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Arnulf Rainer
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other florae
10/18 - 11/14/2008
Curated by José Roca
opening: 18.10.2008, 11h>15h
exposição/exhibition
Artists:
alberto baraya
arnulf rainer
brígida baltar
irit hemmo
jaime tarazona
jan fabre
johanna calle
juan manuel echavarría
marcos chaves
maría fernanda cardoso
mark dion
miler lagos
robert williams
roxy paine
sanna kannisto
The history of Brazil and of Latin America in general is marked by the figure of the voyager - a mix of an artist and a scientist - who has charted the territory and classified its fauna and flora. The objective discourse of science has often hid the ideological implications and the political motivations that have ended up mapping the colonies and cataloging their natural resources, so paving the way for their following exploration. Today, this figure is under critical scrutiny by many artists who confront new (or already well known) territories with a profound awareness of the intrinsical limitations that restrict every extraneous regard willing to set about in the fieldwork. Other Florae gathers artists who look to the territory with attitudes ranging from ironical distancing to genuine fascination and from the will to naturalize the "exotic" by means of exposing the contingent of this category to the resolution of searching the everyday for the uncommon. The tensions between the natural and its cultural assessment, the alternative forms of classification and the issues of territory are a few of the topics elaborated by the artists in this exhibition.
Many historians say that the New World's real discovery started in 18th Century, when geographers, cartographers, geologists, botanists and zoologists came to America in order to catalogue the territory and its natural resources. These scientists, belonging to the payroll of colonial European powers, had a very clear political and economical agenda thrilling their search for knowledge. Mapping the territory also meant occupying it and dominating it. Just as their forerunners who used to hold either the cross or the sword, these wayfarers arrived armed with the Truth, although this truth was supported by objective observation or at least seemed to be so: the neutral and uninterested discourse of Science. The scientist voyagers traveled across the territory, "discovering" it, classifying it and most of all assigning names to things that the indigenous population already knew and used for generations. In this sense, the appropriation of the American botanical riches was probably the biggest case of biological robbery ever perpetrated. The voyagers also instilled in the local populations their knowledge on the superiority of certain races, stimulating them to abandon uncivilized practices and instructing them on the limitations inherent to life in certain places - the Geographical Determinism or the incapability of the inhabitants of tropical climates to develop "sophisticated" societies. The observations of the voyagers have served to rouse a social and political system based on exclusion, racism and privilege, establishing a pyramidal system of values in which the apex represented European race, religion and cultural values, resting over a basis formed by Native Americans, the black and the mixed-blood, whose knowledges were always thoroughly underrated. This form of stratification relying from its origins on scientific evidence still remains today and is at the basis of social, racial and economical conflicts in contemporary Latin America, either in hidden violence or in open confrontations.
For more than one decade, Alberto Baraya have been working on the deconstruction of the figure of the voyager - and consequently of the discourse of science. In the project Herbario de plantas artificiales (2003-2008), Baraya dislocates the botanist naturalist, parodies their practices and questions the objectivity of their methods. Baraya's Herbario is a task as enormous and absurd as Linnaeus': to classify every and each one of the artificial plants he receives from every corner of the world. Many of these specimens made of plastic, fabric or paper were stolen from restaurants, waiting rooms or private houses, so reproducing the ethical nature of the act of "collecting" realized by the botanist voyagers. In the last years, Baraya took his project a step ahead literally entering the territory, just as European and American explorers did in the 18th and in the 19th Centuries, following their routes and collecting artificial plants on the way. Baraya has noticed also that plants and flowers are among the favorite motives of tattoo fans, and has so started to register in photography these occurrences of botanical specimens on the surface of human bodies. At the same time, Baraya has rescued historical images in archives and published small catalogues to be distributed in tattoo shops, so that tattoo artists may offer them to their clients. Spreading these images through the social tissue Baraya literally carries on his project of questioning scientific knowledge and its vehicles of dissemination.
One of the problems faced by voyaging botanists was how to picture adequately the specimens they found, as plants, flowers and fruits could not stand the long journey until Europe, where they would arrive either dried or putrefied. Thus appears the botanical plate, a cultural construct different from reality, inasmuch as it often tells more than the plant itself; a plate may present, for instance, a flower and a fruit at the same time, or different stages of the development of a plant that in its natural state would never coincide in a same moment. The Finnish artist Sanna Kannisto, who has joined botanical expeditions to rainforests in Costa Rica, Brazil and Equador, projected an appliance that allows her to improvise a photographic studio inside the forest, settled in situ around the plant, so that it is not necessary to remove it from its natural site. These pictures' neutral background makes that the colours and textures of plants and animals look almost unreal, just as it presents them without any mediation and so closing the breach between experience and representation. In the video Bee Studies: Orchid Bee Males (2004), also realized in the forest, two different species of bees fight for a small dish filled with the essence of a certain orchid. The struggle between individuals of the same species becomes tougher after the arrival in such a precarious territory of a bigger bee of other species, with the result of an interesting dynamics between size and force in the dispute for the control of the territory.
Since the end of the 50's, the Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer intervenes in several images - ranging from self-portraits to botanical plates, including reproductions of masterpieces of classical and contemporary works of art - with intense strokes of oil tubes in a sort of automatic gestural writing, almost completely obliterating the subjacent image. The interest for the tension between life and death, the spiritual and the physical and especially the religion with its emphasis on sacrifice and redemption is remarkable in Rainer's whole work. Among the images submitted to this sort of intervention is the Palmarium by Von Martius, one of the most important European explorers who traveled in Brazil, as well as European botanical plates from the 18th and the 19th centuries. Each of these plates describing in detail a different species was repainted with Rainer's obsessive strokes. The marks that blur the plates may be seen as the tension between reason and unconscious, the rational and the gestural, nature and culture.
The classifying action of the Enlightenment was as enlightening as obnubilating. The inclusion of a native species in the universal canon of Botanics, its "discovery", was followed by the germ of its gradual disappearance inasmuch as it paved the way for its further exploration by the colonial powers. This equation Botanics=death also underlies the work by the Colombian artists María Fernanda Cardoso and Juan Manuel Echavarría. In Christian tradition, flowers were part of the rites of mourning, usually in the form of garlands which were sent as a posthumous offering to the family of the deceased person. In the mural installation Cementerio, Jardín Vertical (1992-2008), Cardoso uses plastic flowers to compose a beautiful memorial alluding to the funerary crypts of Bogotá's Central Cemetery. The title of Juan Manuel Echevarría's series Corte de Florero (1997) alludes to the macabre practice of Colombian rural guerrillas in the 50's of cutting their victims' corpses according to codified patterns: corte de flanela (according to which the head should be cut off from the neck); corte de gravata (in which the tongue was exposed through a slit opened in the victim's neck); corte de florero (substituting arms and legs for the head), and so on. It is unconceivable that such an extremely barbarous act should follow an aesthetic dimension, showing the huge ability of dehumanizing the victim until it becomes an object. Echavarría photographs human bones that he assembles in order to look like flowers; these pictures with titles in Latin take the form of botanical plates suggesting the impossibility of setting apart science, religion and war in the European colonizing venture in America. The video Guerra y pá (2004) shows that which in a first glance looks like a Catholic cross and later reveals itself as a perch, a precarious territory under dispute by parrots. Echavarría patiently trained the birds to say always one only word: war or peace, respectively. Full of humor and irony, the video shows the struggle for space between individuals of a same species and so is a metaphor of the contemporary situation in which intolerance and dogmatism are on the basis of fratricidal confronts around the world.
Jan Fabre uses several organic materials (such as beetles, dried animals and skulls) in his artistic works. These are, more than sculptures, dramaturgies of the regard, as he stated himself. Originating in the theatre, Fabre's work is always a mise en scène, a staging that alters the reading of History. Gravetomb (2001) is an installation formed by swords, crosses and skulls. In the diagram of Conquest, the relations between acculturation, evangelization and death are indissoluble. In the appropriation of the territory at all costs, the cross and the sword have always taken turns. The beetle-covered skulls, like iridescent trophies, hold in their mouths specimens of fauna as a posthumous offering to the European civilizing action in the so-called New World.
Mark Dion has reflected on the nature of the work of archeologists, anthropologists, ornithologists, botanists and specialists in general whose work is to discover, extract, analyze and interpret the alterity or "the otherness". His journeys, expeditions and projects take possession of the scientific rhetoric, and at times of its methods as well, which he uses with attitudes ranging from mimesis to parody, including the ironical distancing.
One of the first biologic robberies of history was probably the smuggling of rubber trees by the English from Brazil to Malaysia, where they established industrialized plantations that could produce more latex at lower prices and so breaking Brazil's then flowering latex industry. Part of the Amazon's post-colonial history is related to this historical circumstance. In The Seed Smuggler's Luggage (2008), Dion mentions this historical fact, which cannot be separated from the current debate on the appropriation of species by transnational biotechnological enterprises, synthetic and transgenic seeds. On the other hand, the delicate drawings by Johanna Calle show a subtle woof of lines the resemble the texture of skin as it may be seen under a microscope. In reality, it is the enlarged surface of a leaf found in the natural park of Amacayacu, near Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon. The drawing is realized with the use of writing as a trace; the text is extracted from a report on the influence on a molecular level of the Glifosato, a chemical substance used to destroy illicit harvests in Colombia, with harmful side effects for the ecosystem bordering the plantations of cocaine and poppies. The drawings show clusters of dots, which for Calle represent fungi. The possibility of implementing a biological control with the fungus Fusarium is under studies as an alternative to fumigation. So far, tests have been done only in laboratory, not on the natural environment; if this alternative becomes effective in the event, the effects may be devastating, doubtlessly much worse than those generated nowadays by defoliation with chemical agents. This ethical crossroads marks the ongoing debate on the role to be played by botanical research in the solution of problems with an economic motivation, the consumption and the traffic of narcotics, whose solution should be found in a political level. The image of the fungus is also present in the work Polypore Slab, by the North-American artist Roxy Paine. In his hyperrealistic representations of nature, realized with resin, acrylic and other industrial materials, Paine focus on the natural aspect that acquires an extraordinary visual force after it is extracted from its original surroundings and is later exhibited in the context of a neutral space. In some cases, this contemporary naturalist's "subjects of study" are different types of fungus, parasites with which we keep an ambiguous relationship: some are beneficial, others are used as psychotropics. In other works, Paine concentrates on a farmed area - a fragment of land with plants and bushes - where he establishes oppositions between the human ordered nature and the apparent chaos - which corresponds to the natural order.
Many voyagers from the 18th century spent great parts of their lives classifying the material they have collected in the colonies, in order to publish their observations and studies in the form of illustrated books. The literature of voyage, extremely popular in 19th century, was the source of inspiration and stimulus for further expeditions, and books illustrated with engravings were the vehicles for the dissemination of this knowledge. Today, the interest for exotic nature finds in travel magazines and publications like the National Geographic the necessary information on distant lands and natural resources, making possible for one to acquire knowledge without having to travel. Irit Hemmo makes collages with images of nature extracted from gardening, travel and fashion magazines, with which she creates contemporary botanical plates, authentic fragments of forest where innumerable species coexist without any type of order. Jaime Tarazona and Miler Lagos referred to the historical engraving from different perspectives. Tarazona observes the voyagers' plates and, instead of focusing the attention on the composition's main subject, directs his regard to the background, where usually is the natural landscape. After he enlarges these fragments until they reach enormous dimensions, the landscape and the sky become mere lines, in an abstraction, stressing the way leading to the idea of the forest as an idea, a generic territory in occupying the site of a specific place. On the other hand, Miler Lagos reestablishes the relation between the paper's natural origin, the tree and its cultural elaboration. Lagos gathers pictures, magazines or newspapers, heaps them one over another so as to form piles and then sculpture them using a sander. The edges burn with the friction and so take up again the smell and the appearance of wood. For Other Florae, Lagos created a floss silk tree, a species present throughout America and sacred for many cultures. Because it may not be transformed in wood for commercial use, the floss silk tree often appears isolated in the middle of a forest, as the last bulwark signaling the resistance of a nature that is reluctant to die in spite of the uncontrolled deforestation.
Brígida Baltar has played in the past the role of a voyager, collecting the inapprehensible: the mist, the fog, the humidity, the spirit of a moment. These impossible collections are not so distant from the pretension of capturing the world by means of its fragments. Just as the fog, American botanical species have resisted to the appropriation by withering and diminishing on the way to their final destinies in Europe. In more recent works, Baltar uses the dust of the bricks from her own house to compose big mural drawings of forests and bushes, reestablishing, as in the case of Miler Lagos, a relation between the culturally elaborated material (brick/house) and its natural origin in the landscape. In her series Acordos (2008), Marcos Chaves also establishes this tension between nature and culture registering in urban parks the way the forest covers the urbanization, crossing metal bars and breaking the concrete floor, entering through cracks and claiming the territory for itself again.
José Roca, 2008. |
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