Daniel Beerstecher

‘A Brazilian Heritage for Daniel Beerstecher’, by Daniela Labra

Brazil, 1808: colonial [rule] came to an end when Portuguese Prince Regent João VI and his court fled to Rio de Janeiro to avoid surrendering to the Napoleonic and Spanish forces that were threatening to take over Portugal. It was thanks to this fact, and therefore nearly accidentally, that various social and institutional advances were brought about in the nascent country, beginning the long and yet unfinished process of constructing modern Brazilian society. The dawn of the 19th century saw the founding of the first bank, the stock exchange, the academy of fine arts and library, among other institutions, in a colony where formal education and the press was still forbidden – thus maintaining the people in a state of ignorance and submission. That time of openings also saw the repeal of a law that prohibited the circulation of foreigners in Brazilian lands, thereby setting off a wave of expeditions by European traveling artists who disembarked in Brazil to explore and document the flora, fauna and local peoples. These expeditions gave rise to a vast production of texts, paintings and drawings, which portrayed previously unknown natural specimens, landscapes, exotic animals and “primitive” human types, such as the “savage cannibals,” and helped to compose the European mindset in regard to the New World, variously described as either a hell or a paradise on earth.

Some of the traveling artists were essential for the development and teaching of the arts in Brazil, as was the case of Jean-Baptiste Debret, who came as a member of the French Mission (1816), and served as a professor on the first faculty of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, in Rio de Janeiro, later becoming its director. During the 15 years he lived in Brazil, Debret portrayed the people, fashions and life of the young city, creating an extensive visual record that now serves as a source for studies about colonial Brazil.

The colonial period theoretically ended with the Proclamation of the Republic of 1889, when Brazil gained full status as a sovereign nation. In terms of artistic production, however, it was not until the 1920s that a group of modernist artists began to confront the French academic model, which was still devoted to realistic paintings of a romantic or epic nature, in accordance to the nearly 100-year-long legacy of the Academy of Fine Arts. Although it involved a rupture, a shift to chromatic visuality and local themes, the first Brazilian modernism was informed by European avant-garde references, and Brazilian art would take several decades to find an original artistic language, produced here, presenting its own unique proposition among the international scene of art and art criticism, which pigeonholed non-Eurocentric art productions as picturesque, exotic, or a bad copy of the Western model. It finally came into its own in the 1950s, when the concretism that had belatedly taken root here was deconstructed and cannibalized by artistic thinking based in Rio de Janeiro, giving rise to neoconcretism. The rest is a long and still recent history.

Today this Republic of continental proportions possesses a painstakingly constructed democracy, and continues to be artistically prolific. Meanwhile, it suffers from acute social problems and widespread political demoralization within a global context of upheaval. Brazil nevertheless continues to represent a cultural hope and an alternative for the world’s environmental balance. The international forecasts at the outset of the 2000s concerning the potential of the BRIC countries as a horizon of prosperity – although there are current signs that point to a breakdown of this outlook – triggered a new wave of Latin American, Asian, African and European immigration, especially in the post-2008 period. This movement brought to Brazil professionals of every sort; and, in the art segment in particular, a reasonable contingent of foreign artists has become established here, taking advantage of the winds of professionalization among the Brazilian art world which have been blowing stronger for more than a decade. One such artist, Daniel Beerstecher, who can also be considered a traveling artist of the 21st century, has encountered an art scene which for a long time now has ranged beyond its picturesque past, possessing a stimulating art history that is still being written. This condition allows the artist to dialogue with the still incomplete destiny of Brazilian modernism, full of cracks and gaps, while immersed in a precarious and makeshift daily life that inevitably affects the making of art focused on the social context.

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In November, 2011, Daniel Beerstecher packed his backpacks and traveled to Brazil for a stint of investigation and work that has extended until today. The artist – whose interest in artistic practice began nearly by chance, during a long trip to Latin America – lives in Rio, where he is developing an ongoing processual and performative work that has naturally expanded to the point of blurring the borders of art and life. Beerstecher’s work, though presented in projects that appear distinct from one another, is driven by a genuine interest in the critical, ironic and relational possibilities engendered by his artistic proposals. This focus was evinced in his exhibition Deslocamentos [Displacements] (2014), held at Galeria da Funarte in São Paulo, which also transformed the gallery into a corner bar that brought people together and operated as an interpretation and translation of the Brazilian context in which Daniel lives and works.

In a general way, his projects are characterized by his practice of setting out on long overland hikes and ramblings as an investigative method, and by frequently inventing absurd contexts that contrast symbols of Western culture with pristine nature, thus subtly satirizing man’s romantic and mortal efforts to dominate the earth by force. These processes and questions are clearly posed, for example, in Hugo Boss/Sarek (2005), Sand am Meer (2007), Outdoor-Mobil and in the Land-Sailor saga (2012–2014). While his meticulously planned overland ramblings and performative acts are the hallmark of his overall work, it should be noted that the artist’s persistence, no matter how strange and difficult the goal may be, is not motivated by a direct desire to experience hardships or exhaustion. Although he suffers the stresses of his tasks, Beerstecher maintains a rational and distanced approach to the hardships they entail, insofar as emotional or sentimental data are irrelevant.

The common thread running through his work is an intuitive ethnographic and anthropological interest, in the sense of not their being based on academic studies or classical training in these areas. While he produces his art in Brazil, the artist is recognized as a foreigner and shows no desire to mimic the local culture, remaining aware of the sort of different reception that his artistic research has in Germany and here. It is curious to note in his talk as an artist how he takes advantage of the opposite features of the cultures of the two countries, without, however, looking down at either of them, surfing in the sand to encounter the proper blend of German perfectionism and planning mixed with Brazilian unpredictability.

Beerstecher moreover positions himself as a critical observer when he creates fictional situations interwoven with reality that approximate his work with that of the playwright or screenplay writer who invents stories based on real facts. For being circumscribed within the field of contemporary art, where the mingling of art and life can be extremely radical, the artist’s fictions are closer to the real than to non-documentary cinema or theater – where representation still predominates and is sometimes submitted to artistic language and form.

By putting Beerstecher’s work in perspective within the context of the developments of an artistic language in Brazil, without any historical commitments, we can attempt to approximate his rambling researches with the heritage left by our modernist avant-garde movements, whose first artistic walks took place in the 1920s, influencing a legacy in literature and the visual arts. It was only in the late 1950s, however, with the so-called neoconcrete movement, that walking as a process of formal questioning and creation arose in this country. Resuming the initial tone of this text where we ventured to take a brief stroll through the history of Brazilian art to locate the practice of this traveling artist of ours, it should be noticed that neoconcretism arose among artists who understood constructivism as a concept to be softened and appropriated. Amidst those discussions there arose in Brazil a multidisciplinary artistic avant-garde that used walking as a creative resource, making its own discourses and relational practices emerge in the visual arts during the 1960s.

As a creative trigger in the production of Brazilian contemporary art, walking is currently part of the practice of various important artists of different generations, such as the originally Portuguese artist now living in Brazil Artur Barrio (1945), Rio de Janeiro artist Ducha (1977) and Minas Gerais artist Paulo Nazareth (1977). They share in common their way of understanding life as an existential and political work of art, involved in the construction of personal discourses of criticism and ways of thinking about art. As in Daniel’s work, the artistic projects of the Brazilians require processes related to walking, traveling, or letting time pass as acts of resistance. These processes normally give rise to different sorts of diaries: a blank notebook of Barrio’s urban strolls, the reports and photos of investigations concerning the relations between man, capital and nature of artist/climber Ducha, or the photographs and objects that document Paulo Nazareth’s journey on foot through the American continent, gathering mud on his semi-barefoot multiracial feet.

Being perhaps more ironic than his Brazilian colleagues, and more concerned about the technical resources and finishing touches his work requires, Daniel Beerstecher ends up presenting diaries that can take the form of films, collages, photographs, or even a book. The outcome of intense editing, these diaries/reports narrate the situation proposed by the artist while operating as a large, ongoing series, made up of chapters or tomes of a collection of unfinished records, concerning experiences yet to take place.

To sketch out a larger context of the practice of walking in art, we could begin with Baudelaire, continue through the dadaists, situationists, fluxus artists, tropicalism, the artist collectives at the beginning of the 21st century, and go on to cite artists now active in the global contemporary art scene, among so many other movements and names. But this stroll must remain for another opportunity. For now, we will let Daniel Beerstecher return to persistently walk through the world, rubbing shoulders with the ordinary rhythms of life; he travels after goals that arise like absurd ideas, yet nonetheless charged with the faith of being achievable. Always in search of new routes, this artist does not take vacations.

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Daniela Labra
An art critic and independent curator, Daniela Labra holds a PhD in art history and criticism, and a post-doctorate in communication technologies and aesthetics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Born in Chile in 1974, she now lives in Rio de Janeiro.

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‘Daniel The Wanderer’, by Pedro Butcher

In the text “Le style et le geste” [“Style and Gesture”], published in the March, 2013 issue of Cahiers du Cinema, Stéphane Delorme argues that it is gesture rather than style that defines a cinematic auteur. “When Gus Van Sant made Promised Land, we did not recognize the style of Gerry or Elephant in it, and yet they were undoubtedly the work of the same author. Van Sant travels the same path as (Francis Ford) Coppola, who shot two very similar films during a single year in radically opposite styles (Rumble Fish and The Outsiders). What do these two filmmakers have in common? A gesture that signifies being close enough to their subjects to the point of molding itself to them”.

In the inevitable process of “cubby-holing” according to which theory classifies creation, Daniel Beerstecher is not a “cinéaste” but a visual artist who works with so-called “expanded cinema”. But the term “gesture” (borrowed from Delorme’s defense of auteur cinema) fits like a glove to define his art. Daniel’s works consist of interferences upon the surface of reality and is based on the idea of displacement – not just physical displacement but a displacement of meaning as well.

The choice of the specific passage that alludes to Gerry is not a random one. In it, Gus Van Sant films two actors (Casey Affleck and Matt Damon) on long walks through the desert. Daniel walks in almost all of his works. “Hugo Boss/Sarek” (2005), for instance, is the photographic record of a ten-day trek through Sweden’s Sarek National Park. In “Sand and Meer” (2010), he carried a surfboard across a desert. In “Wie Ich Meinem Vogel Die Welt Erkläre” (“How Do I Explain the World to My Bird”), he starts out from São Paulo’s city centre and eventually arrives at an Indian reservation on the coast of that state, all the while carrying a caged bird on his back.

Daniel Beerstecher was born in Stuttgart in 1979. His taste for travel came about much earlier than his taste for art. As a child, he belonged to a troop of boy scouts inspired by the European tradition of the travelling journeymen – one that dates back to the Middle Ages and survives in Germany to this day. According to this tradition, after they finished their apprenticeships and prior to mastering their crafts, they would set off on journeys in which they would exchange work for food and lodging even as they amassed professional and life experiences. “During the holidays, I was always travelling with my boy scout friends in much the same spirit”, he recalls.

His taste for art emerged much later – more of an intuition than a certainty and, not by chance, during one of the many travels he undertook before deciding “finding his way in life”. As a schoolboy, for instance, he hitchhiked to Morocco with two hundred Euros in his pocket, occasionally sleeping in forests or under bridges. After graduating from university, Daniel spent three months traveling across Latin America, from Santiago de Chile to Mexico, where he did volunteer work in an orphanage. Following that, he explored Central America, having spent a total of two years away from Germany (from 2000 to 2002).

One day, while diving in the Caribbean, he came upon a shell and made a small sculpture with it. “In that moment I realized that I had to make art – don’t ask me why, exactly. I’d never felt any connection with art before. But then and there I felt that art was a path to express what I was feeling”. In that moment, Daniel says he still knew nothing about modern art and was considering the possibility of becoming a sculptor.

Back in Germany, he showed a few of his drawings to a college professor who recommended that he spend a year working as an assistant to a group of artists. During that time, he put together a portfolio that was accepted by the university. “During my first year, I held on to the idea of making sculpture, but I was never satisfied with abstract, purely formal things. I realized that the way out was making art with what I like to do: travel”.

Thus, Daniel developed two projects. In the first one, he spent ten days hitchhiking aimlessly and wearing a hidden microphone. He would always answer questions about his destination with the same reply: “That’s exactly where I’m going”. “Remarkably, from truck drivers to millionaires driving Porsches, most anyone in Germany will stop to give you a ride”. He stockpiled forty hours worth of stories, from those of the environmental activist who participated in a protest against Shell oil to the spiel of the superstar architect who had just finished designing an important project in London. Subsequently, he shot footage from a moving car and added the recorded audio. Those people remained unidentified, and the stories were told in fragments. “It was my first work, quite well received at the university, and it gave me the confidence I needed to proceed with similar projects.”

For the second project, Daniel traveled from the North to the South of Germany (roughly 1,2 thousand kilometers), likewise equipped with an audio recording device – the idea being to travel light and go from door to door, asking for food or assistance. He confesses that, at the time, he had a preconceived notion that he would face every manner of difficulty with German standoffishness, but it turned out to be precisely that trip which radically altered his perception. “I never once had to ask for anything. I met people who invited me into their homes, who offered me shelter, kept my backpack full”. Once again, Daniel recorded conversations and kept a diary of everything that happened. Later on, he recreated some of those encounters with actors who are heard but never seen.

In 2005, Daniel donned a Hugo Boss suit purchased for roughly one thousand Euros and returned to Sweden’s Sarek National Park, which he has already visited during his teenage years – “one of the most inhospitable places in Europe, where there aren’t any trails or anything”. His ten-day trek through the park while wearing that same suit were photographed and later organized in a slide show titled “Hugo Boss/Sarek”. Until then, Daniel’s works had more closely resembled documentaries. This one already reflects another type of movement – one in which the performer is the artist himself and someone else (or a team) records his action.

His next work, “50°60’59,50″N / 8°40’35,30″O” (2007), was his first video performance. Daniel checked in to a Hilton hotel and, once he had settled in to his room, he set up a camper’s tent on real grass and vegetation spread throughout the entire location. Daniel spent the night in his tent. “I said I’d be giving an interview and requested permission to film, in order to be able to record my arrival at the hotel. But the hotel didn’t know what I was going to do. Everything I needed to transform the space was packed into a suitcase”.

Whereas that video performance contained no displacement in any literal sense, it still depicted the idea of travel (the hotel, the suitcases) and, especially, the displacement of meanings. The artist brings nature (or the wild) into the urban setting by radically reconfiguring such spaces. To this end. he first works in a more conscious manner with the tools of film language: long shots to show the assembly of the tent inside the room; close-ups during night scenes in which the setting morphs into a forest. The same is true of his use of sound – recorded forest noises further help to create the environment.

The operation of displacing meanings becomes even more powerful in “Barbecue” (2010), the idea for which took shape when the artist and a girlfriend found themselves standing before pastures and soy plantations during a trip to the Brazilian state of Rondônia. “Meat and soy are commodities, export products. It was there, for the first time, that I understood how a given lifestyle affects different regions”. In this video, Daniel climbs an enormous tree and, among its highest branches, sets up a barbecue grill upon which he grills pieces of beef.

The result is simultaneously critical and celebratory, insofar as it records the moment in which Daniel bids farewell to the life of a carnivore and savors his last pieces of meat before embracing a vegetarian diet.

That same year, Daniel made “Sand and Meer”, which, among his work, most closely resembles a traditional film, produced with support from a German film school. “As an art student, I was entitled to one project with them. I proposed this one and they approved it. So I was able to rely on a budget and the school’s technical possibilities, such as good cameras and equipment”. In it, the artist crosses the Moroccan desert carrying a surfboard. A first radical change of style also becomes evident. The documentary aspect is entirely abandoned. We know nothing of how the artist arrived there, how he prepared for the crossing, what he did during breaks between shoots. The (now widescreen) image is marked by mostly long shot framing that emphasizes man’s smallness in face of the forbidding vastness of the landscape, and lush music flirts with an epic tone (“Lawrence of Arabia” inevitably comes to mind).

But although the style changes, the gesture does not. “Sand and Meer” is a displaced epic, empty of action. An absurdist tone is emphasized in the image of the surfer who travels the desert before dunes that resemble large, static waves that cannot possibly be surfed; irony emerges in the language that contrasts the lushness of the image and the minimalism of the situation.

“In the beginning, the point was to retain a documentary aspect, but we wound up editing out everything except the person who walks, and making use of all the tools of film language – camera movements, editing and music”. Daniel recalls that it was in preparation for this work that he first made use of collage – a technique that was to become essential to his creative process. “From that moment on, collage took on great importance for me. When you bring two things together, you create a new one”.

Displacement, absurdity, criticism and irony come together even more forcefully in “How Do I Explain the World to My Bird”. The title is a tribute to “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” (1965), by Joseph Beuys, a pioneer of expanded art. Made when Daniel was awarded a yearlong film scholarship to the Universidade de São Paulo, the video records a trek that begins in São Paulo’s city centre, continues through the city’s outskirts and finally arrives at an Indian reservation on the state’s coastline. Ironically, on his back, the caged bird covers a distance it can travel by flying. “We covered more or less 96 kilometers in three and a half days, recorded and edited down to a fourteen minute video. One sees every manner of thing on this march: buildings in the city centre, suburban houses, industrial areas, favelas, the Atlantic rainforest, and a native Indian village. It’s incredible how one can find all of this at brief intervals in Brazil. You can see its flaws and its beauties, good things and absolutely awful things, and it helps us to better understand how systems work, how capitalism functions”.

Again, a change of style, but not of gesture. As his work progresses, the aspect of performance has been underscored in Daniel’s work – a performance less linked to what we are used to seeing today (the live presence of the artist, with audiovisual documentation as accessory), and much more linked to the film tradition of cinema’s author-director performers (such as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Jacques Tati). It is a performance conceived for the camera, one in which the elements of audiovisual grammar are central – if only because that would be the only possible way for Daniel to realize that intuitive union that marked the beginning of his work (i.e., to ascribe an artistic connotation to travel). Only the camera is able to carry the spectator away on the journeys he proposes.

His most recent undertaking resembles the cinema of his fellow countryman Werner Herzog. As in “Fitzcarraldo”, in which we see the image of a huge boat being pulled uphill, “Land Sailor – The Conquest of Uselessness” shows a boat that crosses part of Argentina – from Patagonia to Buenos Aires – by land.

At once romantic and modern, Daniel Beerstecher’s art updates the age-old sentiment of “wanderlust”, which is no more than curiosity about things and people, an irrepressible desire to explore the world, and brings it to the core of the matter contemporary art. Here, travel is the polar opposite of tourism. It is a gesture that withdraws things and ideas from their places in order to reveal the absurdity of the world and multiply its meanings.

[English translation by Steve Berg]

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Pedro Butscher (born 1971 in Rio de Janeiro) is a journalist and film critic. He has contributed to several newspapers and magazines, including Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinemascope. He is now working on his doctorate at the Federal Fluminense University.