Red Shift Cildo Meireles and the Definition of the Political-Conceptual1 Camila Maroja

ARTICLE Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/1/30/720306/artm_a_00131.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 red shift Cildo meireles And the definition of the politiCAl-ConCeptuAl1 CamiLa maroja In 1967, Cildo Meireles, Brazil’s most internationally prominent experimental artist, envisaged an improbable but possible place: a white room fi lled with objects all in shades of red. The work that even- tually emerged from this vision, Red Shift (Desvio para o vermelho), was fi rst shown in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ). In it, Meireles had expanded his initial project to incorpo- rate two unrealized artworks conceived independently in 1978: the fi rst, a tiny fallen bottle next to a disproportional quantity of liquid, and the second, an angled sink into which water constantly fl owed. Art critics have continually associated Red Shift with violence and politics, begin- ning with Ferreira Gullar’s laudatory 1984 comments and continuing with Paulo Herkenhoff’s 1998 press release promoting the 24th São Paulo Biennial, which established the enduring interpretation of the installation as a political piece.2 1 The author thanks John Baltes and the ARTMargins editors for their helpful questions and suggestions for improving this essay, Regina de Paula for scanning Malasartes’s images, and Ronaldo Brito, Cildo Meireles, José Resende, and Instituto Inhotim for enabling the copyright permissions for their images. 2 Ferreira Gullar wrote about the artwork in the magazine Isto é, in October 1984. Paulo Herkenhoff’s analysis linked the artwork to a story he was told by Meireles: as a child in Brazil, his father had taken him to see the place where, on the night a journalist had been assassinated, his colleagues had used his blood to write, “Here died a young man defending the freedom of the press.” Herkenhoff’s interpretation of Red Shift as inspired 30 © 2016 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00131 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/1/30/720306/artm_a_00131.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Cildo Meireles. Desvio para o vermelho I, Impregnação (Red Shift I, Impregnation), 1967–1984. Mixed media. Inhotim Collection, Brumadino, Brazil. Image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Daniela Paoliello. On the occasion of a 2008–2009 solo exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, Meireles attempted to rectify “political and ideolog- ical interpretations” of the color red in Red Shift, stating that “for me the piece was much more linked with chromo-poetics, if I may call it that, more to do with poetry than with politics, more to do with per- ception, sensitization, than with a symbolic meaning.”3 Meireles not only rejected a political reading of his work, but also denied that he was a conceptual artist—a term that, when referring to the movement by this memory was republished in his monograph Cildo Meireles (London: Phaidon, 1999) and has been extensively quoted in and out of Brazil; see, for instance, Lisette Lagnado’s critique of the artwork, which was published in the 1998 São Paulo Biennial catalog. Lisette Lagnado, “Cildo Meireles: Detour into interpretação,” in Nucleo histórico: Antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos, vol. 1 of XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), 398–405. Challenging this reading in several interviews, Meireles denied any direct correspondence between Red Shift and his child- hood memory. For instance, “Pano de roda” [2000] in Encontros: Cildo Meireles, ed. Felipe Scovino (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2009), 140–41. 3 From an interview with critic and curator Guy Brett, incorporated into “Corners and Crossroads,” Frieze, no. 117 (September 2008). Available at . maroja | red shift http://www.frieze.com /issue/article/corners_and_crossroads/ 31 in Latin America, was viewed as directly linked to politics. The canonization of Latin American conceptualism4 as political was inaugurated by Mari Carmen Ramírez in her 1993 article “Blue Print Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America.”5 Ramírez’s essay pro- vided a uniform legibility to a series of artistic experimental practices, to starkly contrast them to Conceptual art in the United States and Western Europe. Binding Latin American conceptual art to local politics, Ramírez defined the production of the 1970s and 1980s as Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/1/30/720306/artm_a_00131.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 disruptive stratagems inseparable from their sociopolitical contexts, referring to the work of artists such as Meireles, Luis Camnitzer, and Alfredo Jaar as “political-conceptual.”6 She insisted that, unlike their peers in the Atlantic North, Latin American “political-conceptual” art did not reject political and social issues beyond the exclusive domain of the art world—an understanding that echoed most Latin American artists’ views.7 So why did Meireles refuse to accept this label? The answer lies in Meireles’s resistance to the dominant trend in the art 4 Following Ramírez, when referring to Latin American conceptual practice, I use the low- ercase “conceptualism.” In discussing the North American movement, Ramírez used the capitalized “Conceptualism.” The term conceptualism in reference to the conceptual art movement in Latin America was popularized by the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s at the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 1999, discussed later in this article. This exhibition, organized by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Faver, and Rachel Weiss, was crucial in decentering the canonization of conceptual art and shifting the way we perceive it. Intended to examine experimental art practices outside of the US– Western European initiatives that had defined the paradigm of conceptual art, it also affirmed these practices as being more socially and politically engaged—an argument also advocated by Ramírez in her articles discussed here. For further discussion of the term, see Luis Camnitzer et al., eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), exhibition catalog, viii. 5 The article was published in the catalog of MoMA’s 1993 Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century exhibition, organized by Waldo Rasmussen. The exhibition aimed at providing a historical view ranging from “Early Modernism,” represented by artists such as Diego Rivera and Xul Solar, to “Recent Painting and Sculpture,” represented by artists such as Camnitzer, Waltercio Caldas, and Meireles. Rasmussen invited Latin American experts to contribute to the selections and the catalog. Unlike Ramírez’s article, the exhibition did not concentrate on socio-political conditions in the region. Ramírez, “Blue Print Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” in Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, ed. Waldo Rasmussen (New York: MoMA, June 6–September 7, 1993), exhibition catalog, 156–69. 6 Ramírez, “Blue Print Circuits,” 156. 7 To create this stark opposition between conceptual art in the Northern and the Southern hemispheres, Ramírez builds on the Spanish critic Simón Marchán Fiz: For Marchán Fiz, the distinguishing feature of the Spanish and Argentine forms of Conceptualism was extending the North American critique of the institutions and practices of art to an analysis of political and social issues. At the time when he made artmargins 5:1 these observations, the radical edge of North American Conceptual art’s critique was 32 world toward commodifying works of art and aligning them into artistic styles. The emphasis on the aesthetic, collectible object stifled artistic creativity and experimentation, denying the contemporary Brazilian scene a showcase for their expression. This abbreviation of art into a product was linked, for Meireles, to the centralized authority that governs the systems of art circulation through which cultural expression flows. For his generation, the concept of political artwork could not be Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/1/30/720306/artm_a_00131.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 confined to a specific art movement, since the division of artworks into artistic “ism”s (including conceptualism) was viewed as a product of the logic of the art market. For artists such as Meireles, a political artwork should not only directly intervene in the art world, challenging both the commodification of art and the cultural politics embedded in it, but also open art to the public, presenting other, more expansive ways to perceive and navigate everyday life. As a form of resisting market ideology and orchestrating cultural change, Meireles’s generation proposed the artist as the creator of cultural products. Rather than creating commodities or exotic markers of identity that would conform to colonial expectations, his goal was to open space for artworks that would function as autochthonous cultural products, products of a local artistic genealogy, giving birth to a new perspective on art history. Therefore, rather than being concerned with formal rup- tures and the creation of new art movements, Meireles’s artistic generation proposed a new standpoint from which to analyze art and its effects on society. I use the question of why Meireles refused the label “political- conceptual” to reconsider the meaning of political artwork in Latin American conceptualism. My reassessment of political-conceptual art links Meireles’s stance to cultural debates about resistance to the art market and the creation of a local art historiography that were at the core of the Brazilian artistic milieu in the 1970s. By examining the socio-artistic theories promoted by a short-lived but groundbreaking magazine, Revista Malasartes, founded by Meireles and eight others in obscured by the generalizing, reductive posture of Kosuth’s “art-as-idea-as-idea.” (Ramírez, “Blue Print Circuits,” 156) It is interesting to note that the critic Ronaldo Brito, in his article “Analysis of the Art Circuit,” also cited Fiz.

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