Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Catch-22 of Luciano Mariussi

Entre gritando [Enter screaming], a work by Luciano Mariussi presented in Panorama MAM 2005, features some of the hysteria surrounding contemporary art. Hysteria of misunderstanding, let it not be mistaken. The artist’s proposal was as follows: whoever would scream, “I know what contemporary art is” upon stepping into the Modern Art Museum of São Paulo would earn a discount of 1 Brazilian real at the entrance. The difficulty in personifying the visitor idealized by Mariussi was twofold: people in general were embarrassed by the remote hypothesis of making a screaming entrance—whatever it was that they would be screaming—into a museum; furthermore, they had to deal with the question “have I got any idea of what contemporary art is?” In addition to entering the museum screaming, a behavior that does not comply with any rules of conduct in art premises, the challenge consisted in yelling, at the top of one’s lungs, something that was probably a lie. What if the discount would only be granted if one delivered a definition of contemporary art?

There was too much at stake for 1 real. In the three or four visits I made to the Panorama, I did not bear witness to a single brave screamer winning the discount at the ticket office. But there are accounts from the museum, as the artist told me, of people who took a chance, mostly children. The work was, in fact, a trap (a conceptual one, of course. Whoever yelled “I know what contemporary art is” won a discount without having to explain their knowledge of art to anybody). It was a friendly invitation to win a discount (who does not like a promotion?), which, in a contradiction of terms, would inhibit visitors from pleading their well-deserved discount. The work was paralyzing, although it announced itself as a proposal for action. A summoning into action that was destined to fail. This somewhat perverse strategy is typical in the production of this artist from the state of Paraná. Take, for instance, the works Jogo para jogador inepto (1999) or Unfriendly (2001) and the strategy, with variations in the mode of application, can be witnessed (and enjoyed) again.

More than the paradox, the criticism, and the questioning that are present in Entre gritando, what pleases me the most in the work by Luciano Mariussi for the Panorama 2005 is its very physical presence: for more than three months, the front of one of the city’s major museums had imprinted on it the affirmative imperative of the verb “to enter,” followed by the gerund of the verb “to scream.” In this large-sized advertisement (the remaining information, “...I know what contemporary art is and earn a discount of 1 Brazilian real at the entrance of MAM,” appeared in proportionally “tiny” letters) there lies the major subversion that the work promoted. If it were nowadays, in the times of the “operation visual cleansing” promoted by Kassab,(1) mayor of the city of São Paulo, the lettering at MAM would be even more subversive. The fact is that the presence of this “enter screaming” shouting out at the entrance of the museum gave way to lots of free association of ideas. Besides being a trap, the work was also a charade: contemporary art is... to insert noise into everyday life, and to make people think or wonder.

The binomial embarrass/make think or paralyze/call into action, hereby described as “perverse strategy,” permeates all the production of Luciano Mariussi. In the documentary series comprised of the works Não entendo (1999), Estética (2002), and of three other projects, which are still works-in-progress, the artist uses a “journalistic” approach—a simple camera and a microphone in hand—to talk to people on the streets or in an art venue, and steal a statement off them, point-blank.

Não entendo was a work made in the downtown streets of the city of Curitiba. A film crew would approach unsuspecting passersby and ask them a question about art, in languages other than Portuguese. Not understanding what they were asked, the people would react with discomfort and, invariably, they would say something like “não entendo” [I do not understand]. According to the artist: “The word ‘art,’ which was always mentioned and which has a similar pronunciation in many different languages, was the unifying thread in the interviews, being one of the few words that the public would understand. The answers were filled with estrangement: ‘Art? I do not understand!’ In the video edit, the question was removed, leaving just an answer filled with embarrassment. In addition to the answers, the edit also emphasized silence, which was also frequent, because the subject approached did not flow as in a regular interview. Maybe the typical journalistic approach, already familiar to the passersby, and used here as a trap, has contributed to the feel of discomfort that dominates the video.”(2)

The target of the artist in this video performance is clear: the incommunicability between lay public and art. The strategy to attain the goal of portraying so well and to what extent this abyss is clear to see was questioned in different occasions when the video was shown. But given the presentation of the work, the questions omitted, those who do not understand are the very members of the art audience. Both the layman who was made to feel embarrassed by the artist, which would give way to ethical questionings, and the expert, equally embarrassed for not understanding the work, are in the same situation. The same holds true for the video Estética, the interviews of which were recorded at the opening of an exhibition, held in 2000 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Paraná.

“Contrary to Não entendo, the focus of attention in Estética is not the manipulation and distortion of the interviews conducted, but rather the integrity of the thoughts formulated by interviewees. This video was made during a contemporary art exhibition featuring several important names in Brazilian art, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art – MAC in Paraná. Visitors at the museum were invited to do a reading of the artwork on display, expressing their doubts and (un)certainties regarding contemporary art. The comments are shown in their near-entirety. The video edit favors comments that reach a conclusion, because for this work it was important that each interviewee’s line of thought was exposed,”(3) explains Luciano Mariussi.

To the viewer of the video Estética, due to the camera angle that the artist used—never showing the work that the visitor at the MAC exhibition is commenting on—, the position of doubt and uncertainty that the interviewees experience coincides with the position in which the video itself puts the “metavisitor”: he who observes the visit of the other. Despite the fact that Estética virtually does not manipulate the verbal content of interviews, differently from the approach adopted in the edit of Não entendo, this video manipulates the context in which the set of interviews took place, thus rendering viewers equally unable to grasp the meaning of the “documentary film” that they are viewing. The comments that the interviewees make, some more consistent than the others, some more timid than others, begin to apply to art in general, including the video Estética: the comments are vague, unsure, reluctant. The video is a portrait—or a mirror, as suggested by artist Ana González in an analysis of the work of Luciano Mariussi(4)—of the experience that the contemporary art audience, lay or not, has in the exhibitions that they visit.

The question, then, is: how much of documentary film do these works really contain? A comment that the artist made on his Não entendo video allows us to explore other implications of his work, which flirts with documentary film: “Another important fact in the making of the video was an aggressive tone, adopted by the film crew, upon recording the interviews. This procedure, imposing and embarrassing, was in keeping with the key concerns I had then: the passivity of the viewer when facing contemporary art, and the great power of manipulation exerted by the mass media, combined with the passive acceptance and the lack of knowledge of this power. This last question elicits another question, about the subjective vantage point of documentary films for television and cinema, which are always viewed with a certain ‘aura’ of objective, impartial understanding of the world.”(5)

This is not a new discussion, but the recent flood of artwork that stand on the verge of documentary film—for which a quick, synthesized genealogy could be traced, going back to the Documenta 11 (2002), including, in the Brazilian context, the curatorship of Catherine David, “A respeito de situações reais” (Paço das Artes, 2003), and the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006)—makes this a flaming issue. The 1980s are usually regarded by art critics and historians alike as a reflux of conceptual practices from the two previous decades. The reply to the dematerialization of art was the “comeback of painting.” Art, in the 1990s, was characterized most of all by the subjectivity, the “alienation” to which artists in the first decade of the 21st century reacted with political involvement and activist practices.

The reductive schematics in the paragraph above aside, the fact is that art in the present decade, obviously synchronous with the antiglobalization and antiglobal corporation movements (i.e., contrary to the new economic configuration, described as postindustrial, with all its hazardous consequences to environment, to work, to identities, etc.), seems to have turned to rules that were in effect in the 1960s and 1970s, but with a different approach. In the more restricted field of flows and refluxes of artistic traditions, the dominant practice is the adoption of a stance (favorable, contrary, critical or not) with regard to the emergence of the Internet as a means for circulation and diffusion of mass communication. Once again in schematic, reductive terms, the production that characterizes the present times is that which deals with (or engages itself in) political, environmental, and/or media-related issues.

Taking all of this into account, although in very general terms, it is interesting to notice the play between art and documentary film that Luciano Mariussi proposes to us. By means of a critical view of the media formats that the contemporary person experiences in his/her daily life, from television to cinema, from documentary (through photography, television, or cinema) taken for reality, to the game taken for pure virtuality, from the computer to the cell phone, etc., the artist creates his works or actions (the ultimate goal of which is to become works as well) using disruptive elements in terms of the parameters known and adopted regarding each of those formats. The disruptions that the artist promotes specifically regarding the game and computer formats will be dealt with further on.

Still in Mariussi’s documental series, which, as stated in the beginning of this essay, is comprised of three other projects, which are currently underway, the art vs. viewer relation unfolds into forays into the relations between artist and circuit, art and discourse (in the form of accounts from art critics and curators), and art and value. Two videos will result, for instance, from the artist’s experience as a guest at the 61st Salão Paranaense (2005), at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Curitiba, and as the author of a proposal for an odd division of the annex space at the Laura Marsiaj gallery, in Rio de Janeiro, during his solo exhibition held at the gallery, between April and May 2006, entitled Aluga-se.

In the room that was made available to him at MAC, in 2005, the artist organized a group exhibition featuring the work of artisans who usually sell their items at a fair in the surroundings of the museum, in Curitiba. The work, recorded from the negotiation with painters and the request for the canvasses to be loaned until the day of the vernissage, under the title Exposição de arte contemporânea, according to Mariussi, aimed at promoting the displacement of objects that belonged in a circuit parallel to the art circuit, bringing them into the established circuit. In Aluga-se the procedure was similar: in an answer to an announcement, made by the artist, that in the exhibition room in the annex space of the gallery, in which he had been invited to carry out a project, lots in different sizes and prices were available for rent for the duration of the exhibition, artists of all kinds (and members of various “art circuits”) closed deals and exhibited whatever they wanted to for a month at Laura Marsiaj.

The shape that these actions are going to take when all of the recorded material is edited will determine the reading that one can make of the works, but in both cases, one can notice an unfolding, in the artist’s research, of the binomial “paralyze/summon into action,” always by means of an element that disrupts the traditional rules of conduct in the art medium. By choosing to turn these events—the lay public being approached in the streets, the random request for a guided visit made to visitors at an exhibition, the short circuit of showcasing works of a different nature than that which the viewer expects to find in spaces dedicated to contemporary art, etc.—into documentary videos, Luciano Mariussi widens the spectrum, both in terms of audience, and of possible layers of interpretation for his work. And he also chooses to “drive” the interpretation according to his “perverse strategy” for relating with the audience.

But who is it that still entertains illusions of any type of pure, simple relation—direct, without any intermediation—between art and the audience? The “perversion,” in the sense of a “corrupted” relation (how difficult it is to avoid terms with a pejorative connotation!) with art, is the rule, and not the exception. Luciano Mariussi makes art with the spirit of his time, for the people of his time. The utopia of “aesthetic fruition,” of the appropriate time to take in each “aesthetic experience,” of the full, unrestricted reach—related to Enlightenment, if you like—to an “aesthetic culture” is not in the horizon of the artist.

And his nondocumental works are the ones that best make clear this contemporary stance: Jogo para jogador inepto (1999), a 3D video simulating a game environment, with corridors leading to other corridors in a sort of endless maze, which the camera travels, playing the “role” of the game player; Unfriendly (2001), a computer interface featuring several familiar tools—such as “create,” “show,” “insert,” “help,” etc.—, but which are completely unfriendly when one tries to interact with the software; and Entre (2003), an installation in a closed room, consisting of four video projections that show life-sized characters addressing the visitor using aggressive language, attempting to drive him/her out of the room. Those who want to enter, those who have the courage scream.

(1) Who decided to have all outdoors and advertising removed from commercial storefronts in the city; the last act of our mayor was to forbid feirantes (street market vendors) from yelling: sound-cleansing operation; why does not he dedicate himself to solve the problems of unemployment and lack of habitation in São Paulo, instead of impersonating [former mayor] Jânio Quadros?

(2) MARIUSSI, Luciano. “Não entendo – Entre o documentário e a videoarte,” text published on the Web site of the Federal University of Paraná, as part of the project “MUVI – Museu Virtual de Artes Plásticas”; the entire text is available HERE.

(3) MARIUSSI, Luciano. “Estética – A inclusão do espectador dentro da obra,” text published on the Web site of the Federal University of Paraná, as part of the project “MUVI – Museu Virtual de Artes Plásticas”; the entire text is available HERE.

4) GONZÁLEZ, Ana. “Espectador: apreciador ou consumidor?” Specialization (History of Art) – School of Music and Fine Arts of Paraná, Curitiba, 2004, pp. 41–43, quoted by Luciano Mariussi in “Estética – A inclusão do espectador dentro da obra,” as in footnote no. 3. (5) Ditto as in footnote no. 2.