Reading Looking Up from Your Book: Passionate Insolence / Troubled

The potency of opening up and deploying a creative process as a form of pedagogy whether an artwork in and of itself (like many of the DouAções) or as a means of poetic response to the artworks was embraced as a vital part of the Nucleus’ practice, understood as a kind of complicity with artists and publics. ²⁰⁴ Complicity here could be said to look to the artist’s practice, process and ways of making as a means of grounding an experimental and associative process of re-meaning and making, akin to what Roland Barthes called “reading while looking up from your book” – a kind of insolence that interrupts and a smitten passion that returns and feeds from the text.²⁰⁵ In the context of the “artist-work-public relation” this complicity also simultaneously looks to the worlds of the artist and diverse publics, contexts and realities. Bringing these together is a kind of liminal art/education practice akin to what curator Luiz Camillo Osorio described as the “tight rope” at play in the act of exhibiting and negotiating the versatility of MAM’s galleries and their institutional limits.²⁰⁶ A series of exhibitions in 2011 - 2012 by Elisa Bracher, Fernanda Gomes and Nan Goldin offered distinctly different situational responses to these tensions.²⁰⁷

203 For descriptions see Nucleus blog https://nucleoexperimental.wordpress.com/category/douacoes/ (Portuguese only) and also Sabrina Curi. “DouAções: Sharing the State of Creation.” Revista MESA no 4: Past as Blueprint/Hybrid Practices and Limit Zones (May 2015) http://institutomesa.org/RevistaMesa_4/portfolio/arte-mam-04/?lang=en

204 The idea of the critical accomplice I take from Frederico Coelho’s work on Hélio Oiticica. Frederico Coelho, Livro ou livro-me: os escritos Babilônicos de Helio Oiticica (1971-1978) (Rio de Janeiro: Ed UERJ, 2010) 24.

205 “Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book? It is such reading, at once insolent in that it interrupts the text, and smitten in that it keeps returning to it and feeding on it, which I tried to describe.” Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) 29. Coelho also provocatively uses Barthes to describe Oiticica’s engagement with multiple texts, readings, notetaking. Lirvo ou livro-me p.21

206 Interview with the author, July 22^nd, 2015, Rio de Janeiro.

207 Elisa Bracher and Fernanda Gomes exhibitions were both curated by Luiz Camillo Osorio. Nan Goldin was curated by Ligia Canongia and Adon Peres.

Elisa Bracher works with printmaking, drawing and sculpture and is known for her large-scale installations and public works featuring wood, metal and lead. She is also founder and director of the Instituto Acaia in São Paulo that works with youth from favelas teaching carpentry and other technical and artistic skills. The installation at MAM was presented in what is known as the Monumental Gallery – a vast open space designed by Reidy to have maximum flexibility and featuring the rough exposed concrete of the museum’s external wall, itself an artwork of surface, stains and joints. Bracher’s piece Ponto final sem pausas (Final Point Without Pauses) installed from October 15^th, 2011 – January 15^th, 2012 comprised a large “floating” lead sphere weighing approximately eight tons suspended by steel cables with a backdrop of three thin 8 x 10 metre lead sheets that the artist winsomely called “hankerchiefs.”²⁰⁸ Describing her work as being about

“weight and equilibrium” Bracher draws a parallel between the physical installation challenges she sets for herself and by consequence, the taught relationship of artist and institution, with the struggle for life equilibrium of the youth with whom she works.²⁰⁹ This tension became openly pedagogic in the twenty day installation process, where innumerable engineering feats and institutional limits had to be faced, indeed at the opening, due to technical difficulties, the as yet un-installed piece replete with scaffolding in a rare revelation of process, exposed that struggle.

The suspended sphere would ultimately hang as a metaphor of the possible. In a description of a more recent piece, but equally applicable here, curator Rodrigo Naves notes that these “sculptures at the limit of instability, allow the spectator to find their lost equilibirium as they circulate the work.”²¹⁰ This search for equilibrium was richly manifested by one of the Nucleus’

artist/educators, Bernardo Zabalaga, a dancer, who created a performative response to Bracher’s installation entitled Escalas em equilibro (Scales in Equilibrium). Zabalaga’s description of seeking to relate and construct a dialogue with this piece both reflects Bracher’s challenge to spectators to find their lost equilibrium and the younger artist’s own tentative to carve out a role in the Nucleus and in turn within the “artist-work-public” context of the museum.

The resulting performance is less a convoking to assist an interpretation or enhancement of a particular exhibition, than an opening up of a creative process and state of relation. Not being explanatory or informative, wearing white in contrast to the solid led gray of Bracher’s installation, Zabalaga composed a ritual performance using a light transparent cloth and sphere,

208 “Elisa Bracher: Ponto final sem pausas,” Wall Street International, October 15th, 2011 http://wsimag.com/pt/arte/730-elisa-bracher-ponto-final-sem-pausas

209 Elisa Bracher presentation and video entitled “Espaço de construir: meninos e sculpturas” (Space of Construction:

Youth and Sculpture” at the seminar Reconfiguring the Public: Art, Pedagogy and Participation, November 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVtoaMOoqGo&index=7&list=PLO-GRBBoQZrjDOO0B7xSTsSu40BYBE48m

210 Antonio Gonçalves Filho, “Na mostra de Elisa Bracher, artist ergue labirinto de taipa que fala de luto e mistério,” O Estadao de São Paulo, August 21st, 2015 http://cultura.estadao.com.br/noticias/artes,na-mostra-de-elisa-bracher--a-artista--ergue-labirinto-de-taipa-que-fala-de-luto-e-misterio,1747916

responding to the monumental weight of the artwork, with the lightness of small bodily gestures.

The juxtaposition effectively was able to catalyze rich responses with participants/spectators – the contrast heightening viewer/participant perceptions and opening up a dialogue, intuitively grounded in the force mobilized by Bracher in her installation. Complicit readings multiply and re-distribute rather than explain.

Embracing an “insolent” even if passionate complicity, however, was not always well received. As a counterpoint to Bracher’s weighty singular suspension, Fernanda Gomes offered the poetry of the dispersed. Known for conceptual installations and interventions drawing attention to and transforming commonplace things or situations, Gomes’ exhibition, held from December 17^th 2011 – April 22^nd 2012, turned MAM’s large light filled gallery into an airly but tightly choreographed sculptural canvas of insignificant objects. The long gallery with a solid black floor elegantly sits on a set of concrete pilotis, at once overlooking and seamlessly integrating with the views of the Pão de Açucar on one side and the city on the other – a context that heightened the installation’s simultaneous play of the everyday and the numinous. In contrast to Bracher’s construction zone of scaffolding, pullies, engineers, and heavy lifting, yet in no less time, Gomes spent weeks installing alone, bringing personal and found objects, positioning and repositioning objects and details - white painted drawers and bases, pieces of wood, string and material, a pair of knives hung as if delicate wind chimes, oddly postioned chairs, bottles, and jugs of water. Intimate, precarious and singular, the installation ambiguously hovered amidst a matter-of-fact invitation to recognize the commonplace and an aura of potential alchemical transformation. While committed to multiple readings, Gomes was fiercely against any form of interpretative mediation. She refused to have any curatorial wall text or “educational talking” in the installation. Caught between complicities of sympathy and the passionate insolence the installation inspired, and, of course, desiring to tension their own creative agency, two of the Nucleus artists/educators experimented a new path – an impromtu walking silent performance followed by a discussion outside the gallery. Observed by a monitor who in turn reported the “insolence” to Gomes, the incident opened up a quagmire of critical limit zones of public/private, artist/institution and art/mediation. In a context of disavowal rather than productive tension, the complicit tightrope collapses. Or rather things return to as they were. Yet amidst our overly mediated and determined contemporary life one cannot deny Gomes’ caustic refusal to be a “text” or a “stage” or, for that matter, that of younger artists or educators to limit their agency. It is the kind of Huis Clos situation of contemporaneity where although we may have assumed plural values collectively we do not yet have the habits of practice or language with which to find a way out.

Pedrosa’s “paralaboratory” may suggest an alternate path via a “para” practice of detours, parallels or dérive where the critical and creative accomplice can both look to the world of the artist and simultaneously embrace a notion of a multi-voiced publicness. For this to be taken on institutionally there often needs to be a risk in play. This was the case with exhibition of the contemporary photographer Nan Goldin, Heartbeat, February 9^th – April 8^th 2012. In December 2011 her exhibition was cancelled by the Rio de Janeiro cultural art center Oi Futuro based on the premise that an educational institution could not exhibit risqué photographs of minors. Brazilian law is particularly strict with regards to the photographing of children, so Goldin’s images of sexual and drug undergrounds involving friends and occasionally children, while not overtly violent or (debatably) pornographic, could nevertheless be in a position to be judicially questioned. MAM under the leadership of Luiz Camillo Osorio decided to take the exhibition with the exact opposite position that, in fact, the educational work of the institution is in exhibiting such challenging material. In response to the situation, as an “Ação conjunto” (Action together) in collaboration with Osorio and assistant curator Marta Mestre, the Nucleus held a series of internal conversations together with lawyers, psychoanalysts, artists, educators, and curators, in turn recording various points of view and organizing a series of forums exploring the question “what does it mean to exhibit?” and Nan Goldin specifically.²¹¹ Audio recordings were presented in the museum lobby and the forums in the exhibition itself. The process affected a responsive cross-institutional complicity, suggesting the strategic potential of a “para” complicit model that detours rather than interprets, setting itself up as a parallel of practice collecting multiple perspectives.