An Instauration of Worlds

It would be worth investigating the peculiar nature of that icon. I don't believe in hazy semiology, let alone improbable exegesis. What could be cultivated under such a sign? A phoenix. Yes, a phoenix, I would say – a return or recurrence, that stubborn return! I can, however, assert something more concrete, for I remember that perhaps what I saw was the fruit of another culture, no less strange but much more palpable... At the time, I was dealing with cultivating specimens with an inadmissible purpose: “casual experimenters.” I now find myself at the door to that tower and the phoenix reappears, as I am planting another garden, in a forest, sowing sirens. 

   Tunga, Semeando Sereias (Sowing Sirens)

Lead, gold, silver, copper, steel, scrap metal, aluminum, iron filings, wood, rubber, and clay – but also gelatin, magnets, gunpowder, sulphuric acid, and ether; candles, liquid luciferin, lamps, gas lamps, and lanterns; lipstick, wigs, heads of hair, braids, satin bows, combs, pearls, pure silk, needles, and thimbles; twins, nymphets, super-models, soap-opera actresses, athletic champions, Brazilian stars who shine internationally; fragments of old songs, films, computers, projectors, fancy cigar boxes, clubs, old suitcases, panama and cowboy hats; flies, spiders, lizards, snakes, frogs, and beetles; bells big and small, urns, chalices, jars, vessels, sponges, thermometers, rubber hoses and bones; grass, nets, sand, seashore, and riverbanks – these are Tunga's unusual accoutrements. 
This makes for an intimacy between slices of the world that might otherwise never meet – strange attractions, erotic tension, unusual montages, hybridities. In this luxuriant nonhuman sexuality, unexpected worlds are instaured, populated by beings that are sui generis  – living artworks, all.
Are these fantastic beings from some baroque world? Or better, neo-baroque? Even better yet, neo-barroso? An anthropophagic swallowing? Some tropicalist “general jelly”? It is all of these and at the same time something more. The eternal return of “becoming-other.” Tunga's singular formula for it.
These are vibrational works. Nothing in their environs is neutral; there is no surrounding environment, anyway, since the works, even once made, continue as a multiplicity of elements among other elements surrounding them, available to new arrangement. In the invisible encounter with these environments, different from those that gave rise to the works, a frenzy of attractions and repulsions recomposes the map of mixtures, and new works are made. Then again, aleatory confluences will produce another group of works. Or not.
Sometimes only bits of a work actualize themselves in new compositions: forms, materials, objects, animals, atmospheres, structures that return. Sometimes whole works. Sometimes a work changes name with each re-actualization. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes two different works have almost the same name, only subtle changes having been made. Sometimes a work is combined with another, or with two other works, and at this crossing another work, as yet unknown, is born. Sometimes they are repeated year after year. Sometimes years go by without their reappearing. Sometimes they reappear in cycles, lunar phases. And between cycles, they hibernate, asleep in forgetfulness.
Nothing escapes the palpitation of desire that enfolds bodies and then unfolds them, which in this back-and-forth gives birth to unforeseeable transfigurations. A retrospective, for example: whatever the criterion for selecting and installing works, even if it has nothing of the linear or chronological, a new neighborhood is always established between those works, one that amalgamates them, generating becomings in each of them, and engendering still other works in the process. And yet the same retrospective in different locations, cities, or countries will indubitably be something different each time. For when an artwork and an environment meet, there is a subtle seduction between the elements that comprise them. Some of these elements the work ignores or even rejects. Still others, those that particularly vibrate in the given context, end up imposing themselves and becoming immixed into it. Others present themselves as potential materials of expression for the problems pulsating therein, as if seeking an urgent actualization in order to liberate life from some impasse. When these succeed in becoming part of the action, life with all its creative potential is reactivated and the environment sets to work. Everything is transformed into the raw material of a process of creation, of art but also of existence itself. A piece of the world is denatured, shown inside out, along with a potential for contaminating everything. The universe is revealed to be a work of art: the whole universe is a ‘work in process’, art the critical vibration of the world.
“The examples of objects presented here are on the order of the classical theme of the nude. The nude treated in the ‘field of intimacy’, in an effort to objectify experiences of the sensible domain”, Tunga said at the very beginning of his work. Or more recently, “To make a work is to ransom a series of experiences and to construct a language compatible with those experiences.” Politics? Doubtless, but not as a theme or ideology that is artistically represented, rather a reinvented politics that is inseparably an artistic practice. A reinvented politics that does not represent the real, or images of its future, but puts it into action, exposing it in the intimacy of its nakedness, to the forces that drive it, the affects of human and nonhuman bodies in their couplings and germinations. What a politics thus practiced intends is to “make the invisible visible,” as Paul Klee once put it, by inventing compatible languages. For this it depends on the experience of the sensible world, the only access to this invisible nakedness of the real. It is a question of producing new forms of time, new worlds, other individualities, revelations. Concretely. Or rather, neo-concretely.
The insatiable voluptuousness of this work, which combines and recombines the world through which it passes, does not end there. Everything is swept along in its neo-barrosa wake, beginning with the space in which the work produces itself, which ceases to be simply a space, a neutral ground where things are deposited, and participates actively in the work and is transformed by it. As Tunga says, “There is no ground where things happen. There is no silence where the notes are played, because what would be called silence – which in art would be space – exists as a thing.” Or, “A line defines two objects and not the space and an object.” But it is not only the space: the spectator, the critic and the artist himself are transformed into raw material to be worked by the artwork which, in the process, metamorphoses, and at the same time launches them into unexpected becomings.
The spectator (if that is what these witnesses to this world-in-works can be called) is summoned beyond his canvas-eye or mirror-eye, under the threat of being left behind by the work. He must reactivate the vibrational potential of the eye, which then becomes body, populated by live specimens, a singular and dynamic conjunction of sensation-universes. The spectator has to desire the work. In the pulsation of the drawing-near of the body of the spectator, now an active witness, and the body of the work, new compositions result and other destinies, other meanings present themselves.
Would it thus be in the encounter with the spectator that meaning of this work emerges? Yes, but this has nothing to do with some supposed essence of his subjectivity, nor with a truth to be divined in the hidden recesses of an imaginary interiority, and even less with some supposed essence of the work in its objectivity, its structure, form, or what-have-you (although it also exists on that level and can be discussed from such a perspective). The meaning is neither in the work, nor the one who contemplates it, nor somewhere in-between; taken thus, as achieved individualities, spectator and work are no more than carcasses of processes long over, transformed into a monument. Meaning emerges in the myriad elements that compose the simultaneously present bodies, both human and nonhuman, in their invisible crossings. 
The same is true of any critical commentary, as it is of the present essay. An improbable exegesis, but precisely: exegesis is already a politics of desire, a resistance to becoming-other, a mania for truth. The commentator composes himself along with the work, and in this alliance a double, nonsimultaneous becoming, of the work and its commentary, is produced. The same goes for the films that are made around the work: they are unfoldings and not so-called documentaries that mirror it as such. The critical vocation is preserved, and the work continues making itself.
And authorship then: where is it located? For Tunga, the artist is simply a “proposer,” as he was for Lygia Clark, the prima donna among his teachers, who declared this explicity in a kind of manifesto written, as it happens, in 1968. In Tunga's formula, what the artist proposes is a protocol of experimentation – a list of objects, an itinerary of operations, and even the human or non-human agents of these operations. In the meantime, it is not he who knows or decides what is going to come about, but the vital thread that links the bodies a certain way, depending on how one can affect the other, on the effects of one on the other. The artist refers to this in one of his interviews: “Sculptures and drawings continue to work independently of me...producing and receiving the effects of the different materials used.” 
The artist is a “casual experimenter” who functions as a catalyst of individuations, no more. He can hardly even predict what the element that unleashes creativity will be, that optimal point of tension between heteroclite ingredients coming together for the friction to become fertile – the condition for a world to achieve consistency, individuate and become a work. It takes great art to keep oneself in patient expectancy of that precise moment, a capacity for all sorts of miscegenation, however far-fetched, as long as it is promising, along with a willingness to tolerate the effects of this strangeness in his body. Because the artist is also part of the work, as Tunga says, “Whoever realizes a work embodies it and is embodied in it.” Moreover, for the artist to tolerate the “othering” which these unaccustomed proximities provoke in his sensibility, he has to desert his position as subject and affirm the creative potential of the life that animates him. This potential is the authentic author of the work. But without any melodrama: otherwise, beneath the mask of the victim, the subject returns and everything miscarries and becomes sterile. It thus became imperative to add “humor capsules” and irony to the recipe of the proposer: humor that mocks and de-dramatizes, and a rebellious, guiltless irony that desanctifies. In a text in which he addresses this question of the artist's status, Tunga demonstrates his playful and irreverent strategy to great effect: “I think there must be some fortuitous misunderstanding in my being invited here, since it boxes my presence into the category of artist. It is not, however, in such a category that I have come to present this brief contribution.”
The activating apparatus of a work, its agents of contagion and hybridization, can be multiple. It serves to bind the ensemble of elements that will constitute the same work, or to join and amalgamate various works, and thus to produce another. One such element, the one that perhaps recurs most frequently, is gelatin. This gooey organic material, akin to bodily fluids – drool, snot, semen, sperm – covers everything in slime, producing a continuum. For example, onto the surface of several gigantic bells, each weighing  seven tons, it glues smaller bells, jars, urns, and chalices in some improbable equilibirium. Smeared with gelatin, they surprisingly form a single piece. Is this the return of the “general jelly” of Tropicalia, which irreverently glues everything, from the most common to the most sophisticated, together into a mixed salad whose ingredients are selected solely in relation to the urgencies that impose themselves on the soul of the contemporary artist? Or is it the Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Drool), which here returns as gelatin? Probably a bit of both, along with other unsuspected reactivations.
Magnets are another recurring mechanism in the fabrication of hybrids. At first glance, using them to join materials seems obvious: the function of magnets is precisely to produce an attraction between minerals. On the other hand, in fulfilling their destiny, in the unexpected context of an artwork, they provoke estrangement. The power of the magnet to attract becomes explicit in how the pieces of iron filings are joined: the invisible field thus produced achieves visibility and becomes palpable; the magnetic field molds the sculpture. It's as if the magnets were there to remind us that Tunga’s raw materials are the forces of attraction and repulsion at work when bodies meet. Orienting himself via these forces, he solders what seems unjoinable; to do so he tries every means possible, from the most obvious to the least common.
Other unexpected agents of juncture: make-up – lipstick, base, and powder – on chalices and urns, lips and labia, turning them into one body. In yet others, fine threads of every sort, copper, nylon or silver, unite the elements. 
Finally, there  is one other type of binding or linking that is worth emphasizing: the texts that accompany Tunga's works. These narratives, with their references to imaginary documents – newspaper clippings, research reports, depositions, telegrams, letters, archaeological inscriptions, paleontological finds, records of telepathic experiences, and so on – produce a pseudo-scientific voice-over impregnated with a mystery and magic that ends up contaminating the work. In these texts, where fiction is intertwined with objective and biographical data, art and life become inseparable; life reveals itself as art, and art as a cartography of life. It's as if each link that unites uncompossible ingredients, those that cannot co-exist, to form an work, or unites different works to form a new one, were of the order of necessity, and thus amenable to scientific explanation.
A case in point is the text Xifópagas Capilares entre Nós  (The Capillary Siamese Among Us) in which the performance of the same name coexists with the works that comprise the exhibition, in a story that links both of them, one supposedly experienced by the artist. Everything begins with the studies Tunga undertook around the time of the construction of the Tunel dos Dois Irmãos (the Two Brothers Tunnel) in Rio de Janeiro, where he was filming Ão. Siamese twins (two sisters, like the two brothers of the tunnel) were to be sacrificed and scalped before the age of puberty by the community, with the laudable intention of avoiding catastrophe. The scalp becomes the trophy that ends up in another story, and the narrative thus successively weaves together a continuum of fortuitous occurrences that are at the origin of each of the works in the exhibition: Ão, Torus, Les Bijoux de Madame de Sade (Madame Sade’s Jewels), Troféu (Trophy), Manifesto Oculto (Hidden Manifest), Pintura Sedativa (Sedative Painting), Revê-la Antinomia (Revisited Antinomy). To give just one example, at the end of the story Tunga's dentist, the mysterious Dr. Armando, appears and shows him the molar of a Korean patient in which a sculpted relief can be seen. This is the same design we find in Revê-la Antinomia and Pintura Sedativa, which, apart from helping us decipher this image, would explain its recurrence. The ensemble of prior events suddenly converges in the character of the dentist, leading Tunga to the conclusion that they are all symptoms of the Siamese’s puberty among us. The phenomenon caused nature to enter  its adolescence, which would have provoked a series of becomings and thus works, of which we are now the spectator-witnesses.
Texts like this are not just there, beside or in the midst of the works, in order to translate their meaning or to unveil them as metaphors. The mixture of science and fiction wrenches scientific or specialized discourses from their naturalization as truth, showing they are nothing more than creatures. The vocation of the text in Tunga's work is to reaffirm and strengthen the question that has always animated the investigation he pursues in his oeuvre: the continual mutation of bodies in their imperious inter-breeding, the repetition of difference. Discourse is one among many cartographies of this mutation; like all cartographies it is formed at the same time as the work, participating in its metamorphoses and thus in its destiny. “The text begins inside the production, thus being more of a practical production than a theoretical piece.”, Tunga stated, right at the beginning of his ‘career.’ In this sense, the text that accompanies the work has the same value as the ten-ton structures. The same is true of the gelatin, magnets, make-up, and those fine threads – fragile materials that articulate disparate elements and which, in this articulation, constitute ephemeral solids, evanescent structures. 
Other agents of hybridity act not through juxtaposition or covering, but through devouring. Beings swallow other beings, of another nature, that in turn swallow still others, and so on ad infinitum, like the tunnel that swallows the serpent that swallows the frog in Nervo de Prata (Silver Nerve). Or, identical beings swallow each other, to then re-divide into two new kinds of beings, one with two heads and no tail, another with two tails and no head, like the lizards of Cipó Cinema (Cinema Vine).
The question that remains is the following: in the end, amidst the infinite arabesques that go on and on tirelessly within one another, whether by juxtaposition, covering, or devouring, where in fact is the work of art?
In the first place, each work of Tunga's works on two different planes at once. There is the visible face that can be represented. This, the most obvious, constitutes the actual work: the ephemeral sedimentation of the fluxes into some form, solids bulbs of a rhizome   – the estatic and chronic condition of the work that can be apprehended as a whole, as long as we remember that it is always unstable and that it never ceases to deterritorialize itself. 
There is also and inexorably the other side: infinite virtual works that can be engendered in the invisible agitation of their amalgams, whose directions, expansion, and rhythm are unpredictable, a rhizome which follows its uncontrollable course. This is the dynamic, chronogenetic condition of the work, more perceptible in the instaurations, as the artist likes to call them: to instaure is by definition to create anew, through a method in which the artist produces ‘nuptials-against-nature,’ where human, animal, or mineral kingdoms copulate or devour each other, generating unique, never-before-seen worlds and beings. The same method repeated in another context generates still other worlds, other beings, always singular. 
What Tunga accomplishes is a virtualization of art. This is perhaps the key to his formula. The work is not only what is apprehended by the mirror-eye. Recall the Tacapes (Clubs), which have often recurred since 1986, reappearing in innumerable versions of Lagarte/Lizart/Lesarte, and now return again in this exhibition: what is apparently most solid and most primitive is shown to be an aggregate of tiny clumps of iron filings held together by magnets, a fabricated artifice. This is true of any work: despite its apparent solidity it is always at the same time a hybrid composite in formation. It goes on making itself with respect to the list of possible affects of each material used. A given list will demand certain materials, which Tunga artificially incorporates or selects from the environment in which the work is made. In those spurious couplings new works are made ad infinitum. There is, however, a permanent virtual work actualized in the unpredictable contours forming each of the works in their actuality. 
If there is a mystery in this work it lies in the work's impassable virtuality, from which becomings always await us, the very mystery of life as creative energy. It is not a question here of representing life: simple representations, however original, tend to be inoffensive. It is rather a question of submitting life to experimentation. That is what is strange about this work: there is an undeniable ethical force which, if we let it, tears us from sameness and launches us into process, an ethical force that affirms life’s transfigurative powers. 
There is a famous phrase of Mário Pedrosa’s which has resonated for several decades, in which he defines art as “an experimental exercise in liberty.” This statement, made in relation to the neo-concretists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, could trace a line that links them to their predecessors in the anthropophagic movement and to countless contemporaries – some of their own generation, especially Glauber Rocha in film; others of the following generation, for example Júlio Bressane, also in film, and the poet-composers of Tropicalismo, with their incredibly refined pop music. Tropicalismo was born under the sign of this link, a “neo-anthropophagy,” according to Caetano Veloso. Each of the creators in this lineage incorporates the “banal” in his own way, affirming an inventive and exuberant aesthetic that impregnates daily life in Brazil and that has never been inscribed in the official system of culture. They not only bring this aesthetic to the artistic scene, but mix it in with the most experimental and sophisticated erudite references from the so-called hegemonic centers. But this line of the “experimental exercise in liberty” does not end with these artists: it continues to re-actualize itself, extending to and linking yet other works in the present. The presence of this lineage in Tunga's work is clear; he was schooled in the cultural effervesence of '60s Brazil, combined with the revolutionary Chile of Allende (where he was initiated into the Latin-American neo-Baroque), and a Paris still contaminated by May '68. A singular formula for reactivating this anthropophagic/neo-concrete/tropicalist mark of Brazilian culture is articulated in this artist's entire work.
In Brazil, anthropophagy takes on a meaning that extrapolates the literalism of the act of devouring practiced by the Indians. The so-called Anthropophagic Movement extracts and reaffirms the ethic of this ritual – to devour others, but only the brave, because weak spirits could poison one’s body – transmigrating it to the cultural realm. Taken to this arena, the anthropophagic principle consists of banqueting on the referential universes of ‘colonizing’ cultures (and not only on them), devouring them whole, or at least the more flavorful pieces, mixing them at will in the same cauldron, with no regard for any a priori hierarchy or mystification. But careful: on the menu for the anthropophagic feast the only alien ideas admitted are those which, once they are absorbed by the chemistry of the soul, can reinvigorate it, bringing it a language with which to compose the singular cartography of its disquiets. 
Culture in Brazil thus evolves through alliances, devouring and contamination, not through linear filiation, which contradicts certain psychoanalytic interpretations that, by uncritically borrowing the European model of subjectivity as a standard, insist on the idea that Brazilians lack a solid filiation, a qualified founding father. The map of these alliances and contagions is an infinite rhizome that changes its nature and course according to the inter-breedings that take place in the great factory of our anthropophagic culture. One image of that rhizome could be the vines germinated from the seeds left by Tunga’s work Espasmos Aspiratórios Ansiosos (Anxious Inhaled Startles): weaving through the mounds of sand placed in Rio's Museum of Modern Art, they ended up uniting them in a single body, an entangled complex of contaminations that invaded the museum's space so completely that the work had to be removed.
An incredible diversity and overflowing exuberance characterize the work made according to such an ethic. In a recent interview, Tunga declared, “Brazil is a country with extraordinary cultural richness. It has most fitting and diverse urban cultural practices, linked to communities in extremely diverse conditions... I believe that Brazil is not a country of the future but of the present. What Brazil gives us as subsidies in cultural terms is obviously its diversity, its heterogeneity, and the possibility of engaging the most diverse practices, the most diverse languages, that will produce so-called artistic form. It would be difficult for a European artist to have at his disposal a wealth of cultural experiences and languages that make possible a more complete work.”
But to assume and reaffirm an anthropophagic ethic as a legacy of Brazilian tradition is to discard any idea of national identity. This is not paradoxical, although at first glance it may seem so; according to this mode of thinking, what creates works of culture and life in Brazil is precisely this mixture. That is not a mixture that would make new identities – here half-breeds – but an inexhaustible and varied mixture that always involves becoming-others. Thus, oriented by what I have been calling the “anthropophagic principle of individuation,” Brazilians would tend not to characterize themselves according to any kind of substantialized self-representation, but as being, on the contrary, that which constantly separates them from themselves, whatever the self-image in question and however seductive it may appear.
In the same interview, Tunga declares: “The key to Brazil is its fluctuating identity. Nilton Dacosta, a logician from Campinas, explains that the country is regulated by a logic with a paraconsistent model, in which the principle of identity is not constitutive.” In such a logic the question is not the self-image through which one would recognize oneself to somehow feel ‘at home.’ It is rather a matter of what constitutes the sense of ‘being at home’ indispensable for life. When the principle of individuation in subjectivity is based on identity, the process of becoming oneself is reduced to an image, even if it is replaced by others in life, a image that purports to be identical to itself. The result is a substantialized being-at-home, wholly submitted to the regime of representation. When it is an anthropophagic principle that regulates the process of subjectivization, as is traditionally the case in Brazil, instead of hidebound identities there exists the experience of constituting a being-at-home in the very nomadism of desire, its unexpected couplings and the singular modes of existence they engender. Thus, feeling-at-home here is achieved through a de-substantialized way of being and with multiple and invisible hybridities, giving rise in turn to other becomings – a ephemeral being-at-home, one that knows itself to be ephemeral. How does that work?
First of all, each must expose himself to the other, if only to evaluate whom one is going to eat. But to expose oneself in such a way as to be able to make this evaluation consists of much more than a polite respect for alterity. It is necessary to allow oneself to be affected by the other, if only to know whether swallowing him will bring us strength or make us wilt. And if this other reveals himself as promising delicacies and we decide to devour him, it is impossible for us to leave that eccentric repast the same way we came.
In order for such an attitude towards the other to be possible, it is necessary to desire diversity, to be enchanted with the unknown. It is necessary to withstand the turbulence that the anthropophagic soup induces in the soul, until the other is digested and a new sense of self achieves consistency. One must know how to improvise this new consistency with whatever language presents itself, without preconceptions. All this requires a certain intimacy with the invisible, a certain ability to decipher the silent signs of a map of sensations that traces itself over and over according to the pieces of universe it swallows. In other words, it requires always being attuned to the actual and the virtual simultaneously. One foot in a certain self-image and the other embarked on its becomings. The anthropophagic principle of individuation requires, then, a virtualization of reality.
In the contemporary world, the question of identity has long been the order of the day. The intensification of mixing and the vertiginous transformations we are experiencing make this principle of identity more and more useless. In this context, the anthropophagic mode of individuation is a proposal that extrapolates Brazil's frontiers, and constitutes a powerful response to today’s impasses. (This is perhaps one reason for the international success of the work of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark.) Elsewhere in the same interview where Tunga brings up Dacosta's idea of a paraconsistent logic governing Brazil, he states: “What you see is that contemporary culture in the narrowest sense – as inscribed in the contemporary Western art circuit – is exercised in Brazil in a way perhaps unsurpassed anywhere in the world.” And later he continues: “In the current desperate search for identities it is extremely fitting to preserve a hazy zone in the shade for singularities. I will not hang my hammock underneath infertile palm trees.”
Tunga seems to keep his word. As we have seen, the work of this artist is never where and how one expects. It has no permanent address, form, or name. It is a work that is never exhausted within itself, that flees in all directions, that is never circumscribed within defined limits, once and for all. Obviously, one can say that each work is unique, but they are always and at the same time realizations of one and the same work – the same continuous, inexhaustible, infinite work. An abundant baroque flux. Baroque delirium. A stubborn return. A phoenix.
It was Tunga himself who said in 1984: “The work is an ensemble of works; one always leads to another, as if magnets existed between them.” Or again, more recently: “For me it's a question of giving new force to a work in relation to others. One work ends up reading another, and this can then give new meaning to the whole.”
If so, how can we classify this work? How do we give it a place, meaning and value in the institutional universe of art? The language proper to Tunga's work, which insists on vibrating beyond its formal sedimentations, plays fast and loose with the authoritarianism of the art establishment. This authoritarianism attempts to exercise a monopoly on the creative impulse, one that ignores the majority of artists and imposes direction on the work of those few it recognizes and incorporates, often reducing it to being a commercial and political pawn. Tunga fakes this monopoly out to get around both of the sad alternatives it allows to the artist today: he manages to maintain the visibility of his work and, at the same time, to escape the authorized reserve where the power of art is confined and artistic acts are mummified.
The works of this artist are constantly escaping and for this very reason are rare; the rarer they are, the more in demand and more expensive they become. What is curious is that the way in which they escape is exactly what gives them power in the art world, strengthening their insubordination and further amplifying their liberty of invention and their incorporation of languages. 
Tunga's work is a free zone of anthropophagic hybridizations where creation, as an experimental and disruptive dynamic of existence, is constantly reactivated. It catches the generative force in the act. In flagrante delicto. A generous delight emanates from this infinite instauration of landscapes.