“Actions, strategies, and situations at MAM-Rio” has works by Marcius Galan

In the MAM-Rio collections there is a focus on the output of artists who have reinterpreted the place of the artwork (its artistic presence), with the object yielding its importance to language or experience. This exhibition addresses these issues without intending to dub the selected artists as “conceptual,” but rather with the idea of bringing together a diversity of materials that cast into question some of the traditional, accepted notions from the field of art, especially until the 1960s, like object, institution, circuit, reception, and history.

The time frame stretches from Brazil’s experimental and concrete poetry (Décio Pignatari, Cloaca, 1957), a fertile time for the visual fluctuation of signifier and signified, to Marcius Galan’s contract (Obra de arte em 5 vias [Artwork in 5 copies], 2012), which addresses the nature of the art system and its critical analysis. From this period, we give precedence to the “actions, strategies, and situations” used in developing the works, which means two types of object are included that are still dealt with and studied separately in the institutional context: works of art and documents.

The proposition is to reinforce the different forms of art statement beyond traditional supports (painting, sculpture, etc.), bearing witness to MAM’s commitment to experimental propositions since the 1960s (e.g. the exhibitions Salão Bússola [Compass Salon] and Sala Experimental [Experimental Room]), and situating it in the conceptual turn art took at that time. A time when important groundwork was laid for the art of today, when artists diverted attention away from the physical object as the primary locus of the relationship with the viewer, raised the conception of the artwork above its material execution, and gave it a dematerialized, precarious, temporary nature.

One important feature of the works on display here is the attention to the narrative of experience and the rewriting of history. Many artists have started to make expressive use of the “document”, which has ceased to be external to historical events, but something that can be modified. Artists are new “historians” operating through institutional criticism and theircapacity to question and empower different types of records.

There is some friction at the interfaces between artwork and document in the materials present here: printed poem, book, photograph, photocopy, poster, documentation, contract, proposal, and mock-up.