The
title is a cypher of the work: the + duplicates the shape of the
piece. There is the punning presence of odd and order. There are
bodies in the 4 limits; the bodies are both contained by and contain
(as with limits, I use this word in all its senses) various images
of internal and external limit. The piece is something like a
palimpsest, but it is impossible to say which image is superimposed
upon another. There is no way of knowing which image is foreground
or background, or is more important. No particular image came
first, usurped another, or possessed an area.
The
frame repeats the + made by the open-armed bodies, and the image
of the edge of a forest mirrored in water (at a riverbank or the
edge of a lake; note that the reflection is subtly distorted)
contained in the center of the piece (the internal limit) forms
either a + or a ÷.
The Cuban art critic Eugenio Valdés Figueroa once wrote
that these cruciform works of mine suggest something eucharistic
(communal) in the relation between nature and culture: for the
bodies, within the bodies, upon the bodies, nature emerges simultaneously
as an object of sacrifice and salvation.
Art
is communal. Art is dialogue. Art cannot exist without dialogue
between artist and medium, artwork and viewer or listener or reader.
There are many borders, many frontiers (limits) to be crossed
before entering into dialogue, and a language barrier is only
one among many-a tiny barrier, like all the others, but, also
like all the others, with wide implications. Understanding is
not produced by common usage.
I'd like to mention two different situations:
Years ago, when I was an architecture student, I carried out an
independent project for Raposa, an alternative newspaper in Curitiba,
Paraná. I went to a department store, and every day for
two months I took pictures of the shelves that held cups. After
this period I analyzed and documented the pictures I'd taken.
It did not come as a surprise that after two months very few cup-forms
were repeated on the shelves. Most of them were very different
from those that had appeared two months before. Although those
shelves were very stable in terms of the product they contained
on every day of those two months, the cup-forms themselves made
a seething palimpsest. Hence a very unstable picture of those
shelves. The forms appeared and disappeared before our eyes every
single week. They still do, of course, and we neither notice nor
care to notice.
I'd been living in Germany for some time when, at about 2 AM on
one terrifying night, Iraq fired their first missiles into Israel.
It was the beginning of the Gulf War. I heard that upsetting news
on my radio, which I'd turned on by chance. I never really learned
to speak German very well, but I understood it perfectly, and
I was stunned by the announcer, who was telling us that a missile
was approaching. At that time no one knew if the missile had a
nuclear warhead, or if it would be deploying biological or chemical
weapons. For the first time, I could almost physically experience
the terror of a war. Then came weeks and weeks of those green
phosphorescent images of night raids on Bagdad . . . probably
everybody has seen them.
The first situation reminds me that although we see some "real"
things, like those cups on those shelves, we hardly notice that
what we are really seeing is a formidably unending shift in forms
that appear and disappear before our eyes (like on those shelves
with their seemingly complacent advertisement: the stable, homey
name: cups).
The second reminds me that when we see virtual images of what
is really happening many thousands of miles away from us, we don't
really know that we're not actually there, live, and that we're
only seeing something from the very narrow point of view of a
camera and its operator. In terms of space and time, a live point
of view is very different from a narrow point of view, yet we
often confuse them.
We take it for granted that vision and language and every other
aspect of our common communication with and within the world are
wholly autonomous. They are not. We are not enough concerned with
what it is that forms might signify for our western civilization.
I
wonder, for instance, if language and vision haven't merely seemed
to reach the highest possible degree of dissemination; I wonder
if these overwhelming presences in our world have not been reduced
to entirely pragmatic functions that are destitute of everything
that might allow us a possible focus on variation, a seeing and
saying what is there.
Perception is not possession. When we see, we do not see only
one thing at a time. How can we own what we cannot contain? Because
we cannot limit ourselves to a single discrete percept, we can
never really possess what we perceive: there is simply too much
there. The world and all in it come to us as an endlessy layered
dialogue with our five senses, our minds, and our emotions. Any
attempt to qualify, codify, or otherwise control this dialogue
only results in an impoverishment of perception which in its turn
can only impoverish our thinking and our living.
[assembled
by Chris Daniels from pieces of an ongoing dialogue with Fancisco
Faria. We communicate in both Portuguese and English, sometimes
macaronically. Francisco's writing in English has been lightly
copy-edited]
