Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Art circuits in displacement

1. The title of this lecture contains a redundancy as the idea of “circuit” itself brings with it implications of “displacement”: there is input and output, between which various processes take place within the black box. One can also speak of “systems”. Not that the idea here is to discuss the displacement of this or that, but to perceive displacement as the movement or the state of things with which one works. 2. Consequently, the issue concerns art circuits, or in other words, the fluxes which are established among its various “knots”, between the diverse components of the system. One wishes above all to trace the behavior of the meaning or sense of a work of art and the interplay of its relations, and therefore provide it with more dynamism. A work of art within a circuit, or an art circuit, appear as notions in this context from the moment in which modernity folds over upon itself, an inflection - in which things modern are no longer just a critic on tradition and begins to fold upon itself: it becomes contemporary, post-modern. 3. This is clearly perceived in the 50's for example, when various rituals of the interplay of art itself are staged: look at the work and activities of Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. There is, within these gestures, an effort to begin to articulate another way of thinking - through systems, through circuits. No longer linear thought, evolutionary, where that coming before is surpassed with the objective of redeeming the idealized historical space. This new systematic thinking - in circuits - is now carried out in networks, surroundings, affinities, affections (look at yourself through somebody else's eyes without annihilating them, let yourself be touched, constitute a field of relations, a theater of events), detours. When the state of affairs is made up of circuits in movement purity, linearity, project or end do not exist. 4. In fields of visual arts it is said that notions of art circuits or systems were very clearly consolidated in the 60's, with the advent of so called conceptual art, which took upon itself the task of investigating the specific meanings of production in the field through a triple set of tactics: (1) in which the circuit becomes visible, in evidence, taken to a figurative and operational first plane, (2) in which the work is dismantled into sets of relations, such as the widely used “relation between text and image”, as well as other series involving sound, space, spectator, etc.: installations as a means in which to put various of these terms into a relation; (3) in which art is separated from aesthetics in order to discuss not only truth by means of the sensitive, but overall to investigate the nature of works of art, the properties of an artistic field, which is no longer reduced to an element of formal interplay but is to be defined through the relations with its own circuit, and open itself to the interdisciplinary interplay broached through various fields of knowledge. Things poetic are articulated as being problematic, in a course of action which extends from the interdisciplinary to hypermedia. Artistic genres will no longer be spoken of (painting, sculpture, drawing) but of means - above all hybrid ones - available to the artist (examples: both the minimalist specific object (Donald Judd) and the neo-concrete non-object (Ferreira Gullar) are proposed as a painting-sculpture hybrid). It is here where new categories of performance, of objects, and installations, as well as the diverse combinations of multimedia experiences are born. 5. One can notice then how circuit / system becomes a way of thinking, introjecting into the concept itself of that said to be a work of art or thinkable structure, problematical. It has nothing to do with displacing any object whatsoever, but to conceive things differently, as processual entities that give themselves to vertiginous relational interplay, to their destiny of circulating. To establish, bring to the surface the flux and circulation mechanisms and not just the simple exhibition of things going down their paths, but to perceive significations in ample trajectories, valorize detours, give importance to the process of displacement as a group entity, collective element. 6. Organize issues in circuits, arrange information on paths, systemize them: a very important process as it reveals that this gesture (of constructing a circuit) is a way and manner of thought, that it implies the construction of an interface on which to capture the other and proposes ways and structures of producing value based on established methods: emphasizing processuality, proximity, surroundings: trace a network, group together the points based on the gesture of capturing them, arrange them. Then the simple gesture of constructing the diagram of a circuit activates a group of objects-relations-actions and produces lines of thought in a network: a circuit is the opposite of the homogeneous melting pot of similar objects without any value: always proposing dynamic differences from the singularity of knots through which it runs. To draw is to propose relations, construct networks, rhizome, connect the nearest and the most distant. The beauty of drawing or to propose a circuit is that of being able to arbitrate the centers of attraction, (1) in which the circuit becomes visible, in evidence, taken to a figurative and operational first plane, (2) in which the work is dismantled into sets of relations, such as the widely used “relation between text and image”, as well as other series involving sound, space, spectator, etc.: installations as a means in which to put various of these terms into a relation; (3) in which art is separated from aesthetics in order to discuss not only truth by means of the sensitive, but overall to investigate the nature of works of art, the properties of an artistic field, which is no longer reduced to an element of formal interplay but is to be defined through the relations with its own circuit, and open itself to the interdisciplinary interplay broached through various fields of knowledge. Things poetic are articulated as being problematic, in a course of action which extends from the interdisciplinary to hypermedia. Artistic genres will no longer be spoken of (painting, sculpture, drawing) but of means - above all hybrid ones - available to the artist (examples: both the minimalist specific object (Donald Judd) and the neo-concrete non-object (Ferreira Gullar) are proposed as a painting-sculpture hybrid). It is here where new categories of performance, of objects, and installations, as well as the diverse combinations of multimedia experiences are born.