Unspoken Stories - Cildo Meireles exhibition

Art in America, July, 2000 by Edward Leffingwell

A traveling exhibition of Cildo Meireles's installations and objects reveals them to be metaphoric reckonings of Brazil's postcolonial history.

In 1970, Cildo Meireles authored the text "Cruzeiro do Sul" as a contribution to the catalogue of the "Information" exhibition organized by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Meireles wrote that he had no interest in defending either his work or his nationality. Instead, he said, he would write about the formerly uncharted region south of the equator that is named--in the telling of this fable--Cruzeiro do Sul, for the constellation of the Southern Cross. He described it as a place continually divided and exploited, a region that is part of what we now know as Brazil, awarded to Portugal by treaty in the late 15th century.(1) He called this region "the wild side" or "the jungle in one's head," where people were forced by their oppressors to bury their heads in the earth. According to Meireles, the superabundance of this jungle would eventually reclaim the land from the outsiders with their "gilded projects and their hysterical intelligence." And because the history of this land would be told through fables and legends, its people would be a happy people.

At the same time that he wrote this text, Meireles, then 21 years old, made a sculpture emblematic of his country and his idea, also called Cruzeiro do Sul

(1969-70). It is a tiny cube, 9mm on a side, one half of pine, the other of oak--the soft and the hard, materials from which the indigenous people of Brazil make fire. He intended that this minuscule sculpture, monumental in its implications, be installed as the sole object in a large museum. This proposal has yet to be realized. Such allegorical manifestations are a constant in Meireles's work.

Social Use & Moral Valences

In a retrospective organized by New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art and currently traveling, Meireles's conceptually oriented, measured, tactile, sometimes labyrinthine installations, environments and objects resonate with such evocative stories. Meireles is attentive to the physical experience of making and seeing art, and also to its social use and moral valence. His works reveal broad powers of metaphor exercised in the reckoning of a postcolonial history; he addresses periods of military oppression and persecution, the effects of Brazil's struggle for cultural identity, its history of being subjected to foreign intervention and the pervasive economic and cultural influence of the United States.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948 to a family actively concerned with the rights of the indigenous, Meireles spent his formative years in the country's interior, during the time of the creation of Brasilia. Constructivist art held special meaning for many artists in this country deeply influenced by European modernism. The esthetics of the abstract, formalist Concrete movement, generally associated with Sao Paulo, were countered by the sensory, less intellectual interests of the neo-Concrete artists based in Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, by the mid-1960s, Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Franz Weissmann and Amilcar de Castro had produced constructions that redefined the objective experience of space while intimately involving the viewer as engaged participant. Clark, Oiticica and Pape formulated a culturally responsive variation of what would come to be known as Conceptual art, adopting esthetic strategies in opposition to a government that compromised free expression, a position that Meireles adopted as well.(2)

Informed by the intersecting spatial reliefs of Oiticica and the movable, articulated metal bichos of Clark, Meireles produced a number of related abstractions.(3) One of the two examples on view in this survey, Espacos Virtuais: Cantos (Virtual Spaces: Corners), 1967-68, is a structure that looks like the corner of an ordinary, familiar room. Around a segment of worn herringbone parquet floor are baseboards rich with red enamel edged with pink, from which rise walls of matte and dusty pink that are clearly fabricated from stretched and stapled canvas and exhibit a cracking in the gesso beneath the painted surface not unlike a plaster wall. Meireles shatters this architectural banality with a wedge of space that disrupts the right angle of the corner and seems to shift the line of the baseboard toward a new intersection of walls. It is an unexpected, irrational space, as if it were the threshold of another dimension where people might well disappear.

In 1970, during the military dictatorship, Meireles produced "Insercoes em Circuitos Ideologicos" (Insertions into Ideological Circuits), a group of works which were represented in "Information" and appropriately featured in the New Museum's Public Access Gallery. These projects, which the artist has described as "mobile graffiti," took advantage of existing systems of circulation: the recycling of empty bottles and the exchange of currency. In the Coca-Cola Project, Meireles placed messages, including "Yankee Go Home," in white transfer decals on the body of the familiar bottle, itself an emblem second to none for the cultural and economic presence of the United States abroad. When the bottle was empty, the messages could easily escape notice. When it was filled, the text became legible. With the Cedula Project, cruzeiro banknotes and American dollars were rubber-stamped with messages and returned to circulation. One of these messages, "Who Killed Herzog?," refers to a journalist who had been detained for two days of questioning by the Brazilian army, then pronounced a suicide by hanging.