Meat After Meat Joy brings together the work of contemporary artists who use meat in their work (raw meat, the concept of meat, its symbolism and viscera) in order to investigate the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body. Meat combines flesh, skin, muscle, organs, blood - each with its own relationship to the body, yet meat's only reference to the body is as a once-upon-a-time living biological thing. By putting these artists together, the exhibition seeks to investigate the uncanny effect meat as a medium is for artist and viewer. This is not a show about meat as spectacle but about meat as signification, precisely because meat does not signify (a body) but its very annihilation.

Skin is the body's largest organ and greatest protection. It is the body's most public point of vulnerability and private realm of pleasure. Flesh is associated with the body often the body of Christ. It can't be separated from the body except when it is torn, crucified, burned, flayed. Muscle and fat are anatomy, as well as the fit body, the football body, the anorectic body, the fat body. Meat is the body without skin. It has no identity. Meat cannot have a mood, cannot feel, nor have an intention.

And yet, an exhibition on meat seems like an obvious continuation of discussions of contemporary art and the body. Certainly in relation to feminism, meat has been an erotic and eschatological component of a libratory, transgressive discourse of female sexuality and the body beginning with Carolee Schneemann's path-breaking 1964 Meat Joy. After Meat Joy, the female body was no longer the 'poulet" or chick but an erotic and political force of the laugh of the Medusa (Helene Cixous)-the writhing ecstatic female body freed from the constraints of patriarchal definition (meat is the indefinable flesh) that expresses an epistemology (Interior Scroll 1975) into ontology (the feminist movement). In Meat Joy, although controversial, raw meat -animal human-and the human body are at their most uncontested and merged, for meat is not the absence or the other the body but an act of reclamation and affirmation of all that patriarchy had previously "disemboweled" from the female body.

But forty years later, in Meat After Meat Joy, meat, as metaphor or synecdoche of the body, is different because we recognize more clearly that meat is precisely what the animal or human body is when it is not. In other words, meat has no body, can't be a body, may have been a body but is only called meat because it is no body. Meat here is neither flesh nor skin, but the notion of the human or animal at its most base, absolute zero point of being, "being" as completely without "Being".
- Heide Hatry

 

 

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
511 West 25th Street 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
+1 212 675 2966

 

 

 

 

  

 

Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present Aranhas [Spiders], Paulo Nenflídio's second solo show in São Paulo. In this exhibition, consisting of an installation entitled Teia [Web] in the form of a spider's web along with three spider-shaped sculptures, the artist presents kinetic works, for the first time, exploring visual effects based on physical movements.

Hanging from the walls at a height of 1.7 m, Teia is a large, open and irregular structure that seems to hover in the air. Composed of stretched and overlain electrical wires and nylon line, this artwork also looks like veins or neural connections. In this work Nenflídio has maintained his characteristic use of sound: he has equipped the web with a device able to sense the viewer's proximity, activating the emission of different kinds of harmonic and high-pitched sounds, at the threshold of audibility. This results in a jumble of sounds resembling the noise of a fax machine or Internet dial-up connection.

The Aranhas are right nearby. These sculptures are intended to avoid any static condition, remaining in constant movement. They are open artworks that are reinvented at each moment, like the works by Dutch artist Theo Jansen, a key reference for Nenflídio.

The sculptures are low-tech, made of fiberboard, electrical components, conduit or PVC pipes, motors, power sources, sensors and black electrical tape. They are able to walk about or climb the wall for up to thirty seconds in a predefined space. Sensors situated in their "eyes" detect the presence of the spectator and set the spiders' legs into movement. Wires that connect the spiders to small power sources act as ramifications of the Teia, interconnecting the various pieces of the set.

For Nenflídio, "the artworks are related more with cybernetics than with kinetics, as they are automatons that create automatic music, as all the pieces together form a sonorous composition." The set effectively realizes a central aim of this artist: the interaction/participation of the public with the work of art.
In 2007, Paulo Nenflídio participated in the show Panorama, no MAM - Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; in 2006 he took part in the exhibition Geração da Virada [The Turning-Point Generation] at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. He received an award from the fifth edition of the Sérgio Motta Prize in Art and Technology, in 2005, and was conferred the Pampulha Grant in 2004.

 

 

Also showing:

 

Quase Cheio, Quase Vazio
Sara Ramo

Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present Quase Cheio, Quase Vazio [Nearly Full, Nearly Empty] by Sara Ramo. In her second solo show at the gallery, the artist presents artworks made using various supports including collage, video and slide projection, installation and photography.

Pet Cemetery
Erika Verzutti
 
Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present the exhibition Pet Cemetery by Erika Verzutti. The show transforms the exhibition space into a graveless cemetery, in which twenty-two new animal-shaped sculptures are set atop pedestals or arranged on the floor. For Verzutti, the "cemetery" is a "pretext to exercise different styles, reflect on cultural representation and on the use of bronze, common to the arts and to gravestones."

 

 

Galeria Fortes Vilaça
Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500
05416-001
Sao Paulo
Brazil
+ 55 11 3032 7066

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fake I.D.
Curated by Ken Pratt

16 October/9 November 2008

Jemima Brown, Morten Viskum, Michelle Deignan, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Risk Hazekamp, Simon Willems, Angie Reed, Deborah Schamoni, Caron Geary

The actualization of an authenticity is an idea that remains bound up in popular notions of the aims of artistic practice. Perpetuated by the osmosis of art historical ideas into the popular consciousness, mass understandings of art often embrace the idea that the artist seeks to present an authentic experience. This is particularly notable in popular notions about figurative and representational art: the artist strives to offer the viewer an authentic insight into the full identity of a portrait sitter or to render a building or vista in a way that offers a true sense of the experience, one that cuts to its essence. If anything, this notion of the artist as someone who can offer us the 'real' experience of something in all its beauty or power may even have been heightened in the evolutionary developments to overcome reactionary expectations of representation or realism in the period after photography and movements such as Modernism. Perhaps nothing highlights this preoccupation with the relationship between artistic practices and 'the authentic' more than the developments of discourses such as Bourriaud's notions of Relational Aesthetics in the late 1990's. Within them there is an intrinsic assumption that artistic practices that seek to engage 'authentically' with social contexts constitute a valid and, perhaps, more desirable position for contemporary artists. In many instances, these notions of art that has an authentic engagement with the social context has shied away from artistic practices that results in objects; steer clear of things looking anything like the traditional idea of the painting or sculpture. And yet, both currently, and contemporaneous to the developments of the kinds of practices offered up in a Relational Aesthetics and its adjunct and subsequent developments, there are numerous contemporary artists who, through very different means and to very different ends, intrinsically build in evident artifice and 'inauthenticity' to their work. Identifiable fakeness, artifice or even blatant lies appear as content, concept or working methodologies. Sometimes as counterpoint in which questions about the formal orthodoxies of art are challenged, sometimes as juxtaposition playing a game of double-bluff with popular notions of art as a purveyor of an 'authentic' human experience, diverse artists adopt strategies in which visual elements of the discernibly false and inauthentic feed discussions about everything from the nature of personal identity and cultural trends to media constructs of the documentary. Fake I.D. is a group show that traces some of these devices and strategies through the work of a handful of international artists producing work today.

 

 

© the artist, courtesy of Vegas Gallery, London


Vegas Gallery
64-66 Redchurch Street
London, E2 7DP
+44 7726750762
 

 

 

 

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