Notes on the Human Dimension in Art
by Fernanda Lopes, 2011
Solo Exhibition “Construção”, 2011
Paço das Artes
In one room, paintings of different sizes are scattered across the walls at random, at different heights, covering nearly the entire surface from floor to ceiling. In them, we see basic geometric shapes, such as squares, rectangles, circles, crosses, and triangles. One of these paintings draws attention: a black square on a white background, placed in a corner, in the upper part of the room. It was at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings: 0.10, held in December 1915 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that Malevich first showed one of his most famous works: Black Square. During one of my visits to Felippe Moraes’s studio, the artist showed me this image, pointing out exactly where that painting had been placed. Positioned where the Russian Orthodox Church traditionally places its religious icons, the work generated debate. The shape was chosen by the creator of Suprematism (a Russian abstract art movement founded around 1913) because it could not be found in nature, and was therefore not a representation of it. It was, then, a form constructed by man, by artistic making. Influenced by Constructivism, Suprematism was born at a moment of construction of the socialist world and of strong faith in the individual’s – including the artist’s – capacity to change the world.
According to Giulio Carlo Argan: “What Malevich proposes, also in keeping with the ongoing social and political revolution (although its proponents declared themselves realists and fought against ‘abstractionism’), is a radical transformation, without doubt, though not ideologically finalized. The true revolution is not the replacement of one decadent conception of the world with a new one: it is a world stripped of objects, notions, past and future, a radical transformation in which object and subject are equally reduced to ‘zero degree.’ Hence the reasons for his dissent from a revolutionary movement that transforms one order to establish another, and that produces other objects, even if for the people. For Malevich, in the Suprematist period, the painting is not an object, but a mental instrument, a structure, a sign, that defines existence as an absolute equation between the inner and outer world.”1 (free translation) In both Malevich and Felippe Moraes, when one speaks of spirituality, one speaks of the relationship between Man and the external world. Both share a belief in Man’s capacity for action and creation, and therefore in his capacity to intervene directly in the world, without the mediation of institutions, such as religion (a system of codes of conduct like so many others).
Lygia Clark, heir to the constructive tradition, highlights in texts from 1965 this spiritual dimension of the public’s participation in the field of art: “I have been reflecting on the parallel that exists between religious and artistic evolution. From ancient art to the art of today, which calls for the spectator’s participation, the psychic distance between subject and object has not ceased to diminish, to the point where today they merge into one another. Hence, the Caminhando. Religion, in turn, underwent the same progressive fusion. We moved from God the Father, all-powerful, to Christ, who has a human dimension. The same happened with Greek religion, in which Olympus gradually draws closer to Man, until it takes on his physical appearance. With Nietzsche, all of Man’s religious projections outward are rejected, religious feeling turns inward: Man is divine. The same occurs in art: the proposition, previously perceived by the spectator as external to him, enclosed in a strange object, is now lived as part of himself, as fusion. Every Man is a creator.”2 “Now, the common Man begins to reach the position of the artist. Man has never been so close to his fullness: he no longer has metaphysical excuses. He no longer has anything onto which he can project himself. He is free from irresponsibility. He can no longer even refuse to be whole. Since no transference is possible anymore, all that is left to him is to live the present, art without art, as a new reality.”3 (The two Lygia Clark quotations above are free translations.)
Fernanda Lopes
September 2011
1 ARGAN, Giulio Carlo. Arte Moderna. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. (pages 324–5)
2 CLARK, Lygia. Arte, Religiosidade, Tempo-espaço, 1965. In: http://www.lygiaclark.org.br/arquivo_detPT.asp?idarquivo=23
3 CLARK, Lygia. Um mito moderno: o instante como nostalgia do Cosmos, 1965. In: http://www.lygiaclark.org.br/arquivo_detPT.asp?idarquivo=22
Originally published in the folder for the Paço das Artes 2011 Projects Season, São Paulo.