Experimental Avant-Garde
Pursuit of the new by means of the body Perhaps the first
distinctive feature of the ‘radical avant-garde’, or ‘experimental avant-garde’,
is the generative power that resides in the pursuit of the new by means of the
body, even if mediated by the concrete allure and protean serendipity of matter
that is external to the body as a facilitator of the experience.
As a result of this very primal bond between artist, matter and creative drive, converging in the work, these artists expected to cumulatively experience the creative potency, exert the creative command and re-enact the original creation, in a ‘mythical pattern’ of ‘absolute beginning’ (Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, Woodstock: Spring Publications, p. 60). They expressed this pattern in cryptic terms, such as the ‘full-void’ in the case of Clark (Clark, 1997, Lygia Clark, pp. 111-113), the ‘total act of being’ in the case of Oiticica (Figueiredo, 1986, Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, Selecção de Textos (1954-1969), Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, p. 74), the ‘unified condition of the spirit and body’ in the case of Shiraga (Shinichiro, 1993, Gutai 1954-1972. Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, p. 27), or an ‘immutable meaning’ in the case of Kanayama (Tiampo, 2004, Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954-1968, p. 106).
Recurrence of primordial images It is possible that the second distinctive feature of the ‘radical’ or ‘experimental avant-garde’ is the recurrence of primordial images, particularly of the pattern of ‘absolute beginning’, not merely fulfilling the condition that the avant-gardes extol for creation, but building the enigmatic purposefulness and the sheer vitality of the work itself.
'Experimental', 'radical'
The designations ‘radical avant-garde’ and ‘experimental avant-garde’ may be regarded as equivalents. In this, the term ‘radical’ may bear three senses:
1. To imply the ‘radical leap’ that Guy Brett referred when synthesizing the shift from painting to exploratory work with the body, a disciplinary rupture and its epistemological implications (Ades, 1989).
2. To express the likely result of the experimental use of the body in the pursuit of the new, an ontological rupture rooted in a psycho-physiological change, in a re-organization of the sense-experience and its epistemological implications; the experimental use of the body, under these circumstances, affects the deeper structures of the ‘embodied core consciousness’, through the essential bodily systems, homeostatic, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive, suspending the ‘extended consciousness’ (related with the awareness of the past and the future, and with the ability to master language) and retrieving a ‘pre-linguistic core’, a ‘radical’ bodily level (Damásio, 1999).
3. To stress the fact that the experimental use of the body has a concrete character, in the sense that Eliade speaks of a ‘tendency to the concrete’ (in the tradition of Hindu philosophy), in which the ‘experience’ is ‘based almost entirely on immediate, concrete data, still hardly separated from their physiological substratum’ (Eliade, 1990, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, Princeton University Press, New Jersey: Princeton, p. 144), a tendency that ‘[emphasizes] the necessity for direct experience, for realization, for practice (...) a tendency toward the act, toward experimental verification’ (Eliade, 1990, p. 40), which dismisses all speculation, placing the individual in a ‘radical’ present.
These three aspects are not unlike the stance that Clark, Oiticica, or the Gutai took in their creative practice.
'Absolute beginning'
Eliade uses the expression ‘absolute beginning’ to synthesize the array of images that express a ‘return to the origin’, placing man at ‘the creative time’, ‘the Great Time’, participating in a reenactment of ‘the original creation’ with all that it implies – regeneration and new creation: ‘It would be impossible to overstress the tendency – observable in every society, however highly developed – to bring back that time, mythical time, the Great Time. For this bringing back is effected without exception by every rite and every significant act’ (Eliade, 1971, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward, p. 395).
Eliade further explains the mythical pattern of the ‘absolute beginning’: ‘In the dialectic that made all these homologies possible, we discern the emotion of primitive man discovering the life of the spirit. The newness of the spiritual life, its autonomy, could find no better expression than the images of an “absolute beginning”, images whose structure is anthropocosmic, deriving at once from embryology and from cosmogony’ (Eliade, 1995, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, Woodstock: Spring Publications, p. 60).
Gutai Group
In the Gutai group, a suspicion towards language percolates into every possible entry of theoretical discourse, whether it comes as texts, titles of works or titles of exhibitions, or even interviews. Theory is minimized to assertions that ensue from practice, even if through seeming paradoxes, which eventually resonate with a playful bias regarding discursive statement.
The formation of the group was mainly prompted by an auspicious conjugation of personal factors centred in Jiro Yoshihara. The gathering of the group resulted as a natural consequence of his artistic vision and creative eagerness, of his acknowledgement within the artistic setting of the post-war Kansai area, and of the material means he possessed to pursue and implement a collective endeavour such as Gutai.
Yoshihara was born in 1905, and was 50 years old when the Gutai group reached its initial formation, in July of 1955. Eighteen years later, in its third ‘generation’, the group eventually disbanded after Yoshihara’s death, in February 1972. The ties of respect and admiration between the young Gutai artists and Yoshihara have been expressed throughout the years, by the former, with a remarkably unchanged wholeheartedness. Nonetheless, the selection of members for the group and the assessment of their work followed criteria that could only be held by his charisma, as well as by a genuine conviction on, and ease with, the redundancy of discursive criticism: ‘Yoshihara’s teaching method during the Gutai period was very simple: giving no opinion about each artist’s creative process, but judging only the finished artwork as “Good” or “No good”’ (Yamamoto, 1994, Gutai I, II, III. Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, p. 27).
Hélio Oiticica
The impact that the participation on the social and cultural reality of Mangueira had on Oiticica can be assessed, primarily, by his assimilation of the most characteristic trace of the initiatory pattern – the perception that a change of the mode of being can only be operated by the annihilation of the current mode of being (Eliade, 1995, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, Woodstock: Spring Publications, p. 132), a feature that underlies his commentary about the ‘formulation of the idea of Parangolé in 1964’: ‘I regard culture in formation as the open possibility of a culture, in opposition to the character with which something cultural is usually designated. In a sense – very much so – it is an anti-culture, because it proposes the demolition of what is oppressive; culture, since it is artificially imposed, is always oppressive; it is the non-creation which comes with the glorification of what is already finalized (Figueiredo, 1986, Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, Selecção de Textos (1954-1969), Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, p. 116).
Brought up on a family of anarchist tradition, his experience in the Mangueira slum brought to a comparatively more numerous collective the sharing of processes of anti-culture that Hélio had always lived since childhood, in a complete agreement with his ‘power to be free to experiment’ (Manuscripts, September of 1973), and through an experimental practice of inversion of the natural, conventional and mundane processes, of time and space: swapping night with day, occupying freely the divisions of the family house. This coincidence is noted by Haroldo de Campos, who speaks of a ‘Proustian retrieval of childhood or of the past, of the experience of the past’, by which ‘the Parangolé is linked to Hélio’s experience with the Mangueira slum’ (Oiticica, 1996, Hélio Oiticica. Exh. cat. 30 Sep1996-30 Jan 1997, Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, p. 219).
Lygia Clark
During the last years of her life, from 1976 to 1988, Lygia Clark developed a therapeutic practice that she entitled Estruturação do Self (Structuring of the Self). With obvious connotations with a psychological background of references that led her research and originated previous works, her endeavour concerned a labour with the unconscious, beyond verbal awareness, beyond discursive meaning or elaboration, and beyond symbolization.
The Estruturação do Self consisted mostly in one-to-one sessions that took place at a consultation room at her home, in Rio de Janeiro. The sessions were experimental: what went on might be described as a living experience based on a bodily engagement and with few, albeit important, verbal occurrences. Guy Brett uses the term ‘life-act’ to synthesize the ‘practices and insights’ of Lygia Clark’s work: ‘The proposal of Lygia Clark is embodied in the act, and enacted in the body. It exists in the moment that you do it or live it and nothing remains afterwards. And yet, in its very simplicity, sensuality and ephemerality, it is also a thing of the mind. (…) [artist, mediating object and spectator] evolved organically in a process in which lived experience and thought were completely interdependent and inseparable (Brett, 2004, Carnival of Perception. Selected writings on art. London: InIVA, p. 27).
Handled by the artist, to be sensed or manipulated by the client, a number of candid objects made out of simple everyday life materials would facilitate the bridging into the bodily realm. The concrete qualities of the Objetos Relacionais (Relational Objects) would tranship through sensory channels and bodily systems, revealing sites, accidents within, an ingrained imagery to be confronted with. In Lygia Clark’s words, these objects, ‘in contact with the body, by their physical qualities, cause the affective memory to emerge, bringing experiences that the verbal memory is unable to detect’ (Clark, 2005, Da obra ao acontecimento. Somos o molde a você cabe o sopro, p. 20). She remarked that ‘the silence, at the moment of the session during which I leave the client with the objects, is very important’, given that ‘silence sews one’.
This
path of self-recognition would lead to a ‘state of art without art’: Suely
Rolnik named it ‘therapeutics for illnesses of the creative imagination’, while,
in Lygia Clark’s own words, it aimed at retrieving the ‘normal state of the human
being, which is the creative state’.
Other
Nazareth
Paulo Nazareth is an artist from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is a ‘stranger in a suit, hair wrap and flip-flops’. In his exemplary actions, pragmatic and symbolical initiatives of an experimental practice, he shares the gestures, procedures and inaugural creations of the activities that directly concern subsistence, thus dignified with the ‘prestige of the beginning’. The instructive tranquility of those experiences rests on the situation of ‘absolute beginning’, of ‘restoration of the creative time’, of the mythic illud tempus of creation, when man was given the knowledge of the sacredness of life, of the world and of the cosmos, and their mutual binding as creations. Nazareth takes hold of the processes of ‘high’ culture, discursive and intellectual, mimicking them in the realm of artistic intervention, to show how the dominant paradigm goes against the bodily functions – nourishment and excretion, speech and language – physiologies respectively of the raw, organic, pure instinct, and of a higher course beyond the intellect. He shows how these functions are essentially human, thus, cosmogonic, and how they are preserved on the intuitive and concrete processes of ‘low’ culture, in popular, archaic, aboriginal contexts, and in what is left of the latter after the impact of the rational scientific model, within the eccentricity of the deprived and abandoned who seem to show the limbo between paradigms of knowledge.