Judith Braun, Making My Bed, 2011 black photocopy on neon orange paper and Fingering, 2011
Some thoughts on some works at an exhibition curated by Raimundas Malasauskas
There is a retinal seduction that captures the visitor of How About This, an exhibition curated by Raimundas Malasauskas at Andreas Huber in Vienna. It seems as if there wouldn't be a better place than Viennese architecture to experience certain works of the show, like the drawing/installations of Judith Braun. Seeing her work, I remembered the following thought by Beatriz Colomina on the architecture of Adolf Loos, regarding his Viennese interiors: "Upon entering a Loos interior, one's body is continually turned around to face the space one just moved through, rather than the oncoming space or the space outside. With each turn, each return look, the body is arrested". If in spaces built by Loos one's gaze is kept within the interiors of the house, in Braun's finger drawings on walls (Fingering, 2011) and her bifurcated sensual flora made through photocopied flower compositions (Making my bed 2011) the gaze is dislocated towards the interior[ity] of the individual. In other words, the location and relation of the work with the space and the parcourse of visitors made one's body doubly 'arrested' within a sensorial affect (not effect) that created portals to introspective architectures.
Mariana Castillo Deball and Audrey Cotin, Glories 2011
Drawings on wall based on the Codex Borgia, a Mesoamerican ritual and divinatory manuscript. It is generally believed to have been written before the Spanish conquest of mexico somewhere within what is now today southern or western Puebla.
Benjamin Seror, Songs for Flowers and Jackets, 2011
At the back room of the gallery a rack of eccentric/campy jackets were hanging. They were part of a performance by Benjamin Seror whom the night before had warn them to sing Garageband made melancholic technopop songs he had written. Each song was dedicated to each jacket, and introduced by the artist with a personal emotive anecdote. for example the first flashy flowery tencho-tropical clothing, had been originally given to the artist by a door man of a bizarre night club from where Benjamin had just came out drunk and overwhelmed by such gift. The banal, yet sad and existentialist 4 minute song lyrics, sang by the artist at the exhibition, had been originally sang and hummed by the door man the time he gave away his jacket to the artist. During the night of the performance Benjamin's stories, songs, tone and personas continued and modify as he changed jackets.
Seeing these jackets hanging in a rack, it reminded me of the way in which Helio Oiticica's Parangoles 1964-1979 are sometimes 'displayed' in the white cube to invite visitors to wear them. As Oitician theoretician Victor Manuel Rodriguez has described, when one wears a Parangole, one performs an action of cross-dressing. Cross dressing is often used as 'trasvestism' to become a woman, but in this case it should be taken as to cross-dress into any possible identity, such us those multiple personas 'personified' through the work of Benjamin Seror.
Helio Oiticica, Parangoles, 1964-1979. Display at documenta X (1997)
Helio Oiticica, Parangole, (1964-1979) See from min 1.13
Joint drawing by M. Castillo de Ball, Judith Braun and Audrey Cottin, 2011
Inti Guerrero and Cosmin Costinas with Judith Braun [THIS IS THE ORIGINAL COLOR OF THE PIECE]
Exhibition text by Raimundas Malasauskas:
Judith Braun comes from New York City to apply patterns of the universe on the walls of the gallery. Audrey Cottin has drawn folds and knots exploring the convolutions (and distortions) of the human brain. Mariana Castillo Deball watches Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, spread its wings through time. Wings and knots cross each other on the wall. So far, Gintaras Didziapetris has released one issue of a magazine called Ninety. On the occasion of the exhibition, Ninety has commissioned Elena Narbutaite to make a series of pictures of an ancient ritual called smoking. Nicholas Matranga is writing a concept for the show and defines this as his artwork. Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita recently visited the World Forum of Spiritual Culture in Astana, Kazakhstan, where they shot a video about Noospheric economy and evolutionary algorithms. Benjamin Seror takes all this up and sings it – more or less as a Frenchman would do.
Until 18 June 2011 at:
Galerie Andreas Huber Schleifmühlgasse 6-8, 2nd floor
Curated conference at Rietveld Academy’s Studium Generale
March 2011, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Helio Oiticica and Neville D´Almeida, CC5 Cosmococa 5 Hendrix-War, New York, 1973
Quasi-cinema* was a day conference which gathered international scholars, artists and film curators to discuss experimental cinematographic positions by directors who subverted traditionalist forms of representing gender and sexuality on the screen.
The first part of the program had cultural studies theoretician Victor M. Rodriguez speaking directly on the queer politics behind the work of Helio Oiticica; film curator Marc Siegel screened and talk on the underground filmmaker Jack Smith’s controversial featurette Flaming Creatures (1963) and writer Juan A. Suarez talked about the Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars of Andy Warhol’s filmography.
The second part of program seeked to further expand the cultural specificity of gender and sexual representation in cinema. For this artist Ming Wong shared his work which deals with the theatricality of identity and race as he reenacts iconic scenes from movies by Douglas Sirk, Pier Paolo Pasolini and legendary Malay director P. Ramlee; while trans-gender historian Susan Stryker screened and discuss excerpts of an obscure and campy archival treasure—a 1962 film from the Philippines featuring U.S. transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, who was then performing an extended run at a Manila nightclub.
* Quasi-cinema was a term coined by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica when creating a series of multimedia participatory installations that interrogated the language of film. His work placed the spectator within an almost [quasi] cinematic montage, challenging the traditional 'passive' relationship between the screen and the audience, and thus instigating other social, corporal and sensual relationships amongst the people in relation to art.
More info: www.studiumgenerale.rietveldacademie.nl
Ming Wong in Quasi-cinemas, Amsterdam, 2011
Ming Wong, Four Malay Stories, 2005
Inspired by the work of Malay showbiz icon P Ramlee, a Malay Muslim who made over 60 movies from the 50s to 70s in Singapore and Malaysia. His popularity spanned across all racial divide and social strata, and his memory is often evoked as a beacon for cultural pluralism and racial harmony.
For this series the artist has re-created key scenes from four of P Ramlee's best known films, playing a total of 16 different characters from a comedy, a melodrama, a social drama and a Malay period drama. Many of the chosen lines are classic quotations that have entered the popular lexicon of Malay society. The scenes were chosen also for their depiction of social and sexual mores of the local muslim community at the time, some of which have since been censored.
Relying on his limited knowledge of the Malay language, the artist can be seen repeating his lines in repeated takes of the same scene, along with a simultaneous transcription and literal translation in English in the subtitles - as in a foreign language instructional video. The work traces the artist's attempt in adopting a 'foreign' language and cultural traits, albeit in ways that are deliberately nostalgic, melodramatic, poetic, out-dated or outlawed.
MARCO, Vigo, Spain and FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France
May-August and September – December, 2010
Artists: Samuel Beckett, Marilyn Bridges, Flávio de Carvalho, Cristina Lucas, Ossama Mohammed, Valérie Mréjen, José Alejandro Restrepo, Taller E.P.S. Huayco, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Alexandre Vogler. Curator: Inti Guerrero
‘FlyingDowntoEarth’ dealt with the complex connections between societies and religiosity in relation to institutions, politics, popular culture and collective memory. It asked questions about the ways that belief systems render our psychology, social hierarchies, idiosyncrasies and imaginaries.
The point of departure of the show is a series of aerial photographs of the Nazca lines in Peru taken by Marilyn Bridges in the late 1970's, which is part of the FRAC Lorraine collection. Bridges' dramatic compositions, taken “from up there,” invert the traditional gaze of the earth upward to the heavens that these sacred marks invoked in the past, desacralizing the "above" and exposing the void beneath the clouds. Through different media and a wide range of historical, cultural and political references, the works in 'FlyingdowntoEarth' explore a few key subjects: ritualistic structures employed to comment on representations of the social body (Taller E.P.S. Huayco, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, and Alexandre Vogler); disenchantment and rebellion in the individual's psyche towards religious dogmas (Flavio de Carvalho, Ossama Mohammed and Valérie Mréjen); acts of iconoclasm and iconophily that confront the omniscient presence of power both political and divine (Samuel Beckett/Alan Schneider, Cristina Lucas and Jose Alejandro Restrepo).
Without fetishizing 'the esoteric' or 'the occult', nor ruminating on religion as social anesthesia, this exhibition attempts to start from art in order to understand how our identities are marked by the rituals of affiliation to or emancipation from the sacred. It seeks to capture that precise crucial moment that marks a perceived epiphany or an irreparable disenchantment, as well as the social background of such individual experiences.
The exhibition's installment at MARCO, Vigo responded to the museum's specific setting - a former panoptic prison - by emphasizing the idea of a divine gaze that pervades our everyday lives. The installation at the FRAC Lorraine in Metz builds on this theme of surveillance by integrating a permanent work in the space, "Forever" by artist Dora Garcia, which allows both the artist and the on-line public to continuously observe the interior of the exhibition space.
Artists: Claudia Andujar (Brazil), Cristina Lucas (Spain), Daria Martin (USA/UK), Dzi Croquettes (Brazil), Egle Budvytyte (Lithuania/the Netherlands), Flavio de Carvalho (Brazil), Miguel Angel Rojas (Colombia), Ney Matogrosso (Brazil) and Santiago Monge (Colombia). Curated by: Inti Guerrero
‘The City of the Naked Man’ was a group exhibition based on a 1930’s urban master plan by Brazilian avant-garde artist and architect Flavio de Carvalho, who envisioned a city for a mankind without God, property or marriage.
In 1930 Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973) proposed to build a new city in the tropics. He idealized a metropolis for ‘naked mankind’ that had stripped itself from its cultural body, or in his words, a man without ‘scholastic taboos’, ‘free for reasoning and thinking’ in order to begin a painstaking process of wonderment, change and self transformation. Flávio de Carvalho imagined his urban utopia as a constellation of centers and laboratories located in concentric circles: a “Teaching center,” a “Breeding center,” and a “Laboratory of erotica",” where “the nude man would select his own erotic forms, where no restrictions would demand this or that sacrifice; his cerebral energy would be enough to control and select his desires […], where he would orient his energy toward any direction, without repression; where he would fulfill his desires, discover new desires.”
The exhibition departed from De Carvalho’s transgressive spirit in his unique formulation to construct a new urban landscape in the tropics, a new reality. It gathered artworks and cultural artifacts, which rather than illustrating De Carvalho’s thinking, jointly and along the designed display by architect Marta Bogea, they constructed the radical and countercultural significance of his urban planning, thus opening the possibility of imagining how such a place might be that is “free of scholastic taboos,” “free for reasoning and thinking,” where the individual’s corporality and sexual energy may be directed in “any direction, without repression.” (F. De Carvalho, 1930)
Ney Matogrosso, metallic suit used for video clip; Flores Astrais, 1974
Visual material from the singer Ney Matogrosso and his band Secos e Molhado [Dry and Wet]
Matogrosso's eccentric costumes and makeup, along with his peculiar feminine tone of voice, made him and his band Secos e Molhados, the most transgressive proposal of Brazilian rock of the 1970’s. It is interesting that Matogrosso, with his androgyny, his ambiguity, his strangeness, his queerness, instead of remaining in subculture, was popularly received in the repressive climate of the dictatorship. His live performances, which filled stadiums and his TV appearances, were a type of psychic catharsis of the singer, which was translated on stage through his “aggressive” physical movements. For the exhibition, Matogrosso presents the video Flores astrais, 1974, by Secos e Molhados and the original metallic costume he wore for the shooting of the video. He will also show a photographic study, realized in 1975 for the cover of his first solo album, whose art direction attempts to recreate a “return to the savage”, a Matogrosso as a being “free of scholastic taboos.”
Series of black and white photographs from the article “A verdade andava nua” [Truth Went about Naked], originally published in the magazine O Cruzeiro, December 1949 issue. The images portray a group of middle-class youth from Rio de Janeiro, who decided to go to the beach in gala and winter clothing, as to protest against the hygiene & moral law that in that time prohibited them to wear their swimming clothes in other parts of the city that were not strictly the beach. Their action subverted the norm by exaggerating the absurdity of the law.
Daria Martin, Soft materials, 2004
Two dancers, a woman and a man, enter an artificial intelligence laboratory where they find robotic prostheses constructed with humanoid forms and gestures. Through subtle movement and choreography, each dancer tries to interact with these artifacts, which subsequently react by sensually touching their naked bodies. Like a courtship between man and machine, Soft Materials recalls the historical avant-garde’s imagery on eroticism. Perhaps the most significant reference would be Ballet Mécanique [1924] by Fernand Léger, in which the cinematographic language centers around revealing sexual archetypes in the forms and movements of machinery and industrial objects in modern life. In contrast, desire in Soft Materials seems to have no previous cultural archetypes. Instead, the work deals with an instinctive, archaic moment of the encounter of one body with another. It is a primitive encounter with that which appears to be unfamiliar, yet simultaneously it is a visceral manifestation of mankind with an object that is culturally charged by the history of humanity’s technological progress.
Miguel Angel Rojas, Faenza, 1979
Extensive photographic project attempting to portray the homosexual encounters taking place inside certain movie theaters in Bogota. By only using the precarious light conditions emanating from the movie screen, the long exposures of each photograph created blurry, gestural and uncanny images that revealed the minimal indication of sexual activity. Each of the 65 black and white photographs that compose the series, disrupts the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze by maintaining the clandestine and anonymous atmosphere of these encounters. Together with the artist, six photographs were chosen from the Faenza project. The majority of this selection, contain small phrases superimposed by Rojas to describe these theaters as an architecture of desire… a laboratory of erotica, or in his words as an 'Anthropophagy in the city'.
Santiago Monge, Burlesque, 2007. Miguel Angel Rojas Faenza, 1979
Santiago Monge, Burlesque, 2007
Vitrine with magazines documenting Flavio de Carvalho, New Look, 1956
Manchete magazines documenting Flavio de Carvalho, New Look, 1956
The only work by Flávio de Carvalho included in the show is his New Look [1956]; a male business suit, designed specifically for the climatic, economic, and cultural conditions of the urban man in the tropics. According to de Carvalho the common business suit was unhygienic, because of its enclosed design, which trapped the body’s sweat within the heavy clothing’s texture. The solution proposed by his New Look was to improve air circulation around the body, by incorporating a white, pleated miniskirt and a light short sleeved shirt of vibrant colors, with openings around the armpit area and a metal structure on the inside to separate the fabric from the wearer’s skin. Instead of showing the suit or a replica, the exhibition will include a significant number of magazines and periodicals (including Time magazine) that widely documented the 1956 street launch of his futuristic tropical apparel, for which Flávio de Carvalho carried out his Experiência no 3, as part of the series of his experiences to study crowd psychology.
Claudia Andujar, Rua direita, 1970
Placing her camera over one of the busiest pedestrian streets of the center of São Paulo, Claudia Andujar [b. 1932, Switzerland. Lives and works in Brazil since 1955] managed to capture the individual gaze of curious passers-by, who for an instant paused among the crowded urban flow. In the series of photographs Rua Direita [1970], the uncanny gaze of each individual detains the temporality of the city’s collective agitation. The confrontation of the artist with the crowd seems to invert the power relations between the photographer and who is being photographed. In this case, the passers-by are the ones who control the gaze in the photograph. Coincidentally, rua Direita [Straight Street] was the same street on which, in 1931, Flávio de Carvalho realized his first Experiência in urban space to analyze crowd psychology. Entitled Experiência no. 2, de Carvalho infiltrated a Corpus Christi procession in São Paulo without taking off his green cap, and furthermore, walking among the parishioners in the opposite direction of the religious procession. The artist’s “simple” action immediately instigated the collective rage of the believers, who promptly began chasing him, crying out for him to be lynched, “Lyncha! Lyncha!” [Lynch him! Lynch him!”]. De Carvalho’s individual act before the crowd at that time revealed the lack of individuality of the people who reacted violently under the influences of the church’s ideological doctrines. In the case of Andujar’s photographs, with their gaze, the city’s inhabitants seem to be searching for their self representation, “free to reason and to think” in the absence of political representation under the repressive context of the military dictatorship [1964-1985].
Events Program
Talk with singer Ney Matogrosso
In collaboration with SP Fashion Week
Conversation between curator Inti Guerrero and MAM-Rio Director and critic Luiz Camillo Osorio:
On Saturday, April 17 at the Lina Bo Bardi auditorium of the MAM-SP, a discussion took place with guest critic Luiz Camillo Osorio (Rio de Janeiro) and Inti Guerrero
Screening of Dzi Croquettes Documentary:
"The Dzi Croquettes theatre group, formed in Rio de Janeiro in 1972, brought together the enthusiasm of a group of amateur artists and the professional expertise of Lennie Dale, an American Broadway dancer residing in Brazil. Unlike the drag performers of Praça Tiradentes, who sought classical feminine beauty, grace, and style in their portrayal of women, the fourteen cast members of Dzi Croquette dressed in a mixture of masculine and feminine attire. Baritone-voiced men decorated with glitter and make-up projected male virility yet wore feminine accouterments.
The Dzi Croquettes emphasized sexual freedom. Their androgynous representations and a phrase used in their shows—“everyone should be able to have sex with whomever they want”--provoked the question of their sexual identity. While they were effeminate, they also projected masculinity, so according to traditional standards they were not exactly bichas. Nor were they travestis, since the actors made no attempt to replicate the standard presentation of feminine beauty"
Comprising videos, films, slideshows and talks by Raimond Chaves, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Hans Heijnen, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ossama Mohammed, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Andy Warhol and Ming Wong. Curated by Inti Guerrero
Duet for Cannibals was a screening and talks program on colonialism and cannibalism as forms of cultural appropriation. It brought together a selection of works by contemporary artists and filmmakers together with 1920’s archive films from the Tropical Museum's collection that depict ethnographic expeditions made in former colonies of the Netherlands.
Ethnographic institutions in European colonial powers, like the former Colonial Institute of Amsterdam (nowadays Tropenmuseum), were founded to study and exhibit the culture of 'overseas people'. Their role was to appropriate, classify, and display cultural artifacts and sometimes even human beings. Though they claimed to reveal the pre-supposed cultural essence of the non-European other, such displays further entrenched the stereotypes of a eurocentric scientific and cultural status quo. In other words, it was by means of inclusion of other cultures rather than their full exclusion, that the colonial power constructed and affirmed itself within the enlightened modern institution of the museum, enhancing a privileged position from where it could unilaterally represent the rest of the world. The works in 'Duet for Cannibals' presented a wide range of approaches to this debate by departing from historical strata of colonial archives, post-war cultural imperialism and countercultural forms of metropolitan creole-subcultures. The screenings were accompanied by Q&A sessions and lectures by guest artists and speakers.
The title is borrowed from a 1969 film directed by American author and critic Susan Sontag.
More detail info: http://www.agentur.nl/DuetForCannibals.html
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Instruction, 2009
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gloria, 2008
Q&A with Inti Guerrero, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Jose Alejandro Restrepo
Hans Heijnen, Rock in Ramona, 1991
Still from Rock in Ramona (1991); The Tielman Brothers
is an Amsterdam based art critic and curator born in Bogotá, Colombia. He has published in Afterall (London), Manifesta Journal (Amsterdam), Ramona (Buenos Aires), Idea (Cluj) and ArtNexus (Bogota). Former Curator-in-Residence at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and Capacete Entretenimentos in Rio de Janeiro. Currently he is a researcher at the Amsterdam-based curatorial platform If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution and a visiting professor at Rietvield Academy’s Studium Generale.
Guerrero attended De Appel's Curatorial Program and fulfilled studies on History and Theory of Art and Architecture and General History at both Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia and Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil.
