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Let’s start from the middle: a colon interposes itself between the museum and the observatory and soon we ask ourselves about the kind of relationship this punctuation suggests. It’s not about an identity relationship: strictly, a museum is not an observatory. On the other hand, this doesn’t sound like an accidental approach, a circumstantial arrangement: museum and observatory. The choice of the colon seems to suggest, between one and the other, a historical relationship that can be updated in a singular way in Eduardo Coimbra’s exhibit. The approach set up by the colon – museum:observatory – points out, more precisely, something like a modulation: one term – the museum – gains new modulation, becoming something that surrounds it: the observatory. In another context, in an essay in which the use of the colon is investigated by Gilles Deleuze (1), Giorgio Agamben refers precisely to a magnetism (2) relationship: the colon does not close, nor ends the relation in identity or fusion. It “opens” a relation between two terms that are not totally the same, nor totally distant; a relation of contiguity and transformation: a kind of same that becomes another by proximity. In the terms that are relevant to us, we can say that the colon opens up the museum to the observatory; it becomes, to some extent, an observatory. But we must add that the observatory was already there, present, in the definition of the museum itself. Let’s say then, that the colon marks the passage from the museum to the observatory, highlighting the observatory was there, from the beginning, in the museum. Let’s see if the hypothesis works and how it would work here. • Let’s start by risking the idea that to observe is a secularization of the act of contemplating: a kind of prayer, prayer through the look; to contemplate means to stare at things, images, nature, as one who gazes the work of God; gazing the visible to reach the invisible; to look, therefore, as one who prays (3). To contemplate puts us in front of the mystery, not yet as the object of knowledge, but as a sensitive relation with a presence, before which we are supposed to, finally, lower our eyes (or raise), always in reverence (4). We know that this look is not naïve: there is always a text that underlies to all contemplation, a sacred text that tells us, for instance, that God created the heavens and the earth… Anyway, to contemplate means to be separated – to pay reverence – to what is contemplated. But also, in the opposite direction, to blend with the object of contemplation, as it is present, against us, and carries a mystery which we are also part of, we commune. The contemplation would be a kind of sacred genesis of the observatory that, in this way, secularizes – we risk – the mosques, the abbeys, the convents, the confinement and isolation spaces that, as much as turn into ourselves, make us look outside, to the nature, to the mystery of the divine creation. Narrowly connected to the constitution of the scientific field, observatories are devices that make the act of contemplating laic – institutionalize it and normatize it – considering the new demands of modern society. For so, they constitute a series of mediations that separates us – physically and symbolically – from the object of contemplation, that now can be called, more appropriately, object. To its presence we answer, less with evocation, reverence and reading than, say, with representation, enlightenment desire and knowledge. In this process of extreme separation between subject and object, modernity fills itself with those observation devices. Be they the devices used by science or those reappropriated by entertainment; be they the small machines or grandiose architectures, they take part in a broad transformation of the look, which ultimately implies its mobilization. The look is mobilized in at least two ways: on the one hand, it travels and explores the world in search of fragments that, once made objects, demand investigation, knowledge, fight for attention. The look becomes mobile: here, it is worth noticing with Jonathan Crary (5), the dark chamber is not the model device of the observation anymore, giving way to a series of others that, scattered and distributed, recode the look, seeking to amplify its productivity, to conquer and keep its attention under constant management. So, to become mobile (responding to the constant stimulus that comes from the nature objects and the urban space), the look must let itself be mobilized, must pay attention to a set of rules, procedures and postures activated by this growing range of devices (technological and institutional). To observe, in that way, doesn’t only mean to look outside – the subject separated from the object of observation – but also to look within, in order to respect – observe – the rules that an interested observation imposes us. As Crary still reminds us in his important study, the spectators not only observe the objects of our observation, but also the rules and the codes that regulate our conduct as observers. A spectator is also an observer, as he looks within a repertoire of possibilities, dipped in a system of conventions and limitations (6). So, an observatory (whichever it is) holds, since always, two “degrees” of observation: the first degree refers to the subject that – separated from the world – observes it, making it an object (as we have seen, it is about a subject which attention is variable, disputed by a diversity of objects). That one is followed by a second degree observation, through which, when observing the outside world, we observe the rules (in the sense of obeying, respecting, introjecting) that tell us how to observe. Taking that proposal to its limits, we could say that the observatory is both the object and the subject of the observation: it is a device that creates the nature (the “real”) in the same gesture as it makes up the perspective, the way of observing; it creates the object, in the same gesture, therefore, in which it produces the subject of the observation through the regulation of its conduct. Stricto sensu, the museum is not an observatory: that one dedicates to the works of art (or, broader, to the collections), while this one dedicates to nature, to the “real” and its objects. However, in a certain way, yes, it is an observatory: as a modern institution the museum convenes in its practices both observation degrees, more noticeably the second one. Mostly turned inward, the museum is an observatory that mobilizes internally, setting up the ways of reorganizing the collections, of observing the art works as well as the relations among them. The museum can be defined as a first and wide frame that frames the artworks frames, establishing, first of all, a limit between an inside and an outside, from procedures of separation and distinction. That separation is perhaps what allows Jacques Rancière to say, in another context, that the museum is a place of a stingy kind of art, unrelated to the daily experience sensitive richness which – outdoors – lives out of the exchanges, the displacements and mixture (7). Secondly, the museum establishes ways of organization, distribution and the connection among the art works, within its space (which, without that distribution, is an empty space, desired as a neutral space). The rummage of the space and the distribution of the art works – the internal organization of the space – also mobilize the circulation ways and the enjoyment of the spectators. Finally, the museum’s internal organization – its separation and redistribution criteria – contributes to control the circulation and valuation of the art works – as merchandise – outside its physical and institutional space. That frame, that device – here hastily featured – logically varies in time and updates in different ways from institution to institution. But to our interest, we reaffirm that the frame in the museum – that exists even when the art works overflow its own frames expanding in space – regulates, therefore, its inside and its outside at the same time, separating the objects and subjects of the observation – the artworks and the spectators – and forming them mutually. All of that to say that if the museum is, to some extent, an observatory, it’s not only because of the fact that there we can see – observe – the artworks but, mainly, because that observation also needs to observe the ways of observing (what we call here a second degree observation): the categorizations, the distributions, the visitors circulation itinerary, their posture and behavior within the space. • As we have enunciated in our hypothesis, the meeting of these two devices – museum:observatory – enabled by Eduardo Coimbra’s exhibit in the Pampulha Art Museum makes the first one opens up to the second one in a modulation way: the museum becomes another one – it becomes an observatory – but that other one already belonged to it, since the beginning, as an attribute. If the museum is, since always and in a certain way, an observatory – we observe the artworks as we observe the rules so that observation can happen – here, the transformation of the museum into an observatory happens first through exacerbation, through the intensification of that process in a kind of third degree observation: it’s about what we are used to calling, in the modern experience range, reflexivity. In Coimbra’s exhibit case we not only observe the art works, observing the rules of conduct imposed by the museum, as we mainly observe ourselves observing these rules – those rules that are made visible, explicit – by a reflexive gesture. The work actually becomes the observation of the observation, that perception that our observation is never naïve, but always supported, better said, mobilized by a series of codes, procedures, and “adjustments”. Provoked by the work, our look realizes itself, then, as a mobilized look. That way, Coimbra’s work takes part in a genealogy of experiences that, from reflexive strategies, dedicate less to create artworks destined to be the object of enjoyment in the museums (or other spaces designed to art) than to problematize the ways this enjoyment is organized, mobilized by institutions. Coimbra’s work, however, adds to that reflexive look, addressed to within the institution, a reflexive look addressed to the outside, interested in the surroundings landscape, in its distinctly modernists traits. In Passage Plans, in the museum mezzanine floor, the visitor faces an apparently empty space, without any artwork to be seen. But, slowly, he realizes that this emptiness is punctuated by folds and foldings that modulate it and make it more complex: the windows get mirrors that, once in movement, create a variable play between inside and outside; the parquet floor of the museum unfolds into benches; the modernist surrounding landscape, planned and transparent – The Pampulha Lake complex – enters the museum, deconstructed by that reflexions and refractions play, gaining some opacity. However simple they are, those punctuations produce a disorder, a slight disorganization of our way of looking and our behavior inside the museum: firstly, we reaffirm, there is no “artwork” too be seen; secondly we don’t know exactly how to behave in the (apparently) empty space; finally, we notice that it is exactly what it is all about: by disorganizing our way of looking, we are led to consider how this look is constructed, mobilized, normatized: be it the look that turns inwards, introjecting the rules that show us how to appreciate a work of art in a museum, or the look that faces outwards, the landscape modernist postcard which is now segmented by the cracks, mirrors and hinges play. It is really about a hinge-device that turns inwards and outwards, which rebounds spaces, makes them problematic. The outside is problematized in what it suggests us clarity, accuracy, transparency, desire of calculation and control. On the other hand, the inside becomes problematic as an organized institutional space, regulatory, that wants to be pure and separated from the spread of the outside (the city’s everyday). Both spaces are questioned by a look (that has become reflexive) when in dialogue (a third degree observation). In the auditorium we can find the work Invisible Visible. It is a set of eight photographic panels organized into a circle, lightened by backlights. The museum’s surrounding modernist landscape is photographed there, not without making part of the image, in a subtle folding, the very own photographer’s point of view, the photography’s subject. It is all about a scenery that makes the reflexive formula of a look that sees itself looking come true, about a landscape capable of including the observer in it. The classic operation of separation between the observing subject and the observation subject becomes more complex when the photographer shows up (photographer whose photographic device normally helps keep invisible). We can finally see (in our reversed course) on the museum’s ground floor, that Nature of Landscape gives sequence to the surrounding garden, designed by Burle Marx, inside the building. In a simple and almost literal gesture, the landscape invades the museum that starts to shelter the circumstantial lawn. In that case the reflexive strategy is kept, in a device that articulates – implying - the inside and the outside again: in a look directed to the outer space, we must emphasize the constructed, planned garden’s feature, as artificialized nature. On the other hand, the look that faces the inside sees the museum internal organization destabilized, circumstantially, because of the “infiltration” (both physical and symbolic) of nature (that we know, however, is not so natural). That destabilization is not only caused by the garden’s infiltration into the constructed space – a building protected by the government – but by the demand of new practices to take care of unusual material, a collection. It will be necessary to take care of the garden considering light, water and pruning demands over time. If we interrupted our approach to Eduardo Coimbra’s work now, we would keep it in a modern category – which is not totally unfair: after all, as we have seen, it deals with reflexive strategies and criticism to the codes, rules and institutional procedures (be they internal to the museum or those designed outside the building, in its modernist surrounding). However, it doesn’t seem much to demand that a piece of work be reflexive nowadays: for a long time, both art institutions and spectators (and the market too) have become used to the reflexive-critical gestures, controlling their codes and the strategies to incorporate them (nullifying them many times). We could then advance and think how Coimbra’s work suggests other aspects, beyond that reflexive dimension. In many ways, it seems to indicate not only a third degree observation – the look that becomes conscious about its own mobilization – but also an intense complexification of the very act of observing (in its classical or modern configuration). Better said, the spaces created by Coimbra take us to a contemporary scenario in which both the subject and the object of the observation change themselves with intensity, just like their relationship. On one hand, the nature (the observation object) projects itself and reveals itself unavoidably as a device. On the other hand, the regulatory and cultural dimension is naturalized by the subject of the observation. On one side, the observation participates and constitutes the observed object (the observation creates the landscape). On the other hand, the landscape works on us reinventing rules and behaviors; we look at the objects and we are seen by them, we work on the objects and we are worked by them. Besides, these processes – that used to be a critical-reflexive thought target – are, to a great extent, known, habitual and daily to us. In other words, it’s been long since we’ve learned to live with those nature and culture hybrids that, for authors like Bruno Latour, multiply as much as we try to control them, separate them, purify them. Beyond the reflexivity, Coimbra’s work flirts with that situation and baffles the observation as much as its critics. A situation that would demand not exactly an antimodern attitude but the constant practice of observation, not the kind that separates us from the world, but the kind that includes us and from which we exercise and create forms of life and forms of the common. That is, who knows, the objective of the colon that belongs to the title of this exhibit and that, effectively, says much about what the three works suggest: to highlight the observatory that the museum already houses, to make a reflexive comment on its internal regulation as well as its landscape and mostly to show a transformation of the very own meaning of what to observe is nowadays. Will the museums be capable of, as observatories, opening themselves to that transformation? 2011 obs: text written for the catalog of the Museu:observatório (Museum:observatory) exhibition, held at Museu da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, MG, in November 2011 notes: |