Tropel (Reversed)
Regina Silveira and the Great Attic
With the work Tropel (reversed) the Brazilian artist Regina Silveira occupies the entire top floor extension of The Koege Museum of Art in Public Spaces – a 500m2 space that has been declared of ‘world-class calibre.’ The extension, opened in 2001, was designed by KØGE Architects on top of the older building that houses the museum. The top floor is 30 metres long, 14 metres wide, with a 7-metre high dome formed by two separate roof plates with glass at the top and windows entirely filling both ends - allowing the light to pour in and visitors to look out on a view of the city rooftops. Regina Silveira is the first artist to be invited to intervene directly in this striking architectural space, which with its own beauty, scale and strong natural light represents a major artistic challenge.
It is, however, precisely this charged meeting between architecture and art that is the entire point of the venture. As a museum for art in public places, Koege Museum usually represents its unique field through the exhibition of artists’ sketches and models for projects that by their very nature are absent –somewhere else, in the public realm, integrated in architecture and urban environments. The world of sketches is itself deeply fascinating, and the immediacy of such works can often offer experiences that exceed that of the finished work- as well as offering a unique insight into the artist’s universe. But the exhibition Regina Silveira and the Great Attic opens the museum’s own architecture as a public place for artistic intervention, giving visitors the opportunity for a different and more direct experience of the meeting between striking architecture and art. The exhibition is also the first extensive presentation of Regina Silveira’s projects in Northern Europe, with models, drawings, digital sketches and films about the artist, who with an extended international career behind her has had a major influence on contemporary Brazilian art over the past four decades.
Regina Silveira was an obvious choice to intervene in the museum’s architecture. She has created an impressively extensive range of striking projects in and on major buildings throughout the world, which she has transformed into dreamlike mirages. Among her most remarkable projects are works created for the art museum Reina Sofia’s Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, Robert Venturi’s Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s biennale building in São Paulo. Here, and in her many other projects of equal architectural scale, she has demonstrated her unerring and simultaneously playful approach to architecture, as if she herself were an engineer or architect. But as a visual artist, her role in the architectural universe is entirely different: to deconstruct, displace and disorientate the visual and functional logic of buildings, and with her wild, surprising and often disturbing interventions generate surprise, resistance, fascination and reflection among those of us that move in and around them, experiencing buildings and public places as the dreamlike mirages of her creation.
Silveira’s Architectural Interventions
The list is long and impressive, but Regina Silveira’s most striking projects include Claraluz (2003), created for Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo. Here Silveira based her work on the solid body of the 1901 building and the domed glass roof with its stained-glass inlays raised high above the inner rotunda. Using light projections in the inner rooms of the building, Silveira repeated and displaced the form and colour elements of the architecture and glass dome, thereby creating a three-dimensional, immaterial poem about the very essence of the building.
The installation Memoriazul (2005) was created for the Palacio de Cristal at Spain’s national art museum Reina Sofia in Madrid. The building was designed in 1887 by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco, who was inspired by London’s Crystal Palace. Here Silveira similarly appropriated the glass structures of the building, which were photographed and transferred to transparent blue filters. These filters were inserted in the roof – as a repetition of itself – and in the floor, which along the entire length of the building was transformed into an infinity of fragments of the building created with a combination of real and immaterial images and reflections of coloured light and shadow.
In Tropel (reversed) Regina Silveira employs another of her favourite materials: adhesive vinyl cut on the basis of digital drawings using the plotter technique. Vinyl is a material she also used in Derrapando (2004) where she wound the entire Centro Cultural España in central Montevideo, Uruguay, in winding vinyl tyre tracks, as if the heavy traffic of the city had driven up and around the building. The work was a surreal image of absurd impossibility, together with a fantastic visual restructuring of the linearity of the façade with patterns of tyre tracks that projected the urban street onto the building. She used the same material in her transformation of Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil’s free-standing cubic glass building in Brasilia, which with the work Mundus Admirabilis, 2007 she turned into a gigantic insect cage by covering the walls, floor and ceilings of the otherwise empty glass box with the silhouettes of huge vinyl insects. Tropel (reversed) is also a vinyl work – a reversal of Tropel, Silveira’s contribution to the 24th São Paulo Biennale in 1998, where she applied a 600m2 adhesive vinyl cutout to the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s famous biennale building. This tropel consisted of over dimensioned tracks of animals from every corner of the globe, including birds, lizards, horses, bears, tigers, dogs and snakes in a configuration that began at a single point at the bottom of the façade, and extended in a dramatic expansion upwards. It was as if a flock of different and disconnected species had all fled the building simultaneously into Ibirapuera Park where the biennale building lies, leaving behind only their dramatic tracks on the wall. At Koege Museum of Art in Public Spaces Tropel has been reversed, so the tracks left by these animals look like they came in the window at one end, then spread out at high speed in an explosive formation across the floor and walls .
Art and Cannibalism
It could – in an unreflected reading of Tropel’s animal tracks – be possible to see the tracks as those of wild animals from the exotic Brazilian rain forest, thereby reducing the artist to the category of ‘typically Brazilian’ or ‘typically Latin American’ – like samba or parrots.
But the animals in panicked, distorted flight out of the building come from all over the world. And in 1998 Tropel was Regina Silveira’s astute response to the 24th São Paulo biennale’s curatorial theme of anthropophagy – or cannibalism - in Brazilian art history. The concept of anthropophagy was used by the early Brazilian avant- garde movements of the 20th century, who understood themselves as having ‘eaten’ or ’devoured’ European modernism and converted it to the unique hybrid of Brazilian modernism. This theme was revived by the biennale curators in 1998 as a metaphor for postmodern global and transhistorical cultural appetite, perceived as the basis of Latin American (and all other global) contemporary art today – an art devoid of any specific national identity. What was apparently new about globalisation in the West was well-established in Brazil, with its complex, mixed population of Europeans, Asians, Africans, Arabs and Indians, the descendents of the original population and slaves, colonialists and refugees.
At first glance Tropel appears to be a visual representation of the tracks of animals fleeing in panic, but looking closer it becomes apparent that the work does not only play with the capacity of art to create surprising illusions on an architectural scale. Due to its extreme distortion of perspective and the way it virtually takes possession of the space, Tropel is an example of the way in which Silveira’s architecturally transformative installations also contain the potential for cultural critique, partly by referring to a flock of animals fleeing in panic, partly by distorting the perspective – the most rational of arts in Western culture – to such extremes.
Regina Silveira herself can also be directly ironic about Latin American stereotypes in her works, for example in To be Continued (Latin American Puzzle) from 1997, which consists of a huge jigsaw puzzle of images strongly reminiscent of the tourism industry’s glossy brochures of Latin America, which are impossible to assemble as a coherent whole. The work subtly underlines the fact that Latin America cannot be reduced to a single narrative, but consists of many disparate parts that fit no stereotype. Silveira is herself a conceptual ‘cultural cannibal’ with an exhaustive knowledge of European, American and Latin American literature, philosophy and art history. Silveira departed from her original academy training as a painter at the end of the 1960s, when she lived in Spain. Here she was part of a community of avant-garde artists and authors, and clearly sees herself as belonging to the generation of Brazilian artists who have worked conceptually and across disciplines since the early 1970s. Since the late 1960s she has lived repeatedly in the US and Europe, developing a strong foundation in the conceptual art of the 1970s and working in every conceivable media from classical drawing and graphics, to photography, video and digital media. Although it is graphic prints based on photographic images that have became central to her practice. With her conceptual approach to art and a basis in drawing and photography, Silveira has retained an openness and curiosity about the potential and media in the visual arts toolbox that has stayed with her up to her current and advanced use of digital media, which she started to employ in 1991.
Her work contains numerous direct references to the front figures of conceptual art’s Western avant-garde, like Marcel Duchamp and Meret Oppenheim, pointing – often ironically - to a foundation in the cross-over between surrealism, dada, and the politically based avant-garde. Tracing her theoretical references and sources of artistic inspiration in an interview with the art historian Kevin Power in the catalogue Lumen (accompanying her exhibition at Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2005) Silveira articulates not only a vast interest in art and its own ancient history, but also a solid intellectual ballast in art theory, science, literary theory, philosophy, iconography, anthropology, mathematics, physics, sociology, cultural theory, urbanity and architecture.
Ars Critica – Regina Silveira’s ”Bestarium”
Visual paradoxes, impossible illusions and absurdity are Silveira’s hallmark in a poetics that has been called ’critical, visual thinking’. In Tropel (reversed) we discover not ‘cute’, naturalistic animal tracks to guide us on a hunt along the museum’s walls, floors and windows, but rather gigantic, distorted track mutations that invade the space as shadows in an explosive formation. Due to their size and ’impossible’ presence on the walls and ceilings, but also because of their distortion, they are removed from the world of the real, where they were once the tracks of the real flight of real animals. Instead they are transformed - along with the space itself - into a bizarre, visually fascinating but also absurd, unreal universe. With its sheer scale and aggressive penetrating lines, this gigantic, graphic work takes visual possession of the space. The room is under attack and the architecture confronted by Regina Silveira’s ”Ars Critica.” The disturbing or haunting quality of the work is underlined by the two forms of indexical signs that something has been present in the room – but is now gone.
”Ars Critica” is what the Brazilian poet and critic Adolfo Montejo Navas calls the critical dimension of Regina Silveira’s art. Her critique is never present as dogmatic propaganda, but instead emerges on the artwork’s own terms, subtly ranging from explicit political critique to a poetic intimation of the disturbing and absurd.
One example of what Silveira herself perceives as an explicitly political work is Gone Wild (1996), which she created for the American architect Robert Venturi’s extension of The Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, San Diego, USA. For the opening of Venturi’s new building, the museum sought an artistic dialogue with the architecture and design, and invited Regina Silveira. Silveira based her work on the abstract representation of Dalmatian tracks Venturi had used in the building– replacing them with the tracks of wild coyotes in a hectic explosion of painted tracks that spread across the building’s walls, floors and ceilings. Her political point here was that the word ‘coyote’ is also used to describe the people who smuggle illegal immigrants across the border from Mexico to the USA in the region surrounding the museum, immigrants forced into illegality in their quest for work and a better life. Gone Wild thus refers not only to the wild figurations in which Regina Silveira herself covered Venuturi’s architecture with coyote tracks, but also to the very real and political issue of illegal immigration in this region of the USA.
The exhibition Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas, which was shown at Galeria Brito Cimino in São Paulo in November 2008, on the other hand, is an example of the more poetic, less direct critique of Silveira’s works, which also characterises Tropel (reversed). Here the artist installed a fully decked table with a white tablecloth and the finest porcelain ready for a luxurious, celebratory dinner. But both the tablecloth and porcelain were covered with large, black insects, projected onto the surface of the serving dishes, carafes, glasses and plates. The entire dinner service was on a tablecloth cross-stitched in the style of the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceara, where the women in many towns still master this traditional, local craft.
The insects range from abnormally large cockroaches, mosquitoes and flies to grasshoppers and scorpions. The variety of insects can be seen to represent a mix of references to the Biblical plagues that devastated Egypt (grasshoppers and mosquitoes) and the “bestarium” of the Middle Ages, to the presence of insects in absurd modernist literature by authors like Franz Kafka and the Argentinean authors Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar - not to mention everyday, contemporary ‘bugs’. It was the same Mundus Admirabilis with which Silveira ‘occupied’ Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil’s free-standing cubic glass building in Brasilia in 2007, transforming it into a gigantic insect cage with the domineering presence of giant insects representing a disturbing, universal image of global plagues of all ages. With this shift from Biblical mythology to the daily dinner table, and references to the absurd tradition in European as well as Latin American literature, Mundus Admirabilis symbolizes the plague as the universal phenomenon of classical mythology, but also the very present plagues of modern society, like corruption, war, AIDS or environmental catastrophes.
Phantasmagoria, Tracks and Shadows
In Portuguese the word Tropel refers to the sound of a flock of animals fleeing in panic – an indexical term in that the sound refers to something other than itself and is thus the trace of something, a sign that something has been there. This is equally true of the black animal tracks on the walls, and all the other tracks in Regina Silveira’s works: The tyre tracks on the building façade in Montevideo and San Juan, the traces of human feet in Irruption Series (Saga) from 2006 on the front of Taipei biennale building, and the coyote tracks in Gone Wild in San Diego. These tracks of someone or something are all indexical signs of something absent, something that has been there. At the same time, they embody a playfulness regarding their own impossibility: Cars cannot drive on the perpendicular surfaces of buildings, dogs cannot walk along ceilings, and nobody has feet as big as those that have left footprints behind on the front of the Taipei biennale building. Silveira herself says, in her interview with Kevin Power in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Lumen in Madrid in 2005:
”All these signs belong to the category of traces, the type of images that obsesses me and has left its stamp upon my production for many years. Traces imply a powerful idea of time and a ghostly element: their own reference or origin to be present or absent.”
Related to tracks as indexical signs in Silveira’s works, are the even more enigmatic and mysterious shadows in works like Quimera, 2003, In absentia: M.D., 1993 and Monudentro, 2001. Quimera is a large vinyl shadow emerging from an illuminated light bulb, In absentia has principal works by Marcel Duchamp as the shadows of absent objects on empty plinths, and in Monudentro it is as if the shadow of the military leader depicts his dark side – his power and abuse of that power. Here it is the shadows that in different ways are centre stage, whilst the objects they are shadows of are absent. The ghostly feeling this generates is used in different ways: As a visual response to the role of the great masters of art history, or the terrifying side of men of power.
Silveira’s interest in tracks and shadows form a meta level in her art that addresses the very meaning of representation. With her academic background in drawing and graphics, she clearly masters classical perspective and illusion techniques, but in her conceptual, postmodern optic they are never deployed naturalistically. On the contrary, Silveira displaces and distorts perspective, thereby also consciously displacing a paradigm of Western iconography with roots in Ancien Greece. According to Plinius the Great, the very art of drawing originated when a young Greek woman’s lover was about to embark on a long journey. She positioned him in front of a wall, to capture the shadow of his profile. She then traced the silhouette of his profile, so she had ‘something of him’ – his shadow - while he was gone. The shadow is thus a primal image in the visual representation of the absent, something Silveira uses with a wide range of meanings, for example the role of the great masters of art history in In Absentia, where the empty plinths cast long, distorted shadows of works like Duchamp’s bottle rack over an entire room, to the political abuse of power in Destruturas Executivas (1977), where global power seekers leave long shadows behind them. Or as a final example, The Saints’s Paradox (1994) where an impossible situation is established: A small wooden figure of a saint has been given a large distorted shadow not belonging to himself but to the statue on the monument to the brutal General Duque de Caxias in São Paulo.
Ironic Perspectives and Projections
How to represent, and what representation even means, is at the very heart of art and also Silveira’s work as an artist. Tropel (reversed) has many dimensions, but the work is also an example of Silveira’s brilliant play with perspective and projection and the mathematical and art historical roots of these visual phenomena. Educated in classical drawing, and a master of the photographic and graphic techniques she worked intensively with in the 1970s, Silveira bases her work on graphic art, with all its perspective drawings, shadowing, and the grid as a basis for visual constructions.
The projection of one object on top of another (hand drawn in her earlier works and later produced digitally) in different and often distorted perspectives is a technique she has developed on many different scales, ranging from projecting insects onto porcelain, a fork onto a telephone, or a Marcel Duchamp sculpture up into the corner of a room, to works like her series of installations with the theme Desapariencia where she projects easels onto floors and walls in dotted lines, as if they were invisible. The same technique is evident in her works in public places, where she projects figures onto buildings with lasers, like a flying superhero (SuperHero Night and Day, 1997) or a fly (Transit, 2001). She has also, in major, monumental commissions like Teorema da Gaveta at The Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science at The University of São Paulo in 2002, used the principles of perspective drawing, here in a vast projection of a drawing of a desk drawer on a wall of the building.
In the 1970s Regina Silveira combined perspective with found photographs, as in the series Destruturas Urbanas where she placed perspectivised spaces and grids on top of the photographic spaces, thereby changing their meaning. Later she started to distort or displace perspective by, for example, pulling objects over a space in the series Anamorfas – graphic works based on photographs of everyday objects with a distorted perspective. Whilst the early perspective drawings of the Renaissance aimed to create a naturalistic three dimensional space on a flat surface, Regina Silveira denaturalises space in her work by manipulating perspective - distorting and displacing it in what has been called a parody of illusion. It is precisely this perspective that is on the rampage in Tropel (reversed),where the tracks are superimposed on the space in a grotesque and deformed projection of the window’s own shape across the floor - and up the walls.
About Tropel (reversed)’s seemingly simple visual picture of the trails left by panic-stricken animals on the run, it could be said that, on closer inspection, the piece revolves around something more than merely playing with art’s potentials to generate surprising and exotic visual illusions on an architectural scale. By virtue of the drastic distortion of perspective and an almost obsessive character, Tropel (reversed) also testifies that Silveira’s architecture-transforming installations contain a critical potential – partly by referring to a panic stricken flock of fleeing creatures and partly through so drastically distorting the perspective and thereby ironizing our Western culture’s rational tradition for illustrating the world.
Christine Buhl Andersen holds a Masters of Danish and Art History (1995) and a Masters of Museology (2007). She is the director of Køge Museum of Art in Public Spaces in Denmark