See with the mouth, bite with the eyes
Juliana Monachesi - 2007
Part of Fernando Lindote’s work is inseparable from the way they are made. Paintings, at first sight abstract informal, hide an invoice which inserts them in lineage more in dialogue with body art than effectively with pictoric trtadition. Since Pollock, at least, painting is a discourse from the body to the body, and not from mind to look, although formalist readings intend to insert the North-American painter in a teleological matrix of pure autonomy in the form of planarity conquered by the “heroic artist”- readings ballasted in a mind-body dualism, for long overcome by cognitive science, one must say. An already classic text by Allan Kaprow, written in 1958, shows an opening to all senses promoted by Pollock’s painting, in which work, states Kaprow, “the automatism of the act makes clear, not only that in this case, it doesn’t concern the old workmanship of painting, but also that this act may reach the ritual border”.
The impossibility to see (and dominate) painting at the same time as you are “in it”, brings Lindote’s work near to that of Pollock. It is worth, to continue the analogy, to follow Kaprow’s text: “I’m convinced that, in order to duly apprehend Pollock’s impact, we have to be acrobats, constantly jumping between an identification with hands and body that threw the paint and remained “in” the canvas and submission to objective marks allowing them to confuse and assault us. (…) What we have then, is an art which tends to get lost out of its boundaries, tends to fulfill our world with itself; art that, in meaning, looks, impulses, seems to categorically break with painters tradition that goes back to, at least, the Greeks.
“The fact that Pollock comes close to destroying this tradition can very well be a return to the point in which art was more actively involved in the ritual, the magic, and the life of which we have knowledge in our recent past”.
I insist in highlighting this perception of a ritualistic aspect in Pollock’s drippings in order to underline the difference between a Kaprow’s reading and one of Greenberg, for example, as well as to rehearse a question if the act of licking the clay put on canvas or directly on the wall, in Lindote, coul have something ritual, besides an evident irony in relation to pictorial tradition.
From the thought about painting’s point of view, even the contemporaneous, the temptation to read Lindote’s work from pastiche’s post-modernist point of view is almost inevitable, from another critic vision perspective – since each one has the Pollock one deserves – the question gets stronger: The modern/post-modern discussion is overcome – although Lindote has worked with his paintings of the 80’s -, then the most interesting approximation must be via body art and its unfolding, this struggle between artist, space and “watcher”.
If we act as jugglers trying to balance the identification with language and body that spread the “ink” and stay in the canvas, with the restriction to objective marks of Lindote’s drawings and paintings, allowing the abyss to assault us between one and another, we are before an art that gets lost out of its boundaries and fulfills our world with itself. An organic machine or a mechanical body comes towards us at the same time as it pulls back into the canvas or the wall. Canvases are almost transparent: The artist works on a raw cloth, or intervenes on the raw wall, two types of surfaces that remits to the limits of representation, space, body. The licked paintings or drawings are skins exposed to our fascination and and to our horror. Sublime is one of the terms one can use to define this. Abject is another.
“Not satisfied with the suggestion, through painting, of our other senses, we have to use the specific substance of vision, sound, movements, people, odors, tact”. Also writes the inventor of the term “happening” and forerunner of this production that in the 60’s would approximate art to life. Kaprow foresaw then incorporation, by post-Pollock artists, of every day materials, of any ordinary element in the new art that was to be born, foresaw the rupture(s) with painting understood as pure planarity, but – as history is made of flows and reflows, linearity as well as overlaying and crossings, - also foresaw a less promising horizon of Pollock’s diluters, which was proven as much as the appropriations wave.
Thus, both questions remain: How to produce paintings after painting had been imploded and after the merely visual relation had been exhausted? But how to produce paintings in a context in which planarity and illusionism are still pursued? Or, putting both together: What painting to produce when the pictorial discourse comes back to the same road crossing of 40 years ago?
Discourse criticism
The mouth is the place of language. When it is used in art for other ends that not the speech, as Bataille teaches us, it is a space to criticize the teleological project of modernity, briefly described in the first paragraph of the present text. This Battaillian approach, the first that occurs to me to handle Fernando Lindote’s series of “bitten” or “licked” works, has already been brilliantly developed by Raul Antelo in his essay “Behind images” (2005).
The critic is, inclusively, an integrated part of the 2003 series of drawings made of clay, saliva and iron on paper by the artist, in which Antelo’s signature is incorporated to the works. Another symptomatic discursive torsion is seen there, because, in the moment in which art starts “speaking” with other materials and proceedings – besides the tongue running over the paper’s surface -, the place of speech is part taken by an art theorist.
Bataille “reduces” the mouth – the most visible physical symbol of intelligence – to 6the level of more “improper” organs. To him, once the source of language and saliva is the same, any philosophical discourse may legitimately be represented, both, by the image of an orator who speaks and that of a man who spits. This is how one can watch the video “Edax” (1996), presented in “Panorama MAM” of 1997 or the series of sculptures in bitten EVA (2003-2004) by Fernando Lindote, as philosophy. They are discourses made of chewing dejects, mastication leftovers and drivel.
My first contact with Lindote’s work happened in 2002, when two of the artist’s installation were presented in the Tomie Ohtake Institute, in São Paulo. In the first room, a video projection showed in close-up, the action of the artist biting a white EVA board and spitting the small toothed fragments on the floor. In the room where the video was projected, the floor was covered with bitten EVA pieces. It was the “Edax” video. In a contiguous room, drawings made with colored chalk directly on the wall, occupied the whole space and, on the floor, pieces of chalk trampled by the visitors, formed other drawings. The drawing had nothing of a conventional “composition”: they were automatic and continuous scribbles, like those we unconsciously make on a note pad beside the telephone, while the conversation takes the mind to other places.
This absent drawing, emptied of artistic intentionality, reinforced the “absent discourse” of the previous room in which, the mouth, shown from a very close angle, bit and spitted without emitting another sound except the one of the action of biting and spitting.
If “intentionality” occupied, with the arrival of modern art and, moreover, in the works of high modernism, the center of the critical discourse about the concept of art, Lindote’s works then presented in ITO revoke this, among others, modernist premise to put formalism back upside down, by means of “ informs”. In other words, the bet that even the works more supposedly emptied of relation with the ordinary world are connected to it by inversions, sometimes eschatological, of the visual form, horizontalised and clean which modernism intended to establish between artist, space and “spectator”.
Duality form/content itself, typical of modern thinking, loses sense from the “inform” point of view. The absence of form is also a type of form, and no formalization comes to artistic world unpunished, or, the content is there, despite the artist want it or not. This seems to be the party that Fernando Lindote adopts when sculpting with his mouth unstable, unidentifiable, unsteady, tripping, soft… It is a dialogue with the performance and sculpting tradition, maybe a hybrid between both when he makes us go through an installation like the one at the Mercosul Biennale (2005), among aluminum filaments founded in clay moulds, perhaps also sculpted with the mouth. Also we dance, guided by the suspended rhythm in the dock warehouse on the banks of the Guaíba River.
Two years after the show at Tomie Ohtake, I had the opportunity to interview the artist for an article about his exhibition “Mangue Real”, at Nara Roesler Gallery, in São Paulo. At the beginning of the 1990’s, Lindote explained to me at that occasion, he intended to expand the concept of painting, substituting canvas by colored EVA: “Biting was the resource I found for cutting that surface without the artificiality of the stiletto, a way to give it a rhythm”. Then the formal interest gave space to the intrinsic relation that the work had with the body, he told me. When I produced the article, I wrote that the presence of the body was evident in the mentioned exhibition for, no matter wherever you looked, there were “bowels, fluids, organisms that arise of a fecund surface which, because of being too shallow, leaves those organisms to be seen”. Nowadays I find myself again recognizing those bowels and fluids on canvases or drawings, but having to ask myself if the metaphor wasn’t (and still is) very little to deal with his works.
Quadrate acrobatics
I’m thinking in making a parallel with Duchamp’s malicos moulds, but Raul Antelo’s essay also suggests the vicinity of the Duchampian celibate machine and Lindote’s production. I then return to Pollock’s parallel and think that this experience of being inside a painting gains a new datum in Lindote’s artistic practice, since his work is an experience of being inside the art spaces, like in the intervention re realized in Porto Alegre in 1996, bleeding the walls of the tower, at the exhibition at MAC in Curitiba in 2004, in which he occupied the whole museum with drawings made of clay and saliva on the walls. This “being inside” ramifies in the artist’s curatorial practice, in the multiplier action in formation works of Santa Catarina’s artists that Lindote idealizes and coordinates, like the “Pretexto” project.
In the beginning of last year, when I re-encountered a work from the artist at the Panorama MAM 2005 – a big scale drawing, also produced directly on the wall (in this case, one of these museum modules) – I was intrigued with the work’s title (because these drawings don’t usually have a title): “That said, spat on the floor, made a bit of mud with the saliva and, with the mud, anointed the eyes of the blind.” Something biblical, separated from the work, it seemed to me. When I came to know a video of his, entitled “That said” (2006), a “staging” of this passage of John’s Evangel, I imagined to have definitely captured the ritualistic datum, in the video as well as in the Panorama’s work. But, in the video, the mud made with the saliva does not return the sight to the other; it is used to cover the eyes of the artist himself, eyes momentaneously blinded by the plaster recently expelled by the mouth.
Then the philosophy enunciated by the regurgitation comes to definitely interdict the look, which already was debilitated due to the impossibility to speak. Hindered by language and vision, we are put in a situation of quadrate acrobatics. What works are to come from researches, so coherent and always taken to last consequences by Fernando Lindote? Will we fumble in the dark, guided by some kind of distorted sound, to find works that exhale odors which take us, by some scent suggestion or any other volatile nature, to move and relate with a type of experience more internal than that already provided by his works?
Lindote’s work is a kind of a convocation to life. A deviating convocation, that invites us to see with the mouth, bite with the eyes, think through the skin, understand with the stomach. The automatism of the act in Lindote, contrary to what happened in Pollock’s actions, points to a pulse of life, not death. It consists of a rewriting of the art codes, in a permanent questioning of the state of things, and, above all, of a dialogue with contemporary production. Let us remember that this is an artist who invents pretexts to move and oxygenate the artistic scene of the city and state he chose to live in. And have in mind that his work moves far from recurrent discourses of memory, subjectivity, image, the urban, the pure and simple struggle with materials, the media and technologies, the specific site, the politician and engaged, the identity…That his deviating trajectory always oscillated between a belonging and an independence in relation to groups, movements, tendencies… That, finally, due to a poetic singularity, he could inscribe himself in readings and clippings, that transited through all above mentioned themes.
An open work in the best sense, and an instigating one, because of the resistance framed by the language. Therefore my discursive acrobatics which intended to embrace this production, but ended, fortunately somewhat ill succeeded.
Juliana Monachesi - 2007
Part of Fernando Lindote’s work is inseparable from the way they are made. Paintings, at first sight abstract informal, hide an invoice which inserts them in lineage more in dialogue with body art than effectively with pictoric trtadition. Since Pollock, at least, painting is a discourse from the body to the body, and not from mind to look, although formalist readings intend to insert the North-American painter in a teleological matrix of pure autonomy in the form of planarity conquered by the “heroic artist”- readings ballasted in a mind-body dualism, for long overcome by cognitive science, one must say. An already classic text by Allan Kaprow, written in 1958, shows an opening to all senses promoted by Pollock’s painting, in which work, states Kaprow, “the automatism of the act makes clear, not only that in this case, it doesn’t concern the old workmanship of painting, but also that this act may reach the ritual border”.
The impossibility to see (and dominate) painting at the same time as you are “in it”, brings Lindote’s work near to that of Pollock. It is worth, to continue the analogy, to follow Kaprow’s text: “I’m convinced that, in order to duly apprehend Pollock’s impact, we have to be acrobats, constantly jumping between an identification with hands and body that threw the paint and remained “in” the canvas and submission to objective marks allowing them to confuse and assault us. (…) What we have then, is an art which tends to get lost out of its boundaries, tends to fulfill our world with itself; art that, in meaning, looks, impulses, seems to categorically break with painters tradition that goes back to, at least, the Greeks.
“The fact that Pollock comes close to destroying this tradition can very well be a return to the point in which art was more actively involved in the ritual, the magic, and the life of which we have knowledge in our recent past”.
I insist in highlighting this perception of a ritualistic aspect in Pollock’s drippings in order to underline the difference between a Kaprow’s reading and one of Greenberg, for example, as well as to rehearse a question if the act of licking the clay put on canvas or directly on the wall, in Lindote, coul have something ritual, besides an evident irony in relation to pictorial tradition.
From the thought about painting’s point of view, even the contemporaneous, the temptation to read Lindote’s work from pastiche’s post-modernist point of view is almost inevitable, from another critic vision perspective – since each one has the Pollock one deserves – the question gets stronger: The modern/post-modern discussion is overcome – although Lindote has worked with his paintings of the 80’s -, then the most interesting approximation must be via body art and its unfolding, this struggle between artist, space and “watcher”.
If we act as jugglers trying to balance the identification with language and body that spread the “ink” and stay in the canvas, with the restriction to objective marks of Lindote’s drawings and paintings, allowing the abyss to assault us between one and another, we are before an art that gets lost out of its boundaries and fulfills our world with itself. An organic machine or a mechanical body comes towards us at the same time as it pulls back into the canvas or the wall. Canvases are almost transparent: The artist works on a raw cloth, or intervenes on the raw wall, two types of surfaces that remits to the limits of representation, space, body. The licked paintings or drawings are skins exposed to our fascination and and to our horror. Sublime is one of the terms one can use to define this. Abject is another.
“Not satisfied with the suggestion, through painting, of our other senses, we have to use the specific substance of vision, sound, movements, people, odors, tact”. Also writes the inventor of the term “happening” and forerunner of this production that in the 60’s would approximate art to life. Kaprow foresaw then incorporation, by post-Pollock artists, of every day materials, of any ordinary element in the new art that was to be born, foresaw the rupture(s) with painting understood as pure planarity, but – as history is made of flows and reflows, linearity as well as overlaying and crossings, - also foresaw a less promising horizon of Pollock’s diluters, which was proven as much as the appropriations wave.
Thus, both questions remain: How to produce paintings after painting had been imploded and after the merely visual relation had been exhausted? But how to produce paintings in a context in which planarity and illusionism are still pursued? Or, putting both together: What painting to produce when the pictorial discourse comes back to the same road crossing of 40 years ago?
Discourse criticism
The mouth is the place of language. When it is used in art for other ends that not the speech, as Bataille teaches us, it is a space to criticize the teleological project of modernity, briefly described in the first paragraph of the present text. This Battaillian approach, the first that occurs to me to handle Fernando Lindote’s series of “bitten” or “licked” works, has already been brilliantly developed by Raul Antelo in his essay “Behind images” (2005).
The critic is, inclusively, an integrated part of the 2003 series of drawings made of clay, saliva and iron on paper by the artist, in which Antelo’s signature is incorporated to the works. Another symptomatic discursive torsion is seen there, because, in the moment in which art starts “speaking” with other materials and proceedings – besides the tongue running over the paper’s surface -, the place of speech is part taken by an art theorist.
Bataille “reduces” the mouth – the most visible physical symbol of intelligence – to 6the level of more “improper” organs. To him, once the source of language and saliva is the same, any philosophical discourse may legitimately be represented, both, by the image of an orator who speaks and that of a man who spits. This is how one can watch the video “Edax” (1996), presented in “Panorama MAM” of 1997 or the series of sculptures in bitten EVA (2003-2004) by Fernando Lindote, as philosophy. They are discourses made of chewing dejects, mastication leftovers and drivel.
My first contact with Lindote’s work happened in 2002, when two of the artist’s installation were presented in the Tomie Ohtake Institute, in São Paulo. In the first room, a video projection showed in close-up, the action of the artist biting a white EVA board and spitting the small toothed fragments on the floor. In the room where the video was projected, the floor was covered with bitten EVA pieces. It was the “Edax” video. In a contiguous room, drawings made with colored chalk directly on the wall, occupied the whole space and, on the floor, pieces of chalk trampled by the visitors, formed other drawings. The drawing had nothing of a conventional “composition”: they were automatic and continuous scribbles, like those we unconsciously make on a note pad beside the telephone, while the conversation takes the mind to other places.
This absent drawing, emptied of artistic intentionality, reinforced the “absent discourse” of the previous room in which, the mouth, shown from a very close angle, bit and spitted without emitting another sound except the one of the action of biting and spitting.
If “intentionality” occupied, with the arrival of modern art and, moreover, in the works of high modernism, the center of the critical discourse about the concept of art, Lindote’s works then presented in ITO revoke this, among others, modernist premise to put formalism back upside down, by means of “ informs”. In other words, the bet that even the works more supposedly emptied of relation with the ordinary world are connected to it by inversions, sometimes eschatological, of the visual form, horizontalised and clean which modernism intended to establish between artist, space and “spectator”.
Duality form/content itself, typical of modern thinking, loses sense from the “inform” point of view. The absence of form is also a type of form, and no formalization comes to artistic world unpunished, or, the content is there, despite the artist want it or not. This seems to be the party that Fernando Lindote adopts when sculpting with his mouth unstable, unidentifiable, unsteady, tripping, soft… It is a dialogue with the performance and sculpting tradition, maybe a hybrid between both when he makes us go through an installation like the one at the Mercosul Biennale (2005), among aluminum filaments founded in clay moulds, perhaps also sculpted with the mouth. Also we dance, guided by the suspended rhythm in the dock warehouse on the banks of the Guaíba River.
Two years after the show at Tomie Ohtake, I had the opportunity to interview the artist for an article about his exhibition “Mangue Real”, at Nara Roesler Gallery, in São Paulo. At the beginning of the 1990’s, Lindote explained to me at that occasion, he intended to expand the concept of painting, substituting canvas by colored EVA: “Biting was the resource I found for cutting that surface without the artificiality of the stiletto, a way to give it a rhythm”. Then the formal interest gave space to the intrinsic relation that the work had with the body, he told me. When I produced the article, I wrote that the presence of the body was evident in the mentioned exhibition for, no matter wherever you looked, there were “bowels, fluids, organisms that arise of a fecund surface which, because of being too shallow, leaves those organisms to be seen”. Nowadays I find myself again recognizing those bowels and fluids on canvases or drawings, but having to ask myself if the metaphor wasn’t (and still is) very little to deal with his works.
Quadrate acrobatics
I’m thinking in making a parallel with Duchamp’s malicos moulds, but Raul Antelo’s essay also suggests the vicinity of the Duchampian celibate machine and Lindote’s production. I then return to Pollock’s parallel and think that this experience of being inside a painting gains a new datum in Lindote’s artistic practice, since his work is an experience of being inside the art spaces, like in the intervention re realized in Porto Alegre in 1996, bleeding the walls of the tower, at the exhibition at MAC in Curitiba in 2004, in which he occupied the whole museum with drawings made of clay and saliva on the walls. This “being inside” ramifies in the artist’s curatorial practice, in the multiplier action in formation works of Santa Catarina’s artists that Lindote idealizes and coordinates, like the “Pretexto” project.
In the beginning of last year, when I re-encountered a work from the artist at the Panorama MAM 2005 – a big scale drawing, also produced directly on the wall (in this case, one of these museum modules) – I was intrigued with the work’s title (because these drawings don’t usually have a title): “That said, spat on the floor, made a bit of mud with the saliva and, with the mud, anointed the eyes of the blind.” Something biblical, separated from the work, it seemed to me. When I came to know a video of his, entitled “That said” (2006), a “staging” of this passage of John’s Evangel, I imagined to have definitely captured the ritualistic datum, in the video as well as in the Panorama’s work. But, in the video, the mud made with the saliva does not return the sight to the other; it is used to cover the eyes of the artist himself, eyes momentaneously blinded by the plaster recently expelled by the mouth.
Then the philosophy enunciated by the regurgitation comes to definitely interdict the look, which already was debilitated due to the impossibility to speak. Hindered by language and vision, we are put in a situation of quadrate acrobatics. What works are to come from researches, so coherent and always taken to last consequences by Fernando Lindote? Will we fumble in the dark, guided by some kind of distorted sound, to find works that exhale odors which take us, by some scent suggestion or any other volatile nature, to move and relate with a type of experience more internal than that already provided by his works?
Lindote’s work is a kind of a convocation to life. A deviating convocation, that invites us to see with the mouth, bite with the eyes, think through the skin, understand with the stomach. The automatism of the act in Lindote, contrary to what happened in Pollock’s actions, points to a pulse of life, not death. It consists of a rewriting of the art codes, in a permanent questioning of the state of things, and, above all, of a dialogue with contemporary production. Let us remember that this is an artist who invents pretexts to move and oxygenate the artistic scene of the city and state he chose to live in. And have in mind that his work moves far from recurrent discourses of memory, subjectivity, image, the urban, the pure and simple struggle with materials, the media and technologies, the specific site, the politician and engaged, the identity…That his deviating trajectory always oscillated between a belonging and an independence in relation to groups, movements, tendencies… That, finally, due to a poetic singularity, he could inscribe himself in readings and clippings, that transited through all above mentioned themes.
An open work in the best sense, and an instigating one, because of the resistance framed by the language. Therefore my discursive acrobatics which intended to embrace this production, but ended, fortunately somewhat ill succeeded.
