Tania Rivera
Published in the exhibition catalogue
Carmela Gross: Big Wheel. Porto Alegre: Farol Santander, 2019
[português]
Carmela Gross multiplies the gaze, cuts through space, and suspends the place and the meaning of images and objects.
Conceived specifically for the Farol Santander in Porto Alegre, the installation BIG WHEEL particularly reveals the complex poetic operations that the artist has been shaping, through various media and methods, over more than 50 years. In the atrium of the building, which once served as a bank branch, we find an assortment of diverse objects: car wheels, gas cylinders, stacks of books and newspapers, suitcases and bags, iron chains, wooden and Styrofoam boxes, packages, a punching bag, and numerous iron weights. A television, a typewriter, a trophy, pots, garden gnomes, a Snow White figure, and cement animals might suggest the idea of debris or scrap. However, the arrangement is meticulous, and everything is in good condition, even when slightly worn or rusty. It is not about amassing waste but about carrying out a peculiar operation of construction, as evidenced by buckets, bricks, carts, iron blocks and cylinders, bags of gravel and cement, and a few cans of paint.
The ensemble does not stand apart from our everyday urban landscape, which often blends construction and decay, materials, and remnants. The street, the exterior, invades the building’s interior, and the city seems to permeate the imposing eclectic architecture of the cultural center. But this is not all: BIG WHEEL ties each object to a point on the guardrail or columns of the mezzanine surrounding it using ropes of various colors and intricate sailor knots. This arrangement draws a web of lines that extend in multiple directions throughout the space. Each element asserts its weight and presence in tension with the architecture, while my gaze, leaping from one object to another, overturns—sets spinning—the building, guided by the simplicity of each common object, questioning the relationship between us, places, and things—between me, every place, and every object.
In the grand edifice, full of curves and ornaments, the suspended lines form intersections that echo the X of a 1989 work displayed in the gallery encircling the atrium. The iron ray sculptures of this piece nailed to the wall, allude to the graphic sign commonly used to represent an explosion. The Xs formed by the intersecting ropes in BIG WHEEL might also suddenly expand with a force that could launch the architecture and objects into the air. Or, perhaps, the weight of each object might violently pull on the columns and guardrail, collapsing the walls and ceiling and demolishing the entire structure.
Amid this profound yet precise deconstruction, this movement and singularization imposed on my gaze by this “de-architecture,” something suddenly stands out in the background: a small ladder. It seems to wink at the viewer familiar with its presence in several of Carmela’s works, beginning with the drawing of STAIRS (1968) on a slope on the outskirts of São Paulo, where the terrain, likely shaped by heavy machinery, already formed ascending steps. In this early work, the ladder stood sovereign, as a kind of minimal architecture bridging nature and representation, object and language.
Tensioning these two poles, perhaps the artist’s entire oeuvre consists of a semiotic gesture—precise and subtle—that performs the feat of questioning representation to suspend it in poetry. Oscillating between object and sign, Carmela’s poetics transform what is already there—relief, line, object—into art while simultaneously keeping it anchored in the world.
To better clarify this point, let us return to BIG WHEEL. Suddenly, as abruptly as the ladder, an element takes shape and isolates itself from the ensemble: a bottle rack that resembles a sea urchin, with its upward-pointing metal rods (which also resonate with the installation’s ropes, incidentally). The artist thus appropriates one of Marcel Duchamp’s earliest ready-made, the Bottle Rack from 1914, reactivating, in her own way, the gesture of transforming an ordinary object into a work of art by designating it as such. However, Gross subverts this elevation, making the ready-made revert to being merely a bottle rack among countless other mundane objects in the installation.
The operation is remarkable and might be termed a “counter ready-made”—or perhaps, forcing the English term into a neologism, a “ready-dismade.” But Gross goes further: she not only critiques and dismantles the status of the art object but also undermines the status of any object. Whether art or household utensils, it is insignificant unless connected—through explicit ropes or invisible lines, through language—to other elements of the world’s architecture. Thus, it finds its place within a complex scene on the verge of movement, like a Ferris wheel.
The mechanism I am attempting to untangle here—laboriously and undoubtedly inadequately—is absolutely vertiginous, yet it retains unmatched elegance. From its conceptual vigor, we might extract partial, fragmented, personal, and provisional lessons. I will attempt to outline a few of them.
1. The gaze, like drawing, consists of a set of lines.
The perspectiva artificialis already demonstrated this, systematizing the order of representation to reveal that the world never corresponds to empirical nature but is always a construct of language, an artifice. Each gaze follows pre-existing traces, yet it can, in its singularity, redraw them, transforming the world’s scene and altering conventional protocols of meaning. Summoned by the artist’s semiotic arrangements, my gaze can become a motor that sets the world spinning.
One possible mode of the arrangement consists of having the trace deny the neutrality of the surface (as in STAIRS) to manifest directly in the world’s scene, transitioning and maintaining tension between the two. In an analogous operation, a word can also become both a sign and an object inscribed in the city, rejecting the museum wall on which it is found. Or, still, taut elastic lines forming geometric designs on the wall (perhaps an echo of the ladder’s minimal architecture) can leap from the surface to become MONUMENTS (2001) – emerging into three-dimensionality and the cultural world under this title but also by challenging human scale, exceeding the size that would allow me to view them fully arranged on the wall, in perspective.
In Carmela’s vigorous exploration of the conditions of representation, mimesis can be destroyed, revealing that every image does not arise from a tabula rasa but originates from already-given images (such as illustrations in encyclopedias) that can be manipulated until their relationship with the referent is annihilated. From a means of reproduction, engraving becomes, in Gross’s QUASARS (1983), an open poetic form in which the “pure” potential of meaning pulses, so to speak.
By revisiting, critiquing, and exploring the fundamental conditions of constructing signs and the scenes in which they appear, Carmela may, with each work, recreate the precise gesture by which prehistoric artists painted their cave walls—always engaging with the colors and reliefs already present there (just like the 1968 STAIRS, to emphasize this point). From line to world and from world to line, the artist’s drawings, objects, sculptures, and installations are always inscriptions, in the strongest sense of the term. Inscriptions that confront us like cave paintings, addressing us and inciting us to rethink the world and language, inviting us to reconstruct them poetically, as promised, for example, by the beautiful PROJECT FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SKY (1981). (Perhaps we must look up and ascend, invited by Carmela’s ladders. And for such an ascent, we might need at least one WING [1995]. Or perhaps we have already fallen, and the WING is a kind of monument to that fall, as the lightness of its fabric is undone by the asphalt coating that covers it.)
2. There is no surface.
Or: in the face of a surface, the task is to make it alive.
The X (1989) traced in iron on the wall, which I’ve already referenced as an allusion to the graphic sign of an explosion, could also be seen as a basic gesture of inscription, of marking a place—like the one where I stand before a map of the location. Or it could serve as a reference to initiate the work of representation or cartography, establishing the vanishing point of perspective and the position of the corresponding eye, outside the frame. However, Carmela spaces and skews her rays, destabilizing their trajectory and emphasizing the central void from which they radiate.
Instead of serving as an origin point for the establishment of an imaginary space of representation—a window opening onto the world that perspective would mimic—the trace multiplies and expands, pushing line and letter, sculpture and object, into the world. It breaks through the wall to create space, giving rise to a minimal scene, let’s say, nothing more than a germ of a scene. What it presents and invites me to is nothing less than the raw power of language and world-building.
Or perhaps it would be better to say that it is the letter X—also denoting an unknown or a sign of indeterminacy—that is set into motion and destabilized as a set of lines. It may then become human, like the 13 PASSERSBY (2016), a simple animation. Drawn with strips of electrical tape, these figures come to life with precise gestures that characterize their unique ways of walking. One stumbles and rises again; another triumphantly topples a large line. With such simple yet beautiful gestures, akin to everyday choreography, these EXTRAS take center stage in the world’s scene—like those Marx referred to as the degenerate, the vagrant, the trafficker, the prostitute, the organ grinder, and so on, reclaimed by Carmela in the work of the same year, a LED panel that inscribes them letter by letter, bending the alphabet, language, and, above all, our reading to their will.
In this vein, we can also consider each neon writing or oversized letter that parodies advertising language as an X, an inscriptive gesture that Gross makes in the city to mark her place while transforming urban space into an infinite surface, a voluminous cave mixing things, language, and people. The neon inscriptions AURORA (2003), LUZIA (2004), and I AM DOLORES (2002) bear names of women that are also verbs or nouns (in the last case, woman and pain blend in Spanish). Some of these appear inside architecture but can be partially seen from outside. These women are not exactly people but human events, words, and images that break walls and shout—adopting the strategies of marketing, sometimes employing the intensity of light and red color.
However, these women-events shout something other than a product to be consumed. After all, “real people are dangerous,” as stated in the mezzanine of Farol Santander in English, a 2008 work that could not be fully installed at the time because the event organizers in New Zealand prohibited the last two words—a testament to the work’s power in turning letters into people (and dangerous ones at that!). Here, they might shout the word SUL (2002, in a print version), a geopolitical affirmation. In the confused scene of the polis—peripheral modernity displaced, whose “north” resides in an always unfinished “south,” a promise or task yet to be constructed—amid the lurking violence, amid the fire that might suddenly ignite (as LUZ DEL FUEGO II [2018] reveals), a faceless THE BLACK WOMAN (1997) might also pass by, her black tulle forms vaporous and fluid, her slightly larger-than-human scale turning her into a strange monument, despite the wheels and support that might invite us to stroll her through the city.
3. To conclude: the scene is never there.
It is created through precise poetic arrangements, with signs, objects, and people; with inscriptions, light, and gestures, in the city, in buildings; indoors or outdoors—or rather, moving from interior to exterior, from institutional space to city, from art to life and back again. Therefore, it is as exact as it is immeasurable—spreading beyond itself, relating in complex ways to the world and history, and reconstructing itself with every gaze upon the traces, objects, or images that capture and set it into motion.
It is an event.
Furthermore, and fundamentally, it must be noted that something within it remains hidden. As in THE LOAD (1968), something lies beneath the surface, constructing a kind of fold in the scene. Pulsing within it is a tragedy that endlessly repeats, resisting any representation—yet, at the same time, it resides only on its surface, a mere truck tarp, with seams like beautiful embroidery.
Art must materialize this pulsation—and call on us, in its presence, to take a stand today.
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Carmela Gross 