Texte Zur Kunst
‘Polly wants a Punctuation Mark’
10 January 2011
Diana Baldon
"POLLY WANTS A PUNCTUATION MARK." DIANA BALDON ON RIVANE
NEUENSCHWANDER’S EXHIBITION "AT A CERTAIN DISTANCE" AT
MALMÖ KONSTHALL
Rivane Neuenschwander, "Sunday", 2010, Videostill
In 1957 Japanese author Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki — who, among other occupations,
was John Cage’s teacher of Zen practice — stated that artists following Zen
principles are not interested in imitating nature but, rather, in interpreting its
spirits._1 In the same year, British philosopher Alan W. Watts wrote that nonWestern artists employ cosmocentric abstract production methods to present the
world not for what they think it means but for what it is._2 An example of these are
the indeterminate compositions of Japanese Noh music -from scores based on star
maps to entirely silent- where sounds are supplied by nature and by the audience.
In her first solo exhibition in Scandinavia at Malmö Konsthall, Brazilian artist Rivane
Neuenschwander seems to combine aspects of this model of thought together with
Brazil’s original contribution to the history of Conceptual art, thanks to the
significant practices of artists like Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica whose theories and
strategies centred on the viewers’ body, prompting them to explore space through
tactile, auditory, olfactory and immersive experiences.
Neuenschwander’s effort is outlined in Quem vem lá sou eu / Alarm Floor (2005), a
large in situ installation, co-conceived in collaboration with the musicians’ duo O
Grivo from Belo Horizonte, in which big pine floorboards are walked on by viewers
whose barefoot steps emit sounds as if they played the keys of an extra-sized
prepared piano. The piece is inspired by the “nightingale floor”, a 17th century
system of flooring -made of clamps and nails underneath the boards to create
friction- found in Japanese temples and palaces as a physical alarm system making
it impossible to enter some areas without emitting squeaky sounds. Here the
dynamic bodily experience of Neuenschwander’s performing viewers is directed
Texte Zur Kunst
‘Polly wants a Punctuation Mark’
10 January 2011
Diana Baldon
towards producing melodious sensations out of their musical skilfulness achieved
by playing the boards turned into instruments by way of cans, plastic cups and
metal rods positioned underneath. On the other hand, in the video The Tenant
(2010), shot in collaboration with filmmaker Cao Guimaraes, this kind of physical
engagement is replaced by a static, quasi hypnotic state induced in the audience by
the contemplation of the journey of a soap bubble filled with helium gas, relentlessly
monitored by the camera’s close and seductive scrutiny inside an empty dwelling
under renovation. In his theory about the spatiality of one’s body and motility,
French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that movement depends on
performing a “motor intentionality” established by a balance between voluntary
reactions._3 In these two works, intentionality is revealed in the non-hierarchic
relation between physical and mental motion, lifting the viewers’ embodied
knowledge of basic acts, like walking or following an object with the mind, from their
everyday commonplaceness to offer them a new temporary meaning within the
symbolic realm of the exhibition.
Rivane Neuenschwander, "Prosopopeia", 2010
In many of Neuenschwander’s works a prominent role is taken by organic materials
-egg shells, seeds and spices; water and wood- which are left untransformed. They
reveal no hint at specific narratives or analytical demands, but effortlessly interact
with precise spatial and phenomenological situations of agency designed by the
artist. In Palatable Digressions (2010) dried food products achieve gigantic
dimensions and govern the gallery space. This is a some forty-meter long
intervention created in situ as a response to the building’s glass skylight of the same
Texte Zur Kunst
‘Polly wants a Punctuation Mark’
10 January 2011
Diana Baldon
dimension, a minimal-looking structure made of ten-meter high sheets of
transparent polycarbonate, a material usually employed for temporary
constructions, that falls from the ceiling onto the floor obliquely. Its internal units are
filled up at alternating intervals with spices and powdered foods (coloured sugar
sprinkles, green pepper, paprika, wasabi, coffee powder, yellow mustard seeds,
etc.) thus obtaining long coloured stripes. Despite the monumental size of the piece,
the decaying and precarious nature of its materials make it profoundly anti-heroic
and humble. From a distance the work gains attention for its formally abstract and
serial patterns, though on a closer inspection in the daylight, the pigments brighten
up while an intense scent captures our olfactory faculty, transforming the whole into
a multi-sensory experience. This sculpture plays off the “suprasensorial” theory
advanced by Helio Oiticica in his perceptually-heightening and anarchic
installations, while its repetitive geometric motif and topological specificity draw it
near to the Conceptual practice of French artist Daniel Buren, known for his
unvarying striped patterns of alternating white and coloured vertical bands
employed since 1965, and for his invention of the notion of “in situ.”
Rivane Neuenschwander, "Alarm Floor (Quem vem là sou eu)", 2005
Neuenschwander’s post-Conceptual practice has been often associated with the
fields of poetry and linguistics, an interest that be discerned from the titles of
works, as the one described below, that seek the symbolic or semantic connection
between images and linguistic enunciations. From an art-theoretical perspective, her
artistic production has also been discussed in relation to the function of art as an
agency of social interaction, mediation and communication. In effect, an important
focus in the exhibition have installations able to create situations for participatory
forms of interaction with the audience. Prosopopéia (2010), for instance, consists of
four tables displaying peeled and dehydrated oranges, limes, blown-out eggs,
coconut soaps, etc. filled or imprinted with letters from the alphabet. The audience
is invited to a Scrabble-like game, setting up a reciprocal engagement between
Texte Zur Kunst
‘Polly wants a Punctuation Mark’
10 January 2011
Diana Baldon
work and spectator in a similar way to how American artist Allan Kaprow’s influential
Happening Words (1962) experimented with a structure of controlled tasks for
visitors actively changing panels of words and writing messages onto blackboards.
Here the audience is asked to arrange eggs on containers whose interiors hide a
letter that becomes visible when an egg is inspected against the light of a lamp
suspended above, as if their fertilization would be checked. As a result, we realise
that the shells encrypt a message, spatially arranged as the three-dimensional
variant of a Modernist visual poetry by Stephane Mallarmé or the 1950s Concrete
poems by Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, members of one of Brazil’s most
significant cultural movements. Yet, any potential analysis of language and speech
events is turned into empty speech bubbles (Zé Carioca and Friends) The Return of
The Three Caballeros (2005), or punctuation marks Sunday (2010). If in the first
piece the audience is invited to fill in, or erase, a 8-page story of the Disney cartoon
character José “Zé” Carioca — a parrot from Rio de Janeiro — using a chalk, the
video Sunday portrays an Amazon parrot eating seeds with large punctuation marks
painted on them, while in the background we hear a radio with a football
commentary of the 2002 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil. The bird is
“eating” some symbols that structure written language, thus contrasting the silent
parrot irrupting into the pauses and intonation of human language, against the
relentless talking of the football commentator, who is speaking without interruption.
Perhaps this is the artist’s critique to our insatiable need to compulsively combine
words, while the voice over performs a gasping rhythm of repeats and pauses
which, if transcribed, would form an illogical, counter-organised and anti-textual
prose.
Rivane Neuenschwander, "At a Certain Distance (Public Barriers)", 2010
This and most works in the exhibition underline her quiet detachment in
approaching her subjects, aesthetic and processual investigations, as indicated by
the exhibition title “At a Certain Distance”. In the ostensible free movement between
ideas and materials, sites and situations, textual and visual media,
Neuenschwander’s practice doesn’t superimpose its will on a predetermined form
or conceptual scaffolding, but is subdued to abstract, simple and understated
Texte Zur Kunst
‘Polly wants a Punctuation Mark’
10 January 2011
Diana Baldon
methods that hide, in reality, complex procedures.
Concurrently, her works trigger “primitive emotions” we all have of the inherent
essence of nature; they call for a transformative power which coalescences each
piece into another, like in a Noh orchestra where any sound can become music.
However, as an architectural thinker of the organic, Neuenschwander draws upon
that phenomenology of the spirits known to Zen philosophy, where each formal,
interactive and spatial encounter is inhabited by a large universe, of greater
resonance.
Rivane Neuenschwander "At a Certain Distance" at Malmö Konsthall, September
11-November 14, 2010
Notes:
1 D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism Christian and Buddhist: The Eastern and Western Way,
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957, p. 11.
2 Allan W. Watts, The Way of Zen, New York: Vintage, 1957, p. 174.
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, New York: Routledge,
1962, p.117.