conceptually become something else, in the meaning or in the matter itself, or just condemned to be forever in the state of latency: of being a possibility of completion. And all those “non-beeingnesses” relate very closely to our, although transcendent nature, suspension in time and space, searching for what we were and what we shall be. Forever in the process of becoming.

November, 2011 - Northampton
Felippe Moraes

CLICK HERE to see the exhibition's interactive panorama

Felippe Moraes - On Becoming
Fishmarket Gallery
Bradshaw Street
Northampton - United Kingdom
NN1 3DN

Thu - Sat, 10 am - 6pm
01/12/2011 to 31/12/2011
www.felippemoraes.com

The becoming of "On becoming"

Yesterday was a full day in putting up my solo show "on becoming" at the Fishmarket Gallery.

Division

Division establishes itself over the issues that concern our rational view over the experienceable world that surrounds us.

Numbers and strict notions organize our existance. The question prevails on the possibility or not of their hability to regulate it. Or, the even more profound question, is that if it can be regulated at all, or would it all just be a composition made by chaos?

The numbers by themselves, in their graphical manifestation, hold a strong and absolute concept: abstract and intirely mathematical. When brought to the tangible world they fail in connecting the realms of thought of the concept to that of its experienceable existance.

On the question of measurings

Since I arrived in Britain, measurings have been a real issue. I tend to get quite confused with this distance measuring system in feet and miles and weight in pounds.

It brings me to a very dear question to myself and very present in my work. It isn't just a different system, it is a whole different aprehension of what is measurable, a cultural statement.

Measurings can almost be the language that we give matter to speak to us and for us to reply back, conceiving its dimensions and making judgements and evaluations over its existance.

The chosen system, or idiom, is a statement in itself of how one, or a group of people, put themselves towards matter.

This reminds me of a story I heard once about a tribe which counted only up to the number 3. Beyond that, they would quantify according to the tone of their word for "many". For example: "I have many children", "there are maaaaany stars in the sky!". What is very coherent and logical. The principle is that all they need is 3 numbers and an inprecise concept of many. And that they use and don't conceive, exactly by lacking its necessity, a more precise quantification system.

This thinking, unfolding from the previous post (1/2), brought me to Walter De Maria's work "The Broken kilometer" (1979), in which in the floor of a large room (shown on the pictures bellow) 500 polished metal tubes of 2m each are shown aligned in five rows.

I've allways felt very atracted to this work, but the more and more stronger presence of mathematics in my work has been bringing me back to it, and this whole situation of exception, of feeling almost as if the space behaved differently, since I can't fully understand the local measurings, has suggested exotic apprehension of the dimensions that surround me. And obviously, comming from that, a space that conforms itself differently, as if language was reshapping matter.

Thresholds

The weekend was a torment: the will to work banging on my head as I evolved some old ideas that have been in the deep drawers of my mind and of the material world.

"Thresholds" intitled in Potuguese "Umbrais" is a work I started probably more than two years ago: drawing a golden square in each of 7 tracing papers and than aligning them, producing a three-dimensional feel created by the overlapping of bidimentional planes. Bringing than to the forefront the discussion of perspective and even our aprehension of reality. The planes come together as overlapping layers of existance and, by their transparency, conveying a diverse assimilation of the being. Reality isn't the dynamic of a circle on a transparent surface, but the relations and spaces created between them.

1/2

All these questions of the processes of the becomings of things, concepts, people have brought me into thinking about fractions of the matter. How can this materiality constituted by unified bodies in themselves, be fragmented into pieces, and not becoming autonomous bodies of matter by themselves, but as parts that belong together although aren't, and probably will never be, together as one as we conceive this state of being.

I started thinking of the mathematical procesd of fractioning. I've allways seen each of these strange representations of pieces, such as 1/2, 2/3, 33/48 etc, as parts that should be containned in a whole, or that are desperatly separated from it and wanting to come back to it. I came than to this act of cutting the log into two pieces to reflect on the question of how can a body be as one, or the latency of becoming again what it was as one, and still being separate wholes? Or better: more than being two separate wholes, two latencies of THE one again.

Logs that we carry

Every artist should carry logs to comprehend the density of the matter he deals with.

Today in campus I found these logs which deliberatly asked me to be taken away to the studio.

A system of stars

When closing the drapes to go to sleep, my window gives me this strange vision of this foggy Northampton night. An almost-system of stars, an almost-abstraction of the figurative reality.

How to describe a square or not

Squares in the process of becoming or unbecoming. A tension in the almost cosumation of form.

In the process of becoming...

All that is a work to be but already a discussion in itself. The gap between the chaos and the cosmos, although am not sure which is which.

Un-humanly non-bodies

A strong and dense visual poetry that any place can provide to the wide eyed observer.
Strange bodies in the landscape that, by their own nature, deprive our own bodies from their humanly formed equilibrium.

I am here

"Every serious work is tranquil... Every serious work resembles in poise the quiet phrase, 'I am here'. Like or dislike for the work evaporates; but the sound of that phrase is eternal." - Kandinsky in Roger Lipsey "The spiritual in twentieth-century art"

This quote by Kandinsky touched in me in a very profound way when reading Lipsey's book. It all led me to exact situation for conceiving this simple visual statement, not so absurdly entitled: I am here.

The questions lies on the question of light using itself to write and therefore, in this moment, affirming its presence and existance.

Although sometimes reluctant in giving English titles or putting writings in other languages that not mine into my work, somehow feeling as if I was faking the process or deceiving my history, this was a very specific case and made me notice an important aspect of the reading. The verb "to be" encompasses a dual notion of existance: a transitory and a permanent. On the other hand, in portuguese, a decision would have to be made between: "eu sou aqui" (permanent) and "eu estou aqui" (transitory). I'm interrested in fact in the work as ambiguous as it has become: being eternally, becoming, or whichever gap in time it may want to assume.

Dematerializing

Hammers have been a constant in my work. Although I do not fully understand them, and don't really think I should, there is something fascinating about their existance. So strongly physical and present and executors of the immaterial conceptions.

These hammers were photocopied, a copy, of the copy, of the copy, until fully disapeared. A simple but strong symbolic process of dematerializing such a present physicality.