Enigmatic territory of the commonplace
In the vertigo of the mystery of objects and the enigma that emanates from them, Thiago Honório creates the piece Trabalho (Work), on show at the MASP. Out of the ladders, pickaxes, hoes, sledgehammers, handsaws, brushes, and spatulas employed in restoring an old power plant, the artist unveils a knowledge that unfolds through the hands. The initially clandestine negotiation with construction workers and helpers brings about the realm of sharing and an absolutely singular politics underpinned by the ethics of the vestige, of the trace, and of that which cannot be erased or covered up.
In a dialogue with Lina Bo Bardi’s brutalist, candid, naked architecture, the tools seem to issue forth from the crude material and the exposed concrete, and by shuffling up instruments obtained in distinct ways (through negotiation or donation), the artist reinvents not only the museum space, but also the workplace, creating tension around labor, taken as an arduous or strength-based task, and which, in the artwork, takes on meaning in the potency of subtlety, in a cluster that follows a near-musical logic, to the extent that the layout of the tools comes as a singular response to the inaccessible contained within the gesture of donation, to the void that builds a space a resonance between the objects, the void that causes gifts to thrive, in the manner evoked by Georges Bataille.
To Bataille, the most mundane or sacred human sacrifices, the construction of a church or the gifting of a jewel or a work of art, were no more interesting than the selling of wheat. In his essay “The notion of expenditure,” Bataille evidences the attempt to encompass, in one reflexive space, such disparate domains of knowledge as anthropology, religion, sociology, architecture, art, philosophy, and economics. Also involved here is the power of the buried voice that Thiago Honório evokes by reestablishing a realm of labor as a social performance and production system that extrapolates economic and moral importance. There is something which finds itself violated from the outset, and which the near-miraculous gift actualizes in the gesture of donation, reinserting pulsation into objects beyond their mere appeasing functionality.
By subverting the use of tools, Thiago Honório leads us onto the amazement of a world where the object is not confined to its meaning, valuing and reconfiguring, through the multiple meanings that emerge from the instruments, the living, restless dimension of a labor that is open to the unforeseen, to the unexpected, transfiguring and transgressing any functional imprisonment and bringing about the risk and the tear in a sketch-like gesture which embraces the formless like a scream beyond meaning and as indication of a labor which articulates the inarticulate and retrieves an experience of sacrality by means of objects.
From the contingence between the force of labor and the potency of a piece of work installed into an unstable fissure there emerges the labor of an artist operating with the scarce and causing the dignity of objects to show. In an acute dialogue with the architectural space that harbors the procession of tools, what becomes revealed is the thickness of the tools which, with their artistic, plastic, and visual qualities, are indications of labor and a dramatization of a dearth that is also a presentification of something that disrupts an homogeneous chain and de-hierarchizes knowledges, incorporating the gift as that which belongs to everyone and no one at the same time, which lies within the ordinary and outside it.
From the purposeful act of negotiation, one moves on to donation and the terrain of the uncertain, of the inaccessible, by way of intrusive elements that come through unknown hands. These tools are joined by those negotiated ones, shuffling up the logic of accumulation and productivity, defunctionalizing objects, and causing the territory of the commonplace – as enigmatic as it is difficult, so rare, and ever elusive – to sparkle.
— Bianca Dias, 2016.
Translated by Gabriel Blum