1. model
Portes
On se protege, on se barricade. Les portes arretent et séparent.
La porte casse l’espace, le scinde, interdit l’osmose, impose le
cloisonnement: d’un côté, il y a moi et mon chez moi, le prive, le
domestique, (...) de l’autre c^té il y a les autres, le monde, le
publique, le politique. On ne peut pas aller de l’un à l’autre en se
laissant glisser, on ne passe de l’un à l’autre: il faut un mot de
passe, il faut franchir le seuil, il faut montrer patte blanche, il
faut communiquer, comme le prisionier communique avec l’exterieur.
Thus begins the chapter on “doors” from Espéces d’Espaces, a book by
Georges Perec from 1974 possibly one of the most extraordinary
narratives on space ever written. From bed to the world, its proposed
trajectory maps typologies of inhabitable space, as if the author made
an inventory of the last remaining issue that challenges definition –
and which allows us an existence as physical entities. In this sense
doors are as borders between different categories of living: to each
side of a door an instance partitioned from another dimension. The most
evident separation is the one that divorces public from private space,
the dividing line between the space for intimacy and society from
political space. That is why we always see spaces to either side but do
not see doors themselves as occupying space (doors are either open or
closed as the French proverb goes). Thus too it is that Marcel
Duchamp’s 1927 piece Porte, numero 11, rue Larrey, is such a powerful
metaphor of the transactional character of the door, of its nature as
non-space, a passageway that refuses any permanence.
José Bechara’s small sculptures do not have doors. They have apertures
that, much like architectural models, mimic windows, but they do not
lead inside these sculptures, exploding monoliths, overflowing, spewing
objects through hypothetical windows. Significantly, there are no
doors: there is no possibility whatsoever of interpreting the spaces in
his models as livable, inhabitable spaces, since they are in effect,
and in every sense, impenetrable. In other words, they are models of
interiority that condemn us to exclusion or to a public state. We are,
when faced with Belcher’s small scale works, relegated to the ambit of
the political, the street, the outside world, the public, forever
denied access to their private condition. We become Gullivers on our
arrival at Lilliput: we cannot enter, we cannot cross the difference in
scale nor comprehend the inside of these small constructions that
compose the set of pieces by José Bechara, natural successors of the
“House” project.
They are therefore, models of impenetrability, modular structures that,
invariably, imply in an inner explosion, as if its content had spilled
over to our space, and in true Lilliputian character, since we can
easily identify the objects popping out the windows: tables, chairs,
closets, stairs. Objects that refer to our experience of lived-in
space, we inhabit space as set by our corporal use of the objects that
populate our houses, sofas where we stretch out, tables at which we
eat, chairs on which we sit. Things are thus indissolubly associated to
the very notion of inhabitable space, they are what, ultimately,
establishes our relation with the house, in the form of impressions
left by the bodies of inhabitants. Bechara’s use of furniture models is
thus, imbued with the imaginary invasion of our world – of the public
world that is this side of the impenetrable core of his small house
structures – by a different scale that, in any case, preserves the
surviving memory of another life, of an inner space. This other life,
speculative and small, jumps out, however, permanently, into real
space, a small threat, plausible because of its scale.
2. structure
Bechara’ s models are structurally built by employing three main
elements: a parallelepiped standing for the shape of a house, with its
windows and missing doors; the furniture that spills over into our own
space, in coherent scale with the first “house” element ; and a third
typological element, a parallelepiped in outline, or similar structure
(frequently that of a cube), always bigger than the “house” and one
that relates to it: either enveloping it, completely or partially, or
facing it, or at rest in controlled imbalance, at times anchored on
small furniture models for support.
This structure, whether in the shape of a parallelepiped or cube, is
intriguing. On the one hand, it is an abstract element since it is
neither (to the contrary of other elements) a rigorous facsimile of an
object from the world around us (such as is the case of the small
tables, drawers or bookcases) nor is it an implied object (such as the
cube that becomes an implied house because of its hinted windows). At
most it is perceived as a cube or through its three dimensional
composition in space, but the perception is not processed by the
onlooker as a maquette, but as a thing in itself: a cube is a cube, not
a representation of a cube. It is an element however, that is clearly
fundamental in the constructive logic of Bechara’s pieces, since it
transforms the scale of the model into the scale of sculpture.
In other words, the modular and model character of Bechara’s sculpture
rests on an impossibility, a paradox: they are models of works that
could have an existence in another scale, (as far as we establish a
relation with them by means of a recognition of the typologies of the
objects employed): a table, for example, is an object that has a
particular relation of scale with our own bodies; whenever we look at a
6 inch tall table, we know we are faced with a substitute, a model. A
cube, however, in endowed with no human scale whatsoever. It has,
evidently, size but not one that corresponds to any scale - unless it
is set in voluntary relation to other scales, of architecture or of the
body, or to the size of things, in other words, either it is capable of
being manipulated, or it is another for our bodies, or still, it has an
architectural relation with buildings. In the case of José Bechara’s
sculptures, a relation is established with a model. This is to say that
an abstract object (such as, for example, a cube whose vertices are
projected in space) has its use-function detached from its bodily
relation with the spectator in order to establish a new one, one that
pertains to the model’s of economy of composition and which is thus
converted into sculpture. We can therefore state that the model’s
structure converts itself into a modular structure, one based on the
articulations of modules at two levels – the level of recognition, and
in the form of space as pure speculative process.
On the other hand, a model’s condition will nevertheless lead further
to two different and paradoxical temporal instances. A model is either
a prospective project of a building at a 1:1 scale, or it is the
memory-based reproduction of an area that exists in natural scale and
is subsequently re-converted into an object that points to something
that is, naturally, outside itself. In the case of Bechara’s
sculptures, there is no “outside itself,” nor are there any precursors,
with the sole exception of the “House” project which, in any case,
takes the role of matrix from which the combinatorics of its models are
developed.
Thus they are structures that develop an interdependency between
recognition and a self-reference, functioning as paradoxical models,
and doubly so. Thus their doubled nature, one that is further
strengthened by the fact that they are themselves the subject of
further artistic rendering, in this case through photography, employed
as an art form in its own right.
3. the uncanny
Bechara’s doorless sculptures evoke what Anthony Vidler called “the
architectural uncanny.” Vidler mapped various forms of the uncanny
based on the E. T. A. Hoffman’s short stories (and its consequences in
Sigmund Freud who created the concept along with its lasting impact on
the arts) and his attention fixed itself on the description of Usher’s
house, taken from the short story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe.
The house is described through its inadequacies, and because of the
inexistence of any contact with the outside, it becomes practically an
architectural embodiment of isolation and of that which is sinister.
Clearly Vidler’s concept is born of a gothic literature and its
resulting embodiment in the design of the house, of which the Usher
house is the perfect example. In this context, of the embodiment of the
uncanny in architecture, autistic doorlessness windows that open
blindly like empty eye sockets to an impenetrable interior are signs of
a box that is closed in on itself. This typology of the uncanny
associated to impenetrability, and to a blind gaze that has no
transparency to the soul is also linked to the notion of “unhomely”.
The term is linked to German word unheimlich, reinforcing the notion of
un-belonging, - not limited to the psychological notion of the uncanny.
In a very literal sense, the house’s inadequacy as far as belonging and
habitation are concerned is one of the important aspects of
contemporary art situated as it is at the antipodes of the heideggerian
nostalgia of a life rooted in the world – even if Heidegger’s thought
in 1947 could be construed as imbued with a degree of cynicism. The
fact is that modern thought centers on the lack of belonging, perhaps
the most significant mark of the avant-gardes, especially in the way
that it reflects the body/space relation, and more specifically, the
relation between body and the space of habitation.
This gap between body and bodily space has been filled in by a sense of
existence as ceaselessly nomadic, of having no home, no place of
belonging. It is in this context that we can frame our interpretation
of the relation between inaccessibility and explosion in José Bechara’s
pieces. If, in his models, the inaccessible interior is compensated for
because it provides a way out of our own world, the intrusion (despite
being rendering down to Lilliputian scale) de-structures its enveloping
space, and the process converts inadequacy into conflicting proposals,
sculpture as a home and conversely, the model or maquette generating a
notion of corporal project.
4. Body
Ultimately, the corporal repercussions of José Bechara’s sculptures
exert an influence over a specific aspect of corporal dismemberment. It
is clear too, that his works generate an architectural metaphor that
points to a model of the body that is very different from the one
Vitruvio alluded to when positing the organic relation between
architecture and body, the humanist model that guided the metaphoric
relations between art and architecture. It is a different body, one
that is torn apart and fragmentary, a body that is in transit, nomadic.
If, in some architectural contexts, deconstruction uses the metaphor of
the disruptive and inhuman, bionic body to question the corporal model
– and José Bechara belongs to this genealogy in the field of the visual
arts-; the trend to reinterpret corporality is present in the
proposition of experiences that are disruptive to subjectivity and
upsetting to mechanisms of belonging and recognition. In the case of
José Bechara, his sculptural works imply in a vision that is both
vernacularly and culturally implicated. This is to say that his
processes of recognition are brought about by a strong connection with
flexible building structures, much akin to Brazil’s Second Modernism
and its use and immersion in the reticular and organic systems of the
architecture of poverty, systems that were significant to an entire
generation of artists and which first originated in the pioneering work
of Hélio Oiticica. Nevertheless, the specific nature of this approach
resides in the free interchange present in neo-concretism, its
juxtaposition of figurative and corporal logic, and the adoption of an
idiom that is rigorous, geometric, and flesh-less.
Bechara’s constructive procedure is born of this confluence between
entropic building and compositional order, raising the issue of
representation and its compulsion of presence, which his models do not
refuse.
5. building x dismemberment
The paradox between building and what Gordon Matta-Clark called
“unbuilding” has a long tradition in the avant-garde of the arts that
goes back to the Great Russian Experiment, between 1915 and 1927.
It was during the period that stretches from the 1915 exhibition in
Petrograd – (that helped define in the two main lines of the Russian
avant-garde, Malévitch’s Suprematism and Vladimir Tatlin’s embryonic
constructivism), to the emergence of art destined exclusively for
exhibition such as the work of Lazar El Lissitzky and Rodchenko, that a
field of intervention emerged in which architecture, design and
sculpture met and expanded the range of artistic practice under the
aegis of “real space”.
A group of artists championed the fusion of architecture and sculpture
under the aegis of function and use. The first group led by Rodshenko
and Alexei Gan, defined their point of view as Konstruktivisty. The
term is derived from the word Konstruktor for specialist in Russian, in
the very same sense that today we speak of a specialist in electrical
engineering, to use the comparison by Catherine Cooke. Constructivism
as an activity, therefore, is more closely linked to the labor of
conception and planning than that of physical exertion of building.
Although it does not in any way diminish the notion of physical labor,
it certainly stresses art as an activity related to conceiving
projects, closer in spirit to engineering and architecture than to the
traditions of manual labor.
Thus, if the artists mentioned are influenced by Bogdanov, a rival of
Lenin and author of the Proletkult, his sculptural pieces are,
doubtlessly, architectural, associated to and interrelated to the
development of a project-based culture that is particularly distinct in
the words of one of the most renowned architects of the period, Moisei
Ginzburg:
“It is not at issue whether the artist loses creativity once he is
aware of what he wants, of his intent or in of the meaning of his work.
However, the unconscious, intuition, the creative impulse, ought to be
substituted by a clear and organized method that saves the architect’s
energy...”
This vision, despite having been mitigated by artistic practice, is
clearly present at the origins of the project-culture that has
definitely contaminated sculpture and makes it use architecture as a
device. We can go as far as to say that architecture becomes, for this
group of artists, sculpture transcendental, that is, sculpture can come
into existence exclusively via architecture.
The sculpture through architecture paradigm originated in Vladimir
Tatlin’s 1919 project Monument to the Third International. The Monument
was conceived while Tatlin worked for the Fine Arts Section of the
Lunacharsky Lights Commisariat and set up at the 8th Congress of the
Soviets of 1920. During the conference a flier explaining the monument
entitled “The work before us” was given out to the public. The document
dismissed bourgeois art that pretended to illustrate the revolution and
conferred the Monument the task of proving the holistic possibilities
of the arts, bringing together architecture, sculpture and painting.
The following year, the concept, adopted by a constructivist group,
influenced the entire Inkhuk (Arts Institute). The debates and that
followed are interesting, especially once they defined their central
concepts, namely Tektonika, Konstruksia e Factura. Tectonika relates to
the organic link between political values and industrial techniques.
Factura concerns the specific values of the materials being used.
Konstruksia is the concept taken to an extreme: the project’s
performatic character. In a very short period of time a group of
artists gathered together working systematically in three dimensions,
and who would create a synthesis between the genesis of structuralist
linguistics (as influenced by Roman Jacobson) a procedure based on
projects and the primacy of materials. Sculpture, thus, had been
transformed, becoming social construction.
Thus sculpture seemed to have become nothing but a metaphor of itself,
or an insistence in the process of collective transformation, having
thus the public space as its sole field of expression. When it does not
take the form of an intervention in the public space, it becomes a
maquette, a model, as was the case with Vantongerloo. Undergoing this
process of “architecturalization” if you will, sculpture is given a
natural scale, which is the scale of the body itself, and not one that
is imposed by anthropomorphism, but instead by the metaphor of its
utility. It is, in fact, a particularly important aspect in the period,
one that is present, as we discussed previously, in the use of the term
“real space” by Lazar El Lissitzky with respect to Malévitch’s “Black
Square” of 1913 that marked the end of the era of representation and
inaugurated real space, a non-Euclidian space, but one that is defined
through temporality. Not being a considered a strict constructivist,
namely because Lissitzky saw the primacy of utility as inadequate,
there is nevertheless, in Lissitzky’s trajectory a process in which
sculpture expands towards work over space in a context of the
globalization of experience with an emphasis on the role of the
project.
Well, the project is, progressively, the dismemberment of space, a
project in which sculpture is present as an anamorphic space that
belongs to an ephemeral body, if for no other reason because it is the
utopian body of the revolution, a body to be recreated as its process.
6. explosion
The closing scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabrinsky Point, has
become an engram for all of us who have an interest in the spatial
processes of the projected image. During long minutes the spectator
witnesses a series of explosions, first in real time and subsequently
in slow motion. Exploding before us is a modernist house in the Mohave
Desert, and inside it, all that makes it habitable: furniture, objects,
books.
José Bechara’s work is, finally, a reified extension of this process of
explosion. We can interpret the explosion in a number of ways: as an
internal commentary to the processes of sculpture itself, as an
intervention in the much more ample terrain of cultural and social
commentary.
The explosion is not purely a counter-cultural destruction of the
modern space. It is also, in his case, the Brazilian baroque
manifestation of the excesses of inhabitation, taken from the radical
point of view of impossibility. His models posses a doubling of meaning
at various levels: there is the issue we have already discussed
pertaining to scale and its antinomy with respect to the ontological
aspect of model and work of art; we proposed that it be understood as a
combination, rooted in the Brazilian tradition of neo-concretism,
between the vernacularism of space and formal/compositional typology;
we have already situated deconstruction’s use of the metaphor of
dismemberment of the body.
Finally, we may try to understand the exercise in externalization
proposed by Bechara as an incursion in the terrain of excesses from a
baroque matrix. In fact, the baroque movement is defined by excess,
permanently overflowing and from among a number of spatial
interpretations. Brazilian baroque is endowed with this quality that is
associated to a more penetrating version of the carnal world, or if we
prefer, to greater depth in the concretely physical nature of the
unfolding corporality. A number of authors associate this very same
complexity with multicultural and liminal experiences of corporality
converted into space.
Thus the passage from an inside to its outside (that is inside
ourselves) pertaining to various modules of corporal metaphor,
represent a reified de-multiplication of passing, transient, and
therefore de-territorialized meaning.
It is in the body and in its opposite, uninhabited space, that José
Bechara’s proposition lies, starting from the principle that a body
exists solely, (as Sartre would say and Vidler remind us), because it
has a house. The de-territorialization and the uninhabitability of the
explosion are, also, the baroque explosion of the body - even if as a
model.
In other words, if the Lilliputian dimensions of Bechara’s models do
not affect their hyper efficacy, it is because they always lead us to
alterity: to another space, to another body, to another place. Lilliput
certainly not. Perhaps Blefescu, the other island where Gulliver never
went.
DELFIM SARDO (1962 - ) With an undergraduate degree in Philosophy by
the University of Coimbra, Delfim Sardo has dedicated himself to art
theory and criticism, and is a curator of contemporary art exhibitions.