Bruno Moreschi

‘Construction in Progress’
Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo

“Modern art starts with the renouncement of Historic painting.” (1)

INDEPENDENCE WILL DISAPPEAR. It’s a fact. The painting known as “O grito do Ipiranga” (1888) by Pedro Américo, commissioned by the Brazilian royal family in order to glorify the figure of D. Pedro I and to mold a symbol of Independence from Portugal in 1822 into the imaginary, cannot be seen until 2022. This is the year in which the renovations at the Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo will be completed, whose collection the work is found.

Without proposing a discussion around the political signification of the creation of historical myths, in the work and in the museum itself (all of its collection relates to Independence), its decadence and reopening; the reality is that in the next nine years one of the paintings of reference to popular Brazilian culture will only be available to our sight through reproductions.

This is the news with which Bruno Moreschi begins to give form to the project “Em obras.” The first proposition is the reproduction of Américo’s famous image through parts and by emphasizing a few details, made by the hands of various “street painters” in the artist’s studio, where he acted as an assistant.

It is the first layer of investigation that the artist has been developing, which in its most abstract form I would call “of the visible and of the invisible.” This is because the original work will become invisible, as its highlights are characters normally unnoticed and uncited in the official history: a drover, a herdsman and a person in the window of a house. They are silent witnesses, the invisible in a visible account.

The reclamation of content also reveals itself in the process: the pieces were produced in collaboration by a team of different painters that commercialized their work by directly negotiating with the client and using the public space as a place of sales. These are the workers or professionals of art, as well as an assistant now and as one during the Renaissance, that remain invisible in the art institution. In this occasion, all of them emerge as artists in the show; they are all authors of the works.

What is interesting in this process are the relations created beyond the concept of artwork or authorship, since we are talking from a space that is part of the validating device of contemporary art. Each of the people hired as a worker to make the copy of an artwork established a relationship of labor. At this point a major question emerges regarding what defines a professional artist, a worker, and therefore, in our contemporary art environment and outside of it.

Dialogue 1:
BM – We’re not going to finish the entire painting, I think its best to show a little bit of the process… What do you think?
P1 – Are you sure?
BM – What’s the problem?
P1- They’re going to think I’m a bad painter.

Skill, dexterity, finishing, process, completion, certainty. A finished product does not leave in sight any part of its process. The work of art is simply a product in a market context, but it has, or should have, a meaning and autonomy beyond this. Contemporary artistic activity does not only fit into the means and systems of production. Besides, its processes are open to criticism and self criticism, to free will or to doubt which may/usually generates stupefaction and/or distaste by a majority of society, even more if its form of materialization – that could take any form – deviates from the traditional fine arts.

Sigmar Polke said that painting was nothing more than a construed moral.

“Independência ou morte,” that is the original title of the Ipiranga work, but INDEPENDENCE IS CIRCUMSTANCIAL for various reasons: because after all we are not talking about what happened along the banks of Ipiranga, but mainly, because, any question that we pose about the relations created in a system depends on its context.

The second action done by Moreschi constituted in the hiring of nine wall painters who could freely choose a color, a shape and a piece of one of the gallery’s wall to apply paint to. The composition was completely determined by them – by chance, they all made rectangles as color proofs, even though in a free layout – without any indication or aesthetic judgment from the artist.

Dialogue 2:
P2 – But I’m a wall painter. I’m used to painting walls…
BM – But it’ll be on the wall.
P2 -? But I always paint in the same way, will I have to create?
BM – You’ll have to choose the way that you find best…
P2 – Anything goes?
BM – Anything.
P2 – So in conclusion I’ll have to create.

The historic materialism divides society into proletariats and capitalists; Hanna Arendt, in Animal laborans, a technician for which the work is an end within itself, and Homo faber, superior producer of thought.

Richard Sennet, on the other hand, proposes a system in which the action of the hand and of the brain act in unison, without denying anyone the ability of this active and reflective pair, and that would reach its maximum potential in horizontal collaborative works (2). Joining Rosalind Krauss (3) ideas, what defines the artistic practice as a series of logical operations performed over cultural terms, to Bourriaurd’s (4), according to whom “making the work is inventing a way of working more than ‘knowing how’ to make such a thing better than other things,” we could think of the installation “Pintores” as a proposition to rethink new social contexts through the reflection of the terms handmade and work relation.

The challenge continues to be the real connection between the world of contemporary art and the society in which it is inserted. What is the concept of work, and the concept perceived over the artist’s work and/or the artist as a worker?

Dialogue 3:
P3 – You can call my wife. Tell her I became an artist. I’m going to finish here and then lay on the hammock.

1. Nicolás Bourriaud, Formes de vide. L´art moderne et l´invention de soi, 1999.
2. Richard Sennet, The Craftsman, 2008
3. Rosalind Krauss, L´Originalité de l´avant-garde et autres mythes modernistes, Paris, 1993.
4. Nicolas Bourriard, op. cit.

Text exhibition “Em Obras”, Blau Projects, São Paulo, Brazil.

***
Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo is an independent Curator.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

‘The Varied Dimensions Variable’
Paulo Miyada

To organize “Sem título – Técnica mista, dimensões variadas” (Untitled – Mixed media, variable dimensions) Bruno Moreschi, whose work sometimes encompasses multiple areas of expertise in the process of art, and sometimes subtract almost autonomous logic, chose to have a guest curator. We decided that his first solo exhibition should be more than one thing at a time.

A. It is a travelling exhibition of the ART BOOK’s global publishing , a selection of the most promising contemporary artists, presented in the form of a thematic curatorial clipping about the limits of the integrity of language – a fictional exercise that dramatizes contemporary tics and at the same time, works as comment and development of the practices of Moreschi himself, exemplified by their aggregated itinerant works.

B. It is a solo exhibition that condenses the last years of Moreschi’s production, having his recently completed master’s degree as shaft. Unveiled the fictions that can mislead the public, remains a compilation of teasers about the nature of artistic act: who, after all, is its agent? The one who has idea? Which gives it body? The public in its endless readings? Everyone, as long as understood “acting” as “playing a role”, with all the implications that this theatrical expression can hold.

C. It is a new work in itself, done in collaboration with various guest actors – from the photographers to the curator, through designer – and extended to the exhibition catalog. All subsystems articulated in the realization of the exhibition were treated as creative acts, portions of a broad artistic performance that chooses to take the risk of blurring the boundary lines that separate each work.

Text exhibition “Sem título – Técnica mista, dimensões variadas” (Untitled – Mixed media, variable dimensions), 15/3 – 16/4/2014, Funarte São Paulo, Brazil.

***
Paulo Miyada is an architect and urbanist graduated from Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Brazil. He was the assistant curator at the 29th São Paulo Biennial and today coordinates the Núcleo de Pesquisa e Curadoria at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

‘It is the thief who makes the opportunity’
Paulo Miyada

(Text written for the project ART BOOK.)

Introduction
In the last years of his career as a professional soccer player, the former striker of the four-time winner Brazilian national team, Romário, made his tactic all the clearer. He used to score at least one goal in each game, running very little in the field. Unlike the stereotype of a dedicated striker, Romário would let the game – and the ball – go by many times, wasting endless passes and feeding the defender assigned to mark him with impatience. The defender, almost always over ten years younger than the striker, had a lot of stamina and little sagacity. Half an hour into the game, and Romário had not sprinted towards the goal. Then there was half time, teams changed sides, fifteen minutes more and nothing. Sooner or later, the opponent marking him relaxed and stopped watching one of the greatest strikers in the world, all he could see was a veteran in the eve of retirement. Fatal mistake.

As soon as the young man let go of the marking and went to the attack, Romário asked for the ball. The pass came and he, after two or three touches, wasalone facing the goal-keeper who could do very little. The saying ‘the opportunity makes the thief’ echoes the principles of deterministic beliefs. It is a lie. The thief, like Romário, makes the opportunity.

Extrapolation
In the case of contemporary art, – that is, the production of the past ten years, to which this book is dedicated – an updated version of the saying about thefts and opportunities is appropriate.

Explaining from the beginning: recent generational mappings, such as this book and many other cuttings from the youngest generation of talents all over the world, usually assume that the artistic production may have any form and be produced by anyone. Diversity became an implicit rule celebrated by the potpourri of character, ancestry and nature of the artists collected as samples of their time. Notwithstanding, the heterogeneity is not restricted to the arbitrary combinations of the differences.

There are some typical matrices to be filled in. First of all, the stereotypes: enfant terrible that is admired by making fun of the public that admires him; artist from the peripheral socioeconomic context, mixing techniques and materials associated to the folklore of his country with the hegemonic morphology of abstract art; activist engaged in disclosing conflicts and prejudice typically associated to “non-western” countries; consumerism disguised as criticism of the desire for consumption and capital accumulation; intuitive characters who evade explanations of formal works by moving into mystic and/or unconscious territories, etc.

Then, the techniques: abstract or graphic standard photography; performance based on the conflict between the artist’s physicality and the public; sketch or note of affective-confessional content; neo-pop sculpture based on the most iconic artifacts of the contemporary material culture; materiality of painting or precarious bill; exhibit based on the derivations of site specific art; contemplative videos in line with experimental cinema guidelines; conceptual works full of acid irony and/or extreme reflexivity; etc.

Or also, the census groups: white European man, North- American entrepreneur, repressed Eastern woman, humble Latin, eccentric Asian, architect/musician/dancer relocated to the field of art, intellectual and blasé British, African living in Europe, etc.

All you need is to skim the list of the artists gathered in this book to find one of the several possible ways to rematch these matrices in a young heterogeneous group, all of which, acclaimed by institutions and important events in the global art system.

It may give the impression that, actually, these are typical matrices of contemporary artists that result in the visibility fields which artists take advantage of. Consequently, one may believe that the stereotypes make the opportunity to today’s art production. It is the opportunity that makes the thief, and the system makes the artist.

Once again, it is not really true. Otherwise, the epigraph of this article could be paraphrased into a sentence of an oracle, “It would certainly seem ridiculous to make critical judgment about artists of a blind system”. It may even be a fact that the globalized art scene uses standardized readings of the emerging artists, classifying them into typology with arguments and phrases of pre-made effect, but, from the point of view of creative processes, there are other problems.

Summarizing, philosopher Arthur Danto defines contemporary art as the activity with the ability to dialectally reflect on its own means, and moreover, to criticize the production chains of the meaning of human thought. If we wish to believe in this, summarizing the artists production in stereotypes implies losing focus on what matters most. By simply understanding the disguises that dress the artists, we forget the critic movement their works may bring about.

Just like the good striker, the artist needs to know how to move against laid expectations to escape marking and, then, he may achieve what is expected of him. The goal, or rather, the reorganization of the way things gain meaning and legibility.

Recalling the famous writing by Marcel Duchamp (The Creative Act, 1957), there is a hiatus between the intention of the artist and the works he actually produces – he named it artistic coefficient. Likewise, there is a need for a hiatus between the certainties of the argument that legitimates the production of an artist and what his works effectively bring to fruition – this we might name, for instance, the irreducible difference. It is still too early to say which of the artists with ascending career here compiled will remain in the books of Art History, but it is already possible to read the entries introducing them and compare them to the works that illustrate them. Where there is a void, attention, there may be a treasure.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

‘The image of the other’
Paula Borghi

(Text written for the project ART BOOK.)

Of all the famous quotations, maybe the most pertinent to this situation is “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes”, by Andy Warhol. An artist who needs no introduction, Warhol photographed celebrities, created them and became one of them. In Polaroides Surfaces (1969-1986) there are photographs of professionals already acknowledged in their careers, such as Mick Jagger, Jane Fonda and John Lennon, as well as the ones who became famous in the Factory under the care of Warhol, such as Edie Sedgwick and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If today politician Arnold Schwarzenegger (better known as “The Terminator”) is a public figure, what surely boosted his career was the public attention received when posing as a model for Warhol in 1977.

Warhol literally created a factory, expanded the idea of product and exonerated the distinction between instant celebrity and a can of soup. For the artist, a silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe reproduced repeated times took as much time to prepare and consume as a silkscreen of a campbell’s can. The artist brought a new sense of time to art, the time of the instantaneous, which can be found both in the fresh news and the fresh meat.
The exchange currency that permeated the relationships at the Factory was not necessarily money; the desire to be (in other words, I wanna bee) was what relationships were about. While Edie Sedgwick, better known as the “poor rich girl”, found buyers for the works of Warhol, the artist became an icon of pop art. Mentor for the Velvet Underground band and the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others, Warhol knew how to choose his friends.

Would it be that the future enunciated by Warhol is the present in which we find ourselves? Today, the instantaneous artists are those who at 20/30 years old take part in Biennials, and that, at 40, disappear as fast as they have appeared. The market absorbs a young artist as fast as one prepares a Campbell’s soup can: all you have to do is open the can, heat it up and consume it.

Frequently, lists of the best artists and curators are published in magazines and blogs, usually presenting the 10, 50 or 100 ‘most relevant’ ones. However, the most desired format are the hardcover, bilingual books with over 200 hundred pages, preferably, with an average of 10 critic texts of overview presentation and a text dedicated to each one of the artists; books that weigh at least a kilo and have attractive covers to be displayed on coffee tables in the living or waiting rooms. Being part of a book such as Ice Cream is like having a VIP ticket to museums and art institutes. But the rule does not apply to all kinds of books.

The book Brazilian Art Book, a Brazilian example of this format of publication, is not as fortunate as the Ice Cream. The Brazilian Art Book, which periodically presents names of the Brazilian art, is already in its sixth volume, and every year it gains more pages, without necessarily presenting a better content. Misconceived from the choice of language for the title, the book presents to the reader a compilation of artists who are always in the same restaurants where its editorial board is.

When coming across books such as the Brazilian Art Book, I ask myself about the real need of this kind of format. What is the relevance of this publication to art? Would this format not be restricted and warped? Is being part of a book a certification to step into History? Would a publication of this importance not be a marketing platform to value only a few artists?

These are some of the questions that arise when I think of the ART BOOK, by Bruno Moreschi, that, just as the Brazilian Art Book, has its title in English and 3 cm by 4 cm photographs of the artists in it, is too heavy to provide a comfortable reading and presents generic texts to describe the production of the artists in it. But what moves Moreschi to edit a book such as the ART BOOK? Would it be that this author seeks fame through the artists in this book? What would his relationship with the artists be?

I put myself at risk analyzing the creative process of Moreschi similar to that of Andy Warhol, as both use the image of the other to strengthen their names. For, just as Edie Sedgwich and Arnold Schwarzenegger had their careers urged by Warhol, the same occurs with the 50 artists presented in the ART BOOK. Thus, I ask, “What would the author of such a book aim for?”

This question added to the likeness to the creative process of Warhol, I understand the ART BOOK as a perverse means to reach not only the 15 minutes of fame, but also a way to write the name of the author/editor in the art history. I conclude that Moreschi is a surprising perverse creator/editor and he will surely be successful.

***
Paula Borghi graduated in Visual Arts from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (Faap), part of the group of critics of the Centro Cultural São Paulo and curator of the Red Bull Art Residence. Since 2011, she has carried out the Projecto Multiplo investigation, displayed at spaces such as the MoMA – PS1, in the Contemporary Art Museum in Quito and in the University of Córdoba. She lives and works in São Paulo.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

‘The question that remains: an account of a debate’
Ananda Carvalho

(Text written for the project ART BOOK.)

In August 2013, I attended the ART BOOK debate: readings, appropriations and concepts in contemporary art, an event to advertise this book you have in your hands, held at the Node Center for Curatorial Studies, Berlin. Albert Minter and Sarah Linda Cooper, who were among the guests, reflected on the complexity of the concept of contemporary art, the role of the curator and the production of publications in the same temporal context in which the artists are producing.

German critic and historian Albert Minter, presented a reading of the ART BOOK Encyclopedia based on the published reflections of his book Art of the 21st Century. He considered the themes that characterize the production of contemporary art, relating them to the artists presented in this encyclopedia. Among them, the difficulty in establishing criteria for temporal classification, languages, or “theories”, such as in the work of the painter Edgar Kessler: the object of performance in the self portraits of Malala Ahmed; the reflection on the classification of the works of Arthur Orthof and José dos Reis, the references to the documentation and process by means of impossible projects of Elliot Ford; the dissolution of authorship by the anonymous production of So and So; the idea that anything can become a work of art in the ready-mades of Sarah Glade or the works about ‘nothing’ by the twins Hamona & Hillary, among other examples.

I preferred to account my doctorate research about the curatorial procedures in exhibitions of contemporary art in Brazil. I observed that even if the contemporary art production discusses the problematic concerning the space, the authorship, the participation, the ephemeral and the process – as mentioned by Albert – most of the exhibitions still present a curatorial explanation text (at times, descriptive; other times, hermetic) at the entrance. The truth is that, while researching, I came across very few curatorial notes that deconstructed the traditional exhibition model of the “white cube” and/or the “black box” in the last decade in São Paulo, the Brazilian city with the greatest number of art exhibits.

Last, the American curator Sarah Linda Cooper presented her experience at the Creamier, another type of encyclopedia in which 10 curators of different nationalities selected 100 emerging artists. She discussed her own position as a judge, the criteria for selection, often subjective, and the responsibility of giving visibility to the artists. Sarah ended her talk asking “What are the differences between the published encyclopedias and the great exhibits of contemporary art at the biennials?”

The panel ended with questions about the procedures of the curators in relation to the range of languages of contemporary art. Seizing the opportunity of her question, minutes before the end of the seminar, I questioned the criteria to choose the artists in the ART BOOK encyclopedia. I stated that, up to the moment, I could not understand the reason for the choice of these artists and not others. It caused a sharp discomfort in the audience, especially in the first row, where part of the team who produced the ART BOOK was seated. I did not mind and my question persists. Now, with the encyclopedia published, the reader may voice their opinion.

***
Ananda Carvalho is an art critic, University professor, doctorate student and master in Communication and Semiotic from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). She was a judge at the Temporada de Projetos 2013 at Paço das Artes, attended the residency Ateliê Aberto #5 at Casa Tomada and collaborated at the Canal Contemporâneo, all instutitions of São Paulo.