Cildo Meireles at Galerie Lelong

For several decades, the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles has deployed simple, familiar objects and materials in formal arrangements and interactive environments that explore bodily self-awareness, global and institutional modes of order and control, and the relationships between rationalized space and open-ended experience. Two works recently installed at Galerie Lelong exemplify this practice in contrasting forms.

Strictu (2000) consists of a small wooden table flanked by a pair of chairs and two rows of stainless steel poles between which a chain, strung with handcuffs and iron balls, zigzags across the floor. On the table rests a quotation attributed to a Ku Klux Klan leader speaking of a planned demonstration: "We want to steal their time. We want to steal their space. We want to steal their mind." Below that is a statement by Meireles interpreting the quotation as a perfect expression of authoritarianism in politics as well as in cultural, artistic and curatorial matters.

The spareness of this installation suggests an interpretation of societal relationships in terms of conformity and domination: participants who elect to be shackled are bound to each other, joined by a chain that, like a circuit connecting different geographical locales, winds its way throughout the room. That one can choose among different modes of participation--e.g., sitting at the table or walking about while handcuffed suggests an element of voluntariness in one's place within networks of repression, even as one's navigation through the space is dictated by the chain's path. But Strictu teeters on the edge of bombast in its verbal coda, becoming a catch-all protest that associates political authoritarianism with merely artistic or curatorial control.

"Descalas" (2002), a much more subtle and rarified installation, comprises a series of 16 permutations of a Cor-Ten steel ladder, deconstructed and reformed in one linear configuration after another. In one, the rungs are unlatched from the uprights but suspended in place between them; in another, the uprights stand together on one side of the rungs; in a third, the uprights have been crossed to create a quadratic plane, like a Mondrian painting, with plus signs made of crossed rungs within; and in others, the rungs are split down the middle or float above the verticals into empty space. With its restricted vocabulary, "Descalas" suggests (in contrast to the repressive order of Strictu) the notion of a productive constraint, like the sonnet form or variations on a musical theme. That the ladders cannot be climbed upon suggests that they function in only symbolic terms, as figures of intellectual or spiritual elevation, like the ladder connecting specific material beauty to its universal form in Plato's Symposium, or like Jacob's ladder, by which angels ascend and descend, a conduit between earthly and heavenly realms. While Strictu incorporates the experience of its audience as it reflects on authority, "Descalas" resides in a seemingly autonomous sphere of formal inventiveness as it points to the abstract or divine.

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