Translation - THE CONSPIRACY OF ART
What I look for in life is not an excuse, but exactly its opposite: It is forgiveness I seek. I discover, after all, that if my freedom is not taken into account, all consolation is misleading, a mere reflected image of despair. In fact, as soon as despair tells me - "lose hope, life is just a moment of darkness between two nights", there is a false voice that screams out to me - "have confidence, night is no more than a moment of darkness between two days”.
(…)
It is impossible to know when twilight will fall, impossible to enumerate all the cases when comfort will be needed. Life is not a problem that can be solved by dividing light by darkness or day by night, but rather an unpredictable journey between places that do not exist.1
Art does not always respond to optimists, moralists, stoic romantics or to those who seek help or reasons for living. Although it does not always respond, we are constantly driven to ask questions. I do not know what comforts us the most, the answers or questions that life brings; but I do know as did Stig Dagerman (1923-1954), that the hunger and urge to ask more and seek to answer more, makes our need for consolation insatiable.
The absence of aesthetics around us consumes our balance and allows disorder to settle making us see everything in a cloudy, inexpressive way. But when the eye meets beauty or plainness albeit aesthetic, that is, Art, the heart rests uneasy and recommences. And through this unpredictable journey which we call life, Art opens up paths and possibilities, even when in state of conspiracy, finitude or absorption of the real illusory that surrounds and engulfs us. Art takes us to places that do not exist; day or night, consoling us but never quite sufficiently fully satisfying our needs. The CONSPIRACY OF ART is an exercise of consolation among unbelievers and the incredulous in the process of contemporary artistic creation and its broad reflective potential of contexts, texts and pretexts that mark behaviors in our post-modern times. Unlike Dagerman’s poetry this is a type of affirmative consolation that avoids the idea of death as a subterfuge and highlights Art as an experience of the eternal, but also of the ethereal; of freedom but also of servitude. But why this idea of consolation of conspiratorial appeal, of an accurate observation of affliction as a regular product of our day?
In 1996, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) in “Le complot de l’art” (The conspiracy of art) begins a process of criticism and reflection on the paths of contemporary art and the so-called avant- garde that focuses on the fact that Art has lost its illusory capacity, feeding on itself and becoming trans esthetic as society as a whole. The French philosopher’s book is the motto of the curatorial challenge, configurated as the gateway to zet gallery in 2020. Bárbara Rosário, Daniela Pinheiro, Grécia Paola, Ivan Postiga, Maria Cunha, Maria Regina Ramos, Natasha Martins, Rafael Oliveira and Raquel Oliveira star in an exhibition which questions the limits of mimesis, the semiotic and iconoclastic field of artwork and the possibilities of appropriation of the authentic that characterize the field of contemporary artistic production. The nine authors are all students or have recently finished their studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto. They have been selected for this exhibition with the aim of trying to highlight the character of the School, its plurality of thought forms and the resistance of the know-how, a technical domain that combines conceptual views with different angels and which tells us that painting, drawing and sculpture, while disciplines, will continue to deserve to be the basis, the starting point for the creation of illusions and imaginary conspiracies.
Baudrillard is caustic and in a collection of essays he seeks to show us that contemporary art has fallen into its own traps by attempting to imprison what is real in an orgy of images that hide more than reveal and can even become confusing. In what comes close to a simulacrum of hyper-reality, everything is presented in an almost explicit sexuality or graphic pornography which inhibits us from thinking and renounces our intellectuality. When an image is created, all dimensions are removed from the object, one by one: weight, relief, perfume, depth, time, continuity and meaning.
Art has become quotation, reappropriation, and gives the impression of an indefinite resuscitation of its own forms. But tangentially, everything is a quotation: everything is textualized in the past, everything has always existed. Yet this art of quotation, reappropriation, simultaneity, etc, is different. It plays on the fossilized irony of a culture that no longer firmly believes in that value. In my opinion, the artistic world no longer deeply believes in the destiny of art. I remember telling myself after the 1993 Venice Biennial that art is a conspiracy and even an “insider trading”: it encompasses an initiation to nullity and, without being disdainful, you have to admit that there, everyone is working on residue, waste, nothingness. Everyone makes claims on banality, insignificance; no one claims to be an artist anymore. 2
We have come to an ambush, in which the line of thought of the philosopher and, in a self- critical perspective of what is also praised in the vastness of curatorial options. In THE CONSPIRACY OF ART there is a proposal towards a kind of almost mature return to the essence of disciplines in an expanded context and with a multiplicity of techniques, but maintaining the clarity of the languages, despite the aggressiveness of concepts and theoretical statements that underlie the development of the work of each artist.
Painting is the permanence of a process in a pure state. Travel is the same as process. Process is the same as being before becoming. A work of memory and relation, every painting is the relationship between catharsis and freedom, and the boundaries of the places of reflective practices.3
Painting. The pictorial and geometric map by Daniela Pinheiro, in a fullness of flat colors in semantic degradé, proposes color as a game of manipulation of what we see. It is a mesh, an order that organizes chaos or a code that hides conspiracy, a scam. Figuration dominates in heavy descriptions. Violence. Rafael Oliveira explores the degradation of a built space resulting from disease, loss and death. His work reveals tremendous technical maturity and drives us to some type of thematic detachment that restrains us from diving into the darkness and density of his narrative. Maria Cunha shows roughness and ugliness in detail of revealed bodies. More than an anatomical study, it is a redemption of our shadow painted densely and rigorously with the form stemming from the dark, with daylight; bodies rising from the night. Natasha Martins brings us back to a type of modern expressionism, aggressive and based on a pallet of contrasts. We feel her traction and precision, the breathing of the brush and the movement of the paint. There is a combination of still lifes and ecstatic living bodies that transports us into the field of performance which the artist also explores as an expansion of research into the vital faculties of the body in a kind of interpreted Maslow pyramid. Raquel Oliveira represents herself, she traces, changes and transfigures allowing herself to be possessed by the strangeness of other objects or bodies which alter her complexion while expressing inner, (inter)personal perceptions. Art as an exercise of self-knowledge, catharsis and confession. Appropriation. Through a diversity of supports, while maintaining a two- dimensional register, Ivan Postiga brings us a complex graphic universe, where what is almost natural merges with what resembles suggestions of human or animal figuration. Daring, he traces with color compositions of black and white, streaking or flat with great technical rigor. Maria Regina Ramos, also with a serial proposal, paints wild, enlarged and cosmic universes, equally from degradé and from the stain that builds the form. Her work of great plastic strength, addresses space and its charms and challenges us to an expanded field of observation beyond contemplation, almost calling for an urgent analytical performance.
Experience. Painting aside, we move on to Bárbara Rosário and a set of essays on materials, objects and experience of the body as a binding term of the nature of all sculpture forms. Her work is dense, technically ambitious and rich in its chapters and readings; it approaches the conceptual frameworks, investing in games of light, combining different ways of doing and seeing and proposing an ever different expographic approach. Lastly, Grécia Paola puts forth, with drawing and sculpture, a view and a reflection of that (same) view in an inner and intimate production, persistent and unmeasured, coated with visceral intensity. It is not indisputable, it is demanding. It asks us to change ergonomics and experience discomfort.
There is no taboo when we once again talk about sickness, loss and death, when we question the universe and pose all the questions and answers, without consolation and certain of the scam and the bilateral conspiracy of the experimentation game in Art.
Be it figurative or not, conceptual art, minimalist, free figuration, bad painting; whether it seizes the ready made or it plays with visualization techniques, the work always aims to show the artist's combat against matter, that defies any inscription in the sense domain. Each technique is organized around the same scheme. The technical instrument is incorporated into the materials it deals with, it prolongs the eye, the hand, the gesture without much difficulty, and the purpose of the work is the same – art produced with or without a technical instrument.4
THE CONSPIRACY OF ART seeks to cast the net into the sea from the great semiological force of Baudrillard’s reflections which refute traditional scientific thinking and are based on a philosophy that bets on the virtuality of a constructed reality, a hyper-reality in which the structure of the process where mass culture produces images, evangelizes and induces. More than a school; the protagonists share a choice of know-how combined with critical thinking about the small and great inner worlds and everyday life, approaching real questions from a spectator who more than a contemplator, is a participant. In an almost classic expographic exercise, the Academy and its paths are exposed and, above all it calls for the gathering, the conspiracy and the unraveling of the philosophical, aesthetic, experimental scam, the illusion of consolation.
I have no philosophy in which I can move like a fish in water or a bird on the wing.
All I have is an endless struggle, every second of my life, between false consolations that only add to my feeling of despair, and true consolations that bring me momentary freedom. 5
1 DAGERMAN, Stig – A nossa necessidade de consolo é impossível de satisfazer. Lisboa: Fenda, 1989 (1ª edition). Pages 18 e 19.
2 BAUDRILLARD, Jean – The Conspiracy of Art. South Pasadena: Semiotext(s), 2005. Pages 55 e 56.
3 FERREIRA, António Quadros – “A pintura é uma lição” in SABINO, Isabel (coordenação) – And Painting?
A pintura contemporânea em questão. Lisboa: CIEBA-FBAUL, 2014. Pages 153.
4 CAUQUELIN, Anne – A Arte Contemporânea. Lisboa: RÉS-Editora, sem data. Pages 138 e 139.
5 DAGERMAN, Stig – A nossa necessidade de consolo é impossível de satisfazer. Lisboa: Fenda, 1989 (1ª edição). Pages 25 e 26
