1

ART WITH NO LAND

Written by Maria Benites, followed, interfered, supported and
revised by Wanderley Geraldi and Bernd Fichtner. 1

I would like to start my presentation by quoting Vigotsky at the introduction of his book
Hamlet’s tragedy, Prince of Denmark: “The work of art (as any other phenomenon) may be
studied through completely diverse aspects. It permits an infinite number of interpretations, a
multiplicity, in whose sheer richness remains the guarantee of its endless sense...”…. “But
there is the field of aesthetic critics – field that is only indirectly dependent on all this – and
the field of subjective critics to which belong all the lines that follow from this point”.
Therefore by means of this paraphrase I would like to elucidate this is an absolutely subjective
and personal lecture, and nobody else is to be charged with what is being said here, as feelings
and thoughts, doubts and convictions, all become mixed. Thus, I make use of this leeway to
express my thoughts, not before assuring of my rights on the poem Mcarpem Die by Wal
Whitman.
The theme ‘Art with no Land’ entitles me to do it. Disterritorializing Art means re-
territorializing it with my subjectivity as a subject who is capable of understanding Art from
the perspective of reaching my originality through Art. Joseph Beuys announced, “Every man
is an artist”. And I believe so.
Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in soft Beulah's night,
And twofold always. -- May God us keep
From single vision, and Newton's sleep!

William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22-11-1802 (from the book “Para una
Unidad Sagrada de Gregory Bateson).
Yes, they have desired and almost succeeded in taking from us the possibility of a ‘fourfold
vision’ and a ‘soft Beulah’s night’, they have desired and almost succeeded in taking from us
the ‘twofold always’. They carry on with the intention that we be the mass, following the only
vision that believes in the slumbers of Newton and science, technology, and veracious and fast
solutions. After all, that only vision can subject us to the domination of few.
Who are they, who steal our thousands of different visions? How can they establish so subtle,
so strong, so intricate? It happens that every now and then we question and we think we are
anarchist, communist, terrorist, nihilist, because we do not want to follow what is written,
because we are taken by a certain suspicion, and an indefinable indisposition and thus we
want to question the civilization way.

1
Words in italics stand for Wanderley Geraldi’s interference. Vigotsky and Leontiev’s discovery, and the comprehension of
many texts included in the book were directed and arranged by Bernd Fichtner, who for ten years has been stimulating me
to make ways over the ocean. Dis-coveries are not punctual, but processes. I have had the fortune of having mates who
look at my writings with the eyes free from the power that narrows thinking, ones who look at them with enough freedom
to see the other under the perspective of the ‘self’, and add their own knowledge to the knowledge of the other, with the
rare generosity from the ones who know.
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However, invisible voices say: That is decided! The way you have to go is the media and the
official way: that is the way we should go. There is no other possibility, it is insane, it is
suicide! Would that be so? ….
The problem is that my fourfold vision gets lost and takes cover in me when I get into
museums to learn what art is, and it runs away from me when I read the little jewels of the
critics on universal art, and it gets absolutely blind with the apparent shine of those dogmas
that change Art into art. Scientific knowledge has always been very complex, and from the
inside of this complexity it became common ground one cannot know everything, but
whatever was known was held as true, and that assumed truth of the known was imposed and
supported against any intension of making it wrong. Discovering this knowledge was false
has always been a risk. Not to forget, some centuries ago the Earth was absolutely square;
hell waited for us, poor mortals! and hell was anticipated by means of the power of some few
chosen (via Inquisition) in case anyone did not surrender to the effective knowledge. In this
religious empire that lasted for a number of centuries knowledge was God’s property, and His
managers would know how to control the fear of God. The effective knowledge is based on
the Fear: of God beforetime, of market currently. Under that issue, knowledge lives and
watches Humanity, which becomes salvation business as subjugated.
About the past, the poet Lope de Vega wrote “Do not move me, my God, just to desire the
Heaven that Thou have promised me, nor even move the so feared hell so that I no longer
offend Thee.”, revealing the trading of Love of God.
Long before that past become true and valid, the truths which were previous to its foundation
were defended. In the voice of the poet Victor Hugo, says Elisab, the Temple Writer:

Un membre du parti de l'ordre, véridique

Et grave, me disait: - cette mort juridique
Frappant ce charlatan, naschiste ehonté
Est juste. Il faut que l'ordre et que l'autorité
Se defandent. Comment souffrir qu'on les discute?
D'ailleurs les lois sont là pour qu'on les exécute.
Il est des verités éternelles qu'il faut
Faire prévaloir, fût-ce au prix de l'échafaud.

In Art (capitalized), Love cannot be negociated, nor even Love of God. The Human Being, the
Humanity, rises again from the power of the supported truths.
But we have been, we are, and we will be forced to negotiate entrance into the promised
heaven of the only vision, so that we do not run the risk of falling down in the hells of the
fourfold vision.
John Donne states that if Europe loses a rock, the entire continent will lose it and feels
weakened, so if the humankind loses a man, the whole humankind will lose him and feels
weakened. Thus we should not ask for whom the bells ring, they ring for us.
John Donne, Lope de Vega, Victor Hugo, Blake and so many others understand Art is
something more than merely the object-merchandise that is pushed into us, which is had as
definite and consecrate to some few who manage the entrance of the masses in the temples of
Culture. These managers are usually wealthy white western people, they have appropriate
clothes and gestures to access museums, palaces and galleries, they can read and write and
they are able to read long articles that turn the understanding of arts into something sacred and
ritual.
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Perhaps the company of the artists were better, for they know of our fourfold vision; they
know it is rebel and untamed, but fills us with the supreme delight which is reserved. They,
the artists, enjoy whatever gets us gooseflesh, what makes us feel static and perplexed, what
makes us laugh at the joy of finding intelligence, or what involves us in this other deep joy
which emerges from the kindness of the encounter between the other and the self in the sacred
unit permitted and made possible through Art.
Unfortunately, over the latest century the managers of Art have been acting almost as
successfully as the managers of Fear of God, as we just watch the most fabulous trading of
Art we have ever had notice in our civilization.
Art is no longer that metacommunication between universal and my self. Art is no longer the
surprise of the other in my self, in a vital and dynamical relation between intelligence and
sensibility. Art has lost that thing which used to make her intangible and absurdly concrete at
the same time. Today everything is dissected, specified, read, written and properly analysed,
classified, and DE-FINITE. We have come to the point of giving definition of art (official
definitions account for 234), because we do not accept art as being the freedom that reminds
of Life. Dissacredness of art did not happen through the opening to an experimental and
endless free will, but through the restriction in the relation of property, in which tester has
become consumer and art has become the object that should enclose it (enclosure).
Art is no longer materialized representation of idea, it is no longer the object-idea-thought-
emotion, it is the object itself, it is merchandise, purchased and purchasable as representation
of the world. Trade has set a market value to art, ignoring that Art shall not be sold and even
less bought. However, very few remember of this when they decorate their houses, or become
collectors, or authorize the building of very expensive museums while cutting down on
expenses for education and social programs. I believe Art does not need money, it needs
public in open and free spaces. A public that is free from the desire of purchasing the
materiality of Art, for they are anxious for the vital experience with Art.
In the recent years this anxiety for eternally seeking my fourfold vision has taking me to
think: where? where would that Art be today – the Art that produces this “supreme delight”?
Perhaps it is on the marginal one. It is always the marginal ones that keep the key to the
supreme delight, because they are on the margin of pre-established concepts, and Art is also
that: “breaking pre-established concepts”, according to Paulo Herkenhoff.
And today, what marginal ones are we talking about? Today everything is allowed, accepted,
purchasable, so where are those marginal ones that society legally and legitimately accepts but
cannot tolerate?
Concepts such as ‘object trouvê’ by Marcel Duchamp give a clue. Almost a hundred years
ago, he suspected art was no longer at the officially established sites. His work La Fontaine
has proved galleries and museums have serious problems to deal with Art.
Fifty years later Joseph Beuys talked about social sculpture, and by showing the untenable
lightness of Art to the future, he presented the famous Rose of Democracy as a work of art,
which currently remains at the Museum of Bonn. I have seen it, but the guard of the museum
told me the Rose is artificial today because a natural one would need replacement day after
day (one would soon be withered) what would bring uncountable bureaucratic and
responsibility problems.
Duchamp left Art and devoted himself to play chess, nobody knows exactly why so far. I
myself saw his famous Bicycle Wheel in three different museums, all of them displayed as
“lost original”. In spite of all his effort, Duchamp did not escape from the cultural industry. In
our days he is considered a “Great artist”, the large majority does not know why, but gently
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takes it for granted: in a subjugate Humanity, the materiality that expresses Art becomes
merchandise and is covered by the fetish of merchandising, and Art turns into art.
A certain apprehension arises when Beuys calls the social sculpture as the future of Art: we
feel that this definition may contain the new conception of Art as a way to escape the object
property. On the other hand we think: what kind of material is that social sculpture made of?
The public in the museums, galleries, malls, talk shows, the wageworkers? Who is the raw
material of the social sculpture?
In the latest years I have visited a large number of artists’ studios, almost all the important
museums in Europe, from Denmark to Spain, from England to Austria, I have been to New
York, travel all over the Latin America: just like the traveller who returns from his trips full of
stories and experiences to pass on, I return with an evidence: I did not find the Art of this
world in crisis on the official ways I have been. I have created the ‘Bienal de Artes Visuais do
Mercosul’ (Mercosul Biennial of Visual Arts), so that the History of Latin-American Art could
make its mark. It is now on its fourth edition. It was by the time Biennial was created that I
realized how strong the industrialization of art was: almost everything was sold and bought.
Only the true artists did not have a price, they ran away, they escaped.
But whenever they were forced to show up by their survival needs, they were immediately
found by a dangerous critic and thus their art was canned in the narrow containers of
merchandising. By means of appropriation they ran the risk of becoming easy and docile
objects – they could be appropriated and expropriated.
Artists are terribly human, they need the public, they need us to be artists. They have the
message and we are the ones who have to read it. Poor artists! They are in a double-linkage
situation. The public has to pay the price, otherwise there is no public and their works have no
sense. The market has found this out: art is a product, art is important; negotiating and finding
the niche market is necessary! Good artists no longer die of hunger, they are not on the
margin, on the contrary, they acquire status, they are invited to expose at the temples of
culture, they visit the palaces of private collections. Being an artist has become a professional
career, the quality of the artist has become measurable. Market is the parameter and it turns
into good whatever sells well. The artist no longer needs to submit to the Maecenas who took
his freedom to create with orders that should be stuck to the theme and to the taste of the
patron. Today the artist produces and critics, gallery managers and staff are always ready to
guarantee space for their geniality. Artist is no longer a marginal one, s/he is important for the
consumer society, because creativity is so important in our days as dogma used to be in the
Middle Ages. While the religious market of the Middle Ages was based on the perenniality of
dogma, the present market demands novelties each and every day, one which will surely be
disposed tomorrow as obsolete. Paradoxically, while the artist seeks the immortal in his
works, the market that takes it as merchandise will destroy its stability to consume the
ephemeral. The art of the universal and immortal becomes disposable fashion.
Discontent with the enormous space that Plastic Art has achieved day after day, I also watch
an enormous crisis between artists and the circuit of Art. The crisis of Art is common ground,
but market ignores it. Take the Kassesl’ Dossier as an example, opened this month: video
cameras were installed to reinforce the concern on the public safety, as the public has been
threatened by terrorists ever since September 11th. In each and every little place and space
remain the Big Brother eyes. When informed of this safety measure, the curator decided to
change it into art as well, a typical example of “object trouvê”. All and nothing is Art.
Two Brazilian artists, Helio Oiticia and Ligya Clark helped me immensely to find the self-
confidence that I needed to state as Walt Whitman did: “Que se callen los credos y las
escuelas, que retrocedan un momento, conscientes de lo que son y sin olvidarlo nunca.”
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Lygia Clark left art in the last years of her life and devoted herself to cure human souls with
objects full of sensibility, objects that would permit the human being to feel humanity back.
When asked what being an artist is in modern times, Hélio Oiticica answered: Doing an
efficient and relevant job in Plastic Art requires creative freedom to break the boundaries of
production which is stuck to the staff and artistic class…” And it was he who created the
famous “Parangoles” that Mangueira (a famous samba school in Brazil) danced, giving life to
his work.
At the X Dossier, in which works of these two artists were displayed, I mentioned to the
curator Catherine David, that both Helio Oiticica’s and Lygia Clark’s works could not be
considered their works apart from the public. When exposed, both artists were treated with
reverence. Apart from public’s handling, one could just look at those empty objects and signs
and read what they meant. The creative and participant experience has been replaced with a
rigid and final meaning.
If Art is not even at the Dossier, so where would it be? Where are those on the margin who
produce Art?
The answer – as any answer to a question that was not even well formulated because we do
not have the necessary elements to make up a question – came surprisingly, unexpectedly and
in a place unimagined for this.
At the opening of the I World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brasil, a mystique of the so-called
‘Movimento dos Sem Terra’ (Land-reform activists), alias MST, was presented. I did not
understand at first, it seemed too naïve and banal to me. Their struggle is hard and tricky, life
or death. It is a struggle between the marginal and the society, it is a movement taken as
anarchist. And they presented a little piece of their lives represented by the simplicity of those
who are not used to the means, gestures and words that come from the simplicity of art, from
abstraction of art, from intellectuality of art. They were men and women, children, old and
young, entering somehow clumsily and in a disordered line, carrying produce of the country;
a folk song was the background. The auditorium was between the lights, and suddenly I got to
understand. Better, I qualified and classified the gestures of the play: it was a demagogical
nonsense.
In August, last year, I visited a campsite of the ‘Sem Terra’ – or Landless – at last: it was the
celebration of two years in that campsite, an invaded territory and no longer private property,
land grabbed.
The very same women, men, children, young and old people that I had seen at the I WSF,
though now in their own context, black plastic tents, a school and a cafeteria. At the
celebration, we watched the party and even the Mystique.
And just then I got to understand. My fourfold vision finally arose. I got to understand that
might be the new form of Art, the form that links us like a continental platform of the human
gender, the one that divinises us on the best of the humankind, that makes our eyes shine,
causing them to reflect and be reflected. I got to understand that the social sculpture would
come from that, from that margin of the society that reterritorializes through the struggle of
those who want to live, without slave labour, ones who want to struggle for what they
consider their rights. The re-sacred Art is the space of their festive expression.
Long time ago I read, do not remember where, a letter from a North American Indian Chief
that would reply to a US President who wanted to buy his land. He said something more or
less like this: “How do you ask me to sell something that does not belong to myself only, but
to my people? To all my people, ever since the most remote times! How do you ask me to sell
the wind, the sky, the rivers, the trees, the animals? They are not mine, nor anyone’s, but
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everyone’s…” When I read that letter, I felt an amalgam of pain and joy, joy for losing that
sacred unit between the Universe and I, joy because somebody has ever had it and kept on
with it. And it was then when I found out that body is the exact limit between the two
infinites, the outside one, which belongs to everyone and stands for space and time, and the
inside one, which is my capacity of thinking the outside infinite, in an equally infinite way.
At the moment I watched the mystique, my inside infinite came up from Espinoza’s hand:
“we do not know what body is capable of”. I know and I saw how those 800 people lived for
two long years, with no water, no electric light, no sewerage system, no malls, museums,
supermarkets, and with the minimum quantity of food possible, but full of a dignity from
which I felt far away, because they knew what their bodies were capable of in order to fight
for dignity. It is difficult do explain the complex impact of realizing the Mystique (now
capitalized) in its context, realizing how those 800 people had set up as a society, with their
own laws, norms, and with a clear goal: freedom to be able to eat and live by means of their
effort, and not selling their lives for less than nothing. In that scanty and waste way, they were
giving space to Art: the Mystique included drawings, sculptures made of materials such as
wood or mud, poetry, music, choreography and theatre. Right there, in the woods, in Dourado
do Sul, I saw how marginal/marginalized people organized to represent their enthusiasm, their
struggle, their dignity. I saw it, with my eyes shining, reflecting and being reflected.
Before the Art that so emerges, academic report does not suit. Moreover, making it would be
impossible, for the academic report requires quotations, legitimating authorities and the
discovery is still un-covered with authorization…
I have tried in vain to find someone who had written about this and shared with me this new
space of social sculpture. I just found two articles written by the members of MST
themselves, but I assume they are what best express the meaning of the Mystique for a
movement that already figures on 15 millions of members. Being an MST member does not
mean buying a ticket, but living as a member.
Suddenly light was seen. Yes, Art must be on the margins, the real margins that oppose to
what is instituted, and want to overpass the established concepts. Perhaps the margins – and
hopeless that may come true – are today in the Social Movements, they are the ones that want
to change the world, they are the ones that need new aesthetic forms, they are the ones that
produce as well. The latest Unicef meeting showed a terrifying figure: 700 thousand children
are sold and bought a year. We are still slaves, today in the form of 700 thousand children that
are sold and bought as merchandise. If you count patron, seller and agent, this means there are
at least other 2.1 million of men who believe lives may be sold and bought. Human Being is
not more than merchandise. And the billions of dollars that are employed on security for the
citizens made out to guarantee at least the Human Rights do not stop so terrifying numbers.
We are surrounded by these numbers. We watch peacefully the genocides of Indian and
African peoples. No allied war will save those populations from their extermination. The
reason of the market has already decided their destiny. It is decided!
Newspaper articles do not change our reality. Indians can no longer stand hearing about
NGO’s that arrive, say they will do something and before it really happens, the money is over
and they go away, leaving us in the same old situation. Health must be connected with food,
education and agriculture. Indians are said to be backward, but for 500 years we have taught
the white man how to grow and eat corn, beans, cassava and manioc. Now they say we do not
know how to produce, they want us to produce the same way of the white people, who make
use of land and leave it useless.
Our society is in a crisis, and that is obvious. But the same laws keep in vigour, same old
routines, same institutions, no bases reformulated, nothing is re-thought as a re-evolution from
what has been done.
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It is the one who suffers under this society that wants to change it, the one who knows that
humanity does not need to suffer any kind of hell goes out to the streets to show that it is all
wrong.
I have always found this radicalism on Art; artists are the ones who claim for their fourfold
vision. Now I have found other claims again, for odd coincidence these claims have aesthetics
as the North of their practises.
Us, the ones who have visited and remained in the intellectual world, have determined tastes.
According to Duchamp, “Taste is a habit”, so we have determined habits, of good and of bad
taste. The good taste takes us to Art, but the good habit tells us to keep shut when we see
reports revealing something is very rotten on the Planet. Rottenness has escaped from
Denmark Kingdom, Shakespeare, and spread out by covering us with shut habits.
“¡Es tan cómodo ser menor de edad! Si tengo un libro que piensa por mí, un pastor que reemplaza
mi conciencia moral, un médico que juzga acerca de mi dieta, y así sucesivamente, no necesitaré
del propio esfuerzo. Con sólo poder pagar, no tengo necesidad de pensar: otro tomará mi puesto en
tan fastidiosa tarea. Como la mayoría de los hombres tienen por muy peligroso el paso a la
mayoría de edad, fuera de ser penoso, aquellos tutores ya se han cuidado muy amablemente de
tomar sobre sí semejante superintendencia. Después de haber atontado sus reses domesticadas, de
modo que estas pacíficas criaturas no osan dar un solo paso fuera de las andaderas en que están
metidas, les mostraron el riesgo que las amenaza si intentan marchar solas. Lo cierto es que ese
riesgo no es tan grande, pues después de algunas caídas habrían aprendido a caminar; pero los
ejemplos de esos accidentes por lo común producen timidez y espanto, y alejan todo ulterior
intento de rehacer semejante experiencia. ‘’ Gilles Deleuze: Kant : Filosofía de la Historia. Ed.
Nova. Buenos Aires. (Response to what the Illustration is)
We want to remain in the shadows, we want to remain on the edge, we do not want
radicalism, we do not want to be tracked, and we do not want to be marginal. This is the real
problem of these days.
“Los poderes nos tienen afectandonos, es decir cumpliendo nuestro poder de ser afectado por
afectos tristes, y, sin duda, existen mil maneras. Lo que Spinoza ha visto es el poder de Estado y el
poder de la Iglesia. Él piensa que el poder de Estado y el poder de la Iglesia son fundamentalmente
poderes que tienen a sus sujetos afectandolos de afectos tristes, es decir los deprime. Esta es la
operación fundamental del poder, afectarnos de tristeza, lo que implica evidentemente todo un
juego de compensaciones "si eres sensato, tendrás una recompensa", por eso Spinoza pone el gusto
por las decoraciones del lado de los afectos tristes, las recompensas son como una especie de
compensación de una tristeza de ser fundamental. (Problema concerniente a la naturaleza del ser y
otros temas Gilles Deleuze Curso de los martes (Vincennes) - Diversos (14/01/74) Traducción al
español:Ernesto Hernández Santiago de Cali, Julio-1997)
A few days ago I saw an ancient documentary about the 40 years of surrealism, in which
absolutely all the great artists rebelled and showed disapproval for the fact of being inserted in
an “ism”. Duchamp, Picabia, Miró, Picasso, Erns, Arp, Eluard, De Chirico, Giacometti could
not feel as part of any “ism”, their works were not to be reduced to a single and temporal
interpretation. They created a movement that wished for unveiling the invisible – what could
not be seen, but can be deduced and stated through the idea that representation cannot and
shall not be linear. The idea has its twist and turns, hiding places, and it “assaults us from the
deep woods of memory” and converts us into revolutionaries. All of them asserted the
revolutionary nature of Art, all of them expressed that Artist must be against society and in
favour of the human being as unique and original, as a creature that owes the only thing gives
sense to society: Life. So simple, so complex.
Recognizing the revolutionary nature of Art, always asserted by the artists themselves, is also
recognizing this Art which is pushed into us was pasteurised, converted into a Myth, and a
Myth always hides some important falsity.
Antonio Machado used to say on his three Chantings and Proverbs:
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I
Nunca perseguí la gloria
ni dejar en la memoria
de los hombres mi canción;
yo amo los mundos sutiles,
ingrávidos y gentiles
como pompas de jabón.
Me gusta verlos pintarse
de sol y grana, volar
bajo el cielo azul, temblar
súbitamente y quebrarse.
II
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
III
Todo pasa y todo queda,
pero lo nuestro es pasar,
pasar haciendo caminos,
caminos sobre la mar.
Yes, artists do not seek for Glory; it is given by a certain elite that has the power of Midas in
hands to convert them into knights of the Gold Order.
Many of them are made holy after dead, because our society needs time to dis-contextualise
the message and clear it up properly. We know that.
Mona Lisa is not the forever female; it is Leonardo’s homosexuality. Duchamp made it clear,
on a simple postcard.
What Duchamp and Machado have in common the conscience that there is no way; they know
our lives are sheer foam from the ocean. And when we take possession of those concepts we
know our future is not Glory: it is the human specimen as a whole, like that whole of Donne.
Walt Whitman writes:
WHEN I READ THE BOOK
When I read the book, the renowned biography,
is it this, asked myself, what an author calls a man’s life?
Will anyone, once I die, write my life this way? (as if any man could trully know something
about my life:
Now I myself often think about the nothing or very few I know about my life;
only tracks, weak and indirect clues that I keep on hunting to be able to expose here).

Life and Art are very similar, indefinable unless for Death, then they end but revive at each
new Life, at each new Art that sets up for the necessity that Life has to be displayed and
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manifested, represented, seen, heard, read, danced. Life needs that sacred unit which is human
intelligence on duty of the human specimen.
João Cabral de Melo Neto, in the final verses of ‘Morte e Vida Severina’:
- Severino, retirante
deixe agora que lhe diga:
eu não sei bem a resposta
da pergunta que fazia,
se não vale mais saltar
fora da ponte e da vida;
nem conheço essa resposta
se quer mesmo que lhe diga.
É difícil defender,
só com palavras, a vida,
ainda mais quando ele é
esta que se vê, severina;
mas se responder não pude
à pergunta que fazia,
ela, a vida, a respondeu
com sua presença viva;
e não há melhor resposta
que o espetáculo da vida:
vê-la desfiar seu fio,
que também se chama vida,
ver a fábrica que ela mesma,
teimosamente, se fabrica,
vê-la brotar como há pouco
em nova vida explodida;
mesmo quando é assim pequena
a explosão, como a ocorrida;
mesmo quando é uma explosão
como a de há pouco, franzina;
mesmo quando é a explosão
de uma vida severina.
According to Vigotskij in the book Hamlet´s Tragedy, Prince of Denmark, the author usually
cannot explain his/her work, because it happens in relation to the thousands of meanings that
it makes possible and thus showing one only way would be mutilating it. Vigotskij got to
understand, but our society never did. Because as the author cannot assign one DE-FINITE
meaning, the critic plays the role of THE WHOLE public and reads it to all, defines it (not to
forget the meaning of the word) and removes our ignored possibilities of reading, infects us,
tells us how we should read.
Although we love the virginity** and lightness of Art we feel lost, we cannot, and we should
not read Art by ourselves, it has some meaning that poor mortals like us do not understand but
tells us nothing or very few on the other hand. The feeling of insatisfaction grows.
Thanks to the miracle of the globalised and globalising technology, we can see there is a
whole world around us which is accessible by the mere clicking of keys, mouses, switches:
there is a world waiting for us. How about Art? We ask ourselves where the History of Art is,
in Africa, Asia, Oceania. We want to know about African and Asian Picassos, Velazques, and
Oiticicas. We do not know, as we do not know about Shakespeares, Rabelais, Camões,
Goethes, about Bachs, Beethovens, Mozarts, Strauss, Handels, and Vivaldis. We understand in
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our ignorance that our aesthetic concepts have been directed, lined, mutilated. We do not
understand the geniality of Art in other spheres other than the consecrated ones.
We are in the deep crisis of the human being who knows s/he may know everything, but not
how to know. And this is another big problem in our days, knowing we may know, but
ignoring how to manage that knowledge.
Anxiety is even bigger in Art, this little area of human knowledge. If no society can live
without Art, how is that some continents have an Art which is totally unknown by the
intellectuals who travel around the world looking for this globalising totality of knowledge?
But all of a sudden we find The Art is tracking new fields, fertile and virgin fields, to become
present; we find there are people who truly struggle for a new society, one that may joined to
human beings because of their human condition. That is what so many artists have fought for.
And we start to follow Ariadne’s thread; here and there we see the same old gestures, the
same old faces, the same old rituals.
Enthusiasm, the fourfold vision takes possession of us. Chiapas, Seattlhe, Genova, Porto
Alegre, Brasilia, and thousands of other cities respond to the Multitude call, term used by
Spinoza to define “the intelligent love of God”.
The subject ideas usually come from a universal knowledge: as we accumulate knowledge,
accumulated knowledge unexpectedly emerges like Archimedes’ Eureka
As deficient of a proper*** platform, perhaps we could rely on some concepts, with no
appropriated methodological concerns. Removed from distant places, they can be gathered
here:
Chronologically: the criticism about the role scholars play in the society according to Cicero,
author of 4 prepositions of roman natural law; concepts of essence and potency by Spinoza;
the Theory of Activity by Leontiev, the Proximal Development Zone by Vigotskij and the
concept of Rhizome by Gilles Deleuze. Together, they look like a beautiful salad, but to me –
and make sure this is my opinion – they have their reason to be.
The four principles of the roman society natural law which guide the principles of our
Western Christian society, reduced and maybe mistranslated, are the following:
First proposition: things are defined and define their rights according to their
essence.
Second proposition: the law of Nature is not pre-social, it is in the best possible
society. It is life as according to the essence in the best possible society.
Third proposition: first the duties, then the rights, because duties are the
conditions under which you perceive the essence.
Fourth proposition: Therefore there is the competence of someone superior,
whether the Church, the prince, or the scholar. There is the knowledge of the
essences. The one who knows about essences will be able to tell us how to behave
in life as well. Behave in life would be justifiable of a certain knowledge, and in
the name of this I could not say whether it is good or bad. Then there would be an
honest man, whether the way it was determined, as a man of God, or as a man of
wisdom, who will have a competence.
(Spinoza’s Seminar – December 1980 – Gilles Deleuze – Web Imagine –
Translated into Spanish by Ernesto Hernandez – march 1999; Translated into
English by Jouber Nunes Ferreira – june 2002.)
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The fourth Cicero’s proposition has always annoyed me a lot, as it was the one that legalized
the role of official scholar and our society so well made use of. I do not believe competence
might be an exclusive attribute of the honest man by someone who determines exactly what
being an honest man is. I believe – as said by Spinoza – each person has a specific potential
that fits into their existence and essence is the fleeting moment when their potential and their
existence allow the rising of essence.
We have got Velazques, Goya, Picasso: these artists were radical for the beauty of their works,
for the intelligence rendered and transmitted in those small pieces of matter. Their names have
become symbols of talent and intelligence of the individual; they have become models in a
society that would not accept all their members were talented, in a society that prefers to
concentrate the talent of creativity in a group of artists. Its truth, always repeated, wants the
power of creation for few. Creation is not a normal attribute of the human being. Normalizing
it is a way to make it property of few. That is why strict aesthetics regulations have been
created. But regulations do not last long when it concerns to Art. Every now and then, artists
questioning the famous aesthetics codes appear and the scribblers frenetically have to create
new isms.
Why is this? I ask this question because we take for granted only some geniuses can make Art
for the majority, and I am included in those who as accepted this for a long time, almost my
whole life. But my fourfold vision rebelled against that dogma, and started searching for other
human beings who created, like this, simply, who had the power to believe in their creation.
And I have found them, not in pictures or sculptures, not in texts or concerts. I have found
people who used their process of creation as a process of development of their ‘self’. And
there is the point where the fourth proposition was definitely abandoned, because when
restraining the power of creation to few, the aesthetics regulations exclude creation from
whatever does not correspond to the established taste.
But Spinoza’s concepts of essence, potency and existence blossomed to me like a flower in a
lake of the Amazon, splendorous and innocent in its luminosity. I finally got to understand
that infinite essence is something that connects us as the human gender, that is our possibility
of acting and of being; our potency is the moment when we exercise this possibility of acting
and existence is the only possible base for that. All is nothing without existence. Spinoza
might have been the first expert. And it is not me who says that; it is Deleuze, at his
1980/1981 Seminar on Spinoza. Reading it is a lot worthwhile. What has ever fascinated me
in Spinoza is his radicalism to enunciate Ethics; his analysis on the sympathy is remarkably
complete. His intelligence and the feeling of truth found in his books can only be understood
through the poetry of his proposes. This poetry reaches all of us, because we all have the
infinite essence that joins us to defend the human from the being. Spinoza does not talk about
Art, and that used to worry me as well, because he devoted only some sentences to the
problems of Art and Aesthetics.
An old idea has always been with me: perhaps Essence has the key to reach the true Ethics.
This idea became solid at the meeting with the social movements. Yes, in a world when Ethics
leads people’s destinies, Art may be all, as in Bali. So it would not need to be confined, it
might be able to be present in the 24 hours of people’s daily life. Art would convert into
another thing, much closer to us, because we would be living in Beuys’ social sculpture.
As not all in life is Art, there are luckily other activities for people, present in other sciences
that help us understand the world. On its search for a better understanding of the social human
processes, the historical-cultural school provides extremely valuable tools. The Theory of
Activity, as I understand it, is centred in the nucleus of the human socialization process. This
nucleus has allowed me to understand Art as a social rather than individual process. The
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Theory of Activity is fundamental to understand a social sculpture and to see it as possible

and plausible. The Activity is a process, not an immediate fact.
It was Vigotsky who gave me the clue for another possibility for Art, the Proximal
Development Zone. Yes, Art as Humanity Proximal Development Zone, margins as Proximal
Development Zone. Art is what has this third dimension where we get to know and
understand ourselves. Art is the undefined that summarizes our knowledge about life,
materializes it, makes it universal, like the caverns in Altamira, like the Indian Plumary****
Art, like the Landless’ Mystique, like the flags against Neo-Liberalism, like the II World
Forum Mosaic, like so many others with no authors, no metre, but that show to me and to so
many others a Proximal Development Zone where I will be able to enter by the hand of those
who are no longer there. I yet have not found anyone who treated Art as Proximal
Development Zone, but I know they exist. It is just a matter of time: if the concept allows us
to realize the learning process, recovering the bases that permitted Vigoskij to formulate it, we
can extend it to see Art as a Proximal Development Zone of Humanity as a whole.
And Deleue’s rhizome concept is what might close the heteroclite group, with absolutely no
wish for being classically logical, to enunciate what I think in this moment is my, I said my
great discovery: the essence of the being, rising rhizomatically on the Social Movements.
Via-Campesina has 250 (two hundred and fifty) thousand affiliate associations, I said 250
(two hundred and fifty) thousand associations of peasants all over the world. its base of
operations is here in Holand, one of the strongest centres of Capitalism. MST has 15 (fifteen)
millions associates in Brazil. ATTAC gets over ten thousand associates every week in Europe.
All these quantitative data become qualitative data when we take into account that the aim is
the individual’s dignity, it is his/her development as a complete, entire, living being. Political
parties, NGOs, associations, and institutions develp, multiply and live in a scary speed. They
know something is very rotten on Earth and want to look for solutions. And the most
impacting is that under their potency, to act, made concret in the infinite essence of being
equal, have changing our single vision existence.
Each one of these movements has its own reterritorialization, each one knows about their
goals, internal conflicts, and develops day by day on their lands, disterritorializing it, and they
appear together in different places of the world, joining the other thousands, speaking
different languages, in a chimerical Babel that says “Another World is Possible” and also
“Another Art is possible”.
SUMMARIZING, MY THESIS IS THAT THE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION OF PIECES
OF ART IN MERCHANDISE REMOVED THE SACRED ASPECT OF ART AND TURNED IT
INTO ONE OF AN ONLY MEANING. IN ORDER TO RECOVER THE MULTIPLICITY
WHICH IS TYPICAL OF ART, IT IS NECESSARY TO REDO THIS AND RECOVER THIS
SACREDNESS, PROVIDED IT DOES NOT MEAN WHAT IT MEANT IN THE PAST:
MAKING IT INACCESSIBLE BY DEFINING REGULATIONS THAT SAY WHAT ART IS
AND SEPARATE IT FROM LIFE. THE SACREDNESS SHOWN BY THE SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS IS THE RE-LINK BETWEEN ART AND LIFE. IN OTHER WORDS, ONLY
LIFE LIVED AESTHETICALLY IS ETHICALLY HUMAN.
(Now I will show some slides that will express better what I mean)
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Bibliography :
BATESON, Gregory : « Para una Unidad Sagrada »
HUGO, Vitor. "Paroles d'un conservateur á propos d'un perturbateur". Oeuvres
poétiques II Les Châtiments, les Contemplations. Édition établie et anotée par
Pierre Albouy. Gallimard, 1967
MELO NETO, João Cabral de "Morte e Vida Severina" in. Morte e Vida
Severina e outros poemas em voz alta. Rio, Ed. Sabiá, 4th edition, 1967
COMO VOCÊ PODE NOTAR, FIZ REFERÊNCIAS, SEM CITAR:
MARX (FETICHE DA MERCADORIA - "O CAPITAL"
WALTER BENJAMIN - ENSAIO "O NARRADOR"

p. 11 – Hamlet or Hamel
** p. 11 – ingravidez (?) – virginity (esse é o sentido?)
***p. 12 – plataforma caba (?) – coloquei “adequada plataforma”
****p. 15 – plumário – plumary