The video art of Letícia Parente

​

Rogério Luz​

 

I revisit, from memory, the exhibition of Letícia Parente, at the MAM in Rio, in 1976: the measurements of the docile body, the rebellion of art that transforms them, the matter of thought in the visible.​

 

Michel Foucault described the disciplinary procedures during the 19th century, in Europe, especially the discourses of production of truth and the devices of power and subjectivation. In Measure, art appears as resistance to discipline. It is an intervention located in the present time and also a rupture with a conception, still in force at that time among us, of art as inspired intuition and excellence of form.​

 

Letícia's works, however, do not give ground to the discursive logos. Rather, the artist creates a plane of experience that notes, requests or promotes a physical and mental activity. The ideational categories – for example, the science of body measurements, its statistical procedures and the critique of humanist knowledge in Foucault’s conception of disciplinary society – cannot be taken as principles of the work to which the sensitive experience should conform. Science and pseudoscience intersect, without solution, in the reading and participation that the work of art invites the spectator to follow, as a possible path. For art, for its normalized reception, it is a return to experience: a place and moment of discovery and not the origin and destination of a didactic path.

This is not about examining – others have already done so, and well – the various apparatuses that Letícia set up, by means and following different tactics, to trigger her interventions. It is about extracting from them a strategy of poetic action, undoubtedly linked, on the one hand, to her scientific interests and her critical vision of our society and, on the other, to the context of her artistic practice and the situation of art in that historical phase.

The interest will fall on his well-known video art production, on the articulation of two dimensions: the way in which images are presented, both visual and sound, and the type of thinking that this way implies, especially the more than secular question of the use of the concept in art and its reflective character, which returns to the subject in its now uncertain subjectivity.

​

The historical need to reexamine forms of articulation between feeling and thinking is one of the driving forces behind the revisiting of the artist's work, which opens up perspectives for understanding the metamorphoses of art, its practice and its theory, or rather, of art as metamorphosis, in the temporality of its passages and transitions, unsubmissive to the mere historical determination of aesthetic, social and political forms. A bit of pure time.

 

If the artist's works record configurations of forces, in the interweaving of body and thing, subject and world, they do not aim, as we have said, to illustrate interpretative ideas of the history of the West, nor to deduce artistic products from them. And I add: the artist does not obey the logic of design.

​

Let me explain: an important part of current artistic production conforms to a design that contains, from its instructions, the projected final result. This will then be offered to the public – spectator or participant – so that they can process it according to the rules of a way of using it. The indeterminacy and ambiguity of many contemporary works of art function in two ways: either as an integrated component of the prescribed use or as an unimportant residue of the natural empirical multiplicity of readings. In order to effectively understand the work and participate in it, causes and effects must be foreseen, that is, conceptualized and transmitted by words or other decoding signals, referring to the internal scope of art or to the social environment.​

 

The problem of the role of the concept in art – and not only, at the time, of conceptual art as a historical movement – ​​presents unprecedented developments in our country. The art of the 1970s, as understood by Letícia Parente and other artists, exposes the originality of a path towards the integration of the idea into the composition of the work: an experience of the sensitive that does not bow to either the fascination of beautiful appearance or the dictates of critical thinking. In the rigor of her proposals, Letícia's art links the sensitive image to a thought that goes beyond the repertoire of guiding ideas, explanatory matrices or conceptual justifications.

 

Ideas enter there alongside other materials and gain new meanings, dependent on the internal context of the work, before being articulated with the personal and social situation in which they are inscribed. Concepts are submitted to sensitivity, as working material, that is, raw material to be transformed. They do not serve as models or patterns of organization for the sensitive form. They are given to and through sensitivity, in the space and time of experience. Philosophical, political or religious formulations indicate folds that can be welcomed in the poetic element of the work itself.​

 

In the face of contemporary art proposals, many criticize the need for explanatory texts for their understanding. In Letícia, the text is not explanatory because it is not external to the work, but an indication that is part of it. It is one of its moments, often initial and triggering. This characterizes it as part of the work's event. Each time, it is necessary to reintegrate it as such, as a material constituent among others.​

 

If, on the one hand, the artist avoids the idea, in order to give relevance to the existence of the work, serving as an external justification, on the other hand, the experience of play, typical of art, is not to be confused with that provided by games or gadgets. Throughout the artist's work, criticism and humor establish the difference.

​​

I do not believe, however, that Letícia needed to make explicit the question of the place of the idea and the game in art. The practice of the most significant creators of the period is, rather, concerned with producing a courageous opening for the conception and destiny of art. Letícia's works, by conveying new proposals and using means and techniques different from those found in the so-called plastic and visual arts, introduce open-ended experiences into the field of art.

​

Interactivity, in the new artistic practices that were updated in the period, turns the passive spectator into a participating agent, who must not only receive the sensitive impact in order to elaborate it, but also construct, in the mind or in gestures, the work of art itself, that is, carry it out so that it indicates a meaning, thus integrating itself into the process.

​

All aesthetics – all reception of the work of art, which is complemented by a poetics, a way of doing – requires interactivity. Action and passion respond to and complement each other and this implies mutual activity – sensitive, emotional, intellectual – deferred or simultaneous. The question here is another: that of the new forms of interaction that the different poetic devices introduce into the appreciation of art.

​

With the aim of interfering in the circuit and the market, the art of the period to which Letícia is linked is a social art, but not an ideological or political one, in the current sense. To this end, the artist tests new means of action in the use of technology. Far from being praised as an indicator of progress, a consciously poor meaning is imposed on it, which demands more from its reception than conformity to formal excellence in the handling of production techniques.​

 

It is true that the artists who first experimented with video among us did not master the language of cutting and editing, institutionalized by classical narrative cinema. In any case, they were far from intending to apply consecrated formulas to their video works, beyond the technical limitations of the new medium.​

 

Committed or avant-garde filmmakers sought to expose the traditional mechanisms of film construction in order to criticize and subvert them. This was not the concern of our visual artists either – whom filmmakers sometimes viewed with bias, as incompetents meddling in other people’s fields, at a time when there was still a belief in the specificity of the arts and, within each of them, of the different genres or techniques.​

 

The freedom to deal with the new video technology, without worrying about established canons and procedures of language, is nourished, in Letícia, not by the desire for a new way of describing and narrating – a question of cinema that, if it is not exhausted by considerations of language, finds its axis in them –, but by the conviction of the effectiveness of a way of shaking up habits of enjoyment and understanding within the art she practices. In order to criticize and subvert behaviors and institutions, the artist breaks the specific limits of her own practice. Therefore, for her, it is not a question of a new language for audiovisual, but of a new body in the world and a new subject in the body.

​

Rebellion was, at the time, a combative value that ended up affecting all traditional languages. Criticism of what was considered to be of good taste and quality rose up, in the case of film people, against the established language and, in the case of visual artists, against the consecrated means of artistic creation – drawing, engraving, painting and sculpture – to which photography was added. The two ways of addressing the crisis of visual representation – from still specific territories, that of visual arts and cinema – would influence each other and blur boundaries.​

 

Letícia soon realized that expression was no longer rooted in the creative subject or in the mastery of languages ​​and techniques, but in a socially troubled and unjust world, ordered by the advance of technology, in which it was necessary to propose localized tactics of poetic action. These did not need to aim for great objectives of change to be effective in their scope of action. The small sequences of interventions on the docile and disciplined body aim to insurgency in the field of affections, at a time when the great narratives that explain reality are declining.

 

Within the context, it is also necessary to include the renewal of the feminist movement in the 1970s in the country, which involved artistic and political manifestations. A shift from a belief in the historical role of the working masses to the commitment to situated struggles, in light of issues of interest to society as a whole or to symbolically minority segments, aiming at behaviors of resistance and transformation.​

 

Letícia Parente's video art surprises with its simplicity and currentness. A paradox of an almost timid forcefulness. The modesty of everyday acts – sewing, ironing, putting clothes away in the closet – is shown to be subverted. Everyday gestures, sometimes reserved for women's domestic duties at home or for children's entertainment, are a reference for a disjunctive operation: there is a divergence between the supposed image and the visible image, between the common and the unusual.

​

The credits are amateurish, many of them handwritten on a card. The choice is clear and recalls the Italian arte povera of the late 1960s and its influence on the direct practice of photography that does not seek to manipulate effects.

​

To understand these procedures, which do not arise from ignorance of traditional language or the impossibility of relying on compete

nt editing, it is necessary to contextualize them within the framework of the search, carried out by artists of the time, for new artistic proposals. The period records multiple designations for these: video art, conceptual art, arte povera, mail art, body art, to name a few examples close to the artist's practice.

The naïve appropriation of a new technology and its limits therefore marks a break with audiovisual editing, with its cuts and continuities, and takes up certain construction, graphic and movement tactics from the first art films in the history of cinema.​

 

Many of the videos do not feature any cuts at all: a single shot follows the unfolding of an entire action. The editing is internal to the shot and the framing of parts or fragments unambiguously signals the technical nature of the medium used to produce the image. We are faced with a “reality for the camera”. The close-ups of the body – when, frequently, the artist or her characters do not appear whole – explore and intensify a characteristic that cinema produces: the equivalence between objects and living beings, the stone and the tree, the setting and the actors.​

 

In assimilates the woman who enters the closet to her own clothes. An empty interiority will be filled by the body and its envelope. Instead of showing a content for use, for display to others, the closet inverts its functions and becomes the hiding place of a body-clothing.

In Task I, the traditional ironing of clothes in the domestic environment is transformed into the ironing of this second skin as a covering for the body. The artist lies down dressed on the ironing board. The servant's face does not appear, only her obstinate movement over the fabric and her body, as if ignoring the unusual situation. The framing closely captures what is interesting in a continuous and repeated action, which is also unusual. This proximity gives the viewer the sensation of participating in both the recording and the content of the action and, at the same time, of refusing them, because they see what they are not used to seeing, what cannot happen.

In Letícia's videos, the technique must bend to what she has to think about: for example, the historical time of the house and the country, which is inscribed, through affections, in the body itself and in the image of that body. A body that is the place of the videos, the home they choose. The expressive figures – faces, eyes, arms and legs, hands and feet – dedicate themselves to tasks and postures with sobriety and determination. The technical apparatus is placed at the service of the recording, in which the display of one's own resources does not fit.

​

Preparation I shows the woman applying makeup in front of the mirror. She covers her mouth and eyes with adhesive tape, over which she draws a new mouth and new eyes. The artificial face, now mute and blind, is no longer useful in the game of hiding in order to better show, typical of makeup. Resulting from pantomime, that is, from an act of representation (in this case, of representing oneself in the mirror, of presenting oneself to the gaze of others), the masked image shows what ends up making any representation unfeasible.

​

The works do not intend to illustrate the themes: Trademark (stitching on the sole of the foot of the expression made in Brazil, with an “s”) or the vaccines in Preparation II are protocols for experimentation. The videos aim to show and experiment, not to argue. Declarations of principle on so many important themes – economic dependence, cultural alienation, different forms of domination, the situation of women in society, relationships with one’s own body and the body of others, home or country – become statements of fact. These are facts, visual, verbal, imaginary, that the machine attests. For this very reason, when verifying the fact and opening it to reading, the deed will not be political-ideological, but the effect, yes, this is always poetic.

​

Considering this intrinsic structure allows us to emphasize, in these works by Letícia Parente, the ambiguity and plurality of their meanings. The question about the artist's intentions – what exactly did she want with this? – does not have a single possible answer or no answer at all. The work deliberately causes noise and distortions in current communication, as seen in the first video of the group in which the artist participated. The Wireless Telephone (1976), a childhood game, is a form of noise that produces difference and absurdity – and not a higher meaning – and provokes laughter among the participants due to the misunderstandings of imperfect listening. Against a background of ambient sound, words and phrases from the participants are cut out, without it being important to know what they are about: passion fruit, Maracangalha, cha-cha, chayote beauty, Marrakesh, Antwerp... Structured language is called into question. The circuit opens and results in something random, until exhaustion and disinterest, that is, until it becomes impossible, for any longer, to make noise predominate over articulated contact.

​​

The artist creates unusual situations in which the viewer of the video finds himself involved and even questioned. The game of who blinked first is subverted: the image of the characters, a boy and a girl, facing the camera is a reflection on the glass of a TV monitor. They do not mirror or watch each other, but invite the viewer to do so. The question in the title creates a seer of the scene, external to the relationship between the players: it is up to him to pay attention. At the first blink of the boy on the left, the video ends.

​

On the contrary, in Especular (1978), the natural eye contact is mediated by the technology of a now real wire. There is a virtually infinite remission, en abîme, of the declaration of two characters, one facing the other: I want to hear what you are hearing from me inside you. Each time, the speech relaunches separation and identification. The fusion will always be postponed. In speech and image, two bodies are now confronted, literally united by their differences in place and perception.

In The man with the arm and the arm of the man, the confrontation between the nature of technology and the nature of man occurs in two moments, extended far beyond the informative content of each image. The foreground, a neon drawing above a gym that aims to mechanically reconstruct a flexion gesture, is accompanied by a casual tumult of traffic noises. In the background, human fragility, exhausted of its strength, faces the timeless narcissism of the luminous figure. Only the fatigue of the adolescent can put a silent end to the deception of this similarity, to the historyless repetition of an advertising body.

​

The repetition of gestures – whether in a continuous sequence, in the performance of an activity, or in stages – gains yet another variation in the use of still photos of hands and feet, and contorted fingers in André Parente’s distressing images. Several shots of these almost black and white sculptures are linked together: they appear from the dark and dissolve into it, without any linearity or dramatic progression, just the reiterative exposition of volumes in light and shadow.​

 

Repetition is also a sound resource that returns in a circle to the same point. De afflicti – ora pro nobis (1979) uses the response to the invocations of a litany, without any sacred attribute being heard or named. The drama becomes a religious appeal without an addressee. Who will intercede for us? All we hear is ora pro nobis..., pro nobis..., ora pro nobis.

​

In 1981, the sound of Caetano Veloso's song, with its explicit reference to the leather-lined suitcase, stinking and smelling bad, does not, however, connect with the description of a journey in which one would leave one's homeland behind. Open, the suitcase shows two snakes on a white cloth, perhaps dangerous or repugnant. The character avoids them and carefully removes the sheet lining to hold it in her hands. Feelings of strangeness, danger, protection and tenderness follow one another. The dissociation between sound and image – based on an identity between the traveler's sonorous suitcase and the suitcase visible in the image – disorients the reading of an itinerary. An enigmatic excerpt from an action that remains suspended, as in most of Letícia's works. A presentation of fragments of body, time, place, action and non-representation of an idea, a critique, a program.

​

In short, in Letícia Parente's video art, I highlight, on the one hand, two ways of operating on sensitive matter: the fragment and repetition (of which mirrored doubles are a variation).​

 

On the other hand, by working on what could be called ideational materialities – the major themes reworked within the work –, the artist produces a thought of affections and a critique of what happens to bodies, their intimacy and their relationships.

​​

However, the art that is produced there refuses to be a principle of synthesis, because it can no longer be either a sensitive thing or a mental thing – this is the fundamental trait of its modernity and currentness. The articulation between the ways of operating sensation and the ways of operating thought becomes undecidable. The transit between them – and beyond them – is the poetic strategy by which an aesthetic experience opens up to those who question it.

​

* Rogerio Luz, retired professor at ECO-UFRJ, is a researcher, poet and visual artist.