Group exhibition curated by Paulo Reis
1* The world is everything that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these begin all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the
case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the
same.
2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
2.01 An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This philosophical research into meanings appears in the Tractatus logicophilosophicus. Ludwig Wittgenstein moves the structure of ontology into the field of the signifiers and meanings. Wittgensteinian thought on the logic of things has become crucial in speculations on the essence and appearance of statements, opening up space for the Philosophy of Language, which is so necessary for an understanding of conceptual art. The Tractatus logico-philosophicus, launched in 1921, exactly in the period in which colonial conquests were guaranteed – when western man was coming into contact with the different forms of linguistic approaches, and psychoanalysis was establishing the notion of the Self – is an argument that carries on the phenomenological speculation of Husserl (1859-1938). Husserl, the creator of phenomenology, understood this science as an a priori that deals with ideal objects. Besides being universal, phenomenology is the science of the essences understood as experiences, because for Husserl experience is a psychic act acquired by the “here and now” (hic et nunc). But this experience is only possible when its meaning is realised. Phenomenology deals with significations. And it is signification that makes the word be a word, otherwise it would only be a verbal sign. But the signification is not in the word, as it only calls attention to its meaning. Signification is also not in the object of the word, because this may not exist. Phenomenology is the descriptive science of pure consciousness, as for phenomenologists it is not enough to see; one needs to take account of what one sees. Then consciousness becomes intentional experience. Wittgensteinian propositions relate what we see in the world, but also what we denominate as world. Just as Wittgenstein attempted to go beyond Husserl, Gaston Bachelard (1884- 1962) tried to go beyond Wittgensteinian rationalism, inventing the concept of suprarationalism. For him it is through the use of psychological subjectivity that one may go beyond the scientific concept, using the experience of the expansive poetic spirit. Bachelard then becomes a subtle psychologist of poetic subjectivity, as, despite believing in the somewhat lucid testimony of scientific objectivity, he teaches us to appreciate antinomian values. Thus, life includes the daily imagination of a wise man – the scientist who invents rational hypotheses – but also the nocturnal imagination of the poet – which enriches the subjective and affective side of human culture. These two hypotheses – rationality and poetics – make the expansion of human capacity. In researching into the evolution and plasticity of the principles of reason, Bachelard points towards physics and chemistry as possibilities for the comprehension of the concept of space and of its psychology for man. Essentially, The Poetics of Space – a sort of sixties zeitgeist Bible – with its theories of space according to Bachelard, helped the “minimalists”, “poveros”, and “conceptuals” to weave a study of the values of the dialectic between the inner space and the outer space. The body – as Robert Morris stated – provides the measuring of the world because it is the dwelling of the spirit. But the real space of the world, the house, the place we live in, simultaneously provides us with loose image and a body of images. That is, as long as we consider it at the same time in its unity and complexity, trying to integrate all its particular values into a fundamental value. In both cases we will prove that imagination increases the values of reality. A sort of attraction of images concentrates the images around the house. Through memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter, besides all the houses we dream of living in, is it possible to isolate an intimate and concrete essence that is a justifying of the unique value that all our images of protected intimacy? That is the central problem in Bachelard’s thesis. In the field of the historiography of art, when we make a detailed study of modernity and contemporary production, confirming the difference pointed out by Arthur E. Danto, we realize that many artists are interested in the space as an unquestionable plastic possibility. In modernity, the Russian Constructivists were the first ones to observe it. The Reliefs by Naum Gabo (1890-1977), the Monument to IIIa. International (1919) by Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) and the Architectona (1924-26) by Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) were the first experiments that allowed other artists to analyse architecture as a sensorial experience. The architectural space – in the case of Tatlin, an office – becomes a dynamic sculpture, living, spinning around its own axis like a live organism. In the Architectona, Malevich draws up the theory of Static Suprematism; that is, he creates the sensation of transporting the canvas to the space. In his research into visual phenomena, he observed that the objective world was stripped of meaning in itself, as its meaning was only a sensation. Although Malevich opened up the perspective to gaze attentively at the relationship between architecture (space) and abstract painting (sensation), the apogee was achieved, however, with Neoplasticism, as the Boogie-Woogies by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) used the famous urbanistic spread of New York City as a form. Neoplasticism, Bauhaus and the several different forms of European constructivism, imbued with the spirit of the total work of art (gesamkunstwerk), build house-works, fusing notions suited to architecture (space and line), sculpture (volume and density) and painting (colour and surface). The Schröder House (1924), by Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) and the Summer House (1923), by Theo van Doesburg (1883- 1931) are two examples of the theory applied to full scale and not as models, as the Suprematists had done. Or also the joining of Russian Suprematism with Dutch Neoplasticism promoted by Doesburg with Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) and Jean Arp (1887-1966) in the cinema-restaurant L’Aubette (1928), in Strasburg. All of these examples become a synthesis of the new plastic perception (Die neue gestaltung) that begins to reign in Europe in the first decades of the XX century. For these artists, the aim of art and architecture, being universal in their origins, is that of moderating nature, bringing it closer to human norms. There then followed the steps of the Suprematists and Neoplasticists, the futurists, the “Bauhaus” and all the European post-constructivist currents, and soon afterwards, in the fifties, the American concrete currents (Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela were the countries that most absorbed these ideas). However, in modernity the artists see space as a vast territory for research into sculpture and painting, but the experiments belong to the field of the two- and three-dimensional, without yet incorporating the notion of the in site, which only appears in contemporary art. For Arthur E. Danto, the contemporary begins with the experiments of the seventies, when phenomenology is set up as the only possibility open to an artist resisting the fact of being an artist. At the end of the sixties artists exchanged the experience of figuration of the place for the place in situ, inventing the site specific. From the Standing box by Robert Morris and the House of Cards by Richard Serra, including the works in the form of dwellings in the most varied forms – nests (Helio Oiticica), shacks (Dennis Oppenheim), labyrinths (Dan Graham, Michael Heizer), corners (Naumann, Cildo Meireles), shells (Richard Long), Igloos (Mario Merz), etc – the artists sought out to turn them into plastic, sensorial and existential experiences. In Minimalism, in Land art, in Environment Art and in Arte Povera, the artists see the space, whether its in loco nature is the house (museum, cultural centre, alternative spaces, buildings, galleries, etc.), as not just another space to place the work, but the work per se. In this way the site specific arises out of the artist’s need for a response to the appeal of the space: “Invade me! Occupy me! Appropriate me!” This is a privileged encounter between art and nature, referring us back to the origins of art and of civilization, evoking the development of the species through their expansive poetic spirit. This expansive field defended by Bachelard has been understood with “poeisis” by any artist no better than by Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), the epicentre artist of the Anarchitecture group. Matta-Clark, from an artistic family, being the son of the painter Roberto Matta, lived for only thirty-five years, but became a vortex in US art, proposing a new condition for life through actions on buildings and houses that were symbols of the “American way of life”. Having imploded the frontiers between performance, land art and conceptual art,nMatta-Clark transformed his works into a total work of art. His biography had been marked out by radical, consequent and political actions when, in 1971, having being invited by the Sao Paulo Biennial, he refused to participate as a protest against the military regime, and also headed an international boycott of the exhibition and proposed an alternative exhibition in Chile in order to denounce the living conditions in South America. Having understood that the means is the message, the camera accompanied him constantly in his production from 1971 to 1977, like a tool for exploration and experimenting in which he could reveal his thought. He directs his first film, Fresh Kill (1972, 13 min.) recording the complete process of destruction of his truck (called Herman Meydag), by a bulldozer. This film was exhibited at the Documenta 5, Kassel in the same year that it was made. Matta-Clark directed about 20 films and videos, which fall into three categories. First, the performance-films, in which he often carries out the work on camera; then the texture films or videos, with which he explores the urban fabric, architecture and below-ground, the rejected areas of the cities, between the private space and the public space, to which he granted very suggestive titles like Chinatown Voyeur, Automation House, Substrait (Underground Dailies), Sous-sols de Paris, City Slivers; and, finally, the films of the actions of the cuttings in architectural buildings (Splitting) that Matta-Clark opens, baring their gloomy entrails to the light of day. These latter works are filmic documents which better restore the process of cutting and the strong experience coming from this new relationship with the space, as well the disorientation arising both from the disappearing of the separation between inside and out and from the usual points of reference. “The notion of changeable space is a taboo, particularly in one’s own house”, he would state. His architectural interventions, which start with the film Splitting (1974, 11 min.) show Matta-Clark cutting a house in Englewwod, New York. This is followed by Bingo (1974, 10 min.) when, in August 1974, Matta-Clark made a “cut” in a typical house in Niagara Falls, in the state of New York. He obtained permission to divide the outer façade into nine parts; the central segment remained intact. An hour after completion the house was demolished. The following year he directs Conical Intersect (1975, 19 min.) documenting the “cut” carried out in two houses in the Les Halles neighbourhood of Paris. Besides these “cuts”, Matta-Clark created a series of actions that were architectural interventions on abandoned buildings and port warehouses, bringing light into these spaces in order to modify the spectator’s perception, or creating anamorphoses of emptiness in concrete spaces. Some interventions on buildings led to photographic collages and films, as in City Slivers (1976, 15 min.). In this film he shows urban views of New York City projected vertically, often as a single image, in a group, separating them by black spaces. This film was conceived to be projected on the outer wall and, on other occasions, inside the building, and was exhibited for the first time in an open-air exhibition called Arcades and then later at the Holly Salomon gallery. More than his photographic work, these films now bear witness to the importance of light for the artist and, in the face of their dramatic disappearances, transmit the great energy of these buildings that were destroyed more or less swiftly after their filming. A determining factor for Matta-Clark was the degree to which his intervention might transform the structure into an act of communication by shaking the foundations of the building, a common metaphor for representing the world. It was perhaps with Fresh Kill (1972, 13 min), which was part of 98.5, a compilation of films shown at the Documenta in 1972, and with Clockshower (1973, 14 min), that Matta-Clark was more radical as to the relationship between the camera and the body of the artist in the urban environment. (excerpt from the exhibition text by Paulo Reis)
