Edson Luiz André de Sousa
Published in the exhibition catalogue
Carmela Gross: Big Wheel. Porto Alegre: Farol Santander, 2019
[português]
“It’s our disturbing solitude
It’s our shade on the ground
our margin of error:
the leftover things…”
Manoel Ricardo de Lima[1]
Cumulus congestus is one of the cloud types classified in the low stage, located about 2 kilometers from the surface. These clouds are described as formations with prominent edges at the top and considerable vertical development, indicating strong upward movement. Their existence reveals deep layers of instability. Carmela Gross, in her Big Wheel exhibition, sketches a thought about ascension and fall, volcanic eruptions of language invading spaces emptied of words, mapping countless zones of instability. Her artistic strategies enter like restless vapors through the cracks of the machinery of language, dissolving cliché-images, interrogating signs, unveiling power strategies, confronting form in a movement that we could call counter-image. This affinity with clouds dates back a long time, as in 1967, Carmela Gross created the work CLOUDS — cut and painted wooden pieces with synthetic blue enamel. As Ana Maria Beluzzo evokes, “she sends clouds to the ground, bringing the impalpable within reach of the hands.”[2] While, on one hand, a cloud-thought indicates transient, fragile, and ethereal places, on the other, this same volatile spirit suggests movement, force, and dismantles the idea of a world that always returns to the same place. Fixing places has always been central to the logic of power, establishing realities and trying to freeze places of meaning. Thus, the meaning we must seek will always be the one to come—partial, enigmatic, and incomplete. In this regard, Carmela Gross closely resembles Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, when he challenges Polonius in his subservience to the word of the Other. Hamlet, pointing to the clouds, says to Polonius: “Do you see that cloud over there, almost in the shape of a camel?” Polonius responds, affirming that it is indeed a camel. But then, Hamlet continues: “It seems more like a squirrel to me.” Polonius, ever servile, agrees: “Yes, it has the hump of a squirrel.” Hamlet then provocatively asks: “Or could it be a whale?”[3] Hamlet thus reveals a parasitic relationship with language, reminiscent of the voluntary servitude so masterfully dissected by Étienne de la Boétie. His act of breaking mirrors functions as an analytical interpretation, making established meanings waver. Carmela Gross sets her clouds in motion, and her exhibition forces us to navigate them like the 13 passersby in her animation video (2015), where each person seeks their balance in a singular grammar that supports a journey in the world. The stumble of one of the figures, which falls apart in space, indicates a possible path. We are always stumbling in language, and it is from this fall that we can collect the vapors of new images. More and more, we need images that reclaim spaces of enigma, placing us before new questions, thus triggering territories of hope. To circumscribe our darkness forces us to seek the direction of the roots that sustain us—not to revere them as immutable inheritances, but to also open new spaces of support. Ernst Bloch begins his classic trilogy The Principle of Hope, dedicated to the reflection on the place of utopian thought, with the forceful statement that “thinking is transposing.”[4] We know well that these transpositions do not happen without disturbance, for, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke evokes, “art has done nothing but show us the confusion in which we almost always find ourselves. It has disturbed us, instead of making us silent and calm.”[5]
In the installation BIG WHEEL, which gives the exhibition its name, the spectator is provoked, with their gaze, to draw vertical lines in space, searching for the tie points at the ends of the ropes. The lines tense with the magnetic force of the displaced objects in their stories of drift and abandonment, seemingly pulling the columns to the ground. Many narratives are condensed in this discursive web that tries to tell us a story of remnants, margins, and forgotten things. The space outlined by wires draws a map of lines, reminding me of Milton Santos’ definition of space when he proposes thinking of space as an inseparable set of systems of objects and systems of actions.[6] Carmela Gross thus activates, in the visuality of these forms, gestures stored in oblivion. However, for the artist, it is not enough to point to these places of abandonment. She rips through space so that we can see the extras that do not always appear. We thus have a vast memorial, a kind of melody of the world through an inventory of objects. Each object establishes a possible narrative, a horizon of images in the spirit of Bloch’s utopian consciousness, which sought to see far, but ultimately only to cross the darkness close to the moment just lived.[7]
To see the extras that slowly appear in the background of the world’s scenes, one must listen to the noise of the backstage, refuse the immediate fascination of the first image that shows itself, and wait for the time of what is in the second plane. Thus, the EXTRAS emerge one by one, which the artist visually recites with her luminous red neon, letter by letter. We read, in this way, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx, as the marquee of a film in which history is made by the supporting characters: nulls, vagabonds, deserters, thieves, swindlers, pimps, pickpockets, scavengers, traffickers, beggars… We can imagine this continuous line of words as a horizontal Ferris wheel, which raises the question of what reading really is. How can one read from what is in the shadows? Rilke, in a fragment of his text The Testament, draws attention to two almost invisible apples on the windowsill in Jan Van Eyck’s painting Madonna of Lucca, and says he would like to be not one of the apples, but its “modest shadow.”[8] Carmela Gross seeks to circumscribe these shadows and place them back in the scene.
Thus, the work LUZ DEL FUEGO II presents us with the fires that still burn, and which we have not approached enough to identify the origin of this fire, which is why they will continue to burn. We witness countless images of state violence, attempting to silence so many legitimate uprisings. The video recovers newspaper photos from February 2012 to November 2016—conflicts in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Mexico, as well as in other countries. It also brings confrontations in the streets of Athens, Rome, Santiago, and many others, including demonstrations in numerous Brazilian cities in June 2013. Each image tells a story that reminds me of Jimi Hendrix in his 1968 song “Up from the Skies,” where he evokes the “smell of the world that burned.”[9] Now more than ever, we need to return to those ashes, seek to read them, to minimally respond to the provocation posed by Jack London: “How could someone find the words to describe a nightmare?”[10] The Roda Gigante exhibition by Carmela Gross leaves us some clues.
*
[1] LIMA, Manoel Ricardo. Geografia Aérea. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 7 Letras, 2014.
[2] BELLUZO, Ana Maria. Carmela Gross. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2000, p. 10.
[3] SHAKESPEARE, William. Hamlet. Translation by Millôr Fernandes. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 1997, p. 77.
[4] BLOCH, Ernst. O Princípio Esperança. Translation by Néli Schineider. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Contraponto, 2005, p. 14.
[5] RILKE, Rainer Maria. A melodia das coisas. Translation by Claudia Cavalcanti. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2011, p. 125.
[6] SANTOS, Milton. A natureza do espaço. São Paulo: Editora Edusp, 2002, p. 21.
[7] BLOCH, Ernst. Op. cit., p. 23.
[8] RILKE, Rainer Maria. O testamento. Translation by Tercio Redondo. São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2009, p. 139.
[9] I thank Carlo Pianta for reminding me of this song at the seminary in the Psychoanalytic Association of Porto Alegre (APPOA) on April 2019.
[10] LONDON, Jack. O pagão. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Dantes, 2000, p. 12.
Carmela Gross 