Tunga at Luhring Augustine - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2002 by David Ebony

In this exhibition, Rio-based artist Tunga presented four recent large-scale sculptures, plus a performance piece titled Make-Up Coincidence on the show's opening day. Two of the sculptures, Triade Trinade and Progeny of the Baby, served as sets and props in the two-hour-plus performance on Jan. 26, which featured three female and three male performers. The artist described the event as a chamber version of an elaborate action presented earlier in the year in Paris, and in the fall in Sao Paulo, which included some 200 performers.

Of the works excluded from the performance, La Belle et La Bete was situated near the gallery entrance. It features two bulbous shapes the size of medicine balls, made of highly polished copper. Small hollows and protruding nodules like rudimentary sex organs activate the surfaces. Raised several feet from the floor, each orb is nestled in the crux of a tripod made of long copper and bronze rods. Two of these poles end in hooks, a reference to the tall staffs used by Joseph Beuys in certain of his 1970s performances. Long, thin black chains running along the floor connect these two elements to a third tripod holding a cluster of small black bronze vessels.

Also apart from the performance, Tacape-Scalp closely relates to the Tunga work included in the Guggenheim's concurrent show, "Brazil: Body and Soul" [see p. 108]. Covered in small pieces of copper foil, the glittering totem here was installed in a side room.

In Make-Up Coincidence, which took place in the dimly lit main gallery, the female models/dancers cavorted among the elements of the monumental installation Triade Trinade. This sculpture encompasses a giant iron bell hanging from a tripod support, an enormous steel cauldron and several smaller iron vessels, which were filled on this occasion with large blocks of red lipstick and chunks of other makeup supplied by a Brazilian cosmetics firm. In time to the music, the performers slowly smeared makeup all over themselves and the sculpture.

Occupying the cauldron or moving around it, the female dancers, wearing only panties (in the Paris version, the performers were nude), writhed to a gentle bossa nova beat interwoven with atonal electronic and ambient sounds. Paulo Vivacqua, a musician who has frequently collaborated with Tunga, composed the performance's haunting audio component.

Meanwhile, across the room, the male performers, wearing jeans but shirtless, altered the elements of Progeny of the Baby, an arrangement of a dozen large fiberglass pods placed on the floor, which closely resemble the copper orbs in La Belle et La Bete. Scooping out handfuls of gooey Vaseline-like grease from a plastic bucket, the performers methodically covered themselves and the sculptures with the mucilaginous lubricant. Greasing up each object's hollows and excrescences, they engaged in a slow and mechanical action in a corner of the room, connecting a few of the sculptures by inserting the nodules into the holes. Although the performers did not interact directly with each other, their movements evolved into a suggestive, erotic dance. They wound up rolling around on the floor, embracing and caressing the slimy orbs.

Tunga, who, in a written statement, hinted that one of the principal aims of Make-Up Coincidence was to merge the mechanical and the organic, participated in the action himself. Toward the end of the performance, he appeared in a wheelchair being pushed by his wife, Cordelia (he broke his foot soon after arriving in New York). Wearing identical purple suits, they moved toward Triade Trinade, where the reddish-hued performers proceeded to cover the cast of his propped-up foot in red makeup. After a while, as the hypnotic music began to fade, Tunga was wheeled back out of sight to the gallery office, followed soon after by the orderly procession of performers.

Afterward, at least one critic was heard bemoaning the event as part of the "festivalization" of Chelsea. To others, however, Tunga's seductive and sexy happening, taking place in the dreary months following 9/11, was a positive and life-affirming exercise.