[-empyre-] N State and Tropicalia: 'invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing'

christina112 <christina112@earthlink.net> · Sun, 26 Mar 2006 10:14:43 -0800

Lucio Agra wrote,

Yeah, I see what you mean and it is a great parallel (or contrast,
better saying). On the one hand you have all the promises that the net
would provide - total liberty (vs. some sufocating dictatorship
ambiences such as ours in Latin America, seventies) and, in the other,
the surveillance still menacing this "free zone". Well, kind of a
situation we lived here in the time between 64 (coup) and 68 (strenght
of dictatorship).

Lucio and list,
Responding to the thread introduced in mid month about Tropicalia and  
how it may be an interesting gloss on what is happening now and where  
we can go with post media art and cultural practice,  I noticed just  
today that Cara Baldwin (one of our guests in November (Whispering   
in the Dark.. Journal of Aesthetics and Protest) has touched on this  
in an important piece on Hélio Oiticica; irony, conceptual art and  
politics in Latin America (thanks also to list/guest Ryan Griffis for  
alerting me to this).
An excerpt from this piece that appears in the Journal of Aesthetics  
and Protest, issue 4:

http://joaap.org/4/issue4.php?page=botey

In To Return Earth Unto the Earth: A Paradox of Containment, Guy  
Brett notes that with both Oiticica and Joseph Beuys, there is  
inherent difficulty in preserving the efficacy of their work  
without their living presence. I’d push the comparison further,  
however, into a reflection on the relationship between each artist,  
institutions, and notions of public. Beuys often used the metaphor  
of the artist as a shaman, the artist as a kind of ultrasensitive  
intermediary between the people and the cosmos. This required the  
living presence of the artist. Beuys clearly saw himself as the  
shaman, the professor, the author, the artist and the performer,  
despite his expression, "everyone is an artist." Alternately,  
Oiticica expressed this idea in structures that invited the  
participation of the public. These would lead not to an individual,  
but to a communal work of art. Oiticica’s “nonrepresive  
collectivism” and “rap-play” employed communality in terms that  
explored the finest nuances between individual/solitary reverie and  
social/communal. 18
The environments Hélio exhibited in galleries were variations of  
experimental living and working spaces that he constructed in his  
own home. Reduced to the simplest terms, these were a combination  
of habitable individual “nests” and communal “jive” spaces. Partly,  
he had in mind a secular version of the Tejero, the sacred dance  
building associated with the Brazilian Candomble. His earlier work  
prepared the public for a bodily engagement with elements (color,  
space, transparency) previously conceived for a mental rather than  
tactile engagement. He went on to use the forms of everyday life  
that were prohibited in the space of a museum such as touching,  
lying down, putting on clothing, dancing and walking barefoot.
Insert break. Pause. Question. Maybe these hidden memories are what  
Oiticica presents in the Cosmococas as a “pre-history of the  
future?” If we break off from imagining the shamanic as a model in  
the past, we displace the matrix of western metaphysics from the  
center. We also see a radical Other matrix, wherein dialectic  
violence, that smoking mirror that contains the order of things,  
collapses into a radical Other structure. Oiticica's experiments  
embody this radical Other model of the world— the primitive that  
isn’t. He takes into account non-linear and non-coercive paradigms.  
A form of consciousness appears where the separation of object/ 
subject is re-considered and negotiated; no isolated art object is  
produced in his model. Instead, what comes to existence is a logic  
that prevents violence against the “invisible brilliance of life  
that is not a thing "

The last reference "invisible brillance of life that is not a thing"   
is from Bataille (Theory of Religion).

This 'thing' --- "experiments embodyinging this radical Other model  
of the world...the primitive that isn't... is something we've been  
threading through =empyre- since earliest days... it's key to what a  
networked community like =empyre- in itself can and does effect!  I  
am passionate about this .. along with Melinda Rackham, the founder  
of this list with whom we touched on the radiant works of Lygia Clark  
(2002)
Melinda wrote then,

Christina wrote

>    The aesthetic of the experiments is so direct it reminds me of  
Lygia

> Clark in the sixties; as Guy Brett remarks, "Clark's address to the

> 'spectator' was always in the mode of an invitiation to play,  
complex

> thoughts crystallized around a very simple model." ("Force Fields  
of the
im glad you mentioned lygia clarke and her fabulous works in the

force fileds show....gave me an excuse to pull out the catalogue..  
and an

opportunity to re-live Gianni Colombos' elastic space (spazio  
elastico)

from 1967 whcih

for me was a better VR experience than being at IMAX or in a  
CAVE!!. Elastic

Space its

made from flourescent coated string suspended in a 3d grid by  
weights and

pulleys inside a large dark box . as you walk thru the space the  
string

glows, and the dimensions and perspectives appear to change as the  
pulleys

move the strings and you get a sense of space bending around you.. its

great..its smoke and mirrors (well cardboard and string) .. and it  
sooooo

simple.

https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/htdig/empyre/2002-January/ 
msg00087.html

This afternoon I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Natalie

Jeremijenko,  first speaker for the series AIM III Luna Park at the  
Museum

of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.   A spirited invitation to look at  
the

question of if - how- artists produce empirical knowledge, what  
counts as

knowledge, and structures of participatory knowledge,  Natalie's  
thought

experiments are like a chain of engineered information stimulus/ 
response

nodes.  The nodes are located within a digital cache, tangibly  
actuated off

screen, in real space/time.  A latent content remains ephemeral,  
diaphanous,

homogeneous, and undifferentiated until, if and when, you encounter  
the node

and--critically --attempt to interact with it.  The  node structure  
appears

static until you ask questions of it. Imagine both machine node and  
the

human as repressed or latent zones  until the desire to know,  
presumably on

the part of the human, forces release of information as structures of

knowledge.
   The aesthetic of the experiments is so direct it reminds me of  
Lygia

Clark in the sixties; as Guy Brett remarks, "Clark's address to the

'spectator' was always in the mode of an invitiation to play, complex

thoughts crystallized around a very simple model." ("Force Fields  
of the

Kinetic", catalogue essay, Museu de Art Contemporanea Barcelona).  
Natalie's

itinerary, from engineered node to node, discovers passage: you  
must want to

know, and in wanting to know, you create the map. The information  
actualizes

within the force of your desire. Is there an objective suite of  
data sets

beyond the engineered nodes? It is one thing to recognize  massive  
streams

of data; but to request, is another matter entirely.  Suspicious  
statistics,

supercilious/nebulous, just out there, stereotyped, idees recus--a  
zillion

skeined datacodestreams hit us per diem. The offscreen tangible

manifestation of Natalie's projects hazard, not pattern recognition  
of data,

not data architecture; rather, animation.
Like Lygia with her sensorial hoods,  Natalie takes up a deceptively

emblematic premise, using a life morph, a discrete form (she called  
it "life

represented not by movement but by STUFF you can fuck with" )  
butterfly

wings, breath, touch, skin, spots on a ladybug, and moves quickly,  
by means

of the human dialectic, into a process structure of participatory  
knowing.

Jeremijenko's stuff, like multiple inversions in a musical fugue, cuts

through thematic categories, across morphologies.  The stuff is  
internalized

in us, we animate it in strings of participation, layer upon  
layer.  The

participatory structure becomes a rendered model of life.  A process

definition, in effect, of the kind of knowledge artists produce.
  Lygia wrote,
"For the first time I have discovered a new reality which is not  
within

myself, but within the world, I found a Caminhando {Walking}, an inner

itinerary outside of myself.  Before, the Bicho {Animal} emerged  
within me,

it spurted out like an obsessive explosion - though all my senses.  
Now for

the first time, withh the Caminhando- it is the opposite.  I  
perceive the

totality of the world as a unique, global rhythm, which extends  
from Mozart

to the gestures of beach football."  (also quoted in "Force Fields")

I have been in a meditation about inscape for a long time:  the  
notion of a

constellated dynamic of ontologic and epistomelogic orchestrations, an

interior topography, within and outside the self, on the borders of  
the

mixed realities.  Why modes of digital representation make a kind of

participatory mirror, a new rendering of something we are becoming,

something we can't even really see  yet.  That's the digital sublime..

Christina McPhee
<www.naxsmash.net>

https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/htdig/empyre/2002-January/ 
msg00081.html

    * Follow-Ups:
          o Re: [-empyre-] digital sublime

Lucio Agra wrote,

Yeah, I see what you mean and it is a great parallel (or contrast,
better saying). On the one hand you have all the promises that the net
would provide - total liberty (vs. some sufocating dictatorship
ambiences such as ours in Latin America, seventies) and, in the other,
the surveillance still menacing this "free zone". Well, kind of a
situation we lived here in the time between 64 (coup) and 68 (strenght
of dictatorship).
I think you put it in a much better way than I dream I would do.
Only one observation about the info came from the link you quoted:
Torquato Neto did not commit suicide because of a supposed " forced
"psychiatric care."". The fact is: at that time there were many people
- young - that were put on  forced "psychiatric care" because this was
the way pearents thought you should treat youngs on drugs (even if
someone was just smoking pot now and then).
Torquato volunteered to enter in a treatment some times because there
was also a romanticized view about madness, and after several
experiments with LSD, he believed he would join an imaginary community
of mad people. Gilberto gil, on the other hand, was forced to enter
into a clinic because he was caught with marijuana in a police raid
and it was kind of deal: this or go to jail... Besides, anyone who
used long hair at that time was subject to police suspicion... I would
not say it did not happen abroad but, in our case, people with long
hair were nothing but a few... post-tropicalists.
best
Lucio BR
PS: I am talking about some facts that happened prior to my
generation, for I was born in 1960, like Arnaldo Antunes. We were
afortunate to become adults at the end of dictatorship and passed our
teen age under it. On the other hand we were pressed by our
predecessors and, at the same time, by a foreign "no future" influence
came with punk. I think it may explain something, perhaps... or not!

On 3/8/06, Christina McPhee <christina@christinamcphee.net> wrote:
> Yes, indeed, that was one of the provocations behind mentioning
> Tropicalia 2, to point gently towards Tropicalia itself as a
> 'modern' critical practice with political implications (to say the
> least) during a regime that sought to curtail and even silence its
> practitioners.   Tropicalia's story influenced me very much when I
> was starting to work in new media, not least for the vitality of the
> music itself, but also because of what apparently happened (probably
> others on the list from Brazil can help me out here) to its members
> (see quote below).   I was inspired to think about the 'zero' degree
> of a landscape of surveillance. How your choices as an artist propel
> you, possibly, into conditions of peril.In what ways speech, in the
> topologies of the internet, supposedly a 'free' environment, might be
> challenged or truncated or shut down. How one longed not just for
> 'freedom from' oppression but also 'freedom to' create and how this
> longing itself might lead to exile. How speech in exile might derive
> from a submerged or furtive being -- the 'exotic' 'other' or
> 'queer' ; so in a way it was from Tropicalia that I derive  the
> geneology of my  cyborg  as a topology of the net, an aphasic
> topology but also one that might speak 'truth' (or "parrhesia",
> fearlessness in speaking the truth, a characteristic of Tropicalia).
> "Parrhesia" as an interrogation into the cultural space of the net
> itself ---  as in this small but wild
> speculation on  neural.it, http://www.neural.it/english/
> aphasiaparrhesia.htm   Christoph's Cosmolalia is a related and more
> concrete analysis.
>
>
> Christina
>
>
>