(Porto Alegre, Brazil)
The Iberê Camargo Foundation presents, since the 29th May, the exhibition “Liberdade em movimento” [“Moving freedom”], curated by art critic Jacopo Crivelli Visconti and featuring Runo Lagomarsino and André Severo. The show approaches the role of walking in the contemporary artistic practice with its many unfoldings and possibilities and also brings up important social, political and poetic issues that permeate contemporary art.
Used since dadaism, walking achieves more projection in the 1960s, when it starts representing a possibility of artistic feats in search of distance from commercial appeal and focus on action itself. “A line made by walking” (1961), by Richard Long, is an example of this new artistic attitude. It consists precisely of what the name indicates: a line drawn by the artist in a field basically with the walk repeated in the same course.
Taking tension beyond action and register, Artur Barrio comes up with the extreme experience in “4 dias 4 noites” [“4 days 4 nights”]. In 1970, in a way of breaking with media dependency, the artist wanders through Rio streets over the period of time that named the work, in search of an immersion on reality, just by inscribing his body in the trajectory and following immediate impulses. It is only eight years later that this work gains a register shape, two notebooks (a recurrent form in Barrio’s oeuvre) with blank pages, named “4 dias 4 noites”. According to Visconti, the notebooks represent “almost a surrendering to silence, an understanding of the impossibility of creating a register such as this that, minimally carries the Dionysian, explosive load of the action”.
A tensioning that pervades the show is conflict between action and register. What the public sees is not work in itself, but just part of it, its portion of register – by its nature, biased and limited in regards to the action that originated it. In the curator’s words, “the willingness to deliver the final aspect of the artwork by chance, through more or less direct intervention of others, confirms the indifference attitude of the artists gathered here to a conventional artistic object, perfectly finished. Even when they happen in perfect solitude, more that producing something new, these actions aim at merging artist to space, in a symbiosis with society”.
Featured artists: Joseph Beuys, Francis Alÿs, Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, Lygia Clark, Artur Barrio, Cildo Meireles, Allora & Calzadilla, Emily Jacir, Christian Marclay, Meriç Algün Ringborg, Clarissa Tossin, Runo Lagomarsino, André Severo, Mario Garcia Torres, Andrey Monastyrsky, Multiplicity.
“Liberdade em movimento”, group show with Runo Lagomarsino e André Severo
Curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti
On view through 10th August
3º andar da Fundação Iberê Camargo
Av. Padre Cacique, 2000
Porto Alegre – RS
+55 51 32478000
Tues-Sun: 12am – 7pm
Thurs: 12am to 9pm
Holidays, 12am to 7pm (except Mondays)
Free admission