The photographs in Eduardo Coimbra’s work depict neither storm clouds nor cirrostratus clouds nor even altocumulus clouds but, rather, clouds of the lower atmospheric layers such as the strati or stratocumulus. Beyond reference to scientific classification we might also resort to a typology of cloud representation, so frequently do they appear throughout the history of art – El Greco-clouds, Turner-clouds, Magritte-clouds. In A Theory of Cloud, for instance, Hubert Damisch constructs a history of painting in which the cloud is an element of pictorial semiology, pointing out that its functions vary according to period and call forth various fields in the structure of representation. They are no less present in technically reproduced images, of which Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents constitute a unique moment – unique because they are fragments which evince the cut and its connection with infinity, thus disclosing their condition as photographs.
Like photography, which is, a priori, devoid of form, line, contour or figure, clouds function as trace, a visible effect of other phenomena, in this case atmospheric ones not made manifest to the gaze (such as the wind). Although subject to a constant becoming, Philippe Dubois maintains that clouds capture and reflect in their own matter the luminous variations that surround them: “Cloud and photography are both, therefore, veritable ‘light machines’, veils, meshes, traps, developers, screens, curtains, specters, ghosts of light”.(1) Equivalents, according to the emphasized title of the series in question.
Had Stieglitz not achieved fame for his photographs, he would have done so for his intense work of behalf of modern art and his efforts to promote artistic photography as an autonomous art. Of the Equivalents, produced over the course of nine years (1923-1932), Stieglitz said: “I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in 40 years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life – to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter – not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone – no tax as yet on them – free.”(2)
In this series of great plastic beauty, composition exists purely as the effect of a cut into the continuous fabric of celestial space. Between the delimited, finite space of the photograph and the infinite space of the sky, the gesture of the cut affirms itself radically. Without horizon lines, as regards the subject, these are indeterminate, floating spaces. Thus, instead of masking the cut in a typical pictorialist tactic, Stieglitz states that, if photography reproduces the world, it does so only by fragments.
•
These injunctions of the photographic apparatus are updated in Eduardo Coimbra’s use of cloud photographs. In Isthmus, for instance, the gesture of framing, like all photographic spatial constructions, evokes the presence of a “window”, a paradigm of perspectived representation. The real window connected to it indicates an image with no horizon line (one which is, therefore, a pure cut). In the Horizons, 2000/2001, the title itself re-inscribes an orientation in the image, thus compensating for the absence of any axis of interior reference – orientation is provided by its inscription in the world.
The images taken of the continuous fabric of the sky’s extension which, in its essence, is not composed, postulate an absence of composition and short circuit the internal relations between the elements – an image of reality, yet one which deprives us of the primary element of our relationship with it by suppressing all reference to the ground, to soil or to the horizon. Simultaneously, the way in which it is presented establishes a virtual relationship with the world. If, by definition, the horizon can never be reached, photography generally captures this fleeting element by marking the suspension of time in the landscape.(3) In Horizons for Vera, the horizon is subsumed in the virtual meeting between earth and sky. Because of the lack of a visible horizon in the image, a semantic horizon is established and, instead of updating the potentialities of a place, founds its own territory – it conjugates the frozen, ephemeral snapshot of the contingency, incorporating the passage of time as well as the out-of-time established by the photographic act. It creates isthmuses (connection, communication) between distinct temporalities, to paraphrase the title of his 1992 installation at Espaço Cultural Sérgio Porto (Isthmus, with window and three suitcases with respiratory movements).
As operational devices in Edu Coimbra’s work, both cut and infinity are manifest in Natural Light and other works from the same series, fragmented images of what, as was demonstrated in the Equivalents, are already fragments in and of themselves. They evoke the sky as well as (in other ways) infinity. Two operations are at play – the alignment of fluorescent lights introduces one series (one element after another) and dialogs with the non-composition and minimalist pre-determination. In opposition to these rules, however, an entire simulation is introduced – the distance between the light bulbs is determined by the shadows, providing the fleeting illusion of a whole. Wires, connectors, and light bulb ballasts – everything is on display.
A contradictory relationship is established between the photographic model and its formal presentation – the cadenced repetition of the light bulbs covered with photographic fragments provide a semblance of regularity which is, however, the result of a sort of objectification of photography, whose apparent unity is the product of a manipulation of the image. Emphasized by back lighting, immateriality evokes structures of another space of representation, or of an illusionist effect within the illusion. Submitted to a serial cut, the image of the sky creates the illusion of a unit constructed by fragments of fragments and, in turn, the serialism indicates the possibility of a mental reconstruction of the continuous infinity of the heavens.
In his models, slices of skies envelop what appear to be squares, possible public places where tiny beings stroll, play, perhaps love and thus, by means of the relationship between clouds and landscapes, re-establish the relationship between earth and sky, superimposing transitional situations between internal and external spaces, between nature and artifice, sculpture and photography, and chains of images of heterogeneous elements. Referring to the Slices of Memory installation, Ricardo Basbaum points out that “it is by associating chains of images and objects that Eduardo Coimbra points to the importance of what constitutes an installation’s ‘circulation of energy’, clarifying the flux aspect which brings together matter, life and thought”.(4)
•
Silent steps of stuffed dogs’ legs. A contemporary Vanitas? Yet one that does not prepare us for finitude, although becoming makes itself present. Like the skull and other typical elements of the classical Vanitas, stuffed legs invoke something beyond existence while evoking the relationship between culture and nature, the space between the natural and the artificial. All things are concrete in their materiality and functionality yet, at the same time, they would appear to belong to the sphere of the virtual (Silent Steps, 1994). In Animal/Beuys (5), 1993, felt, wood, foam, and an electric motor are equal components of the scene/action. Less a ritual metaphor of conciliation between man and nature, the work presents itself as an attempt to associate ideas, feelings, images, and references from the history of art – oppositions and correlations. From the represented animal we may infer various allusions without, however, instigating the “good thinking” that the species has the power of suggesting. We are closer to a thing desecrated - the felt which retains heat no longer evokes or symbolizes protection or the “magical link between nature and culture, birth and death, animality and humanity”.(6) It part in the scene is an explicit reference to Beuys. Here, that which might be the most fundamental thing in a living being, its breathing, is the function of a mechanical gadget.
With varied meanings, Silent Steps and Untitled, 1997, call upon the still life in the kinetic operations of their strategies for assembly while voiding the idea of spirituality. A wide symbology which activates the flux of its meanings is added to the diversity of present elements and refers in many ways to a relationship between the sky and the earth, between nature and artifice. In Silent Steps, footsteps and footprints which evoke the earth with which they establish contact unite with the image of clouds in boxes of light. In Untitled, the egg as primordial reality contains the germ of many beings and is symbolically associated to the genesis of the world and its periodic renewal, confronting the material produced by artificial synthesis. A sort of declension of the relationship between nature and artifice is present in the different works.
Nature is both subject and material. Not nature considered in its fatality or workplace, but nature as a fragment; in the case of clouds an outline of bodies and the celestial continuum. Cut. Photographic device. These are fragments. And, if they refer to the romantic genre par excellence, the Silent Steps contain something of a dematerialization of the animal. And, if they aspire to a totality, it is to a rhizomatous, de-centered, transitive one. Reality is constructed, artificial, fabricated. The animals’ legs allude to a sort of spatial and temporal cut. They present themselves as images and, in this sense, retain the same strategies present in the Asteroids photomontages (7), those of constructed nature. The immobility of the stuffed animal, fixed in its pose constructed by the taxidermist and freed from the passage of time, accentuates the “photographic” operation which appears to permeate Eduardo Coimbra’s poetics. Or, according to artist Olivier Richon, “the stuffed animal is like a three-dimensional photograph”.(8)
•
From the nature-culture duality to its symbolic reconciliation, the presence of animals in contemporary art, no longer belonging to the register of representation, indicates (among other things) that relationship to materials occurs within another order as regards the concept of form. Moreover: it is not a matter of formalizing materials; their semantic weight becomes present in the work’s functioning. The real animal is thus present in the most varied contemporary artistic practices – ants, termites, parrots, macaws, horses, cows, sharks, pigs, chickens, dogs, the list goes on and on, not to mention Lygia Pape’s cockroaches and ants or the flies in Duchamp’s 1959 Torture-morte.
In Animal/Beuys, the representation of animal as simulacrum as well as the explicit reference to the German artist indicate, above all else, the impossibility of a redeeming spirituality or the supposition that we may infer behavioral analogies from the physical and spiritual energies of animals for the lives of all creatures. With its grey felt covering, the animal is there; yet its historical and aesthetic connotations make of it something beside itself – which is a definition of allegory. Between the representation of the animal constructed with wood, foam and a motor, and the stuffed animal, have we not entered the field of allegory? Whereas in its classical usage, allegory proposes a hidden meaning and demands exercises in interpretation, its reference in contemporary art points to a mixture of concepts and impressions, citations and fragments. It operates through signs.
Between the stuffed animal and the breath of the inorganic, in the case of the suitcases, a sort of reversibility without hierarchies takes place between nature and artifice. The suitcases are inscribed within a lineage of improbable bachelor machines (9) which present man and the inter-relationship of the sexes in the guise of simple mechanics, as in Raymond Roussel, Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Haussman, Giacometti and a host of others – to say nothing of the famous encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table. Unlike real machines and even imaginary (albeit rational) ones like those of Jules Verne, for example, the bachelor machine presents itself first and foremost as impossible, useless, incomprehensible, and delirious. Governed neither by the physical laws of mechanics nor by the social laws of utility but essentially guided by the mental laws of subjectivity, Michel Carrouges has said that the bachelor machine is “the simulacrum of a machine, like the ones that appear in dreams, in theatres, in films or even in cosmonaut training areas”.(10)
•
According to Eduardo Coimbra, motors and electric light circuits were introduced in his work during his transition from engineer to artist – in Fountain for example, and in Mirror. The breathing suitcases likewise exemplify this passage from the instrumental sphere to an activity more closely resembling that of bricolage. As Lévi-Strauss (11) points out, the engineer operates by means of concepts whereas the bricoleur does so by signs. While the concept proposes to be wholly transparent to reality, the sign both accepts and demands that “a certain humanity be incorporated to this reality”. With the rhetoric of machines and the sensations produced by the vibrations and chasms of power and light signals, Edu Coimbra’s “machines” posit a grasp of time and space and create a scenographic dimension. According to Ligia Canongia, “Eduardo Coimbra’s world is a ‘dream engineering’ of sorts.”(12)
As signs, the superimposition of heterogeneous elements over an ordinary plane, the objects appropriated from everyday life make way for the most varied symbolic allusions. Thus, the wild breathing suitcases, a sort of Surrealist “symbolic functioning object”, unleashes associative mechanisms, interconnections and contaminations of several orders. This interface between the natural and the artificial, as well as the polysemy engendered by it, are equally present in the more recent work in which earth and sky pursue a common, though artificial, horizon of the image.
Invention of Landscape, 1998, contains a procedure which resembles Magritte’s use of the ambiguity between an image of reality (the picture) and an image of the image of reality (the picture in the picture). Transiting equally between reality and images of reality, Eduardo Coimbra’s works establish an ambiguity between nature and culture, and simulate these states of conjunction or fusion between sky and earth. His Horizons, large-scale constructions or models, incite (even if only through imagination) an experience of mobility which typically belongs to the horizon, for the images of clouds, intrinsically devoid of a horizon, take on a “geographical” reality, a territory. Thus a game is established between that which indicates indefinite extension and the simulated meeting between the sky and the earth.
•
In the model and in it’s virtual materialization in external space there’s a displacement of the problem of site specificity. Eduardo Coimbra seeks to delimit territories rather than to establish relationships with an environment and its physical or historical-cultural conditions. If ‘site’ is the place occupied by the object in its broadest sense, ‘territory’ implies the delineation of boundaries. In fact, his works do draw boundaries within which environments/sites are established. Space is occupied and objects operate in settings in which various narrative orders construct possibilities of meaning. Invention of Landscape, for example, operates at the interstice between image and reality or, rather, it operates within the site specific to displace us from the site to its image. Climbing the ramps of Horizons for Vera leads the gaze towards the continuum of the sky even as the sky has been captured as an “equivalent” in the ramp’s very structure. The work completes itself in the relationship between the displacement presumed by the situations and the spatial and temporal outlines of photography. In this created territory which has been made into an environment, the figurines cannot fail to evoke sculptural situations; here, too, as simulacrum less than as representation – as mise en scéne, as a spark of life. They indicate the possibility of experiencing the work and one’s self as a physical being in time.
The landscape as place and material of the works has given rise to a displacement of the boundaries of the circuit of transmission, commercialization and institutionalization, establishing a new relationship between the real world and the world of art. In much of Land Art the totality of the landscape (and, therefore, the incessant displacement of the horizon) are at play, as is the possibility of an experience which encompasses both the work and the landscape. The investment in ‘real’ space implied a deconstruction of the rational unification of time and space, and the perception of space without a unique point of view for the subject. If the horizon defined fixed and immutable spaces in classical representation and if, in the 1970s, investment in the landscape presupposed a grasp of the horizon as continuous displacement, Edu Coimbra`s works offer something resembling a simulacrum. If the horizon indicates both the limits and the possibility of their displacement, his ramps project a natural horizon which changes as the trajectory begins, even as another (artificial) horizon is simulated. These are hybrid models of perception and interpretation of the world but also of a possibility of coexistence, restoring the presence of life under other conditions.
The problematic suggested by Eduardo Coimbra’s poetics does not necessarily retain a historical nexus with these experiments in landscape, but superimposes heterogeneous theoretical and historical references. There is no illusion as to the possibility of reorganizing or returning to a natural environment – the desert, for instance, and its symbologies. Whereas Land Art tends to eliminate a work’s iconic content, nearly eclipsing the work so as to underline its indicial, symbolic relationship to the site, in his work the presence of the image is decisive. It operates within the space-time continuum of the media society in which both our vision and the logic of form are affected. Images of clouds function as a structural element in the works of Edu Coimbra – neither residue nor documentation.
•
Artificial and defined, the horizon is not displaced yet demands displacement. Whereas, in aviation, the artificial horizon is an instrument for materializing a vertical terrestrial reference, here it creates a territory for a possible look at the horizon. In this double movement, the photographic apparatus inherent in the strategy of the works becomes explicit for, whereas the cut isolates part of an infinitely larger field, it never ceases to call forth the implicit presence of the rest of the world.
By superimposing formal outlines onto the implied spatial cut of the photographic act and by inscribing duration in direct relation to the work, these pieces establish a paradoxical relationship between reality and photographic representation which belongs to the order of reality recreated as constructed landscape. Although reference to the sky establishes an immediate indicial relationship with photography, linking the image to the world, the characteristic “having been there” of photography (in the words of Roland Barthes) evinces the conjunction of diverse temporalities – that of any given past moment in the incessant continuum of passing clouds and their situation in the world.
Invention of Landscape in particular restates the problem of the landscape by overlaying nature and culture and, by representing the landscape in situ, it signals that, in the end, a landscape is only that which is seen, and from a certain perspective… the backlit images emphasize this perceptual faming by imitating the frame imposed by the architecture of the museum which makes the landscape an aesthetic object. The soil surrounding it, however, creates another framing of perception: a ‘natural’ landscape inside the museum. By joining different temporalities, the earth evokes the fact that the landscape is not just a pure object before which the subject can locate itself in a relationship of exteriority.(13) In this transitional space between representation and natural element, the landscape is clearly an interface between subjective and objective space. One can only speak of the landscape from the standpoint of perception – its visible, perceptive aspect of space – without, however, passively limiting it to sensorial data. Transgressing from the natural field to the social field, ecological reality and social product, in the words of geographer Georges Bertrand, “the simplest and most banal of landscapes is at once social and natural, subjective and objective, spatial and temporal, material and cultural product(ion), real and symbolic, etc.”(14) As a social interpretation of nature, the landscape is a process, a product of time and, more precisely, of social history. If the representation of landscapes, its establishment in the fifteenth century as a pictorial genre speaks to the modern subject’s ability to objectify the reality of the world, today we behold the transformation of the landscape into environments, their material creation based on representation. In other words, the image takes on aspects of geographical reality in which, as in a stage setting for a play, reality itself becomes mise en scéne.(15) The landscape is “invented”, making it difficult, at times, to distinguish between what is natural and what is fabricated.
Invention of Landscape questions the nature of our relationship to the world and the codes we use to capture the world as representation.(16) By presenting the ambivalence between reality and the appearance of reality, the work dialogues with the intrinsic ambiguity of the word ‘landscape’ which simultaneously designates the things of then environment and their representation. Present in much that was produced during the 1969s and 1970s, the “precipitation to landscape” (or, in other modalities, the inscription in real space) introduced an agency of placement (of the site specific) as expressive modality – a situation in which we are confronted by the question of what is or is not art, and which creates a ‘reality’ made up of all the work’s constituent elements.(17) This depreciation of the self-referential art object carries with it an interrogation of the use of photography in these works as an object re-introduced into the circuit and, for this very reason, is subject to the most varied (and usually superficial) criticisms. Photographic documentation, however, occupies an instrumental place in the interrogation of the real and in questioning conceptions of space based on the perspectival grid. Faced with perception’s characteristic inability to account for multiple perspectives, photography was thus an object of investigation as operational apparatus. Michael Heizer, for one, in an early definition of the work of art as “place”, presents Double Negative in photographic terms as a succession of instants.
A dialogue with these experiences is present in Eduardo Coimbra’s work. Nonetheless, something casts us into another level of perception and interrogation of the real, and does so from another point of view. The photo-landscape imbrication renders these terms “equivalents”. Not as the most direct presentation of photography itself as an irreducible power of the spatial cut (as in Stieglitz) but as a reality which no longer carries with it the ambition of encompassing reality. Reality and its representation, natural and cultural reality, are superimposed.
The tension between the indicial function of the photographic sign and its iconic presence, particularly present in works such as Invention of Landscape, transforms the landscape into an image and the image into a landscape. In Edu Coimbra’s work, the relationship between landscape and photograph would appear to update Robert Smithson’s statement that “Photography has made nature obsolete”.(18) By associating distinct temporalities and spatialities – those of representation and those of the created ‘territory’ – a possible identity between sign and referent as well as the analogy of the photographic image are depleted. Simultaneously, the presence of the photographic apparatus in relation to the landscape indicates the ascendancy of this model: whether as an emanation of the real (without which it cannot exist) or as an interrogation of the real not likely to be called upon in its totality. It is a reality permeated by the image and by its intrinsic discontinuity. In the Asteroids series, the multiple points of view which construct the new landscape attack the perspective paradigm which rules the photographic model and the possibility of a privileged point of view destined to the spectator; it also reveals another dimension of time, thus undermining the characteristic temporality of photographic fragmentation, that is, the instant, as a possible leap outside time. Finally, it emphasizes time as an irreducible element of separation, of the cut, between the photographic sign and its reference. Coimbra’s work is located within a field in which photography and its operative model contribute strongly to the displacement of a self-sufficient artistic meaning and its demands for a sphere of ‘characteristic competencies’; but also in which this model, as an instrument for questioning reality and its representation, has unveiled reality as a subject and no longer as an a priori given. Its démarche would thus appear to call forth the multiple relationships which the photographic image, as apparatus, establishes with the real as copy, contiguity, symbol and part of today’s reality. And in using boxes of lights (light being an element which is present in nearly all his work), he creates luminous fields which interfere in the experience of space, fusing image and the environment into a perceptive whole.
•
Leonardo da Vinci claimed that “It is air that makes the sky blue” and it is in this blue of the immediately visible that we may situate Eduardo Coimbra’s photographs of the sky. In his models and, particularly, in his projects for public spaces in which the cloud photographs appear, distinct agencies are introduced which problematize the relationship with real time-space. Thus, if the snapshot of the photographic temporal cut likewise establishes a perpetuation – a frozen temporality – distinct from the duration in which we are inscribed, the disposition of the photographs implies the trajectory and, therefore, the duration. In these works, the insurmountable gap, given by the temporal décalage characteristic of the photographic apparatus (which keeps these universes from adhering to one another) joins the proposition of an experience in real time. At the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, for example, the earth is there, able to sprout herbs, while the frozen images indicate an out-of-time and space. These are captured spaces, extractions from an infinite continuum, as is the landscape with its point of view. But the photographic space also summons what is outside the frame, that which is not visible. This virtual presence of the rest of the world, of what is explicitly left aside, only reaffirms the museum space and, in a way, the very condition of the landscape in its interaction with the architecture. In its play with the museum’s spaces, there is a sort of a displacement of the architectural planes and their insertion in the landscape: the mages reduplicate the real, remaking with precision the landscape’s angles of vision, virtually reproducing what is offered on the museum’s lower level. This relationship between what is inside and what is out in photographic space, a virtual presence which the logic of the index establishes, is transmuted between the museum’s interior and exterior. According to the artist, “The work proposes the creation of a landscape. The museum’s architecture, both external (with its sculptural character) and internally (as a space for contemplation) is in constant dialogue with the landscape. Interior and exterior are orientations which establish the boundaries of our experience of the space. The expansion and interaction of these boundaries are the subjects of this work”.(19)
•
In different ways, a narrative game permeates the works the rhythm and flow of which evokes a certain cinematic dimension. In Horizons, for instance, the figurines in the models are almost characters in a fictional universe. This is also true of Tunnel, 2000, Basins, 1991, and the Slices of Memory installation, 1995. This “fiction” is particularly present in Isthmus which conjugates, on one hand, motors that generate the respiratory movements of the suitcases and, on the other hand, the action of the photographic apparatus, in the photograph of clouds. Breath, universally associated with the life principle, evokes legendary attempt to breathe life into art. There can be no doubt that they revisit Lygia Clark’s Bichos, which the artist defined as “living organisms”. Yet breath does not transform these “virtual animals” into “organic beings which fully reveal themselves within their internal time of expression”.(20) The anthropomorphic, organic reference is undermined by un-naturalness and artifice – the idea of the organic subverted without, however, neglecting to evoke its symbolic universe. In Taoism, for instance, breath symbolizes the intermediary space between heaven and earth, a result of the first polarization and the breaking of the primitive tie – this “between” is the space of man’s insertion in the world. In Isthmus, within the junction of the hybrid nature of the suitcases and the image of the cloud, whose nature is considered confused and badly defined, the hyperbolic, surreal invocation thus looms over a possible restoration of this tie.
Also in Isthmus, the use of motors deactivates the instrumental sphere, bestowing an unexpected fate upon inanimate things. The relationship between the natural and the artificial gains another bias through the windows which afford a view of the sky yet, like frames, open up onto its image. Conjoined to the motor, it is the photograph which, according to Vilém Flusser, “transforms concepts into scenes”.(21) And in the illusionist game it presents itself both as a possible natural view from a window and, by incorporating windows, a ‘representation’ of its own representation. In this “scene” the internal and external spaces lose their demarcations. Thus, an ambiguous context is created in which associations and encounters of various orders appear to seek ways through which to re-encounter the mysterious essence of things; a Magritte-like environment open to multiple articulations of the unconscious and to different levels of signification. In Landscape-eruption 1997, the presence of earth makes this environment even more explicit, whereas Silent Steps inverts the sense of reality expressed by the saying “to have one’s feet planted on the ground”, for these are the “footsteps” of clouds amid a territory created by rock salt.
•
By summoning various regions of knowledge to create an “architecture of chance” – to paraphrase Borges’s definition of clouds – Edu Coimbra’s work retains the nature of transitive situations in which contaminations of various orders create territories where nature and culture can bring other horizons into being. The articulation of images between sky and earth recreate the landscape as something not only to be looked at but which allows for the possibility of man’s insertion in the world. Like all landscapes, it is also subject to a historical process. And, in fact, his work has been inseparable from his activity in circuits of intervention and mediation of artistic work within a political dimension of the artistic praxis. Action and reflection seem to echo the words of Baudelaire: “Ah! The clouds, I love the clouds.”
2002
obs: text included in the book Eduardo Coimbra, publisher Casa da Palavra, 2004
notes:
1 DUBOIS, Philippe. O ato fotográfico. Campinas: Papirus, 1994.
2 STIEGLITZ, Alfred apud DUBOIS, Philippe, op. cit.
3 TIBERGHIEN, Gilles. “Horizons”, in: TIBERGHIEN G., Nature, Art, Paysage. Paris: Actes Sud/Ensp/Centre du Paysage, 2001.
4 BASBAUM, Ricardo. “Formas do tempo”, Revistausp, n.40, Dec. Jan. Feb. 1998-1999, p.46-57.
5 Animal/Beuys was part of the Um olhar sobre Joseph Beuys exhibition, Museu de Arte de Brasília, 1993.
6 According to Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, “In Beuys’s material, felt is therefore endowed with the power to conserve and protect, but also of providing the magic link between nature and culture, birth and death, animality and humanity, thus acquiring a properly totemic nature in the sculptor’s apparatus.” In: Is it about a bicycle, Paris, Marval/Paris, Galerie Beaubourg, Verone/Sarenco-Strazzer, 1985.
7 This series is composed of six photographs of photomontages, each the result of a photographic record of a given landscape, taken on a given day. (Editor’s Note).
8 RICHON, Olivier. “L’animal comme alégorie de la représentation”, Recherches Poîéti-ques, Revue de la Société Internationale de Poïétique n.9, Spring 1999/2000. (Dossier “L’animal vivant dans l’art contemporain”).
9 The lower part of the Large Glass is called, by Duchamp, “the bachelor machine”. According to Harald Szeemann, various machines proliferated between 1850 and 1925. “We may infer that these machines constructed as bricolage correspond precisely to the most intensely industrial period” (SZEEMANN, H. “Le machine celibi”, in: cat. Le machine celibi. Milão: Electa, 1989.
10 CARROUGES, Michel. “Instruzioni per l’uso”, in: SZEEMANN, H., op.cit.
11 LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1962.
12 CANONGIA, Ligia. “Escultura plural”, in. cat. Escultura plural. Salvador: Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, 1996 / Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1997.
13 In “Points de vue sur la perception des paysages”, Michel Collot points out that landscape “reveals itself as an experience in which subject and object are inseparable, not only because the spatial object is constituted by the subject but because the subject, in turn, may be found there embodied by space”, in: La théorie du paysage en France (1974-1994). Seysse: Champ Vallon, 1995.
14 BERTRAND, Georges. “Le paysage entre la Nature et la Société” ,in: COLLOT, Michel, op. cit.
15 See BERQUE, Augustin. Les raisons du paysage. De la Chine antique aux environnements de synthèse. Paris: Hazan, 1995.
16 An interesting dialogue could be established between Eduardo Coimbra’s operational mechanisms and the “Project for the construction of a sky”, in which Carmela Gross questions traditional representations of the sky. By opposing registers of vision to codes of visual construction, she dissects the conceptual construction of drawing and clearly demonstrates the contradiction between systematizing coordinates as a basis for interpreting the world and sensory apprehension. According to Ana Maria Belluzzo, “The equivalence of visual terms with constructive convention is a ‘feigned’.” (BELLUZO, Ana Maria. Carmela Gros. São Paulo: Cosac&Naify, 2000.
17 TIBERGHIEN, Gilles. Land art. Paris: Carré, 1993.
18 SMITHSON, Robert. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”, in: HOLT, Nancy. The writings of Robert Smithson. New York: New York University Press, 1979.
19 COIMBRA, Eduardo. “Invenção da paisagem”, in: cat. O artista pesquisador. Niterói, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, 1998.
20 CLARK, Lygia. “Bichos”, in: cat. Lygia Clark. Rio de Janeiro: Paço Imperial, 1999.
21 FLUSSER, Vilém. Filosofia da Caixa-preta. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1985
