An exhibition within an exhibition: the Minimal world of Jeanete Musatti
Ricardo Resende - 2008
Paraphrasing U.S. critic Arthur C. Danto, Jeanete Musatti’s art “transfigures the commonplace” , it deals with apparently banal situations that are no longer important in the daily life of contemporary society, and transforms them into artworks, small installations, or miniature art pieces. The situations created in these artistic “environments” (whether or not they are stored in showcases) represent real-life events that usually go unnoticed in their simplicity, due mainly to the great degree of anxiety and amount of information found in contemporary urban life.
With her unpretentious gesture of bringing together (collecting) and combining small “found objects” that she picks up at antique shops, family homes, city streets, sandy beaches, and in the woods, the São Paulo artist creates a cartography of her path and her own existence, as shown in the work Estreito de Corintho (Isthmus of Corinth), of 2006. Here she arranged photographs on a column positioned next to a “showcase” on a pedestal, containing a historical scene. This scene features the remains of two temples and a statue buried in the sand and debris that once constituted them, as if representing the existence and the history of humankind worn away by the passage of time. Interestingly, on the column covered with photographs, a picture presents a single micro figurine photographed from behind that appears to be observing the scene in the subsequent photo. Would this be, perhaps, a way for the artist to portray herself as an observer, thereby revealing the insignificant human scale in face of world things?
For more than 40 years, Jeanete Musatti has been building herself an artistic career around the observation and gathering of small objects, their transfigurations or re-readings, and their subsequent cataloguing with a view to conferring museological meaning on them as soon as she makes them into art pieces. Musatti’s works are recreations of her own inner world. To better assign them an art category, these “organizations” address so-called “interior landscapes”, i.e., small sublime landscapes that require that the viewer bows, nearly in reverential manner, before these minute windows of her soul and her imagination that open up to her inner self, rather than to the outside world.
The artist’s action consists of displacing everyday life scenes into the exhibition space of showcases, displays, glass boxes, or tabletops. It involves nothing besides investigation and the exposure of intimacy. As our gaze delves into Jeanete Musatti’s Minimal world, we come upon the silence that is so critically important for the existence of a work of art.
The procedure of building archives that currently is a vogue in contemporary art has been part of Janete Musatti’s practice since the early days of her career, when she transformed art into a sort of archives, a small curio cabinet, a memorabilia item or memento of lived experiences, whether they be sensorial or aesthetic; or yet the whole organized in such a way as to constitute a magnetized artistic field, as shown in the untitled work of 2004/2008. In this piece, the artist set up a carcass or seashell inside a miniature cradle and then she placed two silhouettes of small birds side by side, as if looking onto the scene. Everything here is made of cast metal or tin. Regardless of the place or surface on which the artist organizes these objects, their visual and sensorial impact on the viewer is always highly impressive.
In the current exhibition, the artist has arranged her work in a stand with shelves, with two photographs lining its inside back panel. Both pictures show a same type of delicate structure made out of an entanglement of hair, which brings to mind a bird’s nest. In the first photo, a figurine resembling a little music-box ballerina emerges from the hair strands that constitute the nest, which the figurine shares with a few stones.
The other photograph shows two fossilized shells inside the nest: one is a snail’s spirally coiled shell and the other, an ordinary seashell. Like in many of the artist’s works, this “arrangement” spawns a somewhat phantasmagoric atmosphere that transcends realism, like a frightening memory game or a nightmare, albeit the delicate figures of the two heralding birds.
In another work of this series, titled Delicadezas da Alma (Gentleness of the Soul), of 2008, many small picture frames serve as boxes inside which the artist creates a cartography of isolated scenes of human gentleness. Small human figurines that could be viewed as pertaining to France under King Louis XV attend these scenes against a background of intertwined lines that add color and a sense of organization to the work. On occasion these scenes seem to represent a gestural expressionist painting, a quasi miniature action painting.
***
Writing on Jeanete Musatti in the wake of such authoritative essays as that by Casimiro Xavier de Mendonça, who delivered a fine and comprehensive description of the artist’s body of works, and that of art critic and historian Aracy Amaral, presents quite a challenge for me. As it seems, all that could be said about the artist’s work has been said. So, after reading Casimiro Xavier de Mendonça, who deserves special mention for his critical oeuvre, I saw no other path to follow except address and reflect on the problematization of the use of the showcase and other confined spaces destined for the artist’s “small archaeologies” – an expression in her own words, quoted in Mendonça’s “Jeanete Musatti” (São Paulo: Ex Libris, 1991).
As collectors or mere gatherers of data (objects) or vestiges (writings and images) of their respective passages through the world, in the recent history of art we have Alan Kaprow, in the 1960s; Sofie Calle, in the 19070s, and countless artists of said generations and thereafter who adopted display windows, showcases, suitcases, plastic bags, pedestals or shelves as supports in their work. Marcel Duchamp, Arman, Christian Boltanski, Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Rosângela Rennó, Farnese de Andrade, Nina Morais, Amélia Toledo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Nelson Leirner, and the more recent Brazilian artists Carla Zaccagnini, Mabe Bethônico, and Cláudia Sampaio, among others, effectively render this desire to create an “absolute archive”, in the words of Elisabeth Roudinesco. “[…] I have reflected on the subject of the archive in psychoanalysis; on the way to organize archives, and on the ‘restless and tragic relation’ (in the words of Derrida) that one can have with archives, with the spectrum of the absolute archive, and with the crazy notion that we can record just about anything.”
The “archaeological” accumulation of things is an ancient practice in the history of art. Many artists have created these “commonplaces” with their “collections” that result from their archive-oriented investigations. These investigations would be attempts to apprehend or “to observe the world through a framing” , as Bernadette Panek wrote in her doctoral dissertation, to which I resort to ponder the function of the showcase in Jeanete Musatti’s oeuvre -- not as a neutral and protected space, but as an unlimited space in which life fragments are viewed through accumulated and re-organize objects.
Even when Musatti does not isolate the “scene” in a window or showcase, letting objects loose in space, the fact that she appropriates them and works them as miniatures or frozen cutouts of a lived scene is a way to isolate them from the so-called real world. The difference in scale and the isolation itself are ways to represent the distancing from or the representation of reality.
“The outline of an isolated field of action is another limit that the display window eventually poses. In this way, the artist stirs up the creation of an autonomous world with its own character, detached from the outside world, while delimiting and organizing elements so that they co-exist and, to a certain extent, relate within this same space. The artist builds a small world, creates specific situations, and practically rejects outside influences. He/she proposes a relation meant to eternalize certain relations that come together only in the interior of this space..”
Jeanete Musatti captures time in her showcases. As it seems, her aim is to eternalize it through objects and situations turned into museum exhibits. Her cases containing miniature scenes serve to freeze and concentrate time. Jeanete Musatti’s art work is always an illusion or a greatly reduced representation of reality. While working with miniatures or simply displacing objects, she reduces the world to a minute scale.
Drawing, painting, pasting, collecting, and organizing are ways to confer meaning on life itself. Jeanete Musatti belongs in the world of small things – a world in smaller scale.
[1] According to Danto’s description in the book “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace” that inspired the first few lines of this essay, a thing “is a thing, and things, as a class, lack aboutness just because they are things”.
[2] ROUDINESCO, Elisabeth. Original French title: “Analyse, L’Archive’. Translated herein from the Portuguese in A Análise e o Arquivo. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001, p. 8-9.
[3] PANEK, Bernadette. In: O espaço isolado da vitrine: espaço de autoria. Dissertation presented in the Graduate Program in Art, with a focus on the theory, teaching and learning in the field of Art History, at the University of São Paulo’s School of Art and Communications, as a pre-requisite for the doctorate
degree in Art under the guidance of Prof. Domingos Tadeu Chiarelli. The researcher has devoted her academic studies to the analysis of the use of the showcase as an integral part of the work of art.
[4] Ibidem.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
Ricardo Resende - 2008
Paraphrasing U.S. critic Arthur C. Danto, Jeanete Musatti’s art “transfigures the commonplace” , it deals with apparently banal situations that are no longer important in the daily life of contemporary society, and transforms them into artworks, small installations, or miniature art pieces. The situations created in these artistic “environments” (whether or not they are stored in showcases) represent real-life events that usually go unnoticed in their simplicity, due mainly to the great degree of anxiety and amount of information found in contemporary urban life.
With her unpretentious gesture of bringing together (collecting) and combining small “found objects” that she picks up at antique shops, family homes, city streets, sandy beaches, and in the woods, the São Paulo artist creates a cartography of her path and her own existence, as shown in the work Estreito de Corintho (Isthmus of Corinth), of 2006. Here she arranged photographs on a column positioned next to a “showcase” on a pedestal, containing a historical scene. This scene features the remains of two temples and a statue buried in the sand and debris that once constituted them, as if representing the existence and the history of humankind worn away by the passage of time. Interestingly, on the column covered with photographs, a picture presents a single micro figurine photographed from behind that appears to be observing the scene in the subsequent photo. Would this be, perhaps, a way for the artist to portray herself as an observer, thereby revealing the insignificant human scale in face of world things?
For more than 40 years, Jeanete Musatti has been building herself an artistic career around the observation and gathering of small objects, their transfigurations or re-readings, and their subsequent cataloguing with a view to conferring museological meaning on them as soon as she makes them into art pieces. Musatti’s works are recreations of her own inner world. To better assign them an art category, these “organizations” address so-called “interior landscapes”, i.e., small sublime landscapes that require that the viewer bows, nearly in reverential manner, before these minute windows of her soul and her imagination that open up to her inner self, rather than to the outside world.
The artist’s action consists of displacing everyday life scenes into the exhibition space of showcases, displays, glass boxes, or tabletops. It involves nothing besides investigation and the exposure of intimacy. As our gaze delves into Jeanete Musatti’s Minimal world, we come upon the silence that is so critically important for the existence of a work of art.
The procedure of building archives that currently is a vogue in contemporary art has been part of Janete Musatti’s practice since the early days of her career, when she transformed art into a sort of archives, a small curio cabinet, a memorabilia item or memento of lived experiences, whether they be sensorial or aesthetic; or yet the whole organized in such a way as to constitute a magnetized artistic field, as shown in the untitled work of 2004/2008. In this piece, the artist set up a carcass or seashell inside a miniature cradle and then she placed two silhouettes of small birds side by side, as if looking onto the scene. Everything here is made of cast metal or tin. Regardless of the place or surface on which the artist organizes these objects, their visual and sensorial impact on the viewer is always highly impressive.
In the current exhibition, the artist has arranged her work in a stand with shelves, with two photographs lining its inside back panel. Both pictures show a same type of delicate structure made out of an entanglement of hair, which brings to mind a bird’s nest. In the first photo, a figurine resembling a little music-box ballerina emerges from the hair strands that constitute the nest, which the figurine shares with a few stones.
The other photograph shows two fossilized shells inside the nest: one is a snail’s spirally coiled shell and the other, an ordinary seashell. Like in many of the artist’s works, this “arrangement” spawns a somewhat phantasmagoric atmosphere that transcends realism, like a frightening memory game or a nightmare, albeit the delicate figures of the two heralding birds.
In another work of this series, titled Delicadezas da Alma (Gentleness of the Soul), of 2008, many small picture frames serve as boxes inside which the artist creates a cartography of isolated scenes of human gentleness. Small human figurines that could be viewed as pertaining to France under King Louis XV attend these scenes against a background of intertwined lines that add color and a sense of organization to the work. On occasion these scenes seem to represent a gestural expressionist painting, a quasi miniature action painting.
***
Writing on Jeanete Musatti in the wake of such authoritative essays as that by Casimiro Xavier de Mendonça, who delivered a fine and comprehensive description of the artist’s body of works, and that of art critic and historian Aracy Amaral, presents quite a challenge for me. As it seems, all that could be said about the artist’s work has been said. So, after reading Casimiro Xavier de Mendonça, who deserves special mention for his critical oeuvre, I saw no other path to follow except address and reflect on the problematization of the use of the showcase and other confined spaces destined for the artist’s “small archaeologies” – an expression in her own words, quoted in Mendonça’s “Jeanete Musatti” (São Paulo: Ex Libris, 1991).
As collectors or mere gatherers of data (objects) or vestiges (writings and images) of their respective passages through the world, in the recent history of art we have Alan Kaprow, in the 1960s; Sofie Calle, in the 19070s, and countless artists of said generations and thereafter who adopted display windows, showcases, suitcases, plastic bags, pedestals or shelves as supports in their work. Marcel Duchamp, Arman, Christian Boltanski, Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Rosângela Rennó, Farnese de Andrade, Nina Morais, Amélia Toledo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Nelson Leirner, and the more recent Brazilian artists Carla Zaccagnini, Mabe Bethônico, and Cláudia Sampaio, among others, effectively render this desire to create an “absolute archive”, in the words of Elisabeth Roudinesco. “[…] I have reflected on the subject of the archive in psychoanalysis; on the way to organize archives, and on the ‘restless and tragic relation’ (in the words of Derrida) that one can have with archives, with the spectrum of the absolute archive, and with the crazy notion that we can record just about anything.”
The “archaeological” accumulation of things is an ancient practice in the history of art. Many artists have created these “commonplaces” with their “collections” that result from their archive-oriented investigations. These investigations would be attempts to apprehend or “to observe the world through a framing” , as Bernadette Panek wrote in her doctoral dissertation, to which I resort to ponder the function of the showcase in Jeanete Musatti’s oeuvre -- not as a neutral and protected space, but as an unlimited space in which life fragments are viewed through accumulated and re-organize objects.
Even when Musatti does not isolate the “scene” in a window or showcase, letting objects loose in space, the fact that she appropriates them and works them as miniatures or frozen cutouts of a lived scene is a way to isolate them from the so-called real world. The difference in scale and the isolation itself are ways to represent the distancing from or the representation of reality.
“The outline of an isolated field of action is another limit that the display window eventually poses. In this way, the artist stirs up the creation of an autonomous world with its own character, detached from the outside world, while delimiting and organizing elements so that they co-exist and, to a certain extent, relate within this same space. The artist builds a small world, creates specific situations, and practically rejects outside influences. He/she proposes a relation meant to eternalize certain relations that come together only in the interior of this space..”
Jeanete Musatti captures time in her showcases. As it seems, her aim is to eternalize it through objects and situations turned into museum exhibits. Her cases containing miniature scenes serve to freeze and concentrate time. Jeanete Musatti’s art work is always an illusion or a greatly reduced representation of reality. While working with miniatures or simply displacing objects, she reduces the world to a minute scale.
Drawing, painting, pasting, collecting, and organizing are ways to confer meaning on life itself. Jeanete Musatti belongs in the world of small things – a world in smaller scale.
[1] According to Danto’s description in the book “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace” that inspired the first few lines of this essay, a thing “is a thing, and things, as a class, lack aboutness just because they are things”.
[2] ROUDINESCO, Elisabeth. Original French title: “Analyse, L’Archive’. Translated herein from the Portuguese in A Análise e o Arquivo. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001, p. 8-9.
[3] PANEK, Bernadette. In: O espaço isolado da vitrine: espaço de autoria. Dissertation presented in the Graduate Program in Art, with a focus on the theory, teaching and learning in the field of Art History, at the University of São Paulo’s School of Art and Communications, as a pre-requisite for the doctorate
degree in Art under the guidance of Prof. Domingos Tadeu Chiarelli. The researcher has devoted her academic studies to the analysis of the use of the showcase as an integral part of the work of art.
[4] Ibidem.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
