{"id":750,"date":"2010-06-22T17:02:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-22T17:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=750"},"modified":"2010-06-22T17:02:00","modified_gmt":"2010-06-22T17:02:00","slug":"rivane-no-nytimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=750","title":{"rendered":"Rivane no NYTimes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rivane Neuenschwander prepares ribbons printed with wishes for \u201cI Wish Your Wish,\u201d part of a show of her art opening Wednesday at the New Museum<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n
A Brazilian Makes Playful but Serious Art<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By LARRY ROHTER<\/a> \/ Published: June 21, 2010<\/h6>\n

At the New Museum last Friday the artist Rivane Neuenschwander was on her knees, slicing up the carpeting in a third-floor gallery as she searched energetically for microphones hidden in the floorboards and walls. A security and surveillance team had secreted the bugs there at her request, but without her knowing their locations; now the devices were recording her hunt in the otherwise silent room, in preparation for a fast-approaching show.  <\/p>\n

Ms. Neuenschwander\u2019s exhibition, a \u201cmidcareer survey\u201d \u2014 she\u2019s 42 \u2014 that opens on Wednesday and continues through Sept. 19, is called \u201cA Day Like Any Other,\u201d<\/a> but this was definitely out of the ordinary. \u201cI don\u2019t know how this is going to work,\u201d she said. \u201cI may have to tear the walls down.\u201d
The painstaking search was part of a new work, \u201cThe Conversation,\u201d inspired by the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola<\/a> film of the same name, in which a wiretap expert believes that he himself is being observed.
\u201cRemember that wonderful last scene, where Gene Hackman<\/a> destroys his apartment looking for a microphone, a bug?\u201d she said. \u201cThat kind of paranoia interests me, and thus this work is a mixture of chance and control. It is not preconfigured but is instead rather like a game, and it ends only when I have found all the microphones, which will then be replaced with speakers to play back the sounds of my destruction of this space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Games figure heavily in much of Ms. Neuenschwander\u2019s art<\/a>, especially games meant to make the spectator a participant in a work. She is a Brazilian, and very much part of a tradition of blurring the distinction between creator and viewer established by modern Brazilian artists like Lygia Clark and H\u00e9lio Oiticica.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think she is completely different from her predecessors, but they are also there and essential to understanding her work,\u201d said Richard Flood, chief curator at the New Museum, in the Bowery. \u201cThe notion of social agency is incredibly important, and maybe that\u2019s what she and they share the most: the belief in art as something participatory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Neuenschwander also draws from her country\u2019s rich folk traditions. One of her best-known works \u2014 \u201cI Wish Your Wish,\u201d first presented in 2003 \u2014 is derived from a tradition popular among pilgrims to the Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Bahia, who bind ribbons to their wrists or the church\u2019s front gate in the belief that when the ribbons fall off or disintegrate, their wishes will be granted.
In Ms. Neuenschwander\u2019s conceptual-art variation, which will be displayed at the rear of the New Museum\u2019s lobby, colorful silk ribbons have each been stamped with one of 60 wishes left by previous viewers of the piece. The show\u2019s visitors can take a ribbon from one of 10,296 small holes in the wall in exchange for scribbling a new wish on a slip of paper and inserting it into the hole. \u201cWhen I was starting off, I was very interested in the ephemeral, in quotidian materials that disappear or are subject to entropy, which is how my art got stuck with labels like \u2018ethereal materialism,\u2019 \u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

Ms. Neuenschwander\u2019s artistic vocabulary \u201calways contains the presence of the other,\u201d said Ricardo Sardenberg, a Rio de Janeiro-based curator, critic and art-book publisher who has known the artist for a dozen years. \u201cShe started off drawing on things that are typically ours,\u201d he added, \u201cfood and objects from the street and from fairs. But once she began traveling outside Brazil, she grabbed hold of elements from the daily life of wherever she happened to be and transformed them aesthetically, too.\u201d
Another piece, called \u201cInvoluntary Sculptures (Speech Acts),\u201d originally from 2001 (but like many of her works, constantly updated), takes its title and inspiration from Brassa\u00ef\u2019s 1933 photographs of graffiti and other ephemera. Ms. Neuenschwander has combed bars and taverns looking for the three-dimensional doodles that customers idly construct from straws, paper, plastic and clips while they drink and converse, which she then turns into \u201cworks of art\u201d by mounting them on pedestals.
Behind the playful exterior of her work, Ms. Neuenschwander says, there often lurks something \u201cmore somber and serious,\u201d even dark. Brazilians may have the reputation of being happy-go-lucky, but that is not an attitude or a temperament she generally shares. <\/p>\n

\u201cI like a sense of humor, but me myself, normally I\u2019m more melancholy than playful,\u201d she said. \u201cI think that I\u2019m fearful, that I take things badly, and that the playfulness you see is really a way of escaping my timidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Suzanne DeChillo\/The New York Times<\/h6>\n
Rivane Neuenschwander installs buckets at the New Museum for her piece \u201cRain Rains.\u201d She says her playfulness has a \u201csomber and serious\u201d side. <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For example, she said, the apparent hopefulness of \u201cI Wish Your Wish\u201d is really a way of getting spectators to articulate the most primeval of their anxieties. \u201cIf you wish for health for yourself and your family, it\u2019s because you fear a disease,\u201d she contended. \u201cIf you say, \u2018I wish for Obama to be re-elected,\u2019 it\u2019s because you dread a return to the Bush era.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in 1967 in Belo Horizonte, the fourth largest city in Brazil, Ms. Neuenschwander is of Swiss, Portuguese and Amerindian descent. She comes from what she describes as \u201ca family of bohemians,\u201d and grew up \u201chappy but kind of directionless\u201d \u2014 and somewhat solitary \u2014 in a striking Modernist house \u201cwith lots of hiding places and nooks and crannies,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very quiet and always had difficulty in communicating, which is perhaps why I had to find a way to express myself,\u201d she said. \u201cI tried music first, guitar and flute, but that didn\u2019t work because I didn\u2019t have the talent, so then I turned to the social sciences, wanting to become an anthropologist. But I didn\u2019t have the patience to study sociology and economics, so I eventually gave that up, too.\u201d
After earning a fine arts degree in Minas Gerais, her home state, \u201cI lost a lot of time doing applied arts to make some money and survive,\u201d she said. But she worked on her own projects on the side, and in 1996 she won a grant to study at the Royal College of Art in London, and a gallery there soon took an interest in her; she also spent time in Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden before returning to her birthplace, where she lives with her German husband, Jochen Volz, artistic director of the Inhotim Center of Contemporary Art<\/a> in Brumadinho, Brazil, and two children.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is always a bit of surprise about her abroad because she\u2019s got that Germanic surname, light hair and green eyes,\u201d Ivo Mesquita, a Brazilian critic and curator who formerly directed the S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial, said in a telephone interview. \u201cBut her passport is Brazilian, she has a Minas Gerais accent when she speaks Portuguese, and her artistic lineage is primarily, though not exclusively, Brazilian.\u201d
Many of the non-Brazilian influences come through film, literature or music. For instance, \u201cFirst Love,\u201d a piece conceived in 2005 that will be part of the New Museum show, is inspired by a Samuel Beckett<\/a> novella of the same name, and requires the services of a police sketch artist, who asks visitors to describe in detail the features of the first person with whom they fell in love.<\/p>\n

\u201cRivane\u2019s work is really very diverse, and she\u2019s got a mind that works around the clock,\u201d said Sergio Bessa of the Bronx Museum of the Arts<\/a>, who was the curator for a show on Brazilian Tropicalismo in 2006 that included a work of Ms. Neuenschwander\u2019s. (Based on \u201cJoe Carioca,\u201d a Walt Disney comic book series, the work stripped everything from the comic page except empty speech bubbles that visitors could fill in.) \u201cShe is definitely here for the long run. She is always interested in ideas, and the material and the style flow from the particular concept that she has decided to grab hold of.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the New Museum, \u201cA Day Like Any Other\u201d travels to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona; the Miami Art Museum; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.<\/i><\/p>\n