[-empyre-] forward: Re: Neoconcrete (Clemente Padin)

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

Friends,

Neoconcretism: symbolic-metaphysic language. This tendency was created by
the poet Ferreira Gullar and another artists which emerged in reaction to
the "Objectivism of the rationalist poets of the Noigandres group, which
tried to imitate the machine", giving way to neoconcretism of a
metaphysical-symbolic temper that attempted the formulation of a new syntax.
Gullar's basic text, "Theory of the Non-Object," published in the Supplement
of the Jornal of Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1960), then to historify the
struggle of artists against naturalistic representation of the exterior
world, predicts the death of painting, in favor of "non-objects": "it is not
an anti-object, but a special object in which is attempted to realize a
synthesis of sensory and mental experiences: a body transparent to
phenomenological knowledge, integrally perceptible, which tends tends toward
pure appearance. A pure appearance". Similarly, in an interview he affirms:

"The non-object does not rest upon references of use or of sense (meaning)
because it does not form part of the condition of utility or of verbal
designation. The non-object is transparent to perception. It is a meaning
immanent to its own form that is simple signification. The non-object is not
a representation but a concrete presence that is perceived above the real
space of the world and not above the metaphoric ground of abstract
expression. The verbal non-object is anti-dictionary: space where the
isolated word irradiates its charge. The non-object demands a spectator
(does it even have to do with a spectator?) as proper condition of its act
of "being made" and not so much that passive boundary of its existence.
Without a spectator the work exists only as potentiality, awaiting the human
gesture that actualizes it".

In other words, there is established one of the basic characteristics of the
art of our time, the active participation of the spectator as co-creator and
actualizer of the work of art.

Another basic concept of neoconcretism: the preeminence of time which in its
transpiring generated meanings in the spatial sphere: "It does not have to
do with raising a metaphoric space in a well protected place in the world,
and does have to do with realizing a work in real space and with giving to
this space, by the appearance of the work--spatial object--a significance
and a transcendence".

Thus, Ferreira Gullar constitutes himself as a precursor of the so-called
action arts, the happening, performances, environments, or installations,
etc., much before many of those who today are relevant figures as
practitioners of these forms. The material aspect and the discipline in
which it is realized are irrelevant to the non-object: what matters is the
transcendental vitality before its discovery, and that occurs in the act, in
duration. For the neoconcretist, the poem is a temporal entity: "it is in
time and not in space that the word totally discovers its significative
nature".

This formulation encountered a favorable echo, and its postulates can be
found not only in the works of Ferreira Gullar, for example, the "Buried
Poem," realized in the quinta of another neoconcrete artist, Helio Oiticica,
but also in the work of numerous artists such as Ligia Clark, with her
manipulable objects "Os Bichos" or the same Oiticica and Ligia Pape with
their famous environments. Likewise, the movements of the "New Objectivity"
in Brazil and the "Non-object Poetry" of Clemente Padin (1971, Uruguay)
recognize their influence. According to the critic Alvaro de Sá, the most
important contributions of neoconcretism are:

"a) the happening; b) the use of the body as an active element in the
realization of the work; c) an attempt toward the interpenetration of the
genres; d) a transference of the center of the reading of the object towards
its perceptive and productive aspects; and e) the participation of the
spectator."

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I hope could have helped in the understanding of the important movement
"Neoconcretism" that have had an enormous influence not only in the Latin
American art but in everybody.

Fraternal greetings,

Clemente