Professional Documents
Culture Documents
artistas
como
intelectuais
pblicos
Respostas a Simon Sheikh
Sobre
artistas
como
intelectuais
pblicos
Respostas a Simon Sheikh
EQUIPE
direo: Tain Azeredo e Thereza Farkas
programao visual e video: Habacuque Lima
projeto grfico: Lila Botter
Participantes do Ciclo de Portflios 2012
Adriano Costa, Ana Maria Maia, Ananda Carvalho, Daniel de Paula,
Flvia Junqueira, Garapa Coletivo Multimdia, Marcos Brias, Paula Garcia,
Roberto Winter e Vitor Cesar
Agradecimento: Simon Sheikh
EQUIPE
edio: Fernanda Carvalho e Renata Nascimento
reviso: Semiramis Oliveira
produo: Alessandra Arruda
2/3
Simon Sheikh
4/5
Simon Sheikh
crtico e curador,
como pesquisador
do projeto Former
e faz doutorado
na Universidade
de Lund. Colabora
com as publicaes
Sprigerin, de Viena,
e e-flux Journal,
de Nova York. Suas
ltimas curadorias
so Do You Remember
the Future?, no Etagi,
2009, coordenou
o Programa de
Estudos Crticos da
Atualmente, finaliza
uma coletnia de
1- Foucault, Michel. O que um autor?. Traduo de Antonio Fernando Cascais e Eduardo Cordeiro. Portugal: Passagens,
2002, p. 69-70. No original, Sheikh cita a verso norte-americana: What is an author?, 1969, em Language, Countermemory, Practice, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, Nova York, 1977, pp.137-138.
6/7
2- Traduo a partir do ingls: Antonio Gramsci, Intellectuals (1932), no The Antonio Gramsci Reader, Lawrence and
Wishart: London, 1999, pp. 301-311.
8/9
4- As plataformas citadas promovem agendas de fomento, discusso e ativismo atravs da arte, em seus diferentes contextos e a
partir de seus diferentes perfis. No Brasil, poderamos mencionar algumas iniciativas correlatas, dentre programas de residncia
e escolas livres. Neste panorama, a Casa Tomada, organizao promotora do Ciclo de Portflios que motivou esta publicao,
rene-se a iniciativas como o Capacete (RJ/SP), o Ateli 397 (SP), o Intermeios (SP), a Casa da Xiclet (SP), o B Cbico (PE), o Fora do
Eixo (DF), o Dana no andar de cima (CE), os extintos Torreo (RS), Arco (SC) e Alpendre (CE), dentre tantos outros.
5- Traduo a partir do original em ingls: Copenhagen Free University, All Power to the Copenhagen Free University, em We are all
normal (and we want our freedom), Katya Sander and Simon Sheikh (Editores), Black Dog Publishing: London, 2001, pp. 394 395.
Ns estamos lidando aqui com uma noo do cotidiano, com uma tentativa de lidar
com condies de vida dentro da economia do conhecimento do mundo ps-fordista,
uma ttica de movimento duplo, tanto contestao quanto absteno. Ns tambm
podemos descrever esse movimento como uma poltica da vida cotidiana, ao invs
de poltica de representaes, deliberaes e/ou acordos. Isso implica, ento, em uma
noo diferente do poltico, isso no tem apenas a ver com movimento, mas tambm
momento, o aqui e o agora, conforme as palavras de um outro autor, Stephan Geene:
O que a b_books est disposta a fazer, no meu ponto de vista (embora
isso no seja muito consensual no grupo), manter um tipo especfico de
opo para o poltico, uma opo que explicitamente no utpica,
de qualquer maneira. A opo baseada na premissa que o poltico no
significa trabalhar por um objetivo poltico especfico + tambm no tem
nada a ver com sacrificar o tempo de vida de algum, mas ao invs disso
investir na mquina que gera o tempo (de vida) de algum em um
processo poltico 6.
Deixe-me oferecer outra definio de contra-pblico: o que est em jogo aqui
a articulao de experincia. Trata-se de assemblage e no de performance.
Enquanto as instituies da indstria cultural apenas oferecem um sem fim de
novas experincias, a produo dos organismos auto-institucionalizados tende
notadamente a parecer chata, no-espetacular na organizao da experincia.
Nestes tempos de um capitalismo global em expanso, corporativizao da cultura
e criminalizao da esquerda crtica, torna-se mais do que apropriado, mas de
fato crucial se discutir e acessar modos de crtica, participao e resistncia na
zona potente entre o campo cultural e a esfera poltica. Ou em outras palavras,
o campo potente entre a representao poltica e a poltica representacional,
entre a apresentao e a participao. nossa convico que o campo cultural
uma ferramenta til para criar plataformas polticas e novas formaes polticas
6- Traduo a partir do original em ingls: Stephan Geene, self-portrait of more than me: a group or its fragments, in:
Simon Sheikh (Ed.), In the place of the Public Sphere?, Oe / b_books: Berlim, 2004, p. 215.
10/11
12/13
14/15
Adriano Costa
16/17
18/19
Ananda Carvalho
[...o contemporneo no apenas aquele
Ananda Carvalho
curadora, crtica
de arte e professora
universitria.
Doutoranda e Mestre
em Comunicao e
do Canal
Contemporneo,
participou da
residncia Ateli
Aberto #5 na Casa
Tomada e integra o
Ncleo de Crticos
do Pao das Artes.
Sua pesquisa de
doutorado (com
apoio de bolsa
CNPq) enfoca
os processos de
criao e os espaos
de hierarquia, no linearidade e
comunicacionais de
redes curatoriais.
Vive e trabalha em
So Paulo.
20/21
Referncias
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. O que o contemporneo? e outros
ensaios. Chapec, SC: Argos, 2009.
BASBAUM, Ricardo. Quem que v nossos trabalhos? In:
FERREIRA, Glria e PESSOA, Fernando (org.) Criao e crtica:
Seminrios Internacionais do Museu Vale. Vila Velha, ES:
Daniel de Paula
Suporte-afirmao
22/23
Mudou-se para
So Paulo onde
ingressou na
Faculdade de Artes
Plsticas da FAAP.
Recentemente foi
premiado no CCSP.
Tambm recebeu
prmio na exposio
EDP no Tomie
Ohtake. Participou
da exposio
Experincia Hlio
Oiticica, no Ita
Cultural. Esteve
presente tambm na
mostra O Desvio O
exposies na Casa
da Xiclet destaca-se
a mostra Emergnese.
ir participar da
residncia artstica
Ateli Aberto #6 da
Casa Tomada.
Flvia Junqueira
O artista como intelectual pblico na minha
opinio aquele que tem como necessidade principal
comunicar. Apesar da afirmao parecer simples e
bvia quando falamos de todo e qualquer tipo de
artista, acredito que importante pensar sobre o
significado do ato discursivo presente em comunicar,
antes mesmo de decidir o que se deseja comunicar
em um trabalho.
Isso acontece porque comunicar no significa
somente transmitir uma ideia atravs de nossos
Flvia Junqueira
vive e trabalha
em So Paulo.
mestranda em
Ramiro e bacharel
em Artes Plsticas
pela FAAP. Integrou
em 2010 o Programa
PIESP da Escola So
Paulo. Recentemente
participou da
residncia Cit
Internationale
Ds Arts em Paris,
atravs de bolsa
contemplada pela
FAAP. Tambm
participou do
programa de
residncias da
Izolyatsias Platform
for Cultural Initiatives
na cidade de Donestk
na Ucrnia.
24/25
nessas duas etapas da comunicao. O grande ponto na maioria das vezes criar
distanciamento para, com clareza, fazer-se compreendido e encontrar a melhor
maneira de formalizar o trabalho. Mas para alm disso, o desafio tambm gerar
novas possibilidades para o artista que deseja amplificar o seu contato com o pblico.
Neste sentido, confesso que ainda estou em processo de descobertas, pois criar
uma ideia e eleger a melhor maneira de formaliz-la como ato discursivo j algo
bastante complexo.
Entendo deste modo, que algumas questes que foram discutidas aqui, significam
nada mais do que partes contribuintes de uma elaborao na qual estamos
adicionando informaes aos poucos. Para alcanarmos novas etapas, apesar
de algumas j existirem inerente s anteriores (como esta publicao), ainda
necessitamos de maior dedicao e aprimoramento.
Garapa
Garapa Coletivo
Multimdia um
espao de criao
coletiva. Temos como
objetivo pensar e
produzir narrativas
audiovisuais,
integrando diversos
formatos, linguagens
e modelos de
distribuio.
Desenvolvemos
projetos para
ambientes distintos:
vamos da fotografia
esttica interao
multiplataforma, do
vdeo instalao
site specific.
26/27
Garapa Coletivo
Multimdia - intervenes
da srie Deslocamentos
(deslocamentos.tumblr.com)
Marcos Brias
Marcos Brias, 1981.
Vive e trabalha em
So Paulo, Brasil.
Sua prtica est
interessada
na natureza
construda das
narrativas pessoal,
social, histrica e
lingustica. O que
construdo pode ser
desconstrudo. Como
tal, a sua obra aborda
a precariedade
do significado
verbal e visual;
ambos so arranjos
fundamentalmente
formais que podem
ser colocados fora
de alinhamento ou
re-editados.
28/29
Paula Garcia
Corpo Rudo: precariedade, incerteza e risco
Minha pesquisa atual consiste no desenvolvido de um procedimento
artstico chamado Corpo Rudo. Criei uma srie de performances com
ms de neodmio e retalhos de ferros recolhidos em serralheria. Com
esses materiais comecei a propor situaes em que meu corpo ficaria
parcialmente entrevado em decorrncia principalmente do peso dos
ferros que estavam colados nele. Os ms colam os ferros no corpo
sem deixar resduos atravs da fora do magnetismo. O magnetismo,
30/31
e trabalha em
So Paulo. Mestre
em Artes Visuais
pela FASM-SP e
bacharel em Artes
Suas pesquisas e
experincias artsticas
em desmontagem, em desmoronamento.
enfocam performance
e suas relaes com
as mdias. Principais
exposies: 6 Edio
da Mostra Anual de
Performance, Galeria
Vermelho - SP (2010);
Galeria Expandida,
Luciana Brito Galeria
- SP (2010); 17 Festival
Internacional de Arte
Contempornea
Videobrasil_SESC,
SESC Belenzinho - SP;
Performa Pao, Pao
das Artes - SP (2011).
Roberto Winter
Detalhe de A extrao da
pedra, de Hyeronimus
Bosch, c. 1494, leo sobre
madeira, 48 x 35 cm
Roberto Winter
artista. Vive e trabalha
em So Paulo. Pode
ser contatado em
rhwinter@gmail.com
32/33
Vitor Cesar
Vitor Cesar
(Fortaleza, 1978).
Artista, vem
desenvolvendo
propostas que
procuram constituir
noes de pblico
atravs de dinmicas
da vida cotidiana, por
meio de exposies,
trabalhos grficos,
debates e outros
projetos. Estudou
Arquitetura e
Urbanismo na UFC
(2003), realizou
mestrado em Artes
Visuais na ECA/USP
(2009), com pesquisa
sobre as propriedades
crticas da arte na
constituio de
esferas pblicas.
34/35
Simon Sheikh
A central issue for critical artists today is the question of interactions with the
apparatus surrounding art production: the parameters for reception (institutions,
audiences, communities, constituencies, etc.) and the potentials and limitations
for communication in different spheres (the art world, the media, public spaces,
the political field etc.). How connections are made and how they are, indeed,
broken. This can be discussed in a number of ways, ranging from the practical
and methodological, that is, discussions regarding the use of signs and spaces in
installation, about conceptions of tools and politics of representation, the role or
function of the artist/author in the construction of other spaces and subjectivities,
that is alternative networks or even counter-publics. Such discussions must focus
not only on the interface between the institution of art and the individual artist,
both politically and artistically, but also on bodily relations in political spaces, the
advent and usage of technologies, and finally the establishment of networks,
communication lines and escape attempts.
36/37
society, a.k.a. fordism, and Barthes post-industrial call to arms, where the death of the
author should lead to the birth of the reader, which is a radically different notion of
activating the public and presumably deepening democracy, are, in effect, attempts
at reconfiguring the function of the author. This reconfiguration of the author/artist
function was to take place through new modes of address, which would in turn
configure new modes of receivership or spectatorship in the sense that a mode of
address is always an imaginary stranger relationality, an attempt at developing an
audience, constituency or community. So if we are to understand the artist as a public
intellectual, we also have to understand how this potential public is constructed and
reconfigured through the historical and contingent placing or function of the artist,
through his or her specific public sphere, which is also termed the apparatus through
which the artist is threaded.
Now the classical conception of the artist, or the public intellectual, as an
Enlightenment figure in a bourgeois public sphere seems less and less up to date
and purely historical. The notion of the bourgeois public sphere as a space to be
entered with equal rights and opportunities as rational-critical subjects, which has
always been a projection of course, is also an increasingly receding horizon today.
There no longer is a public, but rather either no public at all (as understood as free
exchange), or a number of fragmented, particular publics. The enlightenment model
of the west, which was tolerant, to some extent, of avant-garde art, of representing
values other than bourgeois values of conduct, order and productivity, has now
been superseded by a more thoroughly commercial mode of communication, by
a cultural industry. Where the Enlightenment model tried to educate and situate its
audience through discipline, through various display models identifying subjects
as spectators, the cultural industry institutes a different communicative model of
exchange and interaction through the commodity form, in turn identifying subjects
as consumers. For the cultural industry, the notion of the public, with its contingent
modes of access and articulation, is replaced by the notion of the market, implying
commodity-exchange and consumption as modes of access and interaction. This also
means that the idea of the Enlightenment, rational-critical subjects and a disciplinary
social order, is replaced by the notion of entertainment as communication, as the
mechanism of social control and producer of subjectivity. The classic bourgeois
38/39
spaces of representation are likewise either replaced by markets, such as the mall
replacing the public square, or transformed into a space of consumption and
entertainment, as is the case in the current museum industry. Similarly, the former
communist public sphere, which was no public sphere as such, but a matter between
state and party, has been replaced not by the former citizen-model of the west, but
by the market/consumer-group formation as just described.
As such, we then also have to reconfigure the role of the public intellectual as a
rational-critical subject, a universal subject, not as a thoroughly particular subject,
which - as I see it - would only be an affirmation of the consumer-group model, but
rather as an involved instead of detached figure: at the same time as Benjamins thesis
dealing with the mode of address, Antonio Gramsci was defining a different model
of the intellectual, the so-called organic intellectual, which was a figure that was
involved not only in struggles, in causes, but also in production itself.[4] According
to Gramsci all men were intellectuals, although not everyone had that role (the
potential of mass intellectuality), a role that had to do with involvement, organizing
and movements. As such, marketing and advertising men as well as journalists were
the new organic intellectuals of capitalism, whereas teachers and priests could not
be considered organic intellectuals, since they were repetitive. Today, precarious
workers could certainly be considered this kind of intellectual, although it remains
to be discussed whether they are in the service of capital or the cultural industry or
in its counter-movement, a struggle for the multitude. We must therefore begin to
think of artists and intellectuals as not only engaged in the public, but as producing
a public through the mode of address and the establishment of platforms or counter
publics, something that has already existed in both the east and west, clandestinely
and underground respectively, but in opposition to the reigning cultural and political
hegemony of the specific society.
Counter-publics can be understood as particular parallel formations of a minor or
even subordinate character where other or oppositional discourses and practices
[4] Antonio Gramsci, Intellectuals Prison Notebooks Q 12, 1932, reprinted in The Antonio Gramsci Reader, Lawrence
and Wishart: London, 1999, pp.301-311.
can be formulated and circulated. Where the classic bourgeois notion of the public
sphere claimed universality and rationality, counter-publics often claim the opposite,
and in concrete terms often entail a reversal of existing spaces into other identities
and practices, most famously as in the employment of public parks as cruising areas
in gay culture. Here, the architectural framework, set up for certain types of behaviour,
remains unchanged, whereas the usage of this framework is drastically altered: private
acts are performed in public.
According to Michael Warner, counter-publics have many of the same characteristics
as normative or dominant publics - existing as an imaginary address, a specific
discourse and/or location, and involving circularity and reflexivity - and are therefore
always already as much relational as they are oppositional. In recent art history the
notion of self-organization, for example, is most often an oppositional term, and
certainly a credible one, but it is not itself a counter-public. Indeed, self-organization is
a distinction of any public formation: it constructs and posits itself as a public through
its specific mode of address. Rather, the counter-public is a conscious mirroring of
the modalities and institutions of the normative public, but in effort to address other
subjects and indeed other imaginaries:
Counterpublics are counter [only] to the extent that they try to supply
different ways of imagining stranger sociability and its reflexivity; as
publics, they remain oriented to stranger circulation in a way that is not
just strategic but constitutive of membership and its affects. [5]
Of particular interest here, is not only the transformation of bourgeois art institutions
by particular agents, but also the current movement of wilful self-institutionalization
seen in such art related platforms as 16 Beaver group in New York, b_books in Berlin,
Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, Center for Urban Pedagogy in
New York, Copenhagen Free University, Community Art School in Zagreb, Institute
of Applied Autonomy in Boston, The Invisible Academy in Bangkok, School of
[5] Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books, 2002, pp. 121-22.
40/41
[6] Copenhagen Free University, All Power to the Copenhagen Free University, in: Katya Sander and Simon Sheikh (Eds.), We
are All Normal (and we want our freedom), Black Dog Publishing: London, 2001, pp. 394-395.
[7] Stephan Geene, self-portrait of more than me: a group - or its fragments, in: Simon Sheikh (Ed.), In the Place of the
Public Sphere?, oe / b_books: Berlin, 2004, p.215.
42/43
www.prologoseloeditorial.com.br
www.casatomada.com.br
www.pacodasartes.org.br