Reviews
Phantasmagoria of Light
Adolfo Montejo, 2003.
"Cuando las sombras hablan, la luz
escucha o simplemente se hace negra,
vuelve al origen de los movimientos.
Las interpretaciones comienzan el mundo
de las no palabras. ¿Su doble, el negativo
de la presencia? Las últimas dudas
están lanzadas a un ojo que desciende"
AMN
“Total visibility is a trap”
Olgária Matos/Michel Foucault
“The invisible harmony is more powerful than the visible one” 1
Heraclitus
I
Few poetics are so wide-ranging and at the same time so coherent, so zealous of their core, as is that of Regina Silveira. The total sum of views that it produces lays on an almost kaleidoscopic unfolding that never ceases to surprise, since this is an artistic production that goes beyond all expectations, and even contradicts them. On the other hand, the variety of mediums, supports and resources effectively multiplies the expressive ratio of this poetics, which keeps to certain constant concerns, certain key denominators in the architecture, the criticism and the irony of the image – of its representational underlayers/codes – along with its analysis of the meaning of presence/absence in a work of art. The perspective granted by various decades of artistic endeavor allow for a reading of the artworks in a continuous movement of relations, in which a mutual attractive force draws certain pieces together, setting up links or their own elective affinities. At rock bottom, every work of art is a cartography, the construction of a map that represents an artistic pathos. In it, the three concepts pointed out function as articulations, links between some of the artworks and others, at times apparently quite distant.
In this regard, her recent work Quimera [Chimera] is an outstanding example of her development, since it has originated from a graphic work, a basic source (there is always a great quantity of studies, sketches and drawings for each work, like a permanent exhibition of a work in progress). From the recognition that the objects used by the artist participate in a double frame of reference, one may at times perceive the listening of its inner configuration that lends itself to transformation (enigmas, chinaware, small household items, etc.); while other objects deal with the configuration of space (In absentia [Stretched], 1982/1986, A Lição [The Lesson], 2002, etc.).2 Though there is no symmetrical artwork or single reading of things on the part of the artist, a virtual or real projection of the imaginary is set up – in fact this real/virtual porosity is an outstanding characteristic of her poetics. Quimera offers the content/form for a lamp/light bulb: a dream of the lamp/light bulb that may appear like Aladdin’s magic. (Quimera was in the print Lâmpada [Light Bulb], 1997, but it still needed to spring out, to have another dimension). Lately, everything is real and fiction at the same time (even though it was Fernando Pessoa who best intuited it at the beginning of the last century): the light bulb, the space, the shadow, but also the light/projection itself. The artist’s work takes on still more tridimensionality, another notion of space created by a new conjugation of the elements involved. This results in the irony that the light bulb produces the shadow, and it is overbright, enhanced, bereft of all objective correspondence. The light bulb becomes a phantasmagoric signal/sign. A firm artistic paradox is thus set up within a fundamentally visual, profoundly optical artwork, the conceptualization of the gaze arises from another perception, it has another condition.
We are indeed face to face with a paradoxical work of art inasmuch as it gains expressive force and presence through works constructed on absence, in other words, with the negative of the presence (represented by the shadows, the projections as though stripped by light), whether springing from an imaginary light or not, since in Claraluz Regina has realized an expressive tour de force, taking the real light and making it imaginary, displacing the points of incidence and refraction, unlike many artworks with shadows in which these shed light on the lack of a real referent. In her artistic strategy, the first operation produced in her imagery is an emptying, a reduction or elimination of recognized values, followed by a filling, the instatement of another imaginary (curiously, the shadows have this double function: they empty and fill). It is at the same time a deconstructive and constructive work, of both a de- and rematerializing nature due to its striking character of alternating absence and presence, as well as the contextual and cultural role of the image worked by the artist as a visual/conceptual superimposition. The mental image is the work’s latent part, which functions as a “superimposed ghost.” It has the character of a “visual ideogram”: within what is offered, absence is overlapped with presence (both the expressions within quotation marks are the author’s own words).3
II
The thread heretofore implied for the relations that her work establishes allows the establishment of some other correspondences that can be stated by a brief example: the wooden cut pieces of furniture – on the wall – Inflexões [Inflexions] (1985, 1988), already pre- configured the following step taken with Dobras [Folds] (2002). Just as the inverse movement may be made: from Descendo a Escada [Descending the Staircase] (2002) it is possible to return to A Escada Inexplicável II [Inexplicable Staircase II] (1999). On the other hand, Middle Class & Co. (1972) and Destruturas Urbanas [Urban Destructures] (1976) speak of a citizen’s concerns that were to become even more evident in the projections of Transit (2001), or Super Herói [Super Hero] (1997), or the intervention Blindagem [Armor] (2002). Moreover, the city itself is already present in other early prints, postcards, or in that performance of the impossible real-estate brochure, in such a way that the urban space as a cityscape, always emblematic of contemporary culture (of life, power and movement), receives different readings by the artist: since the beginning it has been participating in the structure of the artworks. An increasingly relevant aspect is that the urban or public dimension of various pieces has in recent years reached a strong presence (an expression of this are her prominent participations at editions of Arte/Cidade de São Paulo).
This is the same city that can take us to one of her overriding symbols: architecture – an important nucleus in Regina Silveira’s poetics – since it is significant in this respect that her work has reached buildings, streets and outside spaces through interventions, appropriations and site-specific works – and a good proof is given by this exhibition at the Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil of São Paulo, which goes beyond the scale of a part of her earlier work. If the concept of architecture has this importance, it is in direct relation to the co-founding of countless artworks, both as a constitutive visual element as well as a constructive one. This is what takes place with Daniel Canogar’s photographic images, inscribed in architectural elements (the Spanish artist dedicates redoubled attention to shadows, to projections and the non articulation of the body as a representation). Just as there are artworks dealing with the specific characteristics of the interior – her various staircases, Símile [Simile] (1988), Captura [Capture] (2001) or Auditorium (2001), On Absence: Office Furniture (1991) – which displace the position and the geometry of power of offices through a certain representational vertical abyss, there are architectural works that wind along the border of the exterior versus the interior – in this sense the window is a good place for a border, and is a motif for various artworks: Behind the Glass (1991), Solombra (1990), Vórtice [Vortex] (1994), Todas las Noches [Every Night] (1999), Equinócio [Equinox] (2000, 2002), Lumem [Lumen], or Luz/zul [Light/Thgil] of Claraluz (2002). In the case of Lumem/Luminância [Lumen/Luminance], the transformation of the place is effected through the rereading of a light source, the skylight, and through a multiplication that is not only visual but also spatial: the intervention “destabilizes our understanding of this space,” as pointed out by Martin Grossmann in the first lines of the text outlining the plans for this exhibition. The fragmentation of the light from the skylight finds its reflection in the transparency and also functions as opacity, inasmuch as it incorporates the shadows that the projections themselves generate in the building (two projections). Its effect is somewhat kaleidoscopic, since the glass is divided in various parts, breaking the light in such a way that the light received is cut apart in its projection. At the same time, the skylight situated at the building’s frontier receives the light and also projects it, the exterior light becomes interior. However it is another arrival of light and another place of the image that produces Lumem/Luminância: a new illumination of the building that is metamorphosed, receiving a skin of light multiplied by the building’s various floors. On the other hand, the light, which has an aerial nature, takes on its own physicality, a spatial topography (we remember Solombra and Equinócio, with which it forms a trilogy), which is even more evident in Luminância, a transformation of Lumem. The Bank's safe as the epitome of an enclosed place, unlike the nature of the skylight, will almost disappear in the “collage” proceeding from Lumem. Although the doors of the deactivated safe are only a symbolic reference, with this new intervention they become more unreal, a pure architectural relief in its topographical isolation: the content of the safe is now luminous, aerial images – the doors being the only access that is kept of the former place. The time of the building itself and its skylight are transformed with the fragmentation of this appropriation, this site-specific work that multiplies itself (as an exhibition, Claraluz is various site-specific works).
At this point, it is worth noting that the passage of the projection on the floor or wall to the multiple surface of the architecture, to the projection screen of the buildings, is produced by the way in which the shadows naturally occupy the architecture, naturally dialoging with the three-dimensional spaces. In an apparently similar way, Georges Rousse “interprets” architectural spaces, though in a more metaphorical manner and by way of photographs. In any case, they share a common architectural awareness, already declared in the same phase of construction and in the conjoined and ambivalent reading of the architectural and sculptural volumes, always with the difference that the French artist is a maker of illusions while the artist from the Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo has a disillusionist aesthetics.
At the same time, Regina Silveira’s generation of “projections” – either of shadows or of other images – is aimed at short-circuiting the established senses and the realization of another reading of the city’s signs, processing issues within the work which are of an artistic as well as a social order: urban situations where the movement speaks just as much as the place (Transit, Blindagem). Without forgetting the predominant regime of images that the dynamics of the city establishes as a visual canon – the realm of propaganda and advertising – and where the artistic image is situated – as aesthetic/critical interventions – her work runs close to that of artists such as Antoni Muntadas,4 with his “countermonuments,” and Krzystof Wodiczko, for whom “the monuments are a medium that can always be converted into a screen,” into a public space/support for ethical/aesthetic discussion. In this regard, Oscar Niemeyer’s negative is very significant to the projection of O Enigma do Duque [The Duke’s Enigma] (1995) on one of the buildings of the Latin American Memorial in São Paulo, putting the work into suspense. Perhaps the prohibition speaks even louder than the initial proposal of this same artwork.5
III
Rereading the second epigraph, we see that in Regina Silveira’s work and attitude there is an aesthetics with critical awareness that recognizes this totalitarian visual impossibilities. In fact, her work is based on the opposite premise: to demonstrate the fallaciousness signified by all representation. The change in perception brought about by this work is largely due to the total break-up of visibility, the “dream” that cubist painting already helped to break with a first schism, demonstrating a visual relativism, much more than an artistic absolute. Indeed, with Regina Silveira, the iceberg that every image is receives a new exploration and thought. Her entire course of study of shadows, already sufficiently analyzed, makes explicit the deconstruction of a visual system, along with an ethics/ontology proper to the image (reflections on its nature and function).
“Representations are formations, but are also deformations” (Roland Barthes). This phrase would serve as much for Nelson Leirner as for Regina Silveira, though for different functions. Just as representation always has a political root, an ideological vein, the critical investigation of many of Regina’s artworks does nothing else than reveal the rational surface of representation, ironically, with an application that allies poetry and rationalism, geometry and imagination, materiality and immateriality. In the investigation of the linguistic nature of representation, an entire revision is deduced that Victor Burgin aptly calls “the politics of representation,” as an eminently cultural element. The artistic irony of Regina Silveira’s work falls within the formulation of this criticism as a resource for the demystification of the status of the image and its cultural traps, as well as for the deliteralization of the imagery. All the anamorphoses and reflections are distortions/twists of a perceptive literality, in which the irony functions as an oblique form of affirmation. As a “strategy of interpretation” it is “simultaneously disguise and communication” (Linda Hutcheon), distortion and inversion.
The recognized “oscillation between the said and the unsaid”6 is the third semantic note to defend the North American theoretician as a characteristic of this figure ( the Italic note is ours); it is the reflexive disjunction between the implicit (presence) and the nonimplicit (absence) of the images, with the positive and the negative (visible and invisible in the work), that is established in this poetics as an important question. Its visual correspondence and its conceptual connection create a field of aesthetic tension (truth–falsehood) in which the objectivity is never totally present or complete.
IV
After the apropos division of her work recently carried out by Fernando Cocchiarale (in which the critic points out a trend that “explores the planar, nonsolid character of the incidence of shadow on the space; and the second, more recent one, which deals with the role of shadow in the construction and perception of volume”)7 , one can add a third trend that has very recently been manifested as a projection of the shadow of light (strongly implied by the print of the light bulb). Despite having recognized that shadow – often bidimensional and tridimensional – was nothing at bottom but a black light, it is no longer the shadow that projects the light – the shadows had illuminated – now there is a new view of the image, an almost self-engrossed one, that beckons to a higher plane of aesthetic questions (Doublé [Double], Lunar and Quimera are artworks that question their own nature of realization and, in this sense, are artistic metapoetics).
An interregnum is instated, which arises from the apparition of an image that is real, tridimensional, and another that is fictitious, projected, like a double (Doublé and Equinócio from the exhibition Estratégias para Deslumbrar [Strategies to Dazzle]), and therefore a new instance of space. Regina Silveira’s latest work is measured by a greater occupation of environments – large spaces – between the reality of their doubles, where the public has the greatest presence and there is an incorporation of high-precision technological elements that rework the compositions as hybrid natures (Quimera illustrates this with its interplay of spatial projection/object/shadow). All the content of the Claraluz exhibition is emphatic in this sense, enhancing the degree of virtuality, of visual complexity.
Just as there is an important moment in this “discourse of shadows” in which something physical, real, appears to this dialog with shadows (The Saint's Paradox, 1994), this appearance of tridimensional objects was to be continued at the entrance of a greater reality outside the artworks. For its part, Equinócio introduces a change, a rotation that creates another axis: artworks that mirror each other, making us wonder where the primary light source for the work is (indeed, the first Equinócio has to do with Solombra, and possesses a narrative of displacement, while the second Equinócio doesn’t – it is much closer to this exhibition). In any case, Solombra as well as Equinócio are true starting points for new directions; another kind of composition in Regina Silveira’s poetics. In each of them, a question with an unmistakable Magrittian flavor is produced, introduced; each is an artwork/mirage that deals with the question of representation and of reproduction. A new dialog begins, another incarnation of shadows, a larger field: eclipses, cosmologies, that lie outside the field of the object, whether an art object or a common everyday one. In this regard, the figure of the sphere reaches a certain omnipresence in her latest works. And there is the so-called architectural shadow – both inside and outside the building – which at times has the unexpected presence of a gestural abstract painting by Franz Kline (see the “painting architecture” interior of Cor-Cordis, 2002). This development permits the shadow to “occupy” the architecture, to modify the interiors, and there is perhaps no example more paradigmatic of this than the project Todas las Noches (1999), a work that gathers the whites of the nights – a museum inhabited by what the light of the night produces: a museum of shadows. This artwork/project can also be considered a watershed in a way, just as Dobras (2001) continues to be, a pivotal and trailblazing piece in this artistic production – a mix of shadow and object in the artist’s own words – a borderline work in which the phantasmagoria of furniture – almost furniture/animals – conveys an quotidian strangeness that also possesses a surrealist air, as was present already in Enigmas and in her various artworks involving chinaware.
The new projection of the image is the emphasis of the virtual side that Regina Silveira’s shadows already had, almost an extension of the metamorphoses, in which the real side questioned or was balanced against its appearance. The projections of light are new paths: another fiction within her oeuvre (remember that the denuding of shadow is light). It always involves an enlargement of representation – one of the biggest issues in contemporary art, since both representation as well as reproduction are altered and permuted in her work.
V
Regina Silveira has always established an interplay of distances in her work, in the broadest sense. Her models and most recent large-scale works are the clearest two antipodes for this (not to mention her many works involving chinaware, in contraposition to her series of Dilatáveis [Dilatables]). There is thus a certain “Gulliver” effect in the dimensions presented: the artworks are oversized, while the models are necessarily reduced or diminished. In this oscillating course of work, Dilatáveis is again a reference, while the size of the shadows is that which constructs the effectiveness of the other images. At rock bottom, A Lição reveals, more than the other pieces, that it is a big model, in which we are diminished – ironically, we get a Swiftian view of our own size – as though we had just arrived in a place with different references and scales. This condition of enlarged volume is part of the piece’s idiosyncrasy, its biggest irony (at the other pole we must note another striking work: Cruzeiro do Sul [Southern Cross] by Cildo Meireles, which also uses size as an expressive resource). And again there is an emphatic play on scales in Pulsar (and not to forget another coincidence in the history of Brazilian art, Cildo Meireles’s emblematic work Fiat Lux), a minimalist artwork within the set presented in this exhibition, which like a visualist poem/object celebrates a “poetic act”: to be the birthplace of stars.
It can be said that Regina Silveira has already made her own eulogy of the shadow. Now we know that to read the shadows is to project them once again, to establish a new correspondence between the “luminous” source and its result. Lição, as her penultimate work and an aesthetic irony on rhetoric, is yet another real haunting of shadows. Now, with Claraluz, the taxonomy of any former inventory is overturned,8 especially the most widely recognized one that represents the constructed shadows by their particular deformations. Now there is a greater contamination of the elements by way of the shadows that function as spaces and links at the same time. There is greater emphasis on the “duplication”/illusion/multiplication of images. The exhibition presents a phantasmagoria of light, almost an ode to light, in which the word itself is determinant (Claraluz [Clearlight], Lumen, Luminance, Lunar), like post-concretist roots of the same denominating poem. What Claraluz offers in Regina Silveira’s poetics is the possibility of an artistic diptych, since the other side of the shadows is light, the material par excellence for deshadowing, of disoccultation – the term Heidegger uses for the unveiling enacted by a work of art. The task is both an ancient and a contemporary one: the destruction of the covering of things to reach the evidence. Very significantly, the German word Schönheit means “beautiful” and “that over which the light falls.” Claraluz has this same double objectivity in Regina Silveira’s oeuvre, it possesses this symbolic power, since it is in the very poetics of its images that its ontology is founded. In this way all the new images wind up modifying the tamed images, bringing about a metamorphosis, a transformation of the senses that deauthorizes any visual or conceptual totality. The arrival of this seven-image threshold of Claraluz places our perception on a new frontier: that of perceiving the dimension of the constructed “visual enigmas.” This underlying poetic operation of her work is always above any other interpretive consideration.
NOTES
1. This poem, expressly dedicated to the work of the artist, is part of the book Enquanto Passa o Vento, which will be published by Nankin publishers, São Paulo. It is presented here in its original Spanish version. The epigraph by Olgária Matos is from the text “A Vigilância da Visão,” which appeared in the “Mais!” supplement of the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, August 17, 1997. In the Heraclitus quote, “more powerful” has been translated in various other ways as well, including “better” and “greater.”
2. Both the works Enigmas and Anamorfas [Anamorphs], as well as the use of chinaware as a support, presumes an intrinsic reading of the object – in an era in which this became an artistic genre –many times it does not itself appear, only its preconfiguration. Also, many of the models are not only the initial outline of the artworks, but poem/objects by their size and concept. Some objects, on the other hand, figure as elements or icons of art and gain a rereading as in In Absentia: Masterpieces. In this series, Regina Silveira develops various absences: she left the pedestal empty, abandoned by contemporary sculpture, and from this absence was born the projection of a shadow of something that was not present, but which was introduced by the “lack” of the object.
3. Stated in an email from Regina Silveira to the author in 3 Questões [Questions], December 15, 2002.
4. There are various and diverse concordances between the work of Antonio Muntadas and that of Regina Silveira which deserve more analysis. A fitting dictum of the Catalan artist, which could just as well have been stated by Regina Silveira is: “Attention: perception requires participation.”
5. This work and that which could have been realized at the Museu de Monterrey, Todas las Noches, are the two projects that were left hanging with latent political content.
6. Linda Hutcheon, Teoria e Política da Ironia, Ed. UFMG, Belo Horizonte, 1990, pp. 92, 95 and 141.
7. Fernando Cocchiarale, “Transbordamentos,” IN: Regina Silveira, A Lição, Galeria Brito Cimino, São Paulo, 2002, p. 43.
8. “Cuando las sombras hablan”, Adolfo Montejo Navas, Lapiz, n. 182, Madrid, 2002.
Montejo Navas, Adolfo. "Phantasmagoria of Light". In "Claraluz", Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, 2003.
Regina Silveira's Tropical Enlightenment
Martin Grossman, 2003.
Regina Silveira’s Enlightenment bears certain correspondences with the Enlightenment in Europe, a philosophical investigation that arose in the 18th century. Interlaced with scientific knowledge, they place high value not only on processes of reflection and the understanding of sociopolitical/cultural issues, but also on a conscious action in these contexts. Tolerance and liberalism are two other characteristics they share in common. Regina Silveira as an artist/producer imprint this positioning through her artwork, her attitude and teaching.
First, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of the term “Enlightenment,” a subject matter that has been dealt with by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Walter Benjamin (1892–1935), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and Andreas Huyssen (1942). However, the text that guides this explanation is “What is Enlightenment” by Michel Foucault.
This text by Foucault updates and expands on the issues raised in another text, with the same title, by Immanuel Kant, published in the German periodical Berliner Monatschrift in November, 1784. “What is Enlightenment” was a question posed to the readers of this magazine as a very current, but little theorized question at that moment. Kant was one of those who accepted the challenge to answer it. Foucault rekindles this discussion, since he considered it fundamental to an understanding of modern philosophy. More precisely, Foucault holds that modern philosophy is the philosophy that is trying to respond to this question raised two centuries ago. Foucault also reinstates this question for being of fundamental importance to his own thinking, as he himself states in passages of his text and at other moments of his work.
Foucault’s initial and overall guiding argument is that Kant, in this concise text, reflects in a singular and inaugural way the current discourse of philosophy, that is, Kant discusses the pertinence of his own thought, or that of the philosopher’s discourse, within the contemporary conjuncture of philosophy. In Foucault’s words:
…for the philosopher, to posit the question of belonging to this present will no longer be the question of belonging to a doctrine or a tradition, it will no longer be the simple question of belonging to the human community in general, but that of belonging to a certain “We,” to a We which relates to a cultural whole which is characteristic of its own actuality.
For Foucault, therefore, the novelty of this text lies in its author’s interest in the synchronic condition of the philosophical thought, in philosophy as a reflection of the here and now.
"Have the courage to use your own reason!" – this is the Enlightenment lemma.
These are the initial words of Kant’s text. They are stated aloud, they cry out for self-confidence, for a predisposition to a conscious activity in the here and now, in short, they are the result of a critical attitude within the condition in which the percipient is inserted. This positioning of Kant’s leads Foucault to consider that the Enlightenment needs to be understood doubly, both as a process in which people participate collectively and as an act of courage to be exercised personally. This indicates that, for Kant, the Enlightenment is a process that is able to free us from a state of immaturity, from a state of subjugation that precludes the exercise of freedom. In this sense the Enlightenment would be above all a reassessment of independent intellectual activity, contextualized in a situation that simultaneously considers the universal, free and public use of reason. In other words, reason is not justified by reason itself, since it is inevitably conditioned on spiritual, institutional, ethical and political values. In this scenario, the regulating and mediating element in the individual and public use of reason is criticism.
Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can be assured.
The role of criticism is to question the present state of affairs along with the fields of contemporary experience. It should also serve as the guide and control of reasonableness, aiming at its legitimacy. Foucault denominates this criticism as “the analytics of the present,” “an ontology of ourselves,” “an ontology of the here and now.” Foucault relates his thought to this form of philosophy instated by Kant and which runs through the thinking of many philosophers including Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber and those of the Frankfurt School. For Foucault, what unites these different contributions to this peculiar philosophical investigation is not only the permanent reactivation of criticism, but a critical attitude, an ethos, “that can be described as a permanent criticism of our historical era.”
Foucault’s text is inspiring not only for rekindling the debate over the issues thus far presented, but for promoting one of the great virtues of the Enlightenment: tolerance. Without directly citing authors, he reassesses some of the most negative views on the Enlightenment, such as those of Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Foucault does not disdain nor minimize this type of approach, he only redirections the debate, aiming at salvaging the innate qualities of the Enlightenment and particularly its main difference: its capacity to foment “an ontological criticism of ourselves.”
The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
This paragraph synthetically describes not only the spirit of the Enlightenment’s ethos, but also that of Regina Silveira’s work. Indeed, everything thus far stated in respect to the Enlightenment is also true, by analogy, of Regina Silveira’s work. Would Regina Silveira therefore be a rare case of a tropical enlightenment?
Considering the striking contextual diversities that differentiate our culture from the European one, other questions arise: is an enlightenment possible in Brazil? An enlightenment on the fringe of the Eurocentric culture? A Brazilian enlightenment? Everything indicates that in Regina Silveira we do indeed have concrete signs of a tropical enlightenment. It is nearly impossible, and certainly a paradox, but there is no doubt that this involves a singularity, an atypical case in our cultural context.
Literally, an enlightenment attitude is that which disseminates light where darkness previously prevailed. This directly corresponds to the European condition, to its historical legacy and its geopolitical situation. On the other hand, geographically and culturally, Brazil never lived in darkness. In contrast to the European condition, what is found here is a territorial immensity bathed by an intense brilliance that homogenizes everything. The command of light always met with difficulties in exercising its capacity of discernment, orientation and analysis at places where the light is dazzling. For being a country of great cultural diversity, there does not in fact exist a light or any sort of luminance that stands out from the rest. There is no master beacon in Brazilian culture. What exists, besides tropical light, is an informal configuration of other luminous sources of diverse intensity: lamps, spotlights, lanterns, lighted billboards…
A beacon emitting black light. Regina Silveira instates an inside-out enlightenment, an enlightenment at the edges of the Eurocentric culture and at the center of a relativized, hybrid and precarious culture: that of Brazil. In an analogy with topological geometry, we could denominate this as a topological enlightenment, since it is idealized and generated by another epistemology, compatible with the local conditions and more malleable to changes and interferences than is the European Enlightenment, which is strongly influenced by the desire of establishing universal parameters for reason. The main resources of Regina Silveira’s tropical-topological enlightenment are, besides criticism and self-criticism, metalanguage, irony and reversibility. Its main virtues are: tolerance, flexibility, adaptability, perseverance, constancy and courage. In confronting the impetuous natural radiance of our territory that obfuscates any desire for clearness or coherence or even for splendor, Regina puts into practice a strategy based in the universe the graphos: she plays with the black. In response to one of the questions made by Angélica de Moraes in an interview published in the book Regina Silveira, Cartografias da Sombra [Regina Silveira, Cartographies of Shadow], the artist gives this clue:
“I think I paint in black. I’m making a joke.”
Kidding around it isn’t, it’s a critical commentary on her own production. Regina doesn’t paint anymore, but has completely mastered the tactics, artifices, techniques, conventions and repertoires of the traditional mediums of which she has already made intense use, displacing them to new fields, to the new dimensions her work has been attaining over the years.
Her work left off from being printmaking or painting at the beginning of the 1970s and became an extrapolation, a hybrid art, seeking always and simultaneously to achieve new knowledge and surpass the limits of what is already known and categorized. As has been widely stated by other critics concerning her work, Regina has utilized and mainly appropriated techniques, procedures and applications not only from the traditional mediums but also from the new media. Besides painting, printmaking and drawing, Regina has, with little hesitation or fear, appropriated the resources and possibilities offered by photography, video and photocopying as well as the electronic and digital media. In parallel to these cutting-edge techniques, Regina went off in search of new supports for her migratory graphics in millenary techniques such as ceramics and weaving (see the ceramic ware and the rugs). Regina Silveira clearly demonstrates her intrepidness and her keen awareness in the use and application of her reason:
I would like that my participation in this debate were a kind of reflection on the behavior of the artist in relation to the various mediums. It is clear that the basis is my activity as an artist who has been using different mediums, the artisanal mediums or the technological mediums, to define attitudes in relation to sets of ideas. Here the mediums function as resources that enlarge or allow for a better realization of ideas. I have always had a profound curiosity for ways to realize the images, which is also a curiosity for the nature of representation itself. This is what motivates my work and also that of an entire generation of artists who move within a time where the things flow, are in constant transformation, consolidating new aesthetic practices and interventions.
Regina Silveira’s enlightenment came into its own when she decided to explore the resources that the graphic arts offered at the beginning of the 1970s. Interested in the most current developments for reproduction in the context of the cultural industry, and willing to experiment with new techniques, she particularly investigated the potentials presented by photography when it was transposed to this “new world.” As did Walter Benjamin, Regina invested much in the belief that the function of art would undergo significant epistemological transformations when associated with the development of modern techniques of image reproduction. Without forgetting the lessons that she obtained from painting and printmaking in the previous step of her work, Regina gave shape to her graphic vocabulary, developed her language, structured her enlightenment strategy. Paper was the main support for her work in this decade, just as it is the primordial basis of her work. It is on paper that her graphos is elaborated and registered, serving not only as a kind of map of the here and now, but also as a screen that projects her future incursions into dimensions not yet explored.
With the passing of time, Regina chose to invest in some ideograms that would be the conductors of her migratory ‘graphy’ over the course of her enlightenment thought and practice. Some of these are worthy of special note.
The easel commands this reflection. It is the easel that registers the conquest of space, as a new support for future insertions in In Absentia: para Giselda Leirner [In Abstentia: for Giselda Leirner], an artwork done at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1982. It was to be present at other significant moments such as in situations that dialog with the institutional presuppositions of the White Cube as in the case of the exhibition Ao Cubo [Cubed/To the Cube] held at the Paço das Artes in São Paulo in 1997, and in site-specific situations, as was the case of Desaparência [Disappearance] (2001–2002) elaborated specifically for the Torreão art space in Porto Alegre.
The hand also deserves special mention. Its insertion is commanded by irony. Regina’s irreverence for manual expertise or skill was already present in one series, elaborated with Júlio Plaza in the mid ’70s, and entitled, Saber Pintar – Série Didática [How to Paint – Didactic Series]. However, this hand, which plays with its own myth, was consolidated at the beginning of the ’80s with the series Arte de Desenhar [The Art of Drawing], which makes use of various supports such as video, Xerox and silkscreen. The hand is also present in the project Arteacesa [Artafire] of 1982, in which a group of artists developed specific proposals for one of the first electronic billboards installed in Brazil, situated in downtown São Paulo. The hand, in ambiguous situations, also appears in other circumstances, including on the ceramic ware and on wooden boxes.
The irony of using a hand is extended by way of another ideogram: the revolver. The use of a revolver shouts at sarcasm, since with this element Regina comments, with acerbity, on the misguided announcements of the death of art. Twisting meanings, the revolver winds up representing art’s capacity for extrapolating the limits that it itself imposes.
Two closely related ideograms are the chairs and the auditoriums. It is interesting to note that the chairs arose from a performance held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo in 1977. At this moment, the chairs were still mere chairs, since they kept their function of seating people. In this performance, Regina played with the idea of the participation of the art system in the production of art. She lined up chairs along a central wall of the museum, which at that time was within the Biennial Pavilion, and asked the museum staff to take a seat together with her and to participate in her Jogo do Segredo [Pass-It-On Game]. Seven years later, in 1984, at the same museum, Regina set up a kind of auditorium by way of projection, in sequence, of the silhouette of the same chair, along the same wall that served as a support for her performance. This time, the participants of the art system were excluded. It is not only the absence of the occupants that is felt but also that of the chair itself. The graphos is imposed and leaves its mark on the institution. The graphic representation of the chair, now as a ready-made, would go on to take the form of a set, as it did in the series of auditoriums that Regina produced on various occasions, or would appear as an icon, individually, as in Inflexões [Inflections] in 1986, or more recently in Dobras [Folds], in 2001.
Another recurring ideogram is the ladder/staircase. A surrealist element, it indicates possibilities for extrapolation beyond the art system’s self-imposed spatial confines. Texts such as Inside the White Cube and actions by other artists in art spaces have critically demonstrated this perverse condition imposed by the system itself. This ideogram in Regina Silveira’s oeuvre originates from her Projectio 2 of 1984. If in the beginning it indicated possibilities of ascension, during the 1990’s, Regina inverted the commentary, transforming it into vortexes that swallow everything and everybody. The work that maximizes this situation is the 3D immersive installation Descendo a Escada [Descending a Staircase] from 2002. These staircases are more “realistic”, since they are like passages for access to the basis of art. While indicating routes, Regina demonstrates that besides being dark, they are twisting and complex. The construction of a conscious activity in the contexts of art is not an easy task.
The animal tracks and the flies are humoristic ideograms. They are clearly loaded with a high dose of irony and criticism, but their humor stands out. This is of fundamental importance for any undertaking that aims at the construction and exhibition of a rationale, especially in the tropics. The tracks, besides being the trail of the unconscious and signs of our wildness, serve as an alarm for the arrogance of the art system, which undervalues its social role and its insertion in a context that is much more complex than its own. This is one of the many possible readings of the invasion of animal tracks in the museums, the galleries and the Bienal. The flies can also be understood in this same sense, but perhaps their character is more prospective than reflexive. The flies do not only follow the destinies of Super-Herói [Super Hero] of 1997 – invading megastructures such as the cities, boldly enlarging the limits of art – but also ‘hatch’ new ideas, as is the case of Nightmare from 2000.
After the exhibition of some of the ideograms that take part in Regina Silveira’s graphos, the participation of the shadow in this set becomes evident. Very likely due to its ability to contrast with the whiteness of the paper and the walls and – why not – with the light that bathes Brazilian landscapes and other spaces, the shadows have stood out more than the other ideograms.
Regina cast the shadow as an ideogram, already in large dimensions, at the beginning of the 1980s with her Dilatáveis [Dilatables]. The shadow migrated off the wall and into space in the series In Absentia. In this instance the artist demonstrated her ability to construct a consistent and transformative criticism within the art system. The shadows of the 1980s are commentaries on art, ranging from historical issues to notes on its condition nowadays. However, the use of shadows is not restricted to a critical commentary on art, it takes on other connotations, such as those of a political nature, as in Paradoxo do Santo [Saint’s Paradox] (1994–2002), or metaphysical ones as seen in Equinócio [Equinox] (2000–2002).
Nevertheless, there are two artworks in which this critical spirit soars to such heights that it become almost like a science fiction or a terror movie (depending on the point of view). One of this works is the large installation in honor of Cézanne entitled A Lição [The Lesson], 2002, and the other is the project – not yet realized – Todas las Noches [Every Night], 1990, conceived especially for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo from Monterrey, in Mexico. In this latter case, the shadow covers or invades, in fact, a good part of the museum and its furnishings. The Eurocentric Enlightenment of the art institution is eclipsed by the tropical enlightenment of Regina Silveira.
The exhibition Claraluz [Bright Light] at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo is an enlightening irony, since it reveals that Regina Silveira’s work springs from light, at the same time as it lays bare her enlightenment ethos. This enlightenment brought about by Regina Silveira constitutes a hope, perhaps even a sign, that Brazilian art has achieved its maturity.
NOTES
1 - French version: FOUCAULT, Michel. “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”, Magazine Littéraire, nº 207, mai 1984, pp. 35–39. Online source: http://foucault.info/documents/whatIsEnlightenment/foucault.questcequeLesLumieres.fr.html
English version: FOUCAULT, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” IN: RABINOW, Paul (ed.) The Foucault Reader, London, Peregrine, 1984, pp. 32–50. Online source: http://foucault.info/documents/whatIsEnlightenment/foucault.whatIsEnlightenment.en.html
OBS.: There is a significant difference between the English and French versions. The French version is a transcription of a lecture given by Foucault (a summary therefore) and the English version is a translation of the complete text. Therefore, the main reference of this text of mine is the English version.
2 - This text by Kant is available online at:
http://foucault.info/documents/whatIsEnlightenment/kant.whatIsEnlightenment.en.html
3 - FOUCAULT, Michel. L'ordre du discours (Paris, Gallimard, 1971); trans. R. Dwyer, "Orders of Discourse," IN: Social Science Information 10:2 (April 1971). Cited at: http://www.foucault.hpg.ig.com.br/iluminismo.html
4 - FOUCAULT, Michel. Op. cit., note 1.
5 - Ibid.
6 - MORAES, Angélica de (ed.). Regina Silveira: Cartografias da Sombra, São Paulo, Edusp, 1995, p. 95
7 - Statement by the artist herself at the debate “Arte e mídia: os meios como modo de produção artística” [Art and the Media: mediums as a means of artistic production], organized by Galáxia (transdisciplinary magazine of communication, semiotics and culture of the Postgraduate Study Program in Communication and Semiotics of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo) on 21 June, 2002. The debate was published in its issue n. 4, in October, 2002, by Educ, pp. 195–220.
8 - See HUYSSEN, Andréas. The Cultural Politics of Pop. IN: After the Great Divide; Modernism, Mass Cullture and Postmodernism, London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 141–159.
9 - O’DOHERTY, Brian. Inside the White Cube, the Ideology of The Gallery Space, Los Angeles, California Press, 1999.
10 - Ibid.
11 - In the sequence: Gone Wild (1996), site-specific installation at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, USA; intro (re: fresh widow, r.s.) (1997), gallery Casa Triângulo, site-specific installation, São Paulo; andTropel (1998) site-specific installation at the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil.
Grossman, Martin. “Regina Silveira's Tropical Enlightenment”. In “Claraluz”, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2003.