"There's only knowledge in the way of lightning"
That's a Walter Benjamin line.
And...
 
For serendipity...
 
Serendipity is an English word that doesn't have a good translation in Portuguese
but I found this phrase searching things on the internet
and I found this Benjamin phrase
Serendipity way...
right?
And...
And "there's only lightning knowledge"
came in handy
Campo Grande has many lightnings.
And I think that phrase is very beautiful
and it is the epigraph of my speech
the epigraph of my lecture.
Let's go to Slide 2:
Be realistic,
demand the impossible.
This is a graffiti
that was made in the streets of Paris
 
at the time of the May 1968 protests.
The name of my speech, the title of my speech
is "Art Beyond the Show".
What do I mean by that?
"Spectacle" is a specific concept
 
developed by Guy Debord
the French situationist theorist.
So
already here in the title we have a concept
developed by left-wing thinking.
Now, my speech is addressed to everyone
whether they are left-wing or right-wingers
but
 
perhaps this discussion of Spectacle
is easier to enter
for someone
who communes,
who is in communion, with left-wing thinking.
What is the spectacle?
It's the...
It is the false
the false dimension of life that alienates us
alienates people...
 
And capitalism constantly maintains
the spectacle because
it is interested in
keeping everyone
in the key of consumption
in the key
that will provide profit for it to continue
functioning as a system.
So that's what the spectacle is, it's the fake
that alienates us
Well, that's the definition I'm giving, right?
and
And why does my speech
start with situationism?
Is it going to be a talk about politics?
About art?
Well, situationism has emerged
within art,
Before they were lyricists, international lyricists
then
disagreements, they fragmented...
They became situationist international.
So
 
Situationism is considered the last historical vanguard.
And I would like you
to pay attention to this image,
a graffiti
and we can reflect on this category "graffiti".
 
This "artistic" category?
For some, artistic,
for others, mere vandalism...
What is graffiti?
Regardless of what it is, whether it is vandalism
or an art form
it transmits political messages
in public space, right?
And in May 68,
students were influenced by the ideas
and phrases of intellectuals,
thinkers and situationist activists.
 
There is another curious fact about situationists:
they appeared within art
they denied this affiliation with art,
 
with the intention of
demolishing the art category,
because they understood the art category
 
as one more modality
of alienation, one more ineffective modality
 
 
in the face of this "affront to the spectacle"
which they sought
o make an affront to the spectacle
nd emancipate Western society from the spectacle.
That's it, let's go to slide 3.
So there you go. Spectacle is a problem in our lives.
 
it's a problem in our society.
If we seek to be an affront to the spectacle
I believe that this affront begins with
an awareness.
Yeah, that word is important, awareness.
How are you going to make an affront to the spectacle?
It starts with a
process of awareness, right?
 
And if awareness
is to take an
examination
of your thinking
you evaluate your thinking
you take things clean, what sucks
and what doesn't...
A criticism, an evaluation of our
assumptions and premises.
So awareness goes through
an epistemological process
of self-awareness effort
to come to an understanding of
your situation, right?
Social, political,
spiritual; in a society that
restricts its potentials or tries
to restrict your potentials.
Slide 4.
Now comes this image
of this painting by Marcel Duchamp
"The Bride," a 1912 painting
produced in Munich.
So I talked about the situation and now I go back
in time and show a painting
that is not cubism, not futurism,
a weird painting by Marcel Duchamp. Why is that? Why am I doing this?
 
Well, there would be no situationism
without surrealism,
there would be no surrealism without Dada.
And Duchamp is important, both for Dada
and for Surrealism.
And he is important for the current scenario,
the current situation of art,
this category that we call "contemporary art".
I put quotation marks,
because here I'm problematizing
the various categories, in my speech today.
So let's look at this canvas by Duchamp.
I graduated in plastic arts,
 
so at the academy
we are taught that contemporary art
is a historical period of art
which comes after Modernism, or Modern Art.
 
So there's a
a narrative
and a creation of a new category
that is intended to be historical
but is the present.
There's something very fragile about that, isn't there?
Pretty problematic, right?
So contemporary art is a vague label, badly elaborated,
and we have
to
to think critically,
and question or do, elaborate
try to
understand what this label is for.
We have to do something
and not just be lazy and in semi-historicism, right?
My speech today
will make an affront to semi-historicism
to the alienation of all of us
in the face of poorly elaborated narratives
imposed from top to bottom
let's think about things, huh?
The History of Art, history with a capital H,
, the history that is still being written of the transition from the modern to the contemporary
is often done with fluster
, in the key "great presumptuous and eurocentric narrative".
We
people, ordinary citizens,
 
literate, illiterate, lay people,
specialists (if this exists
in the "contemporary art" field),
want to participate in the elaboration of the
art discourse
- to participate, we want to participate
- it is not right that we will be excluded from the process
of elaboration of this discourse.
So let's think about why
this exclusion takes place
Why Modern Art
as a label has been abandoned in favor
of a new label,
which is badly explained
we don't know much about it, what characterizes it
etc. etc.
But regardless of this whole movement
of problematizing, of skepticism, of questioning
which I am proposing here
regardless of that, it is important for us
to have responsibility, right? We must attack or challenge
the great narrative with responsibility.
Duchamp is important
for us to understand the current production
right?
 
So...
So let's look at Duchamp some more.
This painting "The Bride"
was made a year before
before the Bicycle Wheel which is the first assisted readymade
I don't know if in Portuguese
it's the best translation, but "assisted readymade"
is a readymade that
involves the joining of two things
or two or more things.
So...
the first readymade manifestation
manifestation in history (although it didn't have that name readymade yet)
was in 1913,
with the Bicycle Wheel.
Let's go to the next slide.
The next slide we have an image of the Great Glass
"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even"
is a work by Duchamp
produced over 8 years and
It is a work that he did not complete
he does not understand
that this work was finished
he left it unfinished.
And I am showing you because
from 1913 onwards
13 or 14, he goes to New York
with the various ideas he has accumulated
in Paris and Munich
 
and with these various ideas he has a
a change
in the way of working, of making art,
this change is expressed
not only with the readymades, but with the use of glass, etc.
 
And the Munich phase, Munich's paintings
 
conclude a very intense period
of studies, of immersion of Duchamp
in issues like the fourth dimension
And this is important here for us today
this
this kind of mathematical-mystical adventure
adventure that some of these Western
Cubist artists were involved in.
Not only Westerners
there were Russians, people from the East as well,
people with one foot in the East
, close to Russia
working in Paris.
But to say that things aren't so simple
history needs to be stirred up
and we have to see things behind
, information hidden behind
the layers.
And I'll get there, you'll understand why this whole story.
Let's just read that Duchamp sentence?
"The production of an era is always its mediocrity,"
Duchamp would have said,
and "what ceases to be produced
or what wasn't produced
is always better than what ended up being produced.
A very provocative phrase, right?
Duchamp, in the Great Glass,
makes a kind of diagram of eroticism,
from his previous period in which he faced, got closer to this mystical dimension of the 4th dimension
So the Great Glass is a kind of diagram of this approximation,
a kind of diagram of this failure
so "what was not produced is better than what came to be produced"
is somehow the hidden formula underneath the Large Glass diagram,
this diagram of the failure of the previous phase,
this phase that ends with the Munich period.
So from the New York period onwards,
1913-1914 onwards,
what becomes most evident in Duchamp's work is its "negativity",
for example, in the very expression anti-art
("Dada is anti-art"),
in this very expression this negativity is already very explicit,
some authors like Agamben will read the Duchampian gestures as nihilistic.
So this negativity is what will become more evident from 13-14 onwards,
in this sentence too,
of the production of the time being always the mediocrity of the time,
but, what is beyond this first layer that only appears to be negativity?
What is beyond this layer?
Duchamp is a master at hiding gold.
The gold
that Duchamp
attains, right? with his alchemy,
the gold that he conquers as an artist,
Duchamp's gold is not where we think it is,
Duchamp is constantly making molds
negatives of his intentions,
negatives of his real oeuvre,
and Duchamp presents to us
these molds and these negatives.
He has this expression, which I think is the expression to designate this kind of procedure to the negative,
the expression "allegorical appeareances".
Let's go to slide 6
Then slide 6 you are looking at Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel and the wheel of Arthur Bispo do Rosário,
a Brazilian from Sergipe, who produced a magnificent work,
very beautiful,
basically inside a horrible psychiatric hospital,
he did a wonderful work
and this work on the right is one of the works that Bispo do Rosário produced.
This negativity of Duchamp, this skepticism of Duchamp, let's put it this way,
was very influential and decisive in the constitution of our current artistic landscape.
The opening of the field of possibilities that the readymade opened up,
a non-hierarchy of materials (art materials and non-artistic materials),
this non-hierarchy has now become a consummate reality.
But Bispo do Rosário owes nothing to Duchamp when he used mugs, sandals, spoons, bicycle wheels,
among other non-artistic materials
in the making of his plastic-symbolic universe.
Bispo did not receive formal artistic education
and did not know the history of the European vanguards,
it is highly unlikely
that he saw Duchamp's wheel in a book or magazine.
What conclusion do we draw from that?
What conclusion?
Coincidence?
that these two forms have this similarity?
Is it mere coincidence?
Let's go to Slide 7
Bispo:
born in 1909,
died in 89,
from Sergipe,
artist brut/outsider, marginal,
diagnosed schizophrenic-paranoid,
produced practically all his work in the Colônia Juliano Moreira,
at the time, a madhouse of degrading conditions in Rio de Janeiro
Slide 8
Similar mysteries
(or coincidences, for the most skeptical)
also occur in the trajectory of Conceição dos Brugres
This artist, a farm worker and mother of two,
started a sculpture practice,
from the moment she saw a face on a cassava root,
and decided to highlight this face.
She saw a face, just like when we see a horse, or shapes in the clouds,
she saw a face in the cassava, went there and highlighted this image...
And she liked the result.
And from that moment on,
she started making these wooden faces, these so-called bugres,
"Bugres da Conceição", as they are called
without knowing that she was rescuing a tradition of guaicuru-kadiwéu totems,
today disappeared,
a tradition that has disappeared
but that was registered in drawings of travellers, ethnographers, anthropologists and other researchers,
and these illustrations can be found in museums in much of the world,
So,
What is this mystery, in addition?
Let's go to slide 10
So here on slide 10 you are seeing the recurrence of the wheel in different periods of human history.
right?
It has a Hindu image, this Hindu relief.
In the center,
this tarot card called Wheel of Fortune,
up there on the right
a Renaissance engraving from Dürer
representing the wheel of fortune
and underneath
a Medieval European Wheel of Fortune.
Thus,
the wheel in several different periods and cultural contexts
Why this recurrence of the wheel,
from Hindu art to the present period?
Slide 11
"We cannot understand the mystery, but with cunning we can return from it with full baskets"
a beautiful phrase,
practically a Koan in its concise poetry.
The phrase illuminates human relationship, our relationship, to mystery,
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
