The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: A Conversation with Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz - Interview

The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, H[acute{e}]lio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel is an exhibition curated by Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. It was on view at MOCA from October 17, 1999, to January 23, 2000, and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by the curators, as well as Catherine David, Suely Rolnik, S[hat{o}]nia Salzstein, and Osvaldo S[acute{a}]nchez. Focusing on the work of a group of important artists who are nevertheless little known in the United States, it proposes a remapping of the landscape of post--World War II art and culture to incorporate not only artists who lived outside the United States or Europe, but also works of art conceived not as objects, but as open propositions.

Farmer: The Experimental Exercise of Freedom is not a conventional survey exhibition, but a focused examination of the work of five artists: Lygia Clark (1920-1988), Gego (1912-1994), Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), Helio Oiticica (1937-1980), and Mira Schendel (1919-1988). What is the rationale for bringing the work of these artists together?

Ruiz: The Experimental Exercise of Freedom is not a survey exhibition, but five mini-exhibitions within a large exhibition. Our idea was to bring together significant bodies of work from artists we believe embodied experimental or avant-garde tendencies in Latin American art from the I 950s to the 1970s. Although at the beginning of their careers, these artists espoused a more formalist approach, all of them ultimately made the leap into more conceptual concerns, reworking modern art principles into a contemporary idiom that had a connection to life in the societies in which they lived.

Carvajal: Although each of these artists pursued quite distinctive and singular artistic paths, all of them developed complex and experimental practices that profoundly questioned and transformed the functionalist programs of the pre-World War II European constructivist vanguards in Latin America. Their work critically and syncretically absorbed and dismantled those languages to revitalize and restate them in completely original terms, opening them to new contexts of expression and subjectivation. In different measures, the presence of the constructive in the work of these artists--and its instability--functioned as a vehicle for the liberation of the subject, in which she or he could, through the creative experience, reconstitute her or his own subjectivity and reconnect art and reality.

Farmer: Could you talk about the exhibition's title? Where does it come from, and what does it mean?

Carvajal: The title comes from a phrase in an article about the S[tilde{a}]o Paulo Bienal published in 1970 by the Brazilian critic M[acute{a}]rio Pedrosa, entitled "La Bienal de c[acute{a}] para l[acute{a}]" (The Bienal from Here to There). With this phrase, Pedrosa sought to describe the work of those Brazilian, as well as non-Brazilian, artists who radically reconceived the idea of art. As Pedrosa stated, these artists developed practices that "reformulated and liberated the aesthetic act so that it could give itself up to completely unfamiliar transactions: to[ldots]the experimental exercise of freedom." In other words, they did not conceive of the work of art as an object, but as an open proposition. This shift enabled them to liberate themselves from the constraints of the market, of institutions, of tradition.

Farmer: How is the exhibition organized?

Ruiz: It's divided into five sections, beginning with Goeritz and ending with Oiticica. After Goeritz, we installed Gego and Schendel side by side, but in separate spaces. Then Clark and Oiticica. It is interesting that after designing the installation, we realized that the two male artists serve as bookends to the exhibition, with the three women artists in the middle forming the exhibition core, so to speak.

As Rina suggested, one of the exhibition's premises is that these artists viewed art not as a finished object, but as an open proposition. In order for this proposition to become a work of art, it needs the viewer's participation. When you walk through the exhibition, you begin to sense this development. Starting with Goeritz, the viewer's participation is that of the person looking at something. By the end, if the viewer is willing to put some of his or her inhibitions aside and spend time in Oiticica's Eden--by relaxing in the nests, listening to music in the Caetano-Gil tent, or walking into the various Penetrables, experiencing different kinds of ground, like water, crushed concrete, or dry leaves--then he or she becomes part of that something. The viewer becomes the work of art, since by participating he or she is completing the artist's proposition.

Farmer: Could you talk more about how the artists in the exhibition rethought the idea of art--how they conceived art not as an object, but as an open proposition, as a situation to be lived or experienced?

Carvajal: These artists regarded artistic practice as a mode of liberation, as a process by which they could undo traditional categories of the artist, art object, and viewer. They conceived the individual who experienced the work not as a passive spectator, but as an active participant in the work's creation and as the subject of her or his own liberation. They accordingly valued the immanence of the act over any notion of the permanent or stable object. This experimental approach led them to develop new forms and new ideas that recuperated the concept of space as a living entity in constant flux--as an open and dynamic field of action rather than as the container of completed events or static objects.