MARCIUS GALAN

Like the yellow bands of his sculptures, the hook in The View from The Widow, the film by Marcius Galan in collaboration with Carlos Issa and Newton Leitão, is one of those architectural elements which, in losing the function it has always been assigned, also loses some of its meanings while reinforcing others. In the film, it is a solitary theatrical character with a low voice who is drawn to conversation by its memories and deliriums. It lies alone, surrounded by a future that has been abandoned. The object of its obsession is a mobile by Alexander Calder, which it sustained for years in a servile and loving way, and is no longer there (will it return?). A mirage remains, perhaps, the work of old age or retirement.

Black Widow, a sculpture by Alexander Calder, was fundamental to abstract art in Brazil. It was one of the works that encouraged Brazilian artists to abandon more anecdotal themes and dive into perceptive studies of geometric abstraction. The combination of Calder’s piece with the pioneering design of the São Paulo offices of the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil [Institute of Architects of Brazil – IAB-SP], coordinated by architects Miguel Forte, Rino Levi, and Abelardo de Souza, materialises the constructive effort that would animate visual creation in the following decade.

This onslaught was the cultural side of a modernising project, typical of the postwar period, which aimed to overcome Brazil’s backwardness. The debate about what needed to be done for a new insertion of Brazil into an international trade system was intensely contested. It was a rich debate that enlivened scientific, technological, and industrial production, social thought, and the arts. In 1964, that debate came to a standstill and gave way to a conservative, elitist, and authoritarian kind of modernisation. Celso Furtado, one of Brazil’s brightest thinkers of the time, when theorising underdevelopment, realised that the local elites were born modern, and when trying to modernise, always restored backwardness in a more complex way. Thus, social violence was not a by-product of an atavistic past, but a modern way for society to insert itself internationally.

The Black Widow was one of the silent characters in this debate. It was first shown in Brazil in 1948. Shortly after, in gratitude for the efforts of the Brazilian architects in putting on the exhibition and vitalising the artform, Calder donated it to the IAB. The Widow remained in the building until 2017, when it was removed.

Since then, that sculpture, conceived in the United States, saw significant changes: the optimism of the 1950s waned with the dictatorship, but it witnessed heated debates. It was reborn with the “Diretas Já” movement, which was defeated, but won us the New Republic and new hopes. These took different forms until they were fatally wounded with the violent deposition of President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016, almost the same time as Calder’s mobile left the IAB.

Throughout this period, if we take into account the lines the objects say in the film, the Black Widowlived pleasantly, without looking through the window or paying attention to the noise coming from the street. The sculpture is formed of a chain of linear wires with metal paddles attached to their ends. These wire arms swing and rotate in all directions when hung from a hook, to quote the beautiful metaphor recalled in the film. Owner of itself, in control of the action, the Widow danced in different directions, triggering new satisfying and pleasurable discoveries when responding to the touches of the atmosphere, objects, and people. In its sensuality, it made Mário Pedrosa recall music and dance. In the film, however, the hook speaks like somebody who misses sex.

Its spiralling was self-referring, made of lasting, carnal love. The widow who speaks in her delusions remembers sensory pleasures: light, colour, touch, textures, temperature. Deliriously, she asks the hook to imagine if everyone could touch her while she was hanging there, orgiastically.

Therefore, the nostalgia of Jonathan Gall’s deep voice is of a private nature, urgent, but private, which makes it no small thing. Love turns the grapnel dependent on the sculpture’s delicate dance and makes it live prostrated without it. The piece left over cannot think about life from then on. It is melancholically trapped in a past where even the falls, the stumbles are idealised. In fact, the delight we feel before a mobile by Calder has a domestic nature. He is an artist who deals with playful joys, utopias, not conflicts. Perhaps because of this, the melancholy expressed in the film’s dialogues is private. The hook survives the pain of living only by suffering from affective dependence.

The film, in turn, makes us see something bigger. The lack recalls a description by the singer and composer Chico Buarque of this uncontrollable, unpronounceable desire in his song O que será: ‘E que me faz mendigo, me faz suplicar; O que não tem medida, nem nunca terá; O que não tem remédio, nem nunca terá; O que não tem receita’.[1] At the time, the song, in addition to expressing an uncontrollable interpersonal desire, also spoke of the frustration of those who sought to change their lives faced with the narrow limits imposed by the civic-business-military dictatorship. Brazil is experiencing a similar moment, of a shortening of our historical expectations.

The instrumental reason that governs international trade, which increases dividends and imposes austerity on the most vulnerable part of the Brazilian population, is refractory to the most intimate pleasures. Everything must serve a purpose: to meet the expectations of capital. The extreme neoliberal right wants to knock down our doors, tell us how to live, how much we should work, and for whom. Today, even more so than the smallest joys, we understand the right to do nothing as the result of historical struggles. Even the sadness we feel for no longer being able to see the widow dancing.

[1] Chico Buarque de Hollanda in the song O que será (À flor da pele). Originally recorded in 1976, for the soundtrack to the film Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, by Bruno Barreto.

Who are they?

Prior to their stories, it is important to point out the context of the aforementioned person. His craft, let me put it this way, takes place along a flow of ideas that leaves traces of other works on the way, a continuous network of digressions that would make any person, conscious of his process, with the feeling of already being in the middle of a story that started some time ago. If only we could see what is happening here. Let’s be clear about it. Its beginning could be explained with the aid of this work: iron ribbons hanging from a narrow piece of metal. Leads us immediately to the physicality of a flag. Its schematic missing parts lay there as the remaining fragments of a country. We do our jobs and we rebuild it only using our imagination. The latter, is a crucial element in this project: the imagination is ingrained in the very language of his works. In his realm, the incompleteness theorem is shown in iron: a thick iron base, a missing rectangle space, which hangs like a flag on the mast of a sailing vessel resisting, enduring the elements as its iron ingrained nature. 

In the light of a new piece we remain still: columns surround us. In the context of these pillars, the clever eyes won’t see only a hook that emerges from it. The hook is there for this same reason: semicircle, or open circle, shape is full of tension. Its configuration goes far: a crosier, a fishhook, a hanging hook, a sickle, a billhook, a shepherd’s crook, a hook of moon or a serpent’s tail ending in a hook. The secrecy-shrouded landscape opens up before them: the multiperspectivally tensions embrace the boundaries of history. A concrete idea is sought, but to believe one will find it under a simple and straightforward manner is to swallow the bait. Even a hook on the wall, with a drawn circle holding a hook with a piece of the cut wall, serves as binoculars: ways of seeing, of addressing different focus, distance and closeness: magnification: this (alongside cartography) was the first strike capacity of explication that coerced the previously invisible world to become pictorial . And, when we think that its symbolic potential would vanish, we see ourselves before the ultimate tension assembled by the hook: the view from the widow. A video that unfolds around the hook that held Alexander Calder’s work.  

Would the specificity of this project encircle the entire exhibition? This would only be feasible if the grid of rubbers stained with graphite dust wouldn’t allude to the undoubtedly fact that through these lines we would talk about opposites; on the fact that even to erase history would be to do history. The non-realization of the project (encapsulated in the symbolic potential of the eraser) would allow an increasing explicitidiness of stances pro resistance, pro endurance. Across the board, its margins, its lines, we always encounter world-openness: starting from the basic domestic situation (…) the expansion process proceeds from the village to the city, to the empire and onwards to the finite universe until it loses itself in the uninhabitable boundless space.   

The questions imposed in this context have the strength of drawing forth a response: a sort of metallic thread that holds together two unmated substances: a thread that attracts a cut in the pillars that surround us. But, who are they? They are the ones who endure. People, matters, events, doesn’t matter whom or what. Suspended of time, space, causality. In the present time, on its temporal bandwidth, or at the width of your present, your now, we sometimes forget about what we are doing here, at this place. Or, why we should endure the manifestations that only consider the instant. That let the future or the past vanish. Who are they, you ask? They are, and they will be. They endured the weight of movement, the abandonment, the post-war or the post-celebration. They have answered and questioned triggered by the crisis that surrounded them. But, to question is to endure, it is to see that this obscure point that allows us to see, this sun situated eternally below the horizon, this blind spot that the gaze is unaware of, islet of absence in the heart of vision – that is the aim of the quest and the setting, the stake, of the plot . And that was all .

1.  BORGES, Jorge Luis. The Basilisk in The Book of Imaginary Beings. P. 29 (Paraphrased)

2.  SLOTERDIJK, Peter. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016. P. 75-76. 

3.  SLOTERDIJK, Peter. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016. P. 16. 

4.  PYNCHON, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin classics deluxe edition, 2006. P. 517.

5.  BLANCHOT, Maurice.On an Art Without Future in The Book to Come.Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.P. 160

6.  FAULKNER, William. The Sound and the Fury. London: Vintage Classics, 1995. 

Fervor

In his search, amid concrete works (for him, a singular raw material), was precisely where he found resistance.

However, after so many other artists before him, how would he compose his form?

His craft, let’s call it that, takes place along a flow of ideas leaving traces of works, a continuous network of digressions that would lead any individual following his progress to the feeling of being in the middle of a story that began some time ago.

So, what is this story?

He narrates it as it happens, a story interwoven with interpolations that subtly cover our reality. Let’s see: two concrete columns with wedges. The latter so broad in its meanings. Personal name, expression, place, thing. The wedge seems to underline the intentions, the balances; of the intrusion, but pertinent intervention. If that were not enough, in this strange body we find the strength of the matter. The presence of unavoidable facts. And, due to not being limited to any of the previous meanings, it expands and turns into an impersonal haven, a space of universal influx. The wedge dug its own space: it resisted.

Here is another work. On the floor, a concrete disk with a wedge. The previous could have served as a clue, but not an answer, as we are here faced with another inflection. Once again (and not because of the concrete), the artist leads us to a flashback. And, if we resist apprehending the reason for this new insertion, we know that he will do it again in the future. Well, let’s not confuse its proximity to the ground with a lack of structural weight. We know its name, its properties, its raison d’être. In this case, it seems to have the role of pointing to a center of convergence, the heart of the matter.

Or would it be too much to assume that we see our own economic situation in it? Unbridled temptation. However, once again, we know that we will not find its real strength in the particular.

In the concrete? In the concrete.

Would this matter be indicative of the specificity of what we are dealing with here?

Would it be an illusion to presume this relationship?

Let us not allow the shadow of this issue to disturb our visit. Continuing: three solid wooden bases burned with liquid bronze. And so, we sound a melody: the sound of bronze in contact with the wooden bases. But it is a melody we no longer hear. We know it wasn’t a gradual, subtle thing. We are left only with its new, unheard-of heights. Its matt tones shine brightly. They seem not to exhaust their means to be subsequently and inevitably replaced. There they remain: resistant.

And what succession of other works will we distinguish here?

In this space full of relative opacity, there would be a moment for material astonishment, such as the following: sandpaper and glass painted from red to earthy hues. The tone is the protagonist (mineral sparkle), for a moment, in rapid pulses: lava red, maroon, burgundy, boiling, burning, until it reaches, intrusively and volcanically, the darkness. And the architecture-wall becomes an abrasive material capable of consuming, ruining, and destroying. Which mitigates baroque excess, sands the roughness, streaks the sentimentalism and inaccuracies….[1] Thus it presents us with the contact space: frictional, convulsive, fervent. For those arriving now: the touchstone we see in contact with the blackness of the automotive paint takes us back to the basic abstract. Are we always formulating trajectories and equations without lapidary clarity? Even if this is precisely the issue that most concerns us?

Looking meticulously among the soft red monochrome tapestries, we find clinging ticks. Undesirable and harmful, they spread quickly, depending on how they cling, moor, with thorns that serve to sow. They seem to have been left as vestiges of a continuous process of friction.

The heat. The convulsion. The moment of difficult contact. Of resistance. The moment when the bronze cools and, in turn, appears once again through the figure of the resistant wood: the unarmed volcano, naked, disassembled. We will recognize it in our surroundings. Its echo, schematic and rational, contentful and insensitive, is made present amid the boiling of its omissive smoke signals.

And what tension-resolution does it bring us?

It is in the second stanza, a new echo, that we reach full power. When we see, once again, the concrete column with the delicate floating line (like a nervous meridional blade) that cuts it. We perceive beyond the strength of those who are and always will be. We understand that the obscure point that allows us to see, this sun situated eternally below the horizon, this blind spot the gaze is unaware of, islet of absence in the heart of vision—that is the aim of the quest and the setting, the stake, of the plot.[2] And that was all.[3]

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, paraphrased from the prologue written by the author for the Emecé Editores edition from 1974. Translated for this volume from the Brazilian edition.

[2] Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 160.

[3] William Faulkner, “The Sound and the Fury: Appendix Compson: 1699–1945,” in Novels 1926–1929 (New York: Library of America, 2006), 1141.