Mnemotechnical vegetation
When we look at the work of Nydia Negromonte, we are bound to identify right away a strong “natural” element in it: water, fruit and legumes, clay and wood. The ecological hint reveals itself. But a deeper analysis demands that we outline another suggestion: those works could very well be a specific contribution to the main subject of the nature of art, its own cultural vegetation…
Nature/matter
Up until recent times, art reelaborated images of nature. Paintings and pictures represented nature’s primal elements, not as much the materials themselves, but the plants, the trees in a forest or in the woods, the rivers, hills, mountains and so on. They depicted the general type of landscape. But the landscape also constituted the background of historical, mythological and religious narratives. Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, for instance, are a true landscaping feast. The landscape, be it disguised or more realistic, has always been a form of visual knowledge. Ever since men started painting what they can see and notice, the landscape has been a matter of fabrication built by one’s gaze – thoughtful, careful and mostly imaginary. The painting of a landscape is a reflex of a view of nature. This statement can be legitimately applied to the representation of painting that depicts vegetables, fruit, plants or meat in those traditional still life paintings of the 17th century. From the landscape to the still life – or “silent life” (Stillleben), as the Germans call it – we transition from a bigger scale environment to a domestic environment, from what is far to what is near, from the wide horizon to our daily table. This is a bit of what Nydia does, but the other way around, when she goes from her private atelier to public action, but never preventing this passage from being, at the same time, a widening of the horizon done through the daily table… Would these ancient oscillations between such extreme points in space be still possible today? Can contemporary art keep together horizons that are far apart and intimate proximities? Does it make sense to put Nydia’s work in dialogue with these questions?
Without reinstituting a poetic of gone times, could we say that the “silent life” of nature can still determine the legitimacy of a creation? These questions are not gratuitous. They can be asked by any art historian who will not forget that the passage from “representative” art to the so-called “abstract” art happened through art practices that intended at their core to deepen the knowledge about nature. Impressionistic nature is still the nature of appearances; one could think that cubist or futuristic nature goes further than the nature of appearances, but that is still exactly what it is, even if in a different presentation: to open, explore or represent the chromatic spectrum of light, or to open, explore or represent the anatomic spectrum of the bodies is something that generates aesthetical forms still determined by observation and analysis of nature. As much as “abstract” painting may seem to us as non-natural, it still represents, though, a proposal of singularized knowledge of nature. Mondrian or Kandinsky considered it in terms of a cosmic symbol. That way, it is just not that easy to expel nature from art. Currently, the environment of all the life that surrounds us tends to assume critical aspects that were previously associated with “nature”. To the artist of our times, the very term “nature” carries more meanings. Assimilated within a system, art found itself invited by the conceptualist artists of the 1970s to become a practice of the analysis of the “nature of art” (Joseph KOSUTH). As for the notion of “nature” in its more traditional sense, it survives, tenuous.
In the work of Nydia Negromonte, the oscillations between inherent poles to the topic of “nature” remain alive: productivity and perishability, fertility and ageing, durability and ephemerality, life and death. As classical philosophy once put it, it is a relationship between substance – emblematized in the many substances that make up its universe, be them dense or rarified – and accident, which encompasses whatever happens to those substances as time goes by. Nydia has found the mutual integration of materiality and concept when she named some of the series of works Lição de Coisas (or “a lesson on things”, 2009-2013). The notion of “lesson” implies that, from the observation of nature, phenomena and all beings, a moral can be derived. The genre of fable used to be, from Antiquity to classical times, a poetic and literary support for enunciation and transmission of moralities. The moral of the story here is one in which matter and materials, in their essence, know how to suggest a moral that talks about life as a cycle of growth and death. In more contemporary terms, nature – promoted and, as we are about to see, also inserted – articulates being and becoming, the being and its transformation, in order to, through natural accident – putrefaction, transformation of ingredients while making a potable or edible product, the diaphanous migration between images, etc. –, puts us in touch with the substance of things. In fact, it is with a certain memory of the passage of time that it entertains us. The concept causes the material that confirms it, and vice versa.
What would it be to explore the “nature of art” today? To answer that, we need to reiterate that the horizons of art have expanded considerably since the mid-20th century – without the need of going down to 1900 or 1860! The invention of an ample spectrum of themes and practical possibilities has transformed the very concept of matter. If art history, since the 1800s, can show us a series of movements and semantic slips that are worthy of our interest – and we can already designate quickly what concerns the notion of “nature” –, then we must say that the concept of matter has also evolved. For the longest time, the matter in art was considered by its physical constituents: oil, pigment, earth, bronze, marble, the wood plank for xylography, copper, the canvas itself and so on. One just has to open up Book 35 of Natural History, by Pliny the Elder, which dates from the first century AD, to find, in the description and analysis of colors and natural pigments and of the physical and chemical resources of Roman painting, the wide spectrum of materials with which the artist could deal with even two thousand years ago. Being like that, the evocation of the color rubrica seems to elicit the Brazilian soil, an intensely red earth. Today, it is not the usage of these physical resources that defines the artistic work. However, certain artists could decide to remain loyal to them. In this case, the very act of painting or sculpting means electing a collection of gestures and procedures, without pretending they are more legitimate than others. Painting or sculpting is just a way to make art; it is not anymore its privileged emblem, despite of the long tradition that these art forms carry with themselves. An important modification has affected the term “matter”: the concept of “art material” is quite talked about these days, the notion of an artist’s “material”. If this word has become part of the whole nomenclature, it is because “matter” used to be overly associated with the traditional processes of the creation of an image. By the end of the 1960s, the introduction of the term “immaterial” confirmed the tendency of reconsidering the imperative of art’s “materiality”. More than 20 years later, a historian had perfect authority to title a large book about the subject as Material and immaterial History of the modern art . This “material” is the new “matter” of contemporary artists. It is under this critical perspective that one can evaluate the work of Nydia Negromonte.
Materials
Nydia moves between “matter” and “material”. She makes the mutual integration of both emblematic. When we follow the steps in her work, we find quite diversified modalities. They involve materialities, shapes and plastic propositions that are all plural. We will not be mentioning the works in chronological fashion, because the whole coming and going would not allow for that. The labyrinthine structure of a work initiated in the 1990s demands that we adopt an approach that is more theme-or, say, “family”-oriented.
One first challenge that can be posed is to think of a balanced presence of a slightly more confidential material, one that involves a better known practice of the image and of the material, which by its turn includes a relational and social dimension. In the 2000s, many works correspond to the identity of the former. Poda, Pulmo, Acróstico, Almacén and the such clearly affirm their materic values, concerning themselves with – according to modern logic that thinks of art as the disclosure of invisible phenomena – showing certain subtle behaviors of matter. What we understand by “fine matter” are the processes of superpositioning, molding, and confining the air, all invested in the interfaces and fineness of the proportions between the surface and the backside of tissue paper or rice paper. They generate thin, opaque, translucent skins, marked by the presence, on their fine depth, of objects and drawings. The sensitive dimension of these monochromatic sheets leads the observer to touch and not just to look at them. Two kinds of atelier coexist then: the more traditional one, where creations using woodcuts, photographs, printings, paper and the such can take place; and another one, out in the open, ephemeral and including interactive action. However, so that any good dialectics demands a third item, we can consider that the “confidential material” of the images and the “social material” of the actions intersect with each other and find a way to integrate with each other in one same material aesthetics of memory that physically supports the immateriality of the reflection.
Nydia can be understood as a “tropical member” of a family of artists that we would call “relational”, projected by the contemporary scene from widely spread reflections, at the end of the 1990s, made by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Aside from the differences between artists themselves, we can also notice, in those practices, a strong appeal to the audience, the transformation of art into a request for the audience’s participation, an attempt to dilute authorship – but not exactly to dilute the authority of the proposition –, a search for sharing. This is about Casa das Vitaminas (“house of smoothies”), at the Farroupilha Park in Porto Alegre (2011), or also about the collective exhibition Fiat Mostra Brazil, in the underground of the Biennial Pavilion, in São Paulo (2006). Around a table, the audience can appropriate a device that allows them to make juices and smoothies, in an allegory of the art that feeds. In Nydia’s words, “food and water generate energy”. So how does art nurture? By suggesting the audience ways to participate in it and to think through it. Nydia’s relational actions know how to invest in the uncertainty zone in which no one knows exactly who is who or, in the least, in which everybody pretends to get lost in each other’s identities: the spectator in the artist’s, and the artist in the spectator’s. A kind of aesthetic isonomy shared by the old producer and the old receptor – in Casa das Vitaminas, Nydia does not act, she only watches – supports what can be considered an exercise in repositioning of roles and in the invention of virgin conditions for art experimentation. But let’s be objective: the Domingos da Criação (“creation Sundays”), established by Frederico Morais in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, are not that far from that; its tutelary shadow exerts a strong attraction, even if an occasionally unconscious one. Just like with all physical and natural processes present in Nydia’s work, the cultural porosity and the many types of symbolic capillarity are able to weave subterranean and unconscious relations. The ghost of one Frederico Morais, an institutional agent of marked moments in dominical creativity, over forty years ago, now seems to soar over all kinds of Brazilian artistic context in which the audience is invited to take part in whatever kind of action that has ever since been dubbed a “participatory action”. Nydia explores a vein that has been shown as critically potent in the 1970s, when Roberto Pontual, writing about those Domingos, said that “the artist is the author of a starting structure, but its life and blossoming will depend on the level of participation of the audience or the artist themselves. In this new situation of art-activity, the distance between artist and audience is increasingly shorter. In the creative making, everybody gets fused together” . So, is this invention or reinvention? It is both. The age that has titled itself as “postmodern” has turned “rereading” into a cultural tactic. To the eyes of a critic, it is clear that Nydia “revisits” the fundaments of “participatory art”, which has its Brazilian beginnings dated back to the 1960s. But the renewal, today, of a similar idea means that there is a social demand and that the artist never considers herself capable of adding a “magic” value to her work.
An interesting integrating factor in these actions is their sensory dimension. Why is that? Aside from the handling of fruit, water, ingredients, the fact that this is natural matter emphasizes the touch, the sense of taste and the sense of smell, the hands that operate and manipulate, the eyes that enjoy. It is not about turning “still life” into living culinary; it is about generating some pleasure by bringing together the senses evoked. And pleasure, as we know, is – or used to be – considered by philosophical Aesthetics, back in its historical origins, as the motor that drives the aesthetic experience. Here, the smoothie-making device renders the element of pleasure almost literal, and without it, as was believed in the past, art would have no effect. Actually, independently of the aesthetic quality of the installation, the sensory coefficient can be considered as a tactic of “repoetization” of the artistic experience. The masters of the modern philosophy of art, predominantly the ones with a Marxist alignment, have denied art of the right to bring social relief, satisfaction or a reconciliation with reality. When confronted with Casa das Vitaminas, they would probably criticize its fun dimension. However, it is legitimate to keep asking if art should reconcile or critically suspend our empathy with the world. Nydia Negromonte chooses to side with joy. Shared joy.
Waters
Installations such as Hídrica: Episódios, exhibited in the 30th São Paulo Biennial, or Lição de Coisas, in the Pampulha Art Museum (2012), in Belo Horizonte, complexify their installed devices. The coexistence of water systems (bowls, faucets, pipes) and tables displaying fruit stuck inside a layer of dry clay (or lettuce bags with transparent wraps that bring factual points concerning the product) creates a setting that is hard to interpret. It’s the water. Nydia gives it a meaning that is more political than properly plastic. By the way, what would it be about, if we preferred to talk about the plasticity of water? When it comes to Hídrica: Episódios, the artist talks about a game between the public sphere and the private domain, of private appropriation of a public good. However, water, as we know, is also a plastic element. It does things and acts on things: it molds, involves, irrigates, bathes, cleans, flows, penetrates, humidifies, circulates, stagnates, floats as clouds, restores color, crosses fibers and the earth, it inundates, carries along with it, dissolves and destroys. After Pliny, we can recommend a reread of scientist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote two thousand years later about “imagination and matter” in the introduction of Water and Dreams: “In his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of the flowing water. Water is truly the transitory element. It is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth. A being dedicated to water is a being in flux” . In this sense, beyond the relations between public and private, as Nydia describes her installation in the Pampulha Museum, I can also see, in the water circuitry and its extension in the putrefiable matter, a means of invitation that, by intending to involve the audience “politically”, would actually reconnect with a particular, ethical idea of art. To make “politics” in art, one does not always need to use what is ecologically given. But, since this concerns a natural element, one needs to understand the deep relations with the poetic imaginary in general. To intertwine – in order to reinstate them – the values of material and formal imagination, within an artistic context that has relegated them to one of the margins, is something that defines an ethics. As Bachelard puts it, aware of the material dreams and the oneiric landscapes that build aesthetic emotions, each element is the carrier of a kind of dream, which is itself a carrier of a passion and an ideal.
In the early 2010s, the poetics of Nydia Negromonte happens, as we have seen, under the sign of Lição de Coisas. Those are things of nature, things of life. Ever since the Cinquecento, art has been thought of by artists as a means to measure themselves against nature while also contemplating it. These days, one no longer asks if art is or is not superior to nature – but the relations between them could very well make sense as a “graft”. This is how Bachelard defines the work of imagination. According to him, only the graft “can truly provide the material imagination with an exuberance of forms.” The most potent of these grafts are, for instance, the fruit molded in terracotta. The Palácio das Artes, in Belo Horizonte, later brought them in programmatic fashion, months after the Biennial. Cracks and tears had made their way through the thickness of the containing shells. The fruit themselves sometimes continued to grow, projecting organic extensions to the outside. Here, nature reveals itself as fertile or dead. Life and death. Always. Death and transfiguration. But what makes the biological cycle, both real and metaphorical, be materialized in the fruit and vegetables covered in clay and resounding to us in a suprasensorial level? They point, in allegorical manner, to the work of metamorphosis and memory.
Memory, always
The twenty modules of Lição de Coisas seem to me as emblematic of this poetic of the memory in Nydia’s work. They bring photographs from the artist’s personal archives and also their attached ghostly “doubles” in the form of a laser-engraved picture that is similar to the picture itself. The gestures and the everyday situations have a continuation in the low relief of the image, which, just like a marmoreal pellicle, stigmatizes their silhouettes. Also shown as an installation at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, together with the table with the fruit encased in clay, these binary modules make for a great illustration of the ambivalence and complexity of the images: evident and hidden, clear and secret, discernible and indiscernible, present and removed in their own enigma, body and silhouette, the now-from-yesterday and the here-from-there… A “lesson on something” is also a lesson on time. The visual tenuousness produced by the laser works as an allegory for the attention to time. An attention to observation, an attention to the suggestion given by the phantom image. To turn the image into a particular space and time that allow for the continuation of other spaces and times – to use a currently fashionable choice of words – is still the defining trait of the true art of memory. A folder made available during the 2012 exhibition at Pampulha justifies, on page 7, the photographs of azulejos: “Old azulejo that came from a demolition site in the Santo Agostinho neighborhood. Azulejo removed from the demolition site of a house built by Niemeyer with leftover azulejos from the Casa do Baile (previously a casino), the Pampulha Art Museum and the Iate Clube, all in the waterfront of the Pampulha Lake. Only 15 ‘unique’ pieces.” Here, the azulejo, which brings together fire and earth, is carried within a traditional series of concepts that supports the usual aesthetics of memory. There is not even the need to insist in analyzing its meaning. It constitutes a part of the typology of memory to resort to the vestige, to the significant piece of debris that becomes a relic – and a fetish – because the values of antiquity and historicity are the foundation of all patrimonial concerns. Actually, the artist who explores the vein of memory is doomed to repeat himself. One cannot escape memory. And memory also implies some semiotic and visual repetition. The Lições de Coisas work in pairs. So do the pictures of an intervention in a house on one of Belo Horizonte’s streets. Jasmim do Cabo (2010), or “cape jasmine” in a loose translation, shows the effects of forgetfulness in a house that became uninhabited. This rediscovery constitutes a gesture that is similar to the one made by the archeologist who lived in that house for almost three thirds of a century, a gesture that led Nydia to pick selected photographs from the family’s archive. Printed in adhesive paper, they are then stuck to the wall. Those are semiotic repetitions of memory, but also a dive into the reference mechanisms that the images show, images as they are. When the photograph shows an object that still exists inside the house, the pictured chair is displayed live right beside. If the photograph shows and brings about the “reappearance” of the objects now in disuse, the clay plates, applied in the same shapes by the side, motivate an even more impactful “resurgence”: as they progressively peel down, they reveal the many layers of painting accumulated on the wall. Engraving and photography, together in the process of “revealing”, show here how central they are in the memorial practices. They signal, in their present relationship with the past, certain particularly fundamental categories in Psychology: when someone remembers something, they generate reprints, condensations, superpositions, associations; they reminisce in their mnemic traces, as Freud put it, the cerebral-affective marks of their experience. It is a richness proper to the original ambivalence of the “material”, with strong materic connotations, in order to project a kind of pleasure in loss. Something or someone needs to die so the digger can satisfy their archeological drive. Art tends, sometimes overly, to serve as a compliment to the present in and of itself, forgetting the relationship it once had with death when it was ruled by the notion of “representation”. It is because of absence that the presence of an image acquires a meaning. It is because of presence that the absence is the constituent negative of the image. The marriage of the negative and the positive, or, better said, of the presence and the absence, creates a specific kind of pleasure. And it is not just because it defines itself from a sense of loss that it is less pleasant. As has been said already, Nydia chose joy.
A vegetation of art? If artistic creation can never ignore where it comes from and on what pre-treaded grounds it evolves; if today the notion of “nature” brings together many kinds of understandings – from the model nature of old art to the endangered nature of the contemporary environment, and including the nature of the artistic system, from which no artist can escape; if, finally, every work, every path, every image can never cease to be the tree that hides the ample and immemorial forest of art, then, yes, we are allowed to use a vegetable metaphor here. Let’s conclude with an allegorical image: the spectator who cools themselves under the waterfall that comes through the glass wall of the Biennial pavilion is, in some way, awarded with liquid shards of art. Whether we want it or not, the ample complex formed by artistic nature, which is, at one time, earthy and artificial – a prolix and proteiform vegetation –, cannot be packaged. It leaks and diffracts. Their skins transpire meanings and a sense, cover processes that act from inside out, according to time. In a way, the active(ist) dimension that can be found in Nydia perfectly coexists with the most confidential processes: it is about taking to a public forum, through the transformation of scales and ingredients, the energy and the sensitivity contained within their fine materialities. It is about two differentiated scales of one same process of sensitive and suprasensorial involvement. At that order of reasoning, a “smoothie” is a mnemotechnical process that guarantees the survival of the artistic energy. The rain of metaphors pours over us. It is up to each one of us to accept them or not.