Studio Visits

It was during the busy week of the 8th Edition of the São Paulo International Art Fair that I met Maurício Ianês at a garden party. We had a nice conversation about his work and I was interested to introduce an artist with a performative approach to this Blog. On a monday morning I recorded a fruitful interview with his studio cat and the guy that likes to laugh.

FR: Your work consists of Performances, Videos, Installations and often involves a strong body involvement. Was there a crucial moment that triggered you to become a performative artist?

MI: Yes, when I started building up my artistic view, I was always intrigued by how art can affect both the viewer and the artist and how art objects can act between those two extremities. At that time I was very disappointed about art. I was thinking that my thoughts will never reach the viewer properly through my artwork and the viewer will never be able to respond to me properly through an object. I started thinking that the best way to do that is to be there with the public. I got to know Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, all those big performance artists from the 60 & 70s and I decided to do that myself. (...)
I think body is language. Just like you can push language to poetry or to its limits, you can push body language to that extreme. By this I don't mean challenging my own body to an extreme but to show the artist as someone who is not empowered. To break this power play between the artist and the public and expose myself in this limited situation just to break these hierarchies. Its like humanizing the artist through an extreme situation.

FR: How do you visualize and conceive your work?

MI: I see my work as a book, and each work is a bit like a chapter. I'm interested in the relationship between the artist and the public through language. Besides that, I want to question language itself, be it artistic language, verbal language, or body language. I want to see how this socially functions in an artistic context.


FR: The work “Zona Morta“ or your latest performance “Not no“ that you presented at „Arti et Amiticiae“ in Amsterdam can be described as actions that last a certain amount of time. How do physical and mental limits influence the way you approach, conceive and interact with your work.

MI: (…) When I think of a work or a performance, I never think it would be impossible for me to handle it. I just dive into it. I never rehearse for example. It's just like: lets go! It's like a break in my daily life. I want to experience something new, just like the public. So when the public gets inside a room, sees a performance or an artwork, its an experience and I want to have this fresh feeling for me too. I do not get prepared for a performance through concentration or meditation, but it does affect me mentally.

FR: And in what way does it affect you mentally?

MI: My performances are always a life experience. Actually one performance changed my life personally. It was during the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2008 where I stayed 15 days in the biennial building, living there in silence. I got in there totally naked. I didn't have any possession, anything to eat. I only depended on public donations. Being naked in the biennial building was very extreme for me to start with. (...)The public was very receptive to that performance but at the same time they were very demanding. (...) One of the laws of the performance was: Don't judge! I had to consume everything. So I had to wear all the clothes, eat all the food, etc. It was very extreme. It was not only physically but mentally and emotionally demanding. I basically had to forget myself. I was a mirror of the public, I was them being totally absorbed. For almost a year I was traumatized by the exposure in the exhibition, the availability and these negotiations with the public. I do think it was a life-changing experience.


FR: You perform alone or in collaboration, but never instruct others to accomplish a performance for you. Which roll plays your own body/presence in your work?

MI: In my performance works, I generally question the relationship and communication between the artist and the public. So it has to be me, otherwise it would be fake. I'm not trying to say that it has to be authentic, because it never is. It's always mediated and within a context. But, since I'm posing a question and looking for an answer, I think it has to be me. (...)
How do you relate to things that exist but can not be put into words? They're purely abstract entities that can not be touched. They are real; they are between relationships; they are within us, and I kind of want to expose them. I want to deal with them.

FR: Formal aspects of Language and Communication seem to play an important roll in your installations. Which exploration interests you there?

MI: As I said before, there is that philosophical questioning of language that interest me. I'm very fond of how Derrida, Wittgenstein and Heidegger approach philosophy or a philosophical text. They try to explore and deconstruct a single word and see where each part comes from. They try to rethink the world through the meaning of a specific word. (...)
But then it gets to a point where language becomes all abstract to someone who is not into philosophy. It becomes useless and touches that unspeakable part of language which is very important. So I like to think about that. I think a lot about poetry, especially about modern or contemporary poetry. Stéphane Mallarmé or the Brazilian Concretists for instance, thought visually about poetry and exposed the words in the pages almost like a drawing (…) I'm interested in the physical and emotional aspects of language. I like to remove the words from the book, think about them spatially and dissociate them from there source object. (…)


FR: Are there any artists that play an example role in your work and remain important for you?

MI: Yeah, definitely, even though I don't see them so clearly in my work. I do think that Bas Jan Ader remained important to me since art school. What I like about his work is this simplicity and extreme conceptualism with a very emotional input.(...)
Joseph Beuys' way of thinking was always a huge influence and then of course Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden and Marcel Broodthaers. They made me think of performance.

FR: Performances are always bound to a specific situation and thus have an ephemeral character. How do you deal with its documentation and in which way do you integrate it into your installation based work?

MI: That's a very good question because I'm thinking a lot about that. In my next show I'm going to show some performance documents for the first time. I usually don't see these documents as an artwork itself. I don't think a photograph or a text that you read during the performance should go to an exhibition. But I did two performances in 2010, and 2011, that left very interesting documents. (...)
A t-shirt and a book were leftovers of the performance “The writing“. They made me think about how the documentation can be important or have autonomy from the performance. (...)

It's the beginning of may and today I will do my first studiovisit for the blog. I am meeting Marcelo Cidade in his huge studio in the neighbourhood Belem. It was during one of my first days in Sao Paulo that his show at Galeria Vermelho opened. I was intruiged by his work and wanted to know more about it. On a sunny afternoon we had a long and interesting conversation about his works, thoughts and motivations.

FR: When did you know that you want to become an artist. Was there a specific entry point?

MC: My friends from school were going to the beach on the vacation. My family never went to the beach and I started hanging out on the streets of SP with my skateboard. Between my house and downtown I perceived a lot of social disruption. Problems that I didn't perceive in my private school. After the experiment with the skateboard in the 90s, I became very interested in graffiti. I started to go to trainlines, to paint trains, metro, etc.
I can say that this interest in graffiti was my first interest in art. Later in the artschool I was introduced to art from the 70s, performance art, urban actions, and interventions in the city. I became interested in the actions of Cildo Meireles and Helio Oiticica. I started to perceive that my actions in the street were very political and I was wondering how my actions could be political without using the aesthetics of graffiti.(…)

FR: You currently have a show at Galeria Vermelho. Can you tell me something about your displayed works, your ideas and about the title „Quase Nada (almost nothing)“.

MC: Just like in all my previous exhibitions the title „Quase nada (almost nothing)“ results out of a process that starts in the streets. (…) In my last exhibition at Vermelho, the title „Avant-Gard is not dead“ was related to the idea of avant garde and punk. With the title of the current show, I relate indirect to a work by Helio Oiticica called „Almost cinema“. It's a series of films where he contructs a movie by projecting stills in a fast sequence.
The reference to brasilian modernism is much more conceptual. It relates to a certain attitude. If you take out all the formal aspects of their works, you can perceive a very social motivation to lead life in a different way. This aspect is often forgotten. (…) I try to be subversive while relating to brasilian modernism with almost no forms / works in this exhibition.



Last year I found a book with fotos of the construction of Brasilia. The first page showed a bilboard, that seemed very bizar to me. I was intruiged by it, since it showed Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott’s campaign for the Brazilian presidency, in 1960. It was the first democratic campaign after the dictatorship. Nevertheless, the panel presents the candidate wearing his military uniform beside Juscelino Kubitschek dressed as Borba Gato.
I wanted to paint it and used the B&W photography as a reference. I wanted to emphasize that this is something from the past so I rearranged the panels like a puzzle on the backside of the billboard. In Brasil it's quite common to reuse panels of old billboards in that way for new propaganda.
The title „...e agora, José“ is a reference to the the title of a poetry book by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who was part of the modernist literature movement. (...)


The work „Addition by substraction“ relates to the work „Intra murus“ that I showed in the SP Biennale in 2006. I was interested in the idea of displacement between the private and the public space. In my newest work I wanted to pursue this idea by determining an area with glass fragments in a white cube situation. By protecting this area, I create a kind of value concept although the inside and the outside are equal.
Besides that I start a dialog with the idea of architecture. (...) It refers not only to a frame, but also to a window. Here the windowglass fragments are comming out of the wall and do not evoke the feeling of protection but of aggresion. This confrontation interested me.

FR: The spikes on top of the black gallerywall recalled your work „Addition by substraction„ while I was leaving the gallery. Is there an intentional relation between the architecture of the gallery and this work?

MC: No, not only the gallery has spikes; you can find them all around SP. They are meant to protect people in their houses, but in fact it only increases the violence problems in posh neighbourhoods.
So when I show them inside the gallery, I create a confrontation with people that live behind spike surrounded walls. People who come to the gallery expect to see something beautiful. But exactly the opposite happens. They are confronted with a memory of their own surrounding. (…) My idea of bringing the SP problems inside the gallery is to remind the people who buy art that art can be a problem. And for me art becomes interesting when it creates a problem.

FR: You generate works between art and society, between public space and studio practice. How would you frame the formal vocabulary of your work? Do you use both the aesthetics of the streets and the artcontext?

MC: For me the aesthetic results out of the conceptual preoccupation.
I think much more about concepts and how I can realise this concept. The aesthetic question comes after that. All the time. (...)

FR: In the beginning of the interview you told me that you like brasilian modernism and that you often relate to their formal aspects by appropriating certain forms.

MC: Yes, off course I have my tastes, but I don't want to be misunderstood when I talk about forms. Because I think modernism is often misunderstood. People tend to forget about the concepts of the so called avant garde and only focus on the formal aspects. I think it is important to find a balance between concept and form. Because if there is no form, you're gonna talk about philosophy. Not about art.



FR: You do not only gain inspiration and material from public space, but you mostly intervene. What is it exactly that interests you about intervening in public space?

MC: It's part of my daily life. (…) I think the idea of intervention is for me much more related to the use of the city and its public spaces. In SP we don't really have public spaces, like you have in Europe. Europeans use the public space in a fantastic way, because they don't have enough space. Here we have a lot of space but we are not using it in a good way.
The idea of intervention is a way of reclaiming the streets. I started with this while I was hanging around in the streets. There were a lot of problems and I wanted to change it a little bit. I tried to do something through intervention.

FR: How important is the city SP for you since you are a real Paulista? Is your work very city related or could you make the same work if you were living for instance in Manaus.

MC: I live in a metropolis and some problems that I perceive here, are almost the same as in London, New York or Paris. Off course I can deal with some „Paulista“ questions, but when I'm abroad I see that these problems are not necessarily bound to SP, but are a result of metropolises.
And for sure, when I would have grown up in Manaus or Bahia, I would perceive the world around me in a different way. I think to understand the artist today, it is very important to consider his or her environment.
(...)

FR: While questioning the social system and its political structures, do you feel a kind of responsability towards society as an artist? Especially in a city like SP where the difference between poor and rich is so obvious.

MC: I think my preoccupation is much more to be a good citizin and to have ethics. In this country, ethics is a very good value. We had a lot of corruption during the past and due to that I think its important to have a good and honest behaviour.
While being ethical and respectfull in my daily life, I think my work is also gonna be ok. If I would be a shitty guy, then my work would probably be the same.