Pindorama 02, 2020, Sculpture with beehive and beeswax, 17 x 46 x 25 cm | 6.69 x 18.11 x 0.98 in.
From the neo-concrete movement emerged the idea of the work of art as a “quasi-corpus” and “living organism” and a return to the affective qualities, sensitivity and existential and emotive significance of art. An ambitious project, given the dominance of a certain rationalism in the immediately preceding period, which “robs art of all autonomy and replaces the non-transferable qualities of the work of art with notions of scientific objectivity” (Manifesto Neoconcreto).
For the neoconcretists, such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, it was a question of dynamiting the notions of time-space and creating the experience of art: the communion of matter, form, meaning, relationship and affection, giving the aesthetic experience an almost epiphanic character, based on the contact between artist-object-space-public. The totality of the art experience proposed by the movement could have no other destination than expansion; hence its strong influence on other cultural and behavioral spheres, of which music, with the Tropicalist movement, was perhaps the most exemplary.
It is along these lines that we can situate a work such as that of Ricardo Siri from Rio de Janeiro who, from a career established in the musical world, has expanded his repertoire into the visual arts, in which he incorporates sound elements, performances and immersions. Siri updates certain neo-concrete assumptions of an organic whole for the experience of art, in a spatial and temporal approach that unites artist-work-space-environment-spectator.
But if the neoconcrete project started from the reference of the work of art to reach space, gesture and music – like the parangolés and Tropicália – Siri does the opposite: he starts from music and sound to meet the work, proposing hybrid dynamics for the experience of art and reaffirming its permanent character as an enigma. It’s not the 60s anymore, after all. The promise of liberation through the support/body, as an aesthetic and therefore political element, met with a strong reaction. Manifestos have become meaningless; they are today a resource for stylized politics and PR agency marketing strategies.
Organic concreteness
If all that is left to art in the face of the dystopia that shapes the experience of now is discourse, or “plots of subjective accounts”, as proposed by a significant part of current production, it is a sign that something of the neoconcrete heritage – the force, probably – has dissipated. In an era of cacophony and noise, whose paradoxical result is immobility and silence, in which cultural and social experience takes place in the precariousness and instability of the digital ether, establishing a corpus made up of a network of atomized particles, Siri proposes a certain organic concreteness for art, established in a space of expanded perception and a call for collective experience, in an era exhausted of subjectivity. He therefore conceives a locus – like the Nests – of intimate relations between artist-work-public, but with an intensely political character: collecting sticks to produce shelters, in this crazy world of the new fascism, is something potentially subversive.
Siri seems to be aware of this. However, instead of producing pamphlet art, he uses the very material of the work as the beginning and end of an aesthetic-sensory experience. There is no going back, in art terms. We’re all neo-concrete now, one might say, but in a world that has given rise to Covid-19, how can we interact without touching?
Ricardo Siri, War 01, 2020, Sculpture with beehive and beeswax, 17 x 46 x 2.5 cm | 6.69 x 18.11 x 0.98 in
“Canvases” made of wax
Works such as War and Pindorama, “canvases” made of beeswax molded with solder, forming world maps and a map of Brazil, make explicit this, shall we say, very clash: art and culture confronting each other in the field, eventually mined, made up of matter, form, language, meaning and history. The fragility of the support – wax hives -, supported by the heresy of the proposal (which begins, without being exhausted, in the choice of a theme), is matched by a display of purely aesthetic strength, and this is one of the many paradoxes that Siri’s work seeks to explore. Impregnated with urgency, this is a work that ultimately aims to communicate, the ultimate meaning, if not the purpose, of an expansion. Siri incorporates the world – culture – into the space and matter of art itself. He chooses literality as neoconcretude. And he impregnates the perceptive environment with allusions, affections, emotions and sound – the latter sometimes occurring in silence: there is a buzzing sound that interrelates the pieces and the Organismo exhibition experience.
In Colmeia, Siri amplifies the perception of space-time-sound. He deconstructs trumpets, bombards, trombones and horns, establishing new relationships between the instruments, creating zoomorphic and anthropomorphic associations (instruments-humans-bees) and composing a new whole: from a central core, the ends and bells of the instruments “jump” from the base, towards space – towards the viewer. Siri couldn’t be more explicit. He composes and performs a symphony from silence, at high volume: a sound texture that becomes more powerful the more it is imagined. In the Aglomerados series, in which he sets up a magic eye in the boxes of bees found in apiaries, the movement is reversed; here, it is not the work that goes to the viewer, but the viewer who is called to the work: to discover himself reflected in the crowd photos inside them, encountering a state of collectivity, as a component of an organic whole united by life and language, but whose meaning can only be established, in its totality – that is, in the possible scope of meanings – by means of a magic eye, that is, art.
Between wax, feathers, clay, sticks, drumming and ancestral associations, Siri doesn’t seem to be suggesting a return to a state of nature; eventually, he ironizes the concept of a purity that never existed. So far, and this is an asset, Siri contains the buzz of works in the territory of art, albeit in an expanded perspective: life-art. This may sound smaller than the neo-concrete ambition; Hélio Oiticica aimed for a cosmic expansion from matter, achieved through radical expressiveness; Lygia Clark proposed art therapy, based on sensory interfaces. Conversely, in Organismo, Siri exhausts the expressiveness of matter itself. This is his limit – and the possibility of reaching the transcendental.
Watch Ricardo Siri’s performances on YouTube
