Antibióticos que se unen a la subunidad ribosomal grande

“Brazil is not my country; it is my abyss.”

Jomard Muniz de Britto⁶⁰ Before turning to a reflection on care, it is worth revisiting Oititica’s Environmental Program, as not only pointing toward an engagement with the world as a museum, but also, to the museum itself as a world. As an environment, the museum can be a site of integral fusion for participation, an “indivisible reunion of all the modalities at the artist’s command.”⁶¹ However, as a potential

“environment” MAC is notoriously challenging for artists and traditional display formats. The signature building, the view, and the large glass windows invite visitors to focus on the landscape outside. Art has a hard time competing. Many exhibitions or would be environments fail. Artists and curators must grapple with the museum’s site specific context embracing both the tension between the natural and the constructed and what Oiticica described as the “environment as such”

– the sensorial and experiential environment in all its here-and-now temporality and spatiality.⁶² The museum’s inaugural exhibition Arte Contempôranea na Coleção João Sattamini (Contemporary Art in João Sattamini’s Collection) presented the complexities of this

“environment” of the encounter between MAC’s open architectural proposal and the newly housed contemporary art collection.⁶³ Captivated by the landscape and fascinated with the building, the diverse range of visitors, however, often seemed alienated from the works on

58 Comuniarte meeting, November 2014.

59 Interview with the author, February 5^th, 2014.

60 [Author translation Portuguese original: “Brasil não é meu pais: é o meu abismo.”] From the poem by Jomard Muniz de Britto, “Aquarelas do Brasil,” in Terceria Aquarela do Brasil (Recife: Jomard Muniz de Britto, 1982) See full text in Portuguese: http://www.revistazunai.com/materias_especiais/jomard_muniz_de_britto/atentados_poeticos.htm

61 Oiticica. “Position and Program,” Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, 320.

62 “Environment as such” is the title of the second class of a curriculum Oiticica wrote for a course he gave at the 92^nd St Y in New York in 1972-73 called “Experimentaction.” The little known course is briefly discussed in chapter one.

See Itaú Cultural Hélio Oiticica database: http://www.itaucultural.org.br/programaho/ Note the site is in Portuguese but curriculum was written in English. “Experimentaction” Hélio Oiticica Project Archives # 0507/72 Pages 01 -10.

63 Arte Contempôranea na Coleção João Sattamini. September 2^nd 1996 – September 14^th, 1997. Curated by Reynaldo Roels.

display. Exploring ways of engaging these publics, Luiz Guilherme Vergara created a simple handout, an exercise of looking and discovery, inviting visitors to narrate a story connecting at least four works in the collection. This led to the creation of thousands of stories from the banal to the fantastical connecting artworks that would normally never be considered together under traditional curatorial presentations. This affective creativity inspired Vergara and theory and research director at the time, Luiz Camillo Osorio, to curate the exhibition Visões e (sub)versões:

Cada olhar uma história (Visions and subversions: Each Look a Story) presenting four of the stories alongside the actual works chosen by the visitors together with each one’s brief biography and portrait.⁶⁴ For Osorio this exhibition should be considered a historic marker, a turning point of new possibilities to think about the relationship of curatorship, education and the museum.⁶⁵

From the vantage point of artistic responses to MAC’s “environment as such,” two installations conceived shortly after MAC’s inauguration in 1999 by Antonio Manuel and Artur Barrio could be seen to have set the bar for site specificity.⁶⁶ Manuel created Ocupações/descobrimentos (Occupations/Discoveries) for the museum’s circular veranda gallery.

From its sequence of postcard views of Guanabara Bay to highrise condos and ramshackle fishing boats, the 360º vista makes the veranda an extraordinarily difficult place to exhibit. Manuel saw himself as up against a context that did not care about art. So he built a series of seven fake walls one side painted white and the other with exposed brick (similar to the use of such brick in favela construction) one of which was painted red, that blocked the circular passageway but for a series of holes sledge hammered open in each wall to allow visitors to climb through. The installation interrupted and fragmented the views of the stunning landscape. Its ludic physicality literally made spectator/participants take care, as the inside-outside experience became more consciousness, a heightened sense of traversing, bending, walking and viewing. ⁶⁷

To Manuel’s ludic passageway, Barrio’s O sonho do arqueólogo (The Dream of the Archaeologist) juxtaposed a literal and metaphysical excavation, turning the museum’s central gallery into an archaelogical dig-like experience of the sea – its depths, surfaces, smells, pollution. The almost totally darkened gallery featured a small makeshift hanging yellow light, a large wrapped up tarpaulin, granules of amber resin scattered on the carpet affecting a sparkling

64 Visões e (Sub) versões: Cada Olhar uma História. September 20^th 1997 – January 25^th 1998. Curated by Luiz Guilherme Vergara and MAC Department of Education. See Beatriz Jabor, “Curadorias Educativas e Jogos

Interpretativas,” MAC 10 Anos, 102-127, 104-106 and Luiz Camillo Osorio. “Visões e (Sub) versões: Cada Olhar uma História.” Ibid. p.107.

65 Osorio, “Visões e (sub) versões,” 107.

66 Antonio Manuel. Ocupações/descobrimentos. Artur Barrio. O sonho do arqueólogo. May 20^th – July 26^th 1998.

Curated by Luiz Camillo Osorio.

67 Osorio describes Manuel’s installation as a “new adventure of experimentalism in the constructive vein of Brazilian art, where geometry, sensuality and playfulness interact in a singular way.” Luiz Camillo Osório, Antonio Manuel:

Ocupações/descobrimentos, Exhibition catalogue (Niterói: Museu de arte contempôraneo de Niterói, 2002) 4-13, 12.

twilit sea, a clothesline crossed the space from which hung strung up bundles with codfish.⁶⁸ In bringing the ocean inside the museum, Barrio plumbed the conscience of the place.

If Manuel and Barrio struggled with MAC’s architecture, natural setting and oceanic depths, Nelson Leirner’s 2005 Por que museu? (Why museum?) pop and incisively critical, grappled with the space tongue-in-cheek style.⁶⁹ For his exhibition located in the museum’s main circular gallery and veranda Leirner teasingly questioned the museological function of this ever-increasing popular tourist site. His “why museum?” seemed to also say “why not just a restaurant or a bar?” A carnival-like procession of hundreds of figurines culminating around a football stadium filled the center gallery. Along the veranda with views to the ocean, Coke cans, Christ and saint figures, and a large cow were poised together with two deck chairs and a sun umbrella, all looking out to sea, as if to anticipate the visitor’s desire to call it quits and grab a martini.

In startling contrast to Leirner gleeful jabs, at the same time José Rufino’s exhibition Incertae Sedis (literally, that which has no classification) wrapped around the doughnut-shaped upstairs gallery.⁷⁰ It was like walking into another world, thick with the presence of history. A body of work steeped in the legacy of Brazil’s military dictatorship and those who had gone missing. Trails of bureaucratic stamps pinned to the walls connected suspended wooden desks;

slickly varnished cabinets grew menacing roots; old typewriters streamed filmic texts, and wooden suitcases and boxes coddled white egg-shaped forms. Dense sculptural works combined tables, desks, and chairs with ethereal shroud-like Rorschach inkblots layered on top of collaged archival documents. The experience was one of a pervasive grasping of memory and forgetting, of tangible violence, and of lost administration amidst corrupt and brutal bureaucracies.

The upstairs/downstairs environmental contrast of Leirner’s irony and Rufino’s metaphysics honed and deepened the critical and creative possibilities of each. Yet some have been known to remark that MAC is a great building but a terrible museum. This can be read into Leirner’s teasing joust. Certainly, MAC resists being transformed into a white cube. It is rather best seen as its own anthropophagic gesture – part Niemeyer, part setting – that refuses the museum as mere contemplative armature or encyclopedic tradition and demands that different experiential avenues be explored. Curator and former MAC director Guilherme Bueno (2009 -2012) has argued that he refuses to see these challenges as a priori ones, as if all was hostage to

68 Luiz Camillo Osorio, Artur Barrio: O sonho do arqueologo, Exhibition catalogue (Niterói: Museu de arte contempôraneo de Niterói, 2002) 7-15, 13.

69 Nelson Leirner: Por que museu? October 15^th 2005 – March 26^th 2006. Curated by Agnaldo Farias.

70 José Rufino: Incertae Sedis. October 15^th 2005 – March 26^th 2006. Curated by Luiz Guilherme Vergara and Claudia Saldanha.

the architecture and insists on the potency of the artworks themselves.⁷¹ In contrast to the white cube that situates the spectator in a central position, key gallery spaces require movement, a dynamic that Bueno sees as enabling different curatorial concepts and juxtapositions. Artist Guilherme Vaz offers another reading suggesting the aggregative character of the circular spaces of the museum, which for him is distinctly contemporary. The curve he notes is social.⁷²

If the previous examples mined MAC as a site-specific environment and space of encounter of the modern and the contemporary how might the museum more radically take up the latter drawing on Oiticica’s ethical aesthetic legacy of anti-art, as the artist suggested in his

“Environmental Program,” and “give the public a chance to cease being an outside.”⁷³ If this was partly achieved with the exhibition Cada olhar uma história, it was perhaps even more so with the 2006 exhibition Lygia Clark: Abrigo Poético (Poetic Shelter), the title of which recalled the artist’s 1964 sculpture of the same name, a piece that uncannily parallels MAC’s circular form.⁷⁴ The exhibition embraced Clark’s concept of biological and cellular architecture and her use of simple constructions to emphasize human action/interaction to affect what the artist imagined as a “poetic shelter in which inhabiting is equivalent to communicating.” ⁷⁵ The central gallery presented Clark’s early sculptures and paintings from João Sattamini’s collection. The surrounding veranda explored an archaeology of her creative process – organic line, folding, relational objects – and her artistic legacy via an illustrated timeline and the transformation of the belvedere gallery space into a laboratory of practice featuring Clark’s propositions along with unpacking the processes of related contemporary artists and those of her generation as open public workshops led by artist facilitators. The latter was informed by MAC’s years of curatorial education experiments with “neoconcrete games” exploring artists’ use of materials and their processes with visitors ranging from paper cut outs playing with formal elements and foldings to giant size swaths of material literally playing, making, and experimenting with the constructive use of color and geometry as a live canvas. This spirit continued on the second floor and outdoor patio with dialogues between Lygia Clark’s practice and the work of contemporary Brazilian

71 Gilberto Mariotti, “Uma Pergunta para Guilherme Bueno,” In Periódico Permanente, v.1, n.1, 2012 eds. Ana Letícia Fialho, Gilberto Mariotti, Graziela Kunsch and Martin Grossmann http://www.forumpermanente.org/revista/numero-1/museu-ideal/guilherme-bueno/uma-pergunta-para-guilherme-bueno

72 Guilherme Vaz, conversation with the author, April 2014. Also see Franz Manata’s interview with the artist where Vaz speaks of what he sees as the difference between the modern (white cube) and the contemporary (more aggregative proposals). The interview is one of many featured on the curator’s excellent sound art project web site. (Portuguese only) Guilherme Vaz. Pod # 1. Arte Sonora. http://exst.net/artesonora/podcasts/pod-01-guilherme-vaz/

73 Hélio Oiticica. “Position and Program,” Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, 322

74Luiz Guilherme Vergara explores the parallel between Niemeyer’s architecture for MAC and Clark’s Poetic Shelter in his essay “MAC Niterói as a Place of Hope,” Access All Areas, 113. The exhibition Abrigo Poético: Diálogos com Lygia Clark. September 2^nd – December 3^rd 2006. Curated by Claudia Saldanha and Luiz Guilherme Vergara

75 Letter to Mário Pedrosa, April 22^nd 1969, in Lygia Clark, ed. Manuel Borja Villel (Barcelona: Fundació Tàpies, 1999) 250.

artists from Jarbas Lopes’ Desembola Embola (Unravel Ravel) that invited visitors to unravel and ravel balled up threads contained in tiny wooden boxes to João Modé’s Projeto Rede (Net/Network Project), a collective net/web organically emerging on the museum’s patio hanging from the ramp woven by public contributions.⁷⁶ Here participants could literally became part of and co-construct the environments, like Clark aspired, drawing on Merleau Ponty, affecting a

“fold” in the “flesh of the world” where “the body is continuous with the world – part of its tissue – and yet individuated. A cell of fold within it.”⁷⁷

Clark’s exhibition suggested an understanding of the museum as body and as a living structure. This was also at play in three more recent concurrent exhibitions in 2013. Joseph Beuys – Res-pública: Conclamação para uma alternativa global (Republic: Conclamation for a Global Alternative) presented a survey of the artist’s work and excerpts from his writings together with a series of forums on education, environment and politics in the upper gallery.⁷⁸ Suzana Queiroga’s Olhos d’Água (Eyes of Water) comprised a huge blue transparent inflatable hanging from the ceiling of the center gallery surrounded by works on paper and videos awash in hues of blue and purple.⁷⁹ Futons invited visitors to lie down and contemplate the giant aquatic-like creature with the hum of the inflatable machines created an effect as if it was breathing.

On the veranda A felicidade as vezes mora aqui (Happiness At Times Lives Here) explored the work of eight artists each a former student of the artist and project curator Edmilson Nunes who taught for many years at the local Museu de Inga.⁸⁰ Abel Duarte, Alê Souto, Bernardo Ramalho, Bob N, Ivar Rocha, Maria Mattos, Mariane Monteiro and Sergio Torres, each contributed distinct installations and performances but most of all it was their collective making in-situ embodying the horizontality of artist/teacher so embraced by Beuys, that offered a vision for a living museum as an open-ended creative process.

Amidst such potential environmental possibilities Carlos Vergara’s Sudário crafted its own singular path.⁸¹ For the artist, MAC’s chalice-like raised structure with its red ramp and

76 Beatriz Jabor, “Curadorias Educativas e Jogos Interpretativas,” 124-127.

77 Cited in Susan Best, “Lygia Clark, the Paris Years,” in The Aesthetics of Matter, eds. Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru, and Benedikt Hjartarson (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2013) 292-301, 299.

78 Joseph Beuys - Res-pública: Conclamação para uma alternativa global. September 2^nd – December 1^st 2013.

Curated by Silke Thomas, Claudia Seelmann, Rafael Raddi ad Luiz Guilherme Vergara in cooperation with Instituto Plano Cultural and Thomas Modern Gallery.

79 Specially designed for MAC the piece was a meditation on life and water, drawing on Queiroga’s personal history of the loss of her father whom she would never know in a plane crash minutes from the museum in Guanabara Bay when her mother was pregnant with her. Suzana Queiroga: Olhos d’Água. October 5^th – December 1^st 2013. Curated by Luiz Guilherme Vergara. Funded by National art foundation Marcantonio Valaço visual arts award.

80 A felicidade as vezes mora aqui: Abel Duarte, Alê Souto, Bernardo Ramalho, Bob N, Ivar Rocha, Maria Mattos, Mariane Monteiro and Sergio Torres. September 2^nd – December 1^st 2013. Curated by Edmilson Nunes.

81 Carlos Vergara: Sudário. December 14^th 2013 – March 9^th 2014. Curated by Carlos Vergara and Luiz Guilherme Vergara.