Not everyone looking at the baby behind the glass – at this mixture of babies that nurseries coldly turn out to be – is aware of this other clic! in the world, something more than just this little spit of Nature that babies usually are.

And when they roll their eyes, still grey and half-blind, even if they can hardly see anything (and don’t even know how to relate to the little they can see), they minimally flash one more look that will in some way carry forward human curiosities and suspicions about the world.                                              

Prologue, in O Performer. Fabio Morais (ed.), 2009

Object-book, inkjet on paper and chess piece (the King). Circulation of 100 copies.

I received a request to write a critical text on a series of performances executed by the Performer on the streets of São Paulo and Paris, at his home, on Roman stages, in museums and commercial galleries. The transcriptions of the performances are available only in text form – no images – made of cut vinyl adhesives pasted onto panels in contemporary art institutions. These transcriptions function as instructions for the public to enact the performances wherever and however they see fit.

There are no images, because the Performer understands that we always use language to frame any notion of the world that is offered to us (or conquered). To that popular proverb, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, the Performer, applying the vinyl on display, would say: that´s a lie. Images (photos, videos, sculptures, objects, performance documentation, phenomenology, fruition of the work, the gaze) are always text. Fiction.   

Faced with this fact, I offered to create a drawing interpreting this artist’s work, so that the article to be published in a visual arts magazine would have at least one image (in order to save the content of the magazine; or contemporary art, even). But Clarissa Diniz and Ana Luiza Lima from the publication’s editorial team, replied:

-- Daniela, you can’t draw. Concentrate on the world of letters. Make do with what you’ve got.

Insecure, I proposed a conversation with the Performer at Café Suplicy, in the neighbourhood of Jardins in São Paulo, in an attempt to emulate the meeting between Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier and Hans Ulrich Obrist at Café Select in Paris, in 1993, where they elaborated the curatorial proposal of do it.

Just a parenthesis. do it is an exhibition which, according to the curator, “observes the effects of translation of a work of art as it moves in and out of various permutations of language”[1], because what matters to him, as well as to Boltanski and to Lavier, is the notion of interpretation as an artistic principle.  Still posted on the site e-flux.com, it lists individual instructions prepared by several artists to be carried out by the participating-reader anywhere in the world. Later, images of these actions may be posted on the site, which also includes the do it TV, where some artists from the exhibition give video-based instructions to perform the action.  Yoko Ono suggests us to stage a flight taking off from the top of a ladder; Michelangelo Pistoletto instructs us to create a sculpture (a ball) out of the day’s newspapers and roll it around the streets of Vienna, in his case, but it could also be in João Pessoa, for example.  Some European museums participated in the project giving shelter to some of these artistic instructions. However, at the end of the program, the curator demands that the results be destroyed in order to prevent the objects from being fetishicized. In other words, the project only exists in the immaterial world of the web, a world subscribed by HTML texts. Close parenthesis.  

The Performer suggested we think about elsewhere because the unexpected often happens in the elitist São Paulo neighborhoods and he wouldn’t be able to send me a million cellphone text messages to guarantee the meeting, as the wording of these texts is coarse and hasty.    

-- Indeed, they are. In my opinion, they are effective only in the case of you wanting to end a love relationship bereft of desire and of vulnerability to the other; when you realize you are acting as an accessory to the anesthetized composition of your partner’s self project.  Since being vulnerable to the other means activating the capacity of sensibility, a message like “I don’t luv u anymore. Bye. Xox” is one of the most well-prepared types of communication of the automated neoliberal insensitivity that was developed in the lives and minds of individuals transitioning from the twentieth to the twenty-first Century.  

-- But I´m black, chocolate. And I believe that nowadays, the seven stars are aligned in Scorpio as they were on the day of the Hiroshima bomb. My gods are babies’ heads without hoods. The moment in which we live is a moment of great fear and no desire, or rather, a calculated desire about to feed the sustainability of the economy of desire.  The big difference between the twentieth and the twenty-first Centuries is that in the twentieth we were immortal, we felt immortal: we died for the revolution, for utopia, for passion, for love; now, we die from the fear of dying, which is a more restrained type of immortality, more botox, more cocaine.  But why show contempt for the living? And encourage reactive desires?  Life is not hollow like the hood of a baby with no head.  One of the most evil and at the same time most redemptory things that ever occurred to me was that of imagining Sisyphus – from Camus, not from the myth – happy.     

PS: my first idea of offering a picture to the editorial team as a critical text was to send an image created on my cell phone illustrating this literary artist’s work via bluetooth to the magazine’s computer, because I really can’t draw.  But I was strangely embarrassed to do so, remembering the Performer’s affirmation that we should not get used to needing the things that the capital artificially forces us to need. He further emphasized that the meeting between the trio at Café Select in Paris is a lie; that it was just a catchphrase to introduce the concept for do it. However hard you try for a “radical experimentation of concepts emphasizing the free interpretation that head towards freedom”[2], the paradigm of contemporary art in Western Europe, especially the critical, still insists on staying in Montmartre.  I agreed, because it seems inconsistent to demand the destruction of the object in the name of the non-fetishization of art (or to demand anything else, for that matter) and reach towards freedom at the same time.  

-- However, in the case of consumer freedom, Visa and Mastercard offer different types of demands, tailored to each type of fetish under the notion of freedom, according to each type of consumer profile.  

-- Politics is the pits. And keep criticism away from poetry!  

We ended up meeting in a pizza parlor on the corner of Fernando Pessoa and Alberto Caieiro, on the outskirts of São Paulo. He told me that his series came up after watching the entire collection of performances at the Centre George Pompidou, in Paris, when he was living there to complete an art residency, in 2005. He watched everything and, to his surprise, he was deeply disappointed by the images from the records of performances by Marina Abramovich, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and all the others.  As far as he is concerned, the images crushed the proposals and softened the impact they had on him when he first read the description of these performances.

The pictures emit a bizarre and well-known problematic notion of "truth", that this really happened, in that way. Reading, however, provides a verisimilar reality, where one is able to disclose what is true in fiction. The claim to hold an absolute truth is the source of all violence, says Muniz Sodré.  And, perhaps, images created with analog, electronic and digital devices, even if experimental, are still affirmations of a certain truth, documented or enacted, by the media or by art, it doesn’t matter. Are pictures tools for building layers that construct, mislead or fictionalize reality?

 --Difficult question this one – a true clic!  

 -- Definitely. In fact, nowadays the real ceases to exist, but the use we make of the real create a chain of individual microrealities, whose desires, aspirations and thoughts feed cognitive or cultural, informational or even neoliberal capitalism (whatever you want to call it).

-- But I agree that life is good. Although it’s just the tails; the heads are empty (I’m flipping the coin).  

--  I’ve  had enough of philosophy! This is all an anti-accident, like a rhyme.

-- Oh, baby, are you sad? Has your other half dumped you?  

-- Well, it’s not like that...

We ordered another pizza, this time half ham and cheese, half anchovies and two more beers. Then the Performer related the simple equation of his project: “Fiction + the willingness to subvert language + humor + pull the rug from under the feet of the reader + the territory of truth that exists in fiction = ?. This ‘?’ really is a mystery. I guess my relation with art is and always will be a little of dilettantism and fun. Maybe it was André Gide who created the concept of a cliff: texts, novels, poems that take the readers along, and suddenly leave them not alone on a pathway, but throw them off a cliff. I like that idea. It is almost the same as pulling out the rug. It is the ‘?’”

The “?” is the undefined and vague space that opens up in the absence of images at a visual arts exhibition. Because “?” doesn’t dictate rules nor inaugurates a new genre in the arts; it doesn’t declare the death of the author nor favors conceptual ideas over the physicality of objects.  The “?” is perhaps one of the possible definitions of Ricardo Basbaum’s artist-etc.   Before approaching Olbrist’s proposal of translating an artistic work circulating in various permutations of language, there's a common negotiation in the Performer’s instructions and the reactivator of the text, since the project does not need to be carried out in order to exist. Thus, we question the nature and function of his role as an artist and give the public the criterion of emancipator of the artistic project.

Contrary to the imperative sphere, even if playful, of art as instruction – based on the non-authorization of the artwork, or its redefinition or its disappearance – what you see here is the invisible economy of the interactivity of reading: once a linear relationship between book-reader, now turned multidirectional between physical space-reader. Certainly Duchamp, Yoko and Fluxus’ instructions inform the Performer’s reasoning, but he has the sun in Sagittarius and the moon in Cancer and he would never say “do this”, he would just do it.  The audience negotiates the instructional texts falling off the cliff and not sticking to ideologies. The Performer is text; the audience is both editor and reader. As he himself said, "one who gives instructions knows exactly what one is doing, unlike me. I would never present an exhibition called 'How to Live Together', but one simply called ‘Since I cannot live together', and with the charm of this 'no', I would hit town in search of a date."

I paid the bill and we said goodbye. I took two buses and the subway and on the journey I read the anthology of all the performances given and/or proposed by the Performer, edited by Fabio Morais. I confess I was a bit worried about the slightly pessimistic conversation about neoliberal apathy, the market of desire, the lack of vulnerability to the other and the crisis of sensitivity in our globalized geography. In fact, pessimism is extremely outdated nowadays; after all, we need to see the good side of things. Nobody is there to do right – as the curator of the last biennial stated–; let’s just take the pressures that ethics bring about out of the way. Self-help books and therapists say the power of the positive mind can guarantee happiness, just like those lucky VIPs we see in magazines, in television adds and in newspapers that once coined the millionaire and protocol genre of the "Well-succeeded art" [3] (O Estado de São Paulo, Caderno 2, 15/12/2009).

-- I don’t care about this jewish-christian trip of the colonized with an inferiority complex, whose self-esteem and success are measured by the recognition of aspiring intellectuals and the dollars or euros of the Other - with a capital 'O'. I was the one who split up with him, and he doesn’t even know. Oh, how lazy I feel. I said: I'm busy studying Macunaíma - by phone text message - and he believed me. There is an isthmus between my god with a small ‘g’, and his Gods.    

-- Yes, dear, I know.

The intoxicating effect of the beer was wearing off and I remembered having read in a text by Suely Rolnik (beautiful, by the way, called "The Geopolitics of Pimping", where the idea of the crisis of sensibility was taken from) a quote by Lygia Clark from 1969: " In the very moment when he (sic) digests the object, the artist is digested by the society that has already found a title and a bureaucratic occupation for him: he will be the future engineer of entertainment, an activity that has no effect whatsoever on the equilibrium of social structures. The only way for the artist to escape co-optation is to succeed in unleashing a general creativity, without any psychological or social limits. This creativity will be expressed in lived experience”[4].

But then I relaxed, and imagined myself enacting the following instructions of the Performer: you need to make a documentary without money, which consists solely of the credits with the names of friends who participated in the production for free, called Solidarity (since I don’t know how to make a documentary); we need to turn on the speakers, one by one until the sixth, which gradually removed the sound from the surroundings, until silence reigned (since I don’t know how to make music); we have to save common objects from their ready-made state and reintroduce them into the market (since I don’t know how to make contemporary art). After this, inspired by the creative expressions I experienced, I might write instructions on how to write a critical text for the Performer to carry out. Since I don’t know how to write a critical text. “?”.

Translated by Denise Pierrotti

[1] Hans Ulrich Obrist, “do it: the exhibition between actualization and virtualization, repetition and difference” http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/itinerary/itinerary.html. Acessed in October 30th, 2007

[2] Bruce Altshuler, “Art by Instruction and the Pré-History of do it”. http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/notes/essay/e002_text.html. Acessed in October 30th 2007

[3] http://www.estadao.com.br/estadaodehoje/20091215/not_imp481956,0.php. Acessed in 12/18/2009, the Day when they didn’t reach any agreement on the environmental future of the planet in Copenhagen.

[4] “L’homme structure vivante d’une architecture biologique et celulaire,” in Robho no. 5-6, Paris, 1971 (a facsimile of the journal is available in the catalogue Lygia Clark, de l’ oeuvre à l’événement. Nous sommes le moule, à vous de donner le souffle, op.cit.); reissued under the title “(1969) O corpo é a casa,”  in Lygia Clark, Textos de Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar e Mario Pedrosa  (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1980, out of print); pp. 35-37; then later in Manuel J.Borja Villel and Nuria Enguita Mayo, eds., Lygia Clark, exhib. cat., Fondació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1997. Bilingual editions: Spanish/English and French/Portuguese. In Suely Rolnik, The Geopolitics of Pimping. 2006. http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en/#_ftn13. Accesed in December 10th 2009