Art is about creating something that is lacking.
Thiago Honório
* Istoé Magazine, edition 2273, 07.Jun.13.
** Ernst Fischer, A Necessidade da Arte. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar ed., 1977, p. 52.
*** Walter Benjamin, Obras Escolhidas – Magia e Técnica. Rio de Janeiro: Brasiliense, 1984, p. 176.
Every instrument is a (magical) instrument of power
Documents, an artwork created in 2012 by the artist Thiago Honório, features 45 cutting implements laid out – juxtaposed – on a 6.3-meter-long, 0.82-meter-wide board that sits on trestle stands. The setup feels like a catalog of items on display for scientific purposes.
But unlike such a setup, here, the items are literally exposed. There is no glass display case to protect them – or us.
The knives are at the reach of the hands.
Eye contact with the artwork is riveting. It is aesthetical – there is a formal beauty to each of these cutting tools, and to their carefully arranged layout. It is beautiful to see. It is threatening.
There are handsaws, daggers, knives, scythes, cleaver knives, etc., purchased in Paris in the first half of 2012 during a stint at Cité Internationale des Arts as part of the FAAP Artist Residency Program. The artwork was first shown at the 44th FAAP Annual Art Show in November of that same year, where it remained on display until February of the following year. Documents was later acquired by the art collector Roberta Matarazzo and donated to MAC USP in February 2014. At the museum, the installation is featured in the exhibition O Agora, o Antes: uma síntese do acervo do MAC USP (The Now, the Before: a synthesis of the MAC USP collection), open through December.
“For some time now, I had been meaning to create a piece of work that would question – in all its process- and performance-related aspects – the layers to the notion of ‘work’ and the expression ‘artwork,’” Thiago Honório said in an interview to Istoé magazine*.
The appropriation and montage procedure is characteristic of Thiago Honório’s work, but I will focus specifically on Documents – because it seems to me that it encapsulates the universe that interests the artist. It features a sort of constant search for an archaeology of the materials, procedures, and meanings of art.
The name Documents is also quite suggestive. Speaking during the “MAC meets the artists” program in May of last year, Thiago inquires: what does the artist’s creative work consist of, if not creating something that is lacking? And he quotes Jasper Johns: “an object which speaks of the loss, of the destruction, of the disappearance of objects does not speak of itself, it speaks of others.”
What other objects might lead us to seek out those that are exhibited by Thiago Honório? We are tempted to “complete” the sequence. It is a sequence of cutting tools. What might be further back or further ahead? Their layout is not chronological. Would there be temporal, spatial, formal “cuts” other than this one? Other cataloging cuts? “The author is the author of his work,” says Borges, “and the reader of his reading,” he continues.
Documents suddenly led me back to a seminal text from Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art: Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art, especially chapter two, “The Origins of Art.” Here, I make my own cut, based on the cut proposed by Thiago.
Fischer takes a reading that is at once Marxist and, say, Darwinist, of the necessity of art. His question is: Why do we “necessitate” art? For if we create it, we do so in response to a necessity. As such, the question contains an axiomatic premise: necessity drives creation. And this is a Marxist/Darwinist premise.
How, then, does one uncover the necessity of art? By looking to uncover what necessity it responded to the moment it was invented. But that leads one to further wonder about the place of art within the succession of inventions. Fischer thus traces back a possible chain of tools. Everything is born as a tool.
Let us consider, as per Fischer’s reasoning, that the first tool was a simple rod. Just some rod found at random. That the “pre-human animal,” as he calls it, employed it “instinctively” – paradoxically, the instinct of reason –, to reach some fruit. He would have stored away this rod, and in the very act of storing it away, he would have made it into a tool – an “occasional tool,” in Fischer’s words.
As we will see, this first tool contains all others – and also the “magic” in inventing them.
The author’s proposition is reminiscent of the anthological scene in 2001 – A Space Odyssey in which a group of primates is puzzled by the appearance of a monolith in the depression where they took shelter and rest. Afterwards, during daytime, a group, perhaps the same one as before, “walks” on dry animal bones. One of them manipulates the bones. In this very famous scene, the musical theme introduces and underscores the relevance of the event. The primate becomes imbued with ire and strength: he bangs the bone vigorously against the ground. In a swift, almost subliminal cut, an animal falls dead; in a longer motion, the primate throws the bone upward. The bone is now seen in closeup against the sky, and in another magnificent cut, the scene transitions into space, and finds an elongated spaceship. Like the bone. Like the monolith. Like the spaceship.
Speaking at the MAM, Thiago Honório also referred to the “cut” as a fundamental procedure to film montage as formulated by Eisenstein: the juxtaposition that creates new meanings.
Documents seems to “document” this very search for the “layers of work” involved in the artistic process. And it is amazing that he has chosen cutting tools and their semantic plurality.
Here, I am able to round up my references: Every tool is a tool of power. In its polysemic sense. The cutting tools in Documents render this power explicit. They render explicit the polysemy of this power.
The rod, the bone, or the chipped stone, whosoever kicked off the odyssey of tools, already held within themselves the power and the “desire for infinite power” that they would trigger in man.
Because for Fischer, the tool, if it does not precede reason, awakens it. Such awakening is first of all driven by the “mere” necessity to survive. Those early, casually found tools will be used, will be manipulated. Their usage will awaken in man a new knowledge of nature and the possibilities of the newly found/invented tool itself.
In handling it, man will discover the power to both imitate and perfect objects found in nature. From learning and perfecting them through use, he will move on to designing them, and will create a world of tools. Language itself will be a result of it. Once tools have been created, man will produce work, and work will require that he develop communication. Thus, just like every tool, language also emerges “occasionally”: they are the very sounds of nature which man imitates and then perfects as code.
We must grant Fischer the same thing Darwin requested upon explaining his theory of evolution: one must picture this succession taking place over a huge scale of time, even though Fischer’s is far shorter than the one required by Darwin.
In this “big bang” of culture generated by the first tool, virtually everything was contained: the occasional tool, the production of the tool through imitation, work, and language, also born as a tool. In Fischer’s synthesis-sentence: “man invents tools, but the tools also invent man.”
This original experience, according to Fischer, instills in man a “sense of power”, and at the same time, a desire for “infinite power.” Herein supposedly lay the seed of the separation of man from nature, which was not yet felt by early human groups. Herein also lies perhaps Fischer’s most difficult, most abstract point: the sense of power is tantamount to magic, the magical feeling, the desire to create “tools” imitating nature on a superior scale to overcome immediate survival, so to speak. One such tool is myth. We must go back to Marcell Mauss and his “Essay on the Gift” if we are to understand creation and functioning mechanism of myth as Fischer sees it. Additionally, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” by Lévi-Strauss.
The emergence of Myth is, therefore, a response to a necessity of survival of the group. It is a form of work, and a magical one.
But this “work” has its specificity: Besides acting upon the “guarantee” of success in hunting or upon symbolic exchanges, it creates social unity and meaning. Because the struggle for the more immediate survival, the one achieved through the more “concrete” tools, will lead to fragmentation much later, in class society.
This is why only Myth could have been the more immediate predecessor to Art. And the sorcerer, to the artist. Fischer’s answer to the necessity which art responded to was as follows:
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The artist’s task was to expose the profound meaning of events to his fellow men, to make plain to them the necessity and the essential relationships between man and nature and man and society, to solve for them the riddle of these relationships; (...) to guide individual life back into collective life, the personal into the universal; to restore the lost unity of man**. (emphasis by the author)
Pages later, he concludes: “in a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay.” Fischer does not stop there. He also believes that in order to fulfill its social function, art must also help change the world. We will not delve into this argument now – what interests us here is the association Fischer makes between the tool, magic, and art. And the function that ties them all together. The nature of man becomes that of inventing his “super-nature.”
In the classic “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin, too, considered technique as a “second nature.” In Benjamin’s case, this second nature comes into being only once “technique is emancipated” from technical reproducibility. At any rate, even technique itself is a consequence of the technical nature that the first tool already contained. And for Walter Benjamin, art is also called upon to fulfill its role. In this case, it is cinema that reconnects us with that created second nature.
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Faced with this second nature, which man invented, but has long since ceased to control, we are forced to learn, just as we did in the past when faced with the first one. Once again, art puts itself at the service of this learning. This applies, first and foremost, to film. The purpose of film is to excite in man new perceptions and reactions demanded by a technical device whose role only increases in everyday life. To make the enormous technical apparatus of our time the object of human innervations – such is the historical task whose enactment gives cinema its true meaning ***.
Documents, by Thiago Honório, is an epiphany. It brings to the fore, with these cutting tools and archaeological look, the testimonies of all the other absent, missing, lost tools. It brings us back to an opening shot loaded with all the archetypical ambivalences: imitation, invention, power, magic, and a universe of meanings to be built.
— Edilamar Galvão
São Paulo: Diversitas, 2012.
Translated by Gabriel Blum