Exchanging Values

Modesty, humility and precariousness are the terms that come to mind when looking at the work of Cildo Meireles. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, he uses an economy of media that seems far more povera than those used by some of his Italian counterparts. In this sense, his aesthetic is close to that of Hélio Oiticica, another Brazilian artist who has recently received critical attention in Europe. Both share the search for an artistic space concerned with its social environment.

It is hardly surprising that in the eyes of these two Latin American artists, the media used by the Italian Arte Povera artists seem to sublimate or capitalise on poverty. It might seem unfair to compare levels of poverty in Mezzogiorno - and the discrimination that it suffers in relation to the rich Italian industrial north - and the injustice and misery existent in a country such as Brazil. Nevertheless, the aesthetic differences between the European Arte Povera and the Latin American are blatant.

As Meireles explains, 'it is not a question of working with metaphor but with reality, of transforming the metaphor into a raw material, the subject into the media.' From the beginning, Meireles' work has seemed to attempt a deeper kind of interventionism, moving beyond the boundaries of art in order to question it, as a simile for the undermining activity carried out historically by the Trotskyists in the unions. In his own words, 'the work operates within this model: to act within the art circuit with the same order and the same logic that characterise the relationship between taste and the social whole; to talk about the language of Insertion versus the language of style; to move against the fetishism of the object; to speak with a Murmullo Anonimo (Anonymous whisper) rather than the voice of the Author.'

At the end of the 60s and in the early 70s, Meireles showed a mixture of works together. A group of formal investigations around the basic notions of time and space was displayed alongside interventions of a highly social nature, opposing the military coup of 1964 that brought Brazil to desolation and repression. This mise-en-scene allowed the viewer to discover the confusion in Meireles' art between the ideological discourse and the formalist gesture.

In April 1970, in Belo Horizonte, Meireles attached a medical thermometer to an eight foot pole and placed it on a square white cloth. Tied to this were ten live hens which he sprinkled with petrol, then set alight. The ensuing explosion was thought to relate to the self-sacrifice of the bonzos during the Vietnam war. Seen from a contemporary perspective, Tiradentes: Totem-Monumento ao Preso Politico (Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner), seems of uncertain effect; associations for the protection of animals would be unlikely to approve of it. Tiradentes was a hero of the Inconfidencia Mineira Movement in the 17th century, who fought for independence and was drawn and quartered for his efforts. In fact, Meireles decided to make the piece after the Brazilian military attempted to recover the image of this prisoner and use it for their own means.

Between 1973 and 1979 he made O Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux! (The Sermon on the Mount: Let There be Light!), a strong statement against threat and fear. A surface of 60 square metres covered with black sandpaper was surrounded by 126,000 piled up boxes of matches and eight mirrors inscribed with the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Five thuggish looking actors, resembling bodyguards and/or paid killers, participated in the event. The sound produced by their feet on the sandpaper was recorded and amplified. There had already been three unsuccessful attempts to show the piece before its 24 hour performance at the Centre Candido Mendes in Rio de Janeiro. Existing photographs of the project show the actors surrounding the piles of matchboxes. Aggressive in black sunglasses, they seem to be about to take their pistols from their holsters. The feeling of awe and swaggering bravado emanating from this scene is paradoxical: the treasure that the actors guard is nothing but an instrument that could cause tragedy. The violence is in the material. One match alone, in contact with the sandpaper floor, would cause a catastrophe.

Curiously, the matchboxes are wrapped up in paper printed with the image of an eye and the word 'OLHO' (eye). This serves to reverse the situation. Acting as a kind of God's eye or Jeremy Bentham-style Panopticon, the matches seem to invigilate those that come into the exhibition space. The invigilator/invigilated schizophrenia is reinforced by the reflection of the matchboxes/OLHO onto the surrounding mirrors. The Beatitudes are taken from Saint Matthew's Gospel, a call to sacrifice, offering the believer the reward of the Kingdom of Heaven. The brutality of the 1968 dictatorship in Brazil cannot be forgotten, and this piece should be seen within the context of the violence established in Brazil in that dark period of its history. 'Fiat Lux!' (Let there be light!), says Meireles, whilst pointing out that there is no light, nor escape from the darkness, without violence.

Some years before, at the beginning of the 70s, Meireles created the so-called Inserções em circuitos ideológicos (Insertions in Ideological Circuits), with the aim of creating a 'circulation system, of exchange of information, without dependence on a centralised control'. These Inserções, which set out to highlight the media through which artistic products circulate, are based on the chain letter and the message-in-a-bottle. Printing information and critical opinions on returnable soft-drink bottles and paper money, Meireles would then put them back into circulation.

The canvas, the signature and the ownership of work are values that Meireles tries to undermine, and banknotes and bottles are two examples of anonymous objects that by being in continuous circulation, escape the notion of private property. The messages, silk-screened or printed with a stamp, such as 'Yankees go home' or 'What is the place of the work of art?' now sound childish and ineffectual, especially since these Inserções oppose the hegemony of power with individual practice. Meireles plays with one's values and the exchange value of money in its real and metaphorical sense, but these go no further than the simplistic gesture.

Where Meireles stands out is in such installations as the well-known Missão/Missões (How to build cathedrals) (Mission/Missions [How to Build Cathedrals]) (1987). Connecting a floor of 600,000 golden coins to a ceiling of 2,000 ox bones with a column of 800 communion wafers, the work uses the aesthetics of excess to reflect on the glare, dazzle and fascination of material and spiritual power. The magnetism of this work lies in the accomplished, subtle interpretation of form and content through which the power of religion is connected (vertically, which for Christians denotes the relationship of the Divinity with the human being) with the seduction of economic power (evidenced by the reflected light produced by the coins) and the sense of sacrifice and death evoked by the roof of bones. The title applies to a key moment in the history of Brazil: the missions founded by the Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries. The construction of the spiritual has its foundations, in a broad sense, in economic values and tragedy.

It is paradoxical that it is in spectacular installations such as this one, or Glove Trotter (1991), in which a steel net contains balloons of different sizes, that Meireles creates a more deeply complex artistic language. (The 'v' in Glove is not a grammatical error, but a play on words, combining the idea of universality - the spheres - and the sense of envelopment - the metallic net.) The excellent catalogue, published by IVAM on the occasion of his first solo European museum show, suggests that this piece 'comes from the act of playing with a net to capture a series of elements.' Added to this is the tension that is created when one juxtaposes the memory of chain-mail used in medieval times as body protection and the balloons of different sizes, material and colour. I wonder if this work, dedicated to the artist's son (a relationship of man to man), equipped with so many tied up balls, doesn't have a subliminal Freudian meaning. At least then the semantics of the piece would offer concealed meanings. Hermeneutics or delirium?

Translated from the Spanish by Maria Mencia