CURATOR
GABRIELA VAZ-PINHEIRO*
* Integrated member of i2ADS, Research Institute of Art, Design and Society, Fine Arts Faculty, University of Porto
Foreword Taking into account the encouraging development that scopio Magazine has achieved until now, as well as the interest and significant body of work coming from its Editors and Collaborators, the Editorial and Advisory Board of this publication has decided to adopt a new structure, which comprises four separate volumes: scopio Magazine, scopio Magazine Curator, scopio Magazine Project and scopio Magazine Addendum. scopio Magazine will now also be available in digital format online. In doing this we are offering more autonomy and space for the editorial content in each of these volumes, recognizing that they significantly capture the interest of many of our specialised public and also that more freedom and responsibility should be given to their Editors. Thus, scopio Magazine Curator is now an autonomous publication that is annually published and linked to scopio Magazine´s global theme that governs each cycle for three years, as well as to the class of each year: Architecture, City and Territory. Nevertheless, it is published separately, with its own ISSN and in a date of the year that may be different from the other scopio magazine publications of the same cycle and class. Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries is the global theme that wants to contribute to redefine the borders of the diverse worlds that think or use diverse artistic media as can be seen in visual, performing and the literary arts, taking its readers into Contemporary Art: from architecture to philosophy, painting to performance, from photography to video or film. Thus, in the second cycle of this independent editorial project Crossing Boarders, Shifting Boundaries: City, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, Editor of scopio Magazine Curator, directs her high level of critical analysis and interest towards two Portuguese artists – Fernanda Fragateiro and Nuno Sousa Vieira - speaking about their work and exploring ideas linked to modernism and different appropriation mechanisms.
Pedro LeĂŁo Neto
Modernism: quotation/deconstruction, from "déjà-vu" to "vu de nouveau” “In the particulars of his conscious behavior, the “primitive,” the archaic man, acknowledges no act which has not been previously posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man. What he does has been done before. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others.” (Mircea Eliade)1 . “Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible! - Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!)...” (Friedrich W. Nietzsche) 2. The content for this scopio Magazine Curators’ first autonomous volume, has been built around the idea of bringing two artists as a pretext to discuss an issue that is of interest to me and scopio’s objectives. Although the Magazine is primarily image led, the chosen artists intend, precisely, to help challenge notions of the image, and the issues discussed intend to help add thinking angles to the question of visuality. I have called Fernanda Fragateiro’s and Nuno Sousa Vieira’s work in order to try to unroll some thoughts around the legacy of modernism and around different approaches to appropriation. I have intended to introduce a new term for a sense of revisitation of the past that characterises every expression of civilisation, particularly the one’s which art reworks and to which it pays especial tributes. And for this I was particularly interested in revising the concept of “déjà-vu” in light of an approach that will, perhaps, help us move forward in a time in which saturation and exhaustion have ripped through our minds and lives, and through our modes of capturing and expressing (the reappearence of) representations.
1 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Harper Torchbooks, New York, (1954) 1959, p. 5. 2 Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The will to Power, A Knopf Book, 1968, Book Four, III, 1058 (1883-1888).
Albeit the opening quotes for this text, I could not possibly attempt to discuss the usually referred to myths of the eternal return and recurrence, either in their cosmic (Mircea Eliade) or philosophical/metaphysical (Nietszche) angles, but will instead attempt to determine two main things: first the fact that those elements of the past that insist in returning change with time (times), and so, one always feels permanently trapped by a recurrence that is, inescapably, present bound. Secondly, that the way in which the elements of the past return may be thought in a mode that instead of simply quote back from the past, installs an ongoing flow that, in despair, attempts to stall the present for time by building a future in a sort of ‘present continuous’ form to a point of no return. To be honest, it will be impossible to discuss these matters with the required length and depth, and so this will be an attempt to anchor those two thoughts in the work of the two artists for the current Scopio’s Curators Section: Fernanda Fragateiro and Nuno Sousa Vieira. In order to do this, we dwell on the age old correlations between originality and legitimacy, reproducibility and authenticity, style and copyright. Or even attempt to fundament the quest for “an art of reproduction, of multiples without originals”3 that Krauss inquired apropos Rodin. However, this would lead us to discuss the avant-garde, that utopia of an absolute beginning, and we would land on the deep contradiction Krauss profers so well, when she says that “(...) the actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that ‘originality’ is a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence” (1992:18). Presumably, that blank slate from which art’s purity would claim to arise was the basis for a declared craving for autonomy that artistic practice could only justify on the pairs of correlations I have listed above, and a set of rules to regulate them.
3 Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avan-garde: a Post-modern Repetition” in Brian Walli (Ed.), Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, The Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, (1984) 1992, p.17.
So it is clear that (the illusion of) originality has become a discourse of warranty uttered by different institutions within the art system, from the museum to artists themselves; and that this illusion has led to a sense of broken chiasma between art and the domain of the social. At least until the ethnographic mode came to the rescue... I have said before that I believe that no art is devoid of a social implication, even if it denies a direct connection with the events of the world. Hal Foster4 presents a double possibility for the space in which avant-garde art may have developed. The coexistence of a vertical axis, in which the opening of a space of purity may have inscribed the illusion of a “break with the past”. And a horizontal one in which “it turned to past paradigms to open present possibilities”, thus its social dimension. Truly, one has to conceive that events return in order to justify the place where one stands, if one strives for a better world in the face of an unbearable present. But the fact is that one can not observe the flow of events from within because we are the cycle of things, and we live every event only once. The truth is that it is only because we believe events recur that we are able of ‘observing’ them! And unless one accepts this contradiction, we may never move beyond the palimpsest of time. This is also the condition of the image! Images exist in a fractal mode, they encode history beyond their material presence, like a ghost luring in their background. For this reason, those codes can only be postulated. They can never be measured against each other, their attributes of truth can never be asserted, and this is why their prevalence over one another can only be determined through violence. So far as images travel (and their modes of dispersion, as we know, have increasingly been changed by technology) they generate modes of transmission in which violence is
4 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1996, p xi.
present in multiple forms. This is the reason why images can never be purely visual, they are part of an “optical unconscious” (Krauss)5 that roots itself deeply in our traumas and continually disrupts and rebuilds our optimism. Therefore, the condition of the image is one of space as well. A space of actions. A space of practices onto which the discursive is shaped and the intuitive outlines survival. Our survival and the survival of images themselves. In every moment of human existence conceptual realities are remade. References to the past, helplessly, float and recur. My point here is that there is no clear line moving backwards in search for references, but that these references obey (mostly) to political or institutional plots that will jump time and pick at ease in order to fundament their current agenda configurations. The reason why modernism’s utopia failed so terribly is precisely because there was no straight line, vertical or horizontal, to be drawn from it, other than one that would come to be profoundly embuied in nostalgia. Social justice could never arise from its utopia because social inequality could not fit in modernism’s space of (a craved) purity. At present, images of mid-XXth century vintage haunt us everywhere. As Claire Bishop6 has been advocating, modernism is our present day classicism. There are a number of tints for this reverence: there is a tint of regret for a bygone optimism, a tint of shame for the historical connections between modernism and colonialism, a sense of loss for an uncontaminated realm for art, a longing for a materiality that the defragmentation of experience currently yields. I believe this is not so much due to the particular aesthetic appeal of vintage imagery as it is for a sense of lost possibilities, much as Greek classicism infiltrated western nineteenth century visuality, potentially, as a form of reaction to the foggy world being
5 Although, obviously, there is a lot more to the term coined by Krauss! See: Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, (1993) 1994. 6 From Claire Bishop’s ongoing conference “Déjà Vu: Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernism”.
born from the coal revolution... Today, the “transformation in nature of visuality” Crary speaks about at the beginning of his book “Techniques of the Observer”7, not only is a consequence of the technological advances of our time but it implies a break of references: the filters of a technicolor past coexist with the sharpness of trillions of pixels that surpass human vision. Where does this leave human conscience, if infinity appears side by side with a fabricated analogical longing? And how do we build memory beyond a frame of time? Can it be done? How may progress for humankind be effected if it is the very idea of a linear progressive growth that has to be challenged in the face of the destruction it leaves behind? We can no longer be optimistic about a material progress that has proved to be so blindly damaging. So, how do we maintain the intellectual optimism that we built on the conquests of freedom promised by the 60’s and 70’s revolutions? And before that, on the utopian claims for social justice of the beginning of last century? On quotation: Fragateiro’s drawings There are several forms of quotation. On one hand there is the reverent form of repeating the master’s codes as we see in historical religious paintings and orthodox iconography. On the other, there is a subversive form of quotation, one that decontextualises the image and/or its mode of production like Richard Prince’s act of photographing photographs, for example. Finally, there are the more current forms of remixing, resampling and remorphing to which technology lends a very swift helping hand. I am again lamenting the exiguous space of this text that prevents us from deepening the matter of authorship, copyright, copyleft, and the differences between appropriation and plagiarism... as Roland Barthes advocates, “(...)writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”8 so that every voice becomes a sum of indiscernible voices.
7 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, (1990) 1992. 8 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text, Fontana Press, London, 1977, p. 142.
So, let’s just say state that found references may refer to their “initial author” in multiple ways and that the implications of the mode of production at play in any reworking of those references is what signals the “new author”. It could be assumed that if an artist reworks modernist references, his or her work would not just pay tribute to modernism but perhaps replicate modernist procedures. This assumption is precisely where the dangers of plagiarism or pastiche reside. The procedures are the mode through which authorship reworks quotations into new work. Retracing the steps of one other is, as we all know, an impossible task. Therefore, revisiting the voice of another must always be done with the acute awareness of one’s own mode of doing things, of one’s own position in the world, which implies fundamentally different technological, conceptual and experiential modes. What is so moving about Fragateiro’s drawings is that they are experiential. They are not simply paying tribute to a modernist imagery, they are not purely surface, they contain the lived experience of the artist in the space of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. They ‘read’ that space and transfer the presence of the artist in it, more than they quote the work. And they are experiential, also because they possess the transitory character of a sktechbook. Not final but deeply precious. On deconstruction: the sculptures of Sousa Vieira One of the reasons modernism failed us is that it maintained (or at least did not address) a binary way of constructing the world. In this sense ancient Greek influences are still at play within modernism in pairs such as culture and nature, content and form, feminine and masculine, good and evil, and so on. The challenge posed by deconstruction upon these oppositons, that had increasingly grew obsolete to account for our experience of and in the world, also questioned a hierarchical order both within social life and artistic/literary production. Author and viewer mix their places. Purety and contamination enter a final fight. And so on.
Alhough deconstruction has been initially associated with literary studies and issues related to (the use of) language, its influence broadened to a number of other disciplines9. My point here is clearly not to read Sousa Vieira’s sculptures under the philosophical influence of Derrida, but to hint at this possibility adding to that potential reading the personal dimension of a life story. If différance is both taken in a sense of difference, (because meaning is always a function of context, proximity or contrast), and of deferral, (because the possibility for meaning is endless, constantly pushed forward); and if in this apparently infinite process, each moment contains traces of every and all previous ones, then in Sousa Vieira’s sculptures lurks both a spatial reference to a personal story made of a narrative that we barely access, or access only at the artist’s will, and an accummulation of parts that endlessly reconfigures that past, reconfigures its space of action and reconfigures the spaces we all inhabit everyday. What we see is not really what we get, but what we get will definitely be seen again somewhere in the world. If “déjà-vu” may be translated by “already seen”, “vu de nouveau” would suitably be converted into “seen again”, so that “déjà-vu” is something that reappears, wasted by its own recurrence, tired by return, and “vu de nouveau” is something that keeps coming as if anew and with a promise to come again. As such, we stand on an accumulation of times, and images, and references, in a palimpsest of time that is neither circular nor linear, but an infinite set of accumulated folds that superimpose parts of time, revealing smooth transparencies and sharp edges, much like this text itself.
Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, June 2016
9 Further reading: John Sallis (Ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, The Texts of Jacques Derrida, Uni. Chicago Press, Chicago and London, (1987) 1988.
Fernanda Fragateiro These drawings were made during my residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut Bethany- between May and June 2016. The drawings were born from the look over the art collection, the archives and personal library of Josef and Anni Albers, and are, simultaneously, research, reflection and work. The time to think, the beautiful studio designed by architects Tim Prentice and Lo-Yi Chang, built in the middle of an idyllic forest and the dedication to aesthetic and philosophical principles of the Albers and of all those who work in the Foundation were pure inspiration for this work.
Sketchbook drawings, 2016
Nuno Sousa Vieira SIMALA is the name of a company that, during the second half of the last century, labored in Pousos, Leiria. SIMALA is the name I tautologically call my studio which, since the beginning of this century, is precisely hosted in the first premises of SIMALA. SIMALA is, for me, a place of thought and reflection on the issues of the world. SIMALA interests me as a place inscribed in the world, which also makes it a receptacle and a consequence of it. Using the SIMALA, my sensitive imagination and the body against body relations that are carried out with it, I develop my work according to this relational approach. It is absolutely crucial for me to use this model for the development and experience of my artistic practice.
Sala de Exposição - Peça de Apresentação / Exhibition Room – Presentation Piece, 2016 Wooden door of the work “Uma Vida Inteira / An Entire Life” on wooden trestles, the wood used for the construction of door and trestles is that resulting from processing / destruction of the work “Exhibition Room”, many materials resting on the table top (artist books (Uma Vida Inteira - An Entire Life and Sala de Exposição -Peça de Apresentação / Exhibition Room – Presentation Piece), drawings and the works An Invisible Hour (model), Sala de Exposição / Exhibition Room (model) and Sala de Exposição-Vista Exterior / Exhibition Room-Outside View.
Porta Adjacente #2 / Adjacent Door #2 (View of a detail of the work installed in the studio), 2008 Intervened wooden door of the artist studio, mahogany wood and fittings, wooden structure and MDF. 300 x 465 x 90 cm
Decidir. Exibir. Transformar. / To decide. To Exhibit. To Transform. 2015 Lacquered iron, 134 x 120,5 x 1 cm Decidindo. Transformando. Exibindo. / Deciding. Transforming. Exhibiting. 2015 Twill printed by sublimation. Dimensions variable.
Family Window, 2013 Intervened iron window of the artist studio and mirror, 102.5 x 110 x 80 cm
Waiting For Hope Across The Window, 2013 Intervened iron window of the artist studio, raw material Simala transport plastic bags and mahogany wood, 115 x 75 x 51 cm
VisĂŁo Canhestra / Clumsy Vision, 2016 Intervened iron window and acrylic on MDF. 185 x 180 x 35 cm
An Invisible Hour (model), 2016 Model: mahogany plywood. Support: mahogany.Ed. 3 + 1 P.A.
Composição Corrigida #1 / Corrected Composition #1, 2013 Oil on Canvas. 19 x 12 x 5,5cm
Pintura a Três Cores Corrigida-Pintura de Canto / Three Colors Corrected Painting – Corner Painting, 2013 Oil on Canvas and Mahogany . 74 x 40 x 30 cm
Janela Para Sentir Saudade / Window to feel longing (saudade), 2015 Mahogany wood and brass hardware. 400 x 120 x 4 cm (planned piece).
Biographies Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro is licensed in Sculpture by the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, with a Master Degree in European Scenography by the Central Saint Martin’s College; also has a Master Degree in Theory and Practice of Public Art & Design by the Chelsea College of Art & Design and PhD Degree with the thesis “Art from Place: the expression of cultural memory in the urban environment and in place-specific art interventions”, by the Chelsea College. Had fellowship from the Calouste Gulbenkian’s Foundation, from the Culture’s Secretary of State, from the Contemporary Art Society and The London Institute. Performed many seminars of interdisciplinary nature at Portugal and overseas. Published texts on art and artistic investigation magazines. While an artist, exposes collectively and individually since 1985, at Portugal and overseas, having received many awards and mentions. Fernanda Fragateiro (born in Montijo, based in Lisbon) is interested in rethinking and probing modernist practices, through ongoing research with archival matter, materials, and objects. Fragateiro’s work has been exhibited at MAAT – Museum of Architecture, Art and Technology (Lisbon, 2017), La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma (Roma, 2017), Fundação Eugénio de Almeida (Évora, 2017), Palm Springs Art Museum (2016), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2016), CaixaForum (Barcelona, 2016), Orlando Museum of Art (2015), Palais des Beaux-Arts – Beaux-Arts de Paris (2015), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University (Cambridge, 2015), Krannert Art Museum (Champaign, 2015), CIFO Art Space (Miami, 2014), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, 2014), Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea (San Sebastián, 2014), MUAC – Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, 2014), Dublin Contemporary 2011 (Dublin, 2011), Lisbon Architecture Triennale (Lisbon, 2010), Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, 2007), Fundação de Serralves (Porto, 2005). Her work is featured in several public and private collections. Fragateiro is represented by Galería Elba Benitez (Madrid); Arratia Beer (Berlin); Galeria Baginski (Lisbon) and Josee Bienvenu Gallery (New York).www.fernandafragateiro.com
Nuno Sousa Vieira (Leiria, 1971). Lives and works between Leiria e Lisbon. PhD degree with the thesis “O Ateliê – Do Mundo Para o Lugar. Sala de Exposição (1971/2015)” by Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa. His research seeks to identify strategies and methodologies used in creative practice in order to understand works in a contextual dimension between the studio and the exhibition room. Selected exhibtions: Nasci num dia curto de inverno, Fundação Portuguesas das Comunicações, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017; Sin piedras no hay arco, Galeria Espacio Olvera, Sevilla, Spain, 2017; From darkness to light, Galeria Graça Bradão, Lisbon, 2016; The volume of the visible, Gallerie Emmanuel Hervè, Paris, France, 2015; Uma vida inteira, SIMALA factury, Leiria, Portugal, 2014; Opaco, Escritório, Lisboa, 2014; Ouvi dizer que o lugar mais escuro é sempre debaixo da luz, Kunsthalle São Paulo, Brazil, 2014; Uma ateliê, uma fábrica e uma sala de exposição, nem sempre por esta ordem, Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, 2013; Wall stop for this, Appleton Square, Lisbon, Portugal, 2012; Collecting collections and concepts, uma viagem iconoclasta por coleções de coisas em formas de assim, European Capital of Culture, Guimarães, Portugal, 2012; Somos nós que mudamos quando tomamos efetivamente conhecimento do outro, Pavilhão Branco, Lisbon, Portugal, 2011; Haben gegenstände ein gedächtnis?, Deutschlandpremieren - Quadriennale de Dusseldorf 2010, Hans Mayer Gallery, Dusseldorf, German, 2010; Don’t underestimate the impact of the workplace, Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn, Uk, 2010; Let’s Talk About Houses: When Art Speaks Architecture [BUILDING, UNBUILDING, INHABIT], Museu do Chiado, Lisbon, Portugal, 2010; X-office for a sculpture, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal, 2009. Pedro Leão Neto (Porto, 1962). Has a degree in Architecture from the School of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP, 1992), where he is currently the director and senior lecturer of Communication, Photography and Multimedia (CFM) and Computer Architecture Aided Design (CAAD). He is also the coordinator of the research group CCRE integrated in FAUP’s I&D center. He holds a Master Degree in Urban Environment Planning and Design (FAUP, 1997) and a PhD in Planning and Landscape (University of Manchester, 2002). He has curated several architectural photography exhibitions and international seminars, is director of the cultural association Cityscopio, coordinator of the International Conference ‘On the Surface’, as well as coordinator of Scopio Editions, with special focus on Documentary and Artistic Photography related to Architecture, City and Territory.
Colophon
scopio Magazine Curator Modernism: quotation/deconstruction, from “déjà-vu” to “vu de nouveau”
Invited Authors
Publisher
Collaborators
Cityscópio – Associação Cultural Rua da Cidreira 291, 4465-076 Porto (Matosinhos), Portugal info@cityscopio.com www.cityscopio.com
Editorial and Advisory Board CCRE – Centro de Comunicação e Representação Espacial / Space Communication and Representation Centre Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto Via Panorâmica S/N, 4150-755 Porto, Portugal ccre.arq.up@gmail.com tel: +351 226057100 fax: +351 226057199 Laboratório de Curadoria e Espaço Público Núcleo de Arte e Intermedia i2ADS - Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade Faculdade de Belas Artes - Universidade do Porto Av. de Rodrigues de Freitas 265, 4000-222 Porto, Portugal madep@fba.up.pt
Editorial Coordination Pedro Leão Neto pedro.neto@cityscopio.com pneto@arq.up.pt +351 964040521
Editor Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro gvpinheirofba@gmail .com
Creative Director Né Santelmo ne.santelmo@cityscopio.com
Fernanda Fragateiro Nuno Sousa Vieira Catarina Oliveira Diana Carvalho Paula Camilo
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Copies 100
Signed by the authors 20
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scopio Magazine Curator also thanks and acknowledges all the support it has received from FCT, UP, FAUP, i2ADS/FBAUP, CEAU, CCRE
Cover from Fernanda Fragateiro and Nuno Sousa Vieira
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