MIRA SCHENDEL AT TATE MODERN LONDON
September 25, 2013 – January 19, 2014
MIRA SCHENDEL AT TATE MODERN LONDON
September 25, 2013 – January 19, 2014
Tate Modern is to stage the first ever international,
full-scale survey of the work of
Mira Schendel (1919-1988) from 25 September 2013. Schendel
is one of Latin America’s most important and prolific post-war artists.
Alongside her contemporaries Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, Schendel
reinvented the language of European Modernism in Brazil. The show exemplifies
how Tate is continuing to rethink and re-present the history of modern and
contemporary art by showing artists who established their careers outside
Europe and the USA.
The exhibition will bring together over 300 paintings,
drawings and sculptures from across her entire career, many of which have never
been exhibited before. Highlights include her Droguinhas ( Little Nothings ) 1965-6, soft
sculptures of knotted rice paper in the form of malleable nets, originally
exhibited in London (Signals Gallery, 1966); and the Graphic Objects 1967 - 1968, a group of works
that explore language and poetry and were first shown at the 1968 Venice
Biennale.
Other important works in the show are Schendel’s early
abstract paintings, among them Tate’s Untitled 1963; her later monotype
drawings on rice paper, of which she made over 2000; and the installations Still Waves of Probability 1969 and Variants 1977. Schendel’s final complete
series of works, abstract paintings entitled Sarrafos 1987, are also included. The Sarrafos are white monochromes with a
black batten extending from their surface, addressing the body, space and
environment of the spectator.
Mira Schendel was born in Zurich in 1919 and lived in Milan
and Rome before moving to Brazil in 1949. She settled in São Paolo in 1953,
where she married Knut Schendel, and where she lived and worked until her death
in 1988. Although brought up as a Catholic, Schendel was persecuted during WWII
for her Jewish heritage. She was forced to leave university, due to
anti-Semitic laws introduced in Italy, and flee to Yugoslavia.
Schendel’s early experience of cultural, geographic and
linguistic displacement is evident in her work, as is her interest in religion
and philosophy. She developed an extraordinary intellectual circle in São Paulo
of philosophers, poets, psychoanalysts, physicists and critics – many of them
émigrés like herself – and engaged in correspondence with intellectuals across
Europe, such as Max Bense,
Hermann Schmitz and Umberto Eco. Among key exhibitions
featuring Schendel’s work were the first and numerous subsequent editions of
the São Paulo Bienal; the 1968 Venice Biennale; a solo show at the Galeria de
Arte SESI, São Paulo (1997); and Tangled
Alphabets with León
Ferrari at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009).
Mira Schendel is
organised by Tate Modern and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in
association with the Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea,
Porto. It is curated by Tanya Barson from Tate Modern and Taisa Palhares from
the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/mira-schendel
%2B1965.png)
UNTITLED ( GENESIS ) 1965
9 Monotypes on Paper Between 2 Perspex
Sheets, Pins and Nylon Fishing Wire
Dimensions: Right Panel of 4 Monotypes:
612 x 1237 x 8 mm
Left Panel of 5 Monotypes: 612 x 1537 x 8 mm
Individual Monotypes: 465 x 229 mm
Left Panel of 5 Monotypes: 612 x 1537 x 8 mm
Individual Monotypes: 465 x 229 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the American
Fund for the Tate Gallery 2012
MIRA SCHENDEL’S GESTURE: ON ART IN VILEM FLUSSER’S THOUGHT,
WITH ‘ MIRA SCHENDEL ‘ BY FLUSSER
By Nancy Ann Roth
3 April 2014
In his theory of communication, philosopher and writer Vilém
Flusser (1920–1991) referred to art often, yet unsystematically. This article
proposes that Mira Schendel, with whom he had an extended dialogue in the
1960s, was a point of reference for him, substantially informing many aspects
of his thinking about art. Also included is a new translation of an essay on Schendel
by Flusser.
‘’ If you lie in wait for a word at the moment it comes out
of the mouth, try to catch it, to chew it before it is spit out (and that would
actually be to grasp the gesture of speaking), you notice that you are always a
second too late. ‘’
Vilem Flusser 1
Vilem Flusser 1
‘’ The works currently on display have resulted from a
hitherto frustrated attempt to catch the discourse right at the moment of its
birth. My concern is with capturing the transfer of the instant living
experience, full of empirical vigour, onto the symbol imbued with memorability
and relative eternity. ‘’
Mira Schendel2
Mira Schendel2
Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) is currently best-known as a theorist
of new media, a term he would have defined as ‘communication technology since
photography’. However, he most often described himself as a writer and his
project as a comprehensive theory of human communication, terms that are
considerably more helpful in grasping his sense of art as movement, as a
particular expression of human consciousness and not as a set of objects.
A native of Prague, Flusser emigrated to Brazil in 1940,
then returned to live in Europe in 1972. When his first book, Língua e
Realidade (Language and Reality) was published in Brazil in 1963, his main
focus was on the criticism of literature. But he wrote criticism of specific
art exhibitions, both in Brazil and later, after he returned to Europe. He
participated in the planning and promotion of the São Paulo Bienale, and later
contributed to the American art journals Artforum International and Leonardo.3 A
reader of his many books and articles on an eclectic range of subjects will
nonetheless be puzzled by references to art that sometimes dismiss, sometimes
prescribe, and sometimes embrace art as tantamount to creativity itself,
equivalent to what we think of as human.4 There
is no comprehensive theory. The closest equivalent is a description of artistic
gesture, a pattern of movement associated with a particular kind of
consciousness. But in this way, art does figure in a very comprehensive theory,
for Flusser’s theory of gesture proposes nothing less than a new way of
defining and valuing the way human beings make and share meaning.
The foregoing remarks are vulnerable to the charge of
anachronism, for they draw on an idea of gesture that seems unlikely to have
figured in the direct exchange between Flusser and Schendel, that is, in the
actual, face-to-face conversations that took place on the terrace of the
Flussers’ apartment in São Paulo between the 1950s and early 1970s. Among the
few sources of information about the exchange is the short essay ‘Mira
Schendel’ that is part of Flusser’s autobiography, Bodenlos [rootless
or foundationless] and is reproduced here as an appendix.5 Although Bodenlos was
not actually published until 1992, it was written in the early 1970s, when
Flusser was literally and figuratively between Brazil and Europe, reflecting on
the immediate past in anticipation of imminent change. The text of ‘Mira
Schendel’, which appears in the section titled ‘Dialogues’, describes an
emotionally turbulent yet sturdy friendship.6 He
assures us that Schendel always controlled the content of the conversations,
and that the topic was always her work. To take him at his word, then, it was a
situation in which he was obliged to think from her point of view, to enter
into the intensity, the emotional volatility, the uncompromising materiality of
her way of being in the world. He says that relationship taxed his patience; it
would seem it taxed her patience as well. For although she had a very high
regard for at least one earlier statement he had written about her work,7 what
she read in the manuscript of the text in Bodenlos made
her angry: the time of frequent and intense discussion between them had largely
ended, even before Flusser and his wife left Brazil.8
Schendel continued, nevertheless, to be a force in Flusser’s
thinking. The two quotations reproduced above, both very difficult to date with
any certainty, provide evidence of a shared interest in a very subtle, very
ephemeral event, in ‘catching’ something intangible – a thought, an idea – long
enough to make its meaning available to others. ‘Catch’ – the same verb in both
quotations – seems to involve a physical, embodied movement, returning again to
the idea of a gesture, a physical movement, as distinct from an object. There
is no point in asking which of the two thoughts came first, or which ‘caused’
the other: Flusser categorised his exchange with Schendel as a dialogue, a term
he consistently defined, first, as a free, interested exchange of information
between two different memories, and, second, as the one and only way human
beings can create something genuinely new. Just by putting the statement about
Schendel in the ‘Dialogues’ section of the book, he was ascribing a very high
value to what had transpired between them. And he went on to be more specific:
‘For Mira, I am a genuine critic’, he wrote. ‘I influence her work. And she
presents me with genuine issues that need to be thought and worked through.’9
Schendel’s impact on Flusser cannot be definitively
‘proven’. Among other reasons, he notoriously failed to acknowledge sources in
his published texts. But Schendel raised ‘genuine issues’, and the loss of
direct contact in itself would not have resolved them. In any case, by
heuristically supposing Schendel to have been ‘there’, present in his thinking,
Flusser’s widely dispersed, even apparently contradictory references to art
seem to coalesce and to suggest the scope of the demands Schendel’s project
made on his theory.
UNTITLED 1966
Ecoline and Oil Pastel Stick on Paper
Dimensions: 430 x 610
Private Collection © The Estate of
Mira Schendel
UNTITLED ( TODOS ) 1960 - 1965
Private Collection © The Estate of
Mira Schendel
Photo by Ricardo Ruikauska
GRAPHIC OBJECT 1967 - 1968
Daros Latin America Collection, Zurich
© The Estate of Mira Schendel
.png)
UNTITLED FROM THE SERIES DROGUINHAS
C.1964 - 1966
Japanese Paper
Dimensions: Variable, Approximately 90
x 70 cm
Credit Line: Scott Burton Fund
Copyright:© 2015 Estate of Mira
Schendel
Photo Credit Tate Photography
MIRA SCHENDEL’S GESTURE: ON ART IN VILEM FLUSSER’S THOUGHT,
WITH ‘ MIRA SCHENDEL ‘ BY FLUSSER
ByNancy Ann Roth
TRADITIONAL & TECHNICAL IMAGES
Schendel and Flusser were only a year apart in age. For
both, German had been the language – or one of the languages – of childhood,
and Judaism had been a factor in their earliest religious experience, although
Schendel was educated in Catholic schools. Both had been the object of
religious persecution, and after emigrating to Brazil, in 1940 and 1949,
respectively, they shared the status of ‘expellees’. Flusser used the term in
his well-known essay, ‘Exile and Creativity’ to describe people in a completely
unfamiliar situation, constantly confronted with such vast quantities of new
information as to have to filter and shape it creatively in order to survive.10 Both expellees had had to abruptly
abandon their formal education, and although both investigated the possibility
of going back to earn formal qualifications, both decided against it,
preferring to pursue a broad range of studies independently, guided by
immediate interests, needs and opportunities. Among these was a keen
awareness of language itself.
They were hardly alone. Abruptly plunged as they were into a
completely new culture, they surely felt the force of language with exceptional
intensity. But a heightened consciousness of language was noticeable across
diverse disciplines and institutional contexts at that moment, noticeable
enough to acquire the name the linguistic turn, the title of an
influential collection of philosophical essays published in 1967.11 The
date falls comfortably within the timespan of conversations with Schendel on
the Flussers’ terrace in São Paolo, and there are grounds for supposing some
resonance with the heightened awareness of language that was felt at that
particular moment in art as well as philosophy, in Europe and the United
States. And yet Flusser’s dialogue with Schendel, grounded in a quite extensive
shared cultural – and arguably especially religious – memory, seems to have
facilitated a radical rethinking of the way concepts relate to art.
Flusser was relatively new to art criticism when he met
Schendel. As he had long since adopted phenomenology as his main philosophical
method, however, he may well have tried, in keeping with the philosopher Edmund
Husserl’s epoché, or reduction, to ‘bracket out’ whatever
assumptions he brought to the table regarding the relationship of image to
text. Above all, he may have felt philosophically
obligated not to try to attempt any causal ‘explanation’ of
Schendel’s work. The project would rather be to enter into Schendel’s position,
to gain some insight into the challenges she faced by seeking parallels between
his practice as a writer and hers as a maker. It would have raised the
relationship between text and image as a central issue. And here, writer and
artist did have some common ground. As Geraldo de Souza Diaz points out in his
excellent monograph on Schendel, published in 2000:
Many artists were integrating writing into their images in
the 1960s, if in most cases merely as a formal element. But Schendel’s interest
in the relationship between writing and images can be satisfactorily explained
on religious grounds, for from childhood she had been familiar with the ban on
images as well as the language mysticism that underpins the Jewish concept of
God.12
Flusser clearly shared Schendel’s familiarity with these
aspects of Jewish thought, for the ban on images figures prominently in his
subsequent writing. In fact, he seems never to have seriously doubted that
writing is fiercely and intractably antagonistic toward images. Given a
phenomenological understanding of the relationship of consciousness to its
objects, this intractable antagonism became the basis for his history of
communications media. In this view, writing always sought to dominate images –
or more exactly, writing consciousness tried to dominate image consciousness.
It took a long time: ‘Only in the eighteenth century, after a
three-thousand-year struggle, did texts succeed in pushing images, with their
magic and myth, into such corners as museums and the unconscious.’13 But
by the time of Flusser’s own writing, in the 1980s, the tables were again
turning not exactly back to previous conditions but definitely against
writing.
For whereas writing is capable of channelling, controlling
the meaning of traditional images such as drawing and painting, it cannot
control the meanings of images produced by cameras, video recorders and
synthesizers. This is the difference Flusser makes between traditional and
technical images. Cameras, sound recorders and synthesizers – in his word,
‘apparatuses’ – can penetrate past what human beings can actually see or hear
or touch. They reach in to a level at which the world is a mass of whirling
particles, meaningless in itself. The apparatus can confer a meaning. Most
technical images are still made and used as if they were traditional (in
particular, photographs are still ordinarily understood and used as if they
were paintings or drawings). But technical images potentially store more
information, manipulate and distribute it far faster and more efficiently than
linear, alphanumeric text ever could. Flusser’s writing is not rich in specific
examples, but it seems useful to think of images that consolidate scientific
data visually, assigning visual qualities – shape, scale, colour – to, say,
measurements of speed or temperature, creating an image from information that
no one could possibly ‘see’.
The theory of technical images was elaborated after direct
dialogue with Schendel had ended. And yet the idea seems to be there in outline
form already in the early 1970s, in the short essay ‘Mira Schendel’, where it
is implied that her images are no longer ‘traditional’:
Traditionally, thinking goes something like this: I
encounter something concrete. I form an image of this concrete thing (I
‘imagine’ it), so as to acquaint myself with it. And then I translate my image
into a concept, so as to understand the concrete thing and be able to handle
it. Historically, the phase of imagining is the mythical-magical one, and the phase
of understanding is the epistemological-technical one. (In fact this briefly
describes the structure of Western civilisation.) With Mira, it comes to a
qualitative reversal. She starts from the concept and tries to imagine
it. She uses her imaginative powers to make the world of ideas concrete,
rather that to grasp the world of concrete things (for this world slips through
our fingers). One aspect of the contemporary world of ideas is that it has
become unimaginable. This has a great deal to do with our alienation: we cannot
imagine what our ideas (for example, our scientific ideas) mean. A new kind of
imaginary power is required to do it, and Mira mobilises this new power for us
… To make a concept into an image is to turn what is diachronic into something
synchronic, to collapse a process. Mira’s works, which make concepts
imaginable, are the first steps toward a revolution in human existence.14
It also seems clear that Mira did not make what Flusser
termed, in retrospect, ‘technical images’, for Flusser defined them as images
made by an apparatus. Still, he writes that her images reverse the
‘traditional’ relationship of images to texts. As he describes it, her ‘things’
(more on the difficulty with the designation ‘work’ below) are not available to
theorisation or explanation: in some sense, they already are theory. In fact,
Flusser takes considerable care to avoid the presumption of explaining her
work. He doubles up his discussion, so that two perspectives, roughly ‘his’ and
‘hers’, appear: the description of the content of their verbal dialogue might
be considered ‘his’, and the close visual descriptions of the two pieces, one
Graphic Object and one Notebook, are ‘hers’. The text closes with a passage
that positions Schendel’s project roughly in parallel to his own, both being
responses to a shared contemporary situation. Her ‘voice’ is her work.
Flusser is not alone among media theorists in associating
writing with a particular form of consciousness, or in projecting a culture
after writing, a time when writing becomes a rather esoteric skill, if not altogether
extinct. He does appear to be unique in his sense of antagonism between writing
consciousness (he calls it ‘historical’ consciousness) and image-based
consciousness. Nor is it a conflict that has been resolved in the past. On the
contrary, he experiences it as a regular feature of his own – and presumably
others’ – writing. An idea comes in the form of an image.15 In
order to write the idea down, he must attack it, shattering it into word-scaled
pieces, forcing it to follow the grammatical and orthographic rules of a
specific language. His description of Schendel’s procedure suggests something
like the reverse, only in some ways also a move forward. He reaches a concept
by writing it; she goes on to turn a concept to a new kind of image.
Rather than the conventional relationship between artist and
writer, then, in which the writer writes about and explains the
artist’s work, Flusser suggests a sense in which the image might supersede
writing, in which the artist might imagine the writer’s idea, and in which
writing could disappear.
THE TATE MODERN LONDON
THE TATE MODERN LONDON
In December 1992 the Tate Trustees announced their intention
to create a separate gallery for international modern and contemporary art
in London.
The former Bankside Power Station was selected as the new
gallery site in 1994. The following year, Swiss architects Herzog & De
Meuron were appointed to convert the building into a gallery. That their
proposal retained much of the original character of the building was a key
factor in this decision.
The iconic power station, built in two phases between 1947
and 1963, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. It consisted of a stunning
turbine hall, 35 metres high and 152 metres long, with the boiler house alongside
it and a single central chimney. However, apart from a remaining operational
London Electricity sub-station the site had been redundant since 1981.
In 1996 the design plans were unveiled and, following a £12
million grant from the English Partnerships regeneration agency, the site was
purchased and work began. The huge machinery was removed and the building was
stripped back to its original steel structure and brickwork. The turbine hall became a dramatic entrance and display area
and the boiler house became the galleries.
Since it opened in May 2000, more than 40 million people
have visited Tate Modern. It is one of
the UK’s top three tourist attractions and generates an estimated £100
million in economic benefits to London annually.
In 2009 Tate embarked on a major project to develop Tate Modern. Working
again with Herzog & de Meuron, the transformed Tate Modern will
make use of the power station’s spectacular redundant oil tanks, increase
gallery space and provide much improved visitor facilities.
http://www.tate.org.uk/about/who-we-are/history-of-tate
THE TATE MODERN LONDON
MIRA SCHENDEL’S GESTURE: ON ART IN VILEM FLUSSER’S THOUGHT,
WITH ‘ MIRA SCHENDEL ‘ BY FLUSSER
By Nancy Ann Roth
ART & INFORMATION
In the Bodenlos article, Flusser acknowledges
Schendel as a great artist. Yet the analysis that follows makes no particular
reference to art. With certain notable exceptions to be discussed below, when
Flusser discusses art in his writing, he invariably does so from the ‘outside’,
from the position of a critic, observing, listening, and receiving. Perhaps
particularly in the books published in the 1980s, he writes as someone who sees
art as one kind of message, that is, as information. In broad outline, the
theory he advances defines information in terms of probability and
improbability: the more improbable a given event or object is, the more
informative. In this context, human being are engaged in a kind of permanent
struggle against the forces of entropy, the overall tendency of the world
to gradually lose information, so that everything becomes more and more
probable, predictable. The tendency to resist entropy, negentropy, is another
word for creativity. Nature created the world – very slowly – and continues to
create at the rate improbable events occur, rarely and randomly. But human
beings are capable of creating – which is to say of generating new information
– much more quickly and deliberately.17 They
can do it under one simple, but absolute condition: there must be dialogue. New
information comes exclusively from dialogue, that is, from a free exchange of
information between two memories. The two memories may be aspects of a single
mind – a possibility that largely accounts for the ‘lonely genius’ model of
creativity. There may also be a dialogue between an organic, human memory and
an artificial one, such as a library or archive or memory stored on a server.
But the really exciting form of creativity involves an exchange between two
human memories – provided these are free and equal rather than forced or
predetermined. His concern for the immediate future is that in our society,
reliant as it is on forms of communication that are increasingly automated,
genuine dialogue is becoming close to impossible: a society that does not
generate new information will become completely predictable – and humanly
unbearable. It is in the interests of preserving the possibility of dialogue
(creativity), then, that Flusser discusses the task of art criticism, again,
with the tools of information theory: the more improbable and informative a
given gesture may be, the higher its value as art – and this will be the case
whether the object in question in an image, musical performance, new algorithm,
scientific insight or business plan. Treating art as information leads him to
some startling and irreverent conclusions, for example, the possibility that
our inherited concept of art effectively blocks our perception of new,
especially new digital images,18 or that the idea of
an avant-garde, just by virtue of its isolation, is ‘ridiculous’.19 But
perhaps more startling than either of these is the insistence that any future
art criticism will have to accommodate the tendency for new information to
become old, familiar – it will have to take the formation of habit into
account.20
The engagement with information theory does not, on the
surface, seem to involve Schendel. It is highly abstract, impersonal, and the
relationship with her was neither. What links the two is clearly
dialogue. In the sustained concern with Schendel’s on-going project, with her
thinking and experimenting, elations, frustrations, demands and above all
persistence, Flusser had seen the force of dialogue for himself, experienced it
producing new information, in this case new both highly improbable objects and
equally improbable ideas. He could write about creativity and dialogue with
phenomenological confidence.
He would, further, resist any thought that dialogue might
diminish difference, might blur the distinct features, the identities of the
separate participants. It comes to something of a test in his vision of artists
of the future (no longer called ‘artists’, for in the universe of technical
images they are so different from traditional artists as to have acquired the
name “Einbildner’ or ‘envisioners’). After warning us about the tendency of
technical images to steer us toward intolerable sameness and boredom, Flusser
goes on to envision them used creatively, that is, in dialogue. Toward the end
of Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), he treats himself
to a rather extravagant vision of how this might look (the weakness of the term
‘images’ is exposed here, because the material being exchanged might be
acoustic or tactile, as well as visible). In his description, the exchange is truly
exhilarating – like musical improvisation in multiple dimensions, sensitive to
harmonies and dissonance, to the particular strengths and weaknesses of the
particular players, totally absorbing, culminating in a joyous suspension of
self-awareness.21 Yet
Flusser insists that such creative exchange does not result in any diminished
sense of self but that, on the contrary, it provides the ideal conditions for
recognising, acknowledging and appreciating what is singular, unique about any
one person’s characteristic contribution. Even in this rather fantastic bit of
science fiction, then, Flusser does not contradict his own direct experience
of dialogue.
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/mira-schendels-gesture-on-art-vilem-flussers-thought-mira-schendel
UNTITLED 1980
Private Collection © The Estate of
Mira Schendel
Photo Credit Tate Photography
Photo Credit Tate Photography
UNTITLED 1962
Oil on Canvas
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 74.9 x 74.7 cm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The
Adolpho Leirner Collection of
Brazilian Constructive Art, Museum Purchase ©
The Estate of Mira Schendel
STILL WAVES OF PROBABILITY 1969
Nylon Thread© Mira Schendel Estate
Nylon Thread© Mira Schendel Estate
Installation
View at Tate Modern, London, 2013
Photo Credit
Tate Photography
+1972.jpg)
UNTITLED ( DISKS ) 1972
Letraset, Graphite on Paper and Transparent Acrylic
Dimensions: Support 270 270 7 mm on Paper, Unique
Lent by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 2007
© The Estate of Mira Schendel
Letraset, Graphite on Paper and Transparent Acrylic
Dimensions: Support 270 270 7 mm on Paper, Unique
Lent by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 2007
© The Estate of Mira Schendel
STILL WAVES OF PROBABILITY 1969
Nylon Thread© Mira Schendel Estate
Nylon Thread© Mira Schendel Estate
Installation View at Tate Modern, London, 2013
Photo Credit Tate Photography
UNTITLED 1963
Presented by Tate Members 2006
© The Estate of Mira Schendel
© The Estate of Mira Schendel
VARIANTS 1977 ( DETAIL )
VARIANTS 1977
Oil on Rice Paper and Acylic Sheets
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Adolpho Leirner Collection of
Oil on Rice Paper and Acylic Sheets
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Adolpho Leirner Collection of
Brazilian Constructive Art © The Estate
of Mira Schendel
VARIANTS 1977 ( DETAIL )
MANDALA 1974
Private Collection © The Estate of
Mira Schendel
Photo by Ricardo Ruikauska
Photo Credit Tate Photography
GRAPHIC OBJECT 1967 - 1968
Daros Latin America Collection, Zurich
© The Estate of Mira Schendel
GRAPHIC OBJECT 1967
Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
© The Estate of Mira Schendel
Max Bense was
the only one who understood that… these things didn’ t function as objects,
because all that mattered was the light and shadow, a continuation of some
drawings of mine, those done on that ultra fine, transparent paper.
Mira Schendel
MIRA SCHENDEL’S GESTURE: ON ART IN
VILEM FLUSSER’S THOUGHT,
WITH ‘ MIRA SCHENDEL ‘ BY FLUSSER
By Nancy Ann Roth
GESTURE & AND THE ARTISTIC LIFE
If information theory seems to gain and lose prominence in
Flusser’s thought over time, his grounding in phenomenology is constant. One of
the best examples is his persistent engagement with the thoroughly
phenomenological idea of gesture. The three books in which he outlined his
theory of communication appeared in quite rapid succession, in 1983, 1985 and
1987, respectively.22 The
volume titled Gesten (Gestures), first published in 1991, ‘traces
back to years of talks and courses Vilém Flusser gave in São Paulo and Aix-en-Provence’.23 The
book bears witness to a striking continuity in his thinking. It suggests
someone moving around his objects of study – a bit like the photographer he
describes in ‘The Gesture of Photographing’ moving around his subject, changing
the distance, changing the angle, finding what he may not have quite known he
was seeking. The book consists of eighteen essays. Two are introductory, and
sixteen bear the title, ‘The Gesture of …’. Many of the gestures correspond to
established ‘media’, for example, writing, painting, videoing or filming. Some,
such as ‘The Gesture of Planting’, take up a broad historical shift in social
consciousness, in this case the rise and spread of ecological awareness. Still
others examine such repetitive, familiar movements as shaving.
‘The Gesture of Writing’ comes first after the
introductions, and, in this context, it quickly becomes identifiable as an
analysis of Flusser’s own most characteristic gesture – the one through which
he articulates his own way of being in the world most effectively. From here,
we move out, with him, either as participants or as spectators of the various
gestures, and Flusser takes care to state his own experience – or lack of it –
in each case. ‘The Gesture of Painting’, for example, is written from the
standpoint of someone observing a painting-in-progress, for Flusser did not
paint. In fact, within the collection, ‘The Gesture of Painting’ presents a
kind of primer in the phenomenological method, the careful bracketing out of
prior knowledge about the matter at hand. It starts with a deliberate refusal
to accept that the painter is the ‘cause’ of the painting, or even that the
‘painter’ can be regarded as separate from his or her brush or pigment or
canvas. The memorable conclusions he reaches here include the idea that a
painter is really only a painter in the gesture of painting itself, in the
actual movement.
Nothing in ‘The Gesture of Painting’ contradicts the memory
of Schendel. And yet her presence seems far stronger in another essay, “The
Gesture of Smoking a Pipe’. The title hardly announces any discussion of art,
and so it comes as something of a surprise to find Flusser using pipe-smoking
to establish both a weak connection and a very sharp distinction between
himself and a ‘real’ artist. For, of course it is Flusser himself who is
the pipe-smoker.
The essay is concerned with a classification of gesture, and
more particularly with the classification of ritual gesture. The broad
contention – argued in more detail elsewhere – is that, with allowances for
overlap, a given gesture will belong to one of three broad categories: work,
communication or ritual. He argues that pipe-smoking belongs to the third
category, ritual – defined as a gesture that is meaningful without either
changing anything, as work is intended to do, or communicating anything. This
furnishes the occasion to look more closely at ritual, and in particular at
religious ritual. He emphasises how Jewish tradition in particular guards
zealously against any association between its rituals and, for example, magic –
for magic seeks to have an effect in the world, and so constitutes a form of
work. He himself seems somewhat startled to conclude that ritual gesture is
essentially aesthetic – not concerned to change the world or to communicate
anything but to ‘act out’ a unique way of being in the world. And it is on this
last point that his pipe-smoking is drawn into the comparison – because it,
too, is only an expression of a singular, personal set of judgements with no
further ambitions. Pipe-smoking is exposed as a pale, small example of ritual,
only just enough to appreciate the kind of gesture that dominates ritual lives,
the lives of priests, prophets – and artists:
It will be apparent to anyone who has ever made such a [ritual]
gesture that we recognize ourselves in them, and only in them: only in piano
playing, only in painting, only in dancing does the player, the painter, the
dancer recognize who he is. It is a founding principle of Zen Buddhism that
self-recognition can be a religious experience, if the recognition is of the
‘whole’ self: its rituals (tea drinking, flower arranging, board games) are
therefore sacred rites. Certainly the greatest discovery of Jewish prophesy is
that religious experience is an experience of the absurd, the groundless, that
‘God’ is manifest as that which is inexplicable, indefensible, ‘good for
nothing else’: hence its battle against magic and its insistence on the absurd
rite, with no aims that make any sense. But all these noble insights, those of
the artist, the Zen monk and the prophets, can be gained in a modest and
profane way by watching such everyday gestures as pipe smoking with sufficient
patience. For then it becomes clear how each of us is a virtual artist, and a
virtual Zen monk, and a virtual prophet. For each of us performs purely
aesthetic, absurd gestures of the same type as smoking a pipe. What also
becomes clear, of course, is what sets us most of us apart from real artists,
Zen monks and prophets: namely the complete renunciation of reason (in the
sense of explicability and purpose) and the unconditional surrender in the
gesture and to the gesture essential to the real artist, the real Zen monk, the
real prophet.24
The real artist, then, is someone who lives in ‘renunciation
of reason and the unconditional surrender in and to the gesture’. It is someone
quite different from a person for whom the aesthetic gesture is superficial, as
pipe-smoking was for Flusser himself. I contend that Mira Schendel had shown
him such a life. She presented him with a challenge of such intensity and
consistency that it burst the boundaries of any understanding of art available
to him at the time. He was forced to develop another. In a sense, he
never recovered the lost boundaries, for they dissolved in the much broader
context of gesture. As gesture, art emerged as a particular kind movement, an
expression of a one kind of intention rather than a vast inventory of objects,
or ‘works’. Set free of physical objects, art flows out of dedicated
institutions and becomes a particular dimension, an intensity, a level of
commitment potentially available in any human activity at all.
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/mira-schendels-gesture-on-art-vilem-flussers-thought-mira-schendel
