Through the Labyrinth: An Interview with Cildo MeirelesAuthor(s): John Alan FarmerSource: Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 34-43Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778026Accessed: 07/10/2010 15:27

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Cildo Meireles was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948. Since the late 196os, he has created sculptures and installations that function as open propositions in which the audience is invited to become acutely aware of the experience of their bodies in space and time--not only as physical beings, but as psycholog- ical, social, and political ones as well. A retrospective of his work, organized by Dan Cameron and Gerardo Mosquera, was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1999 and then traveled to the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo. In conjunction with the exhibition, a major book on the artist's work, entitled Cildo Meireles, was published by Phaidon Press in i999. It includes an interview with the artist by Mosquera, essays by Cameron and Paulo Herkenhoff, texts

by the artist, an extract from Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Garden of

Forking Paths," and a chronology.

Farmer: You once said that you consider Orson Welles's radio broadcast The War of the Worlds (1938) to be the greatest work of art of the twentieth century.

Meireles: The War of the Worlds is an example of an art object that worked per- fectly, in the sense that it seamlessly dissolved the border between art and life, fic-

tion and reality. I named my younger son Orson Joaquim in tribute to the director, especially to this work. The fact that Orson Welles produced such a work when he did is really incredible. As you remember, it begins as the interruption of a broadcast of a concert from a club by a news bulletin reporting the sighting of what is perhaps the crash of a meteor. The concert resumes and then is interrupted by a series of increasingly dramatic bulletins describing an inva- sion of New Jersey by Martians. Listeners went crazy. They thought that what they were hearing was real. It's a beautiful

work. I am also partial to Orson Welles because he traveled to Brazil to make a feature-length film.

Farmer: Yes. In 1942, the office of the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs invited Welles to shoot a film in Latin America for audiences in the United States to encourage good relations between the two regions. He decided to go to Rio de Janeiro, where he shot footage of Carnaval and then developed a

story line about four fishermen who travel to Rio to plead for assistance from President Vargas for their people. But the production was very troubled, and he never finished the film.

Meireles: That's all true. But I think even within the context of the whole body of Orson Welles's work, The War of the Worlds is outstanding. It is a work of art.

Farmer: You were saying one of the reasons you admire this work is because it dissolves the boundary between art and life, fiction and reality. When did that become an interest for you in your own work?

Meireles: In the 1960s and 1970s this was a subject of real discussion in Brazil among my colleagues. Perhaps there was a little bit of a utopian imperative behind this. This imperative recalls Vladimir Mayakovsky, who said, I believe, that aesthetics

35 art journal

John Alan Farmer

Through the Labyrinth: An Interview with

Cildo Meireles

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ideologicos: Projeto C6dula (Insertions into Ideological Circuits: C6dula Project), 1970. Rubber stamp on banknotes. Dimensions variable. Collection New Museum of Contemporary Art, NewYork.

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will be the ethics of the future. And then this border will no longer exist. One of the functions of an art object should be, in some way, to help redefine or dissolve this border. In this respect, Brazilian artists of this generation did a lot.

Farmer: Why do you think that the imperative to renegotiate the relationship between art and life in Brazil in the i96os and 197os among artists like Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, as well as younger artists like Tunga and

yourself, who conceived the work of art more as an open proposition than as a discrete object, was so powerful at this time, the years of the military dictatorship? Do you think there is a connection between the work and the social and political context in which it was produced?

Meireles: Of course. The artists themselves refer to the political situation in their correspondence. Many artists, including myself, responded to this situation, even though I think that they, like me, were much more preoccupied with other kinds of issues. I started producing more explicitly political work in 1969. A

group exhibition was scheduled to open at the Museu de Arte Moderna. The artists who would represent Brazil at the Paris Biennale would be chosen from that show. I had made a formal work for the show, but some of the other works were politically controversial. Three hours before the opening, the police arrived, surrounded the museum, and ordered the show to be dismantled immediately. So it was. This created international

repercussions. For ten years there was even an international

boycott of the Sio Paulo Bienal. They used to say that for Brazil, May 1968 started on March 23, because that was when daily confrontations with the police began, because they had begun to kill students.

Farmer: How did these events affect your own work? This was about the time that you began Insercaes em circuitos ideologicos (Insertions into Ideological Circuits, 1970), in which you printed political messages onto ordinary bank notes and Coca- Cola bottles and put them back into circulation, wasn't it?

Meireles: For the first time, I felt that I should refer to the politi- cal situation more explicitly than I had done before. Before that, I was not inter- ested in making political work. In fact, I always had a problem with proselytizing artworks--with works that engaged in a propagandistic way with political issues. Instead, I was more preoccupied with the art object, language issues, this kind of

thing. You could even talk about Insercbes in formal terms. I believe that a political work first has to stand by itself as an art object, formally and conceptually. In some ways this is hard, because to do nonproselytizing work, you open the space for someone to invert your intentions. For example, a Neo-Nazi could use the

strategy of insertions for a totally different purpose. A certain neutrality is intrinsic to the structure of the piece. But that's how I think about doing more political work. With Insercbes, there was the idea of connecting with art in a different way, outside of the museum: you don't have to go to the art; it comes to you. There

36 FALL 2000

Espa;os virtuais: Cantos (Virtual Spaces: Corners), 1967-68. Wood, canvas, paint, woodblock flooring. Approx. 120 x 39 x 39 in. (305 x 100 x 100 cm). One from a series of 44 projects. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, NewYork.

was also the idea of making anonymous things, because I wouldn't sign most of the works. Remember that the work is not what we see in a museum exhibition. It's not the bank notes or the Coca-Cola bottles. These objects are only relics. The work itself has no materiality. And it is ephemeral. It only exists when some- one is interacting with it. In this respect, it's much more connected with the con- cept of the antiobject or the nonobject. Are you familiar with the Brazilian critic Ferreira Gullar's theory of the nonobject? This was a concept I had in mind when I was making this work. I wrote many notes about this subject, some of which have been published.

Farmer: This makes me think of your decision to begin producing installa- tions in the early 1970s. These works were not sculptural objects, but situations that required the participation of the audience in order to be complete.

Meireles: Yes. Though they are not really installations, the Espapos virtuais: Cantos (Virtual Spaces: Corners, 1967-68) are the first works I produced that dealt with this issue. They are models of corners of a room, in which I deformed the logic of Euclidean space. They are interactive works, because you have to search for a means of perceptually organizing the spaces so that they become coherent.

Farmer: I was curious about that series. You were making drawings, resem-

bling technical drawings, of the corners, before you realized them in three dimensions. What led you to make the shift from making drawings to actual three-dimensional realizations of the drawings?

Meireles: It happened quite naturally. When I was a child, I had already been thinking of making things in three-dimensional space, and I started by making drawings. My father give me this beautiful book on Goya, when I was twelve or thirteen, which was very important. Anyway, one of the reasons that I made drawings was because this was one of the most accessible mediums for a kid in Brazil at that time. We usually didn't have the resources to explore other things. But at one point, I planned to make movies. In fact, I worked for several months in 1965 and 1966 in my little room in the back of my parents' house making a six- minute animated film. I was even planning to go to university to study filmmaking.

Farmer: Did you think about pursuing filmmaking after that time?

Meireles: Yes, but it was impossible.

Farmer: Do you watch a lot of films?

Meireles: All kinds. There is a beautiful school of cinema in Brazil. There is a Brazilian filmmaker who studied in France with Jean Vigo. He perhaps knows more about Jean Vigo than anyone. I also like Glauber Rocha, a very well-known Brazilian filmmaker. Many of my friends were very talented. It's a pity that we couldn't pursue filmmaking.

Farmer: In the text that you wrote in conjunction with your first installa- tion, Eureka/Blindhotland (1970-75), you state that the investigation of space in all of its aspects--physical, geometric, historical, psychological, topological, and anthropological-constitutes the nucleus of your work. How did you become interested in the investigation of space? In this regard, could you

37 art journal

describe what it was like growing up in two very different places: Rio, where

you born, and then Brasilia, where you moved when you were ten and lived until you were nineteen?

Meireles: I was born in Rio, but I moved to Goiina before I was four years old, and then to Brasilia. There was a French sociologist who used to study Brazil at

that time. He developed the idea that Brazil was constituted of islands of

loneliness. This is very understandable, because that's how it was at that time.

Farmer: What was Brasilia like?

Meireles: As you can imagine, for a

ten-year-old kid it was a city of beauty. All the trucks and machines and build-

ings going up overnight. You would go to sleep one night, and the next day when you woke up, there would be a new building. You would even see lakes being constructed by men oper- ating huge machines.

Farmer: Brasilia was a very modern

city.

Meireles: It's still modern. I would like to think of Brasilia as a utopian space for social democracy, but sometimes this ideal is inverted. For example, the plan of the city is very rationalized, but it was used to control the populace. That's the problem. It's a type of fas- cism. But the city can't be controlled.

Farmer: Do you think about the issue of control when you make

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EurekalBlindhotland, 1970-75. Eureka, 2 pieces of identical wood, I wood cross, weighing scales. Blindhotland, 200 black rubber balls, varying in weight between 150 and 1500 g (5.3 and 52.5 oz.). Dimensions variable. Installation view at Galerie Lelong, New York, 1997. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, NewYork.

your installations? Although you give the audience the freedom to participate in the creation of the work, you also create situations that you control very carefully.

Meireles: Yes. I play with people's fears. Fear is the material of many of my works. For example, in Voldtil (Volatile, 1980/94), fear is present. You see the

lighted candle at the back of the space and smell the scent of natural gas. You are afraid that the room will explode. But when you have fear, your senses become

heightened. You become more attentive to your environment.

Farmer: Does heightening the audience's perceptual faculties have social

implications for you?

Meireles: Of course. Taking someone to the point of fear is a kind of initiation. That person becomes engaged.

38 FALL 2000

Volitil (Volatile), 1980/94. Wood, ash, candle, natur- al gas. 118 x 591 x 157in. (300 x 1500 x 400 cm). Installation view at Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco, 1994. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie

Lelong, NewYork.

Farmer: When I enter a work like Fontes (Fountains/Sources, 1992), I don't

necessarily feel fear, but I do become completely engaged with the environ- ment I find myself in. My experience of space and time becomes totally disori- ented. The walls are covered with clocks that are identical except for the fact that the clock faces vary: what reads as 3 o'clock on one might read as 6 o'clock on another. Similarly, the calibrations on the measuring sticks hanging from the ceiling all differ. One stick might be calibrated as i, followed by 2, 3, 4, 5 inches, and so on, while another might say 72, 67, 58, 29, 39 inches, etc.

Meireles: With Fontes, I wanted to make a work about displacement. It's con- structed in the shape of the Milky Way. From the top you can see that it's a double spiral. It's also inspired by what was once thought to be Vincent van Gogh's last

painting, Crows in a Wheat Field (1890). I wanted to bring that yellow and black into the piece. This is actually one of three versions.

39 art journal

Fontes (Fountains/ Sources) (detail), 1992. 6000 yellow carpenter's rules, 1000 yellow clocks, 500,000 black numeral labels, soundtrack. Dimensions variable. Dedicated to the artist's friend Alfredo Fontes. Installation at Docu- menta IX, Kassel. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Luisa Strina, Slo Paulo.

Farmer: How are the three versions different?

Meireles: I'd like to have one with black numbers on white. I would like another to have white phosphorescent numbers on deep blue.

Farmer: You made another installation that deals with fear and danger called

Atraves (Through, 1983-89). This installation consists of a large space divided

with different kinds of barriers, including a picket fence, a chain link fence, venetian blinds, barbed wire, a tennis net, an aquarium. The floor is strewn with shards of broken glass. Is the visitor allowed to enter the space and walk

on the glass?

Meireles: At their own risk. The piece was once installed for more than a year, and no one was injured. However, because you are walking over real glass, there is always a risk. But the sound was beautiful. It, too, deals with fear. As you walk over and break the glass, you produce a sound that gives the piece a certain sinis- ter beauty.

Farmer: Many of your installations, including Fontes and Atraves, remind me of labyrinths. When you walk through a labyrinth, you often have a feeling of

40 FALL 2000

disorientation or even fear, because you don't know where you're going. But when you finally reach the end and get out, you feel like you've accomplished something. In many Gothic cathedrals, a labyrinth was put onto the surface of the floor, and walking through it was a metaphor for the journey to union with God.

Meireles: I have actually made very few labyrinths. Borges knows much more about labyrinths than I do. But I like the idea. The journey through a labyrinth is premised on a thoughtful, attentive search. You have to walk, but with each step, you have to stop and think. That is the good thing about labyrinths. They help us to slow down. Again Borges. He can speak about labyrinths. The labyrinth is in some ways a kind of metaphor for the way he worked.

Farmer: It's also a metaphor for how you work. For example, I would use this metaphor to locate the politics of your work. As you were saying earlier,

you're not a didactic artist, who has a "message" that you want to convey to

your audience in an explicit way. Instead, you create situations, journeys that sometimes incite fear, in which visitors have the opportunity to become more conscious of their bodies in space-not only in physical space, but in social

space, too.

Meireles: Yes. I think that this tendency has been a characteristic of Brazilian art. This location of an ethics in the relationship that the artist constructs between him- or herself and the audience through the work of art.

Farmer: When did you start reading the work of Borges?

Meireles: In 1967, when a friend gave me a book of short stories. But I am not

only interested in Borges. Julio Cortizar is also an interesting writer. And very central.

Farmer: What about these two authors interests you?

Meireles: Borges plays fun and wonderful games. Cortizar also has a certain imaginative capacity.

Farmer: You are also interested in Joao Guimaraes Rosa, who wrote the

story "A terceira margem do rio" (The Third Bank of the River).

Meireles: Yes, but he is very difficult to translate, because his writing is a bit like

James Joyce's. He invents a lot of neologisms, but he used to say that he invents nothing, because he simply goes back to the oldest meaning of a word and uses it in the most primitive way. When I had to select an "Artist's Choice" text for the Phaidon book, I was torn between "The Third Bank of the River" and Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths," which I ultimately chose. Cortizar also has a very interesting story about a man who wakes up one morning, like Gregor in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, and finds that the world is not as it was when he went to sleep. As he gets out of bed, he finds that his foot passes through the floor. He thinks that it is a bad dream, but it isn't. He decides to get up and go meet his girl- friend at a street corner for a prearranged appointment. But as he walks through the city, he sinks deeper and deeper into the ground, until he disappears. When his girlfriend arrives at the corner, she finds only his hat on the sidewalk.

4 I art journal

77,

. ... ...

42 FALL 2000

Atrav6s (Through), 1983-89. Fishing nets, voile, reinforced glass, livestock nets, architects' grid-lined paper, venetian blinds, garden fencing, wooden gates, prison bars, wooden trellis, iron fencing, mosquito nets, metal city barrier fenc- ing, aquarium, tennis nets, metal stakes, barbed wire, chains, chicken wire, museum rope barriers, ball of cel- lophane, shards of win- dow glass.Area approx. 2,421 sq. ft. (225 m2). Installation, Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium, 1989. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Lelong, NewYork.

Farmer: How does your interest in filmmakers like Welles, and writers like

Borges and Cortazar, who dissolve this boundary between art and life, fiction

and reality, relate to your interest in making installations, which has been

your primary medium for the past several years?

Meireles: My first installation was Eureka/Blindhotland (1970-75), which dealt with the difference between appearance and reality. It was inspired in part by Borges's story "Tl6n, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius" (1941).

Farmer: Yes. That's the one in which Borges writes about the fictional world T16n, which he describes as a "brave new world" created by scientists,

philosophers, artists-a world that does not exist as a system of objects in

space, but as a series of actions in time. I think that he even writes that "Tl6n is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men."

Meireles: Yes. In Eureka /Blindhotland there are two hundred black balls of the same volume but of different masses. The audience was invited to handle the balls, and in the process disrupted their conventional sense of perception. It's a work about the deceptiveness of appearances. So is Sermao do Montanha: Fiat Lux

(Sermon on the Mountain: Let There Be Light, 1973/79), in which five govern- ment agents surrounded a huge stack of boxes filled with matches resting on the floor, which was covered with black sandpaper. But the agents were really just actors. That was another work about fear.

Farmer: Do you like working with installation because you can involve the audience in a more direct way than one can with painting, in which the viewer typically has a more passive relationship to the work?

Meireles: Yes. The problem with painting is that the artist is always authoritarian, even if you don't want to be. By giving people a space to interact with, you also

give them freedom. When we give someone freedom, we get freedom ourselves.

We would like to thank Meg Blackburn of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, for making this interview happen and Mary Sabbatino and Joanna Kaplowitz of Galerie Lelong, New York, for their generous assistance.

John Alan Farmer is Senior Editor of Art Journal. He is also the curator of the exhibition The New Frontier: Art and Television, 1960-65, on view at the Austin Museum of Art from September I to November 26, 2000.

Cildo Meireles's work has been featured in numerous one-person museum exhibitions, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1999-2000); the Museu de Art Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (1984); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1990); IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia (1995); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1997); Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helskinki (1999). He has also been included in many group exhibitions around the world.

43 art journal