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Xeque-mate, 2007




                
              In Xeque-mate [Checkmate], beef cattle skins have been diagrammatically reduced to a “board” on which lies, diagonally crossing it, a lead cord twisted by the strength of my hand. The arrangement is housed in a lacquered wooden structure, topped with a weave of skin scraps sewn and glued to the structure – the “board” – that covers its top; and a crystal acrylic dome, forming a display case. This display structure is taken as the body of the sculpture itself, not simply as a neutral base or support.  

             Xeque-mate is part of the set of works brought together in the exhibition entitled Exhibition (2007). In Exhibition, I sought to link and establish a relationship between the works, giving an active status to the spaces left empty; in this way, while I sought to preserve a certain autonomy of each of them, I immersed them in a kind of bundle of reciprocal relationships, a situation in which the visitor could find themselves permanently invited to redefine the set. I wanted, by a kind of emphasis attributed to these spaces left empty between the works, to materialize, to make palpable the intervals between them.

            The works that made up this exhibition – whose title Exhibition literally stated the problems I faced at that time, and which reappear in the exhibition Corte (2010) – were freely inspired by the novel Story of the Eye¹ by Georges Bataille (1897-1962), as well as the essay Mirror of Tauromachy² by Michel Leiris (1901-1990). Considered a “faceless autobiography”³, written in the time of Lord Auch⁴, Georges Bataille’s novel speaks of the “migration of an object”⁵. It tells the story of three restless, anxious and turbulent young people – the narrator, Simone and Marcela –, shameless and violently driven by the idea of ​​taking the body, life and death, through the suppression and/or absence of limits. Something that also attracted me to this novel, to this “active ferment of speculation”⁶, is the fact that it constitutes a “dry and unpretentious account, which avoids expressive detours, psychological subterfuges or evasions of any other kind”⁷.

             Michel Leiris’ essay analyzes the spectacle of bullfighting – the Spanish corrida, its preparation and the bullfighter’s passes – “from the perspective of the relationships it maintains notably with erotic activity”⁸, as if he were looking at a drawing. In this kind of aesthetic essay, he defines it as “a tragic art”, pointing out the imbalance, the deviation and the dissonance as essential aspects of that art, of all art, because “no aesthetic pleasure will then be possible without there being a violation, transgression, excess, sin in relation to an ideal order that sometimes acts as a rule; nevertheless, an absolute license, like an absolute order, could only be a tasteless and meaningless abstraction”⁹. Mirror of Tauromachy is cited with admiration by Georges Bataille in the preface to L’Érotisme – a book he dedicates to Michel Leiris.

             Both the novella Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, and the aesthetic essay Mirror of Tauromachy by Michel Leiris, each in their own way, were “ferments” – based on an imaginative power – for the creation of Xeque-mate. Furthermore, they were taken as flammable substances and in their own material dimension, as they make explicit a notion of limit that, in some way, appears in the physical evidence of this work: be it through the gestures and force employed in the twisted lead cord through a physical and corporal relationship established by them, or in the sewn board of skins, forming, from patched scraps, an organic weave.

Thiago Honório, November 2011.



1. Published in 1928, this is the novel that marks Georges Bataille's debut, in which the author discusses the adventures of three teenagers "whose sexual frenzy does not exclude enjoyment": the narrator, his friend Simone and Marcela. The story raises intriguing questions about the body, life and death, in an erotic and libertarian dimension that brings it closer to authors such as Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), Roland Barthes (1915-1980) — for whom Georges Bataille is said to have written the story of an object — and Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). BATAILLE, Georges. História do olho. Translated and prefaced by Eliane Robert Moraes. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004.

2. Essay originally published in 1938, in which the author analyzes the spectacle of Spanish bullfighting from the perspective of anthropology, eroticism and aesthetics. LEIRIS, Michel. Espelho da tauromaquia. Translated by Samuel Titan Jr. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2001.

3. According to Eliane Robert Moraes in the book's preface, p. 13.

4. o paraphrase the title of Michel Leiris’ essay, “Nos tempos de Lord Auch” (“In the Times of Lord Auch”) — which evokes one of the “caricaturesque” and unusual pseudonyms adopted by Georges Bataille — first published in L’Arc 44, January-March 1971, in the special issue dedicated to Bataille, and later appearing in the afterword of the Brazilian edition of Story of the Eye, published in 2004. LEIRIS, Michel. “Nos tempos de Lord Auch”. Translated by Samuel Titan Jr. In: BATAILLE, Georges. Op. cit., p. 105.

5. Idea developed by Roland Barthes in the essay “A metáfora do olho” (“The Metaphor of the Eye”), originally published in Critique 195-196, August-September 1963, special edition dedicated to Georges Bataille, and, later, in the afterword of the Brazilian edition of Story of the Eye, published in 2004. BARTHES, Roland. “A metáfora do olho”. In: BATAILLE, Georges. Op. cit., p. 119.

6. Michel Leiris tells us, in his aforementioned essay “Nos tempos de Lord Auch”, that the ideas of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) were for Georges Bataille “an active ferment of speculation”. LEIRIS, Michel. Op. cit., p. 114. The Gift, by Marcel Mauss, written between 1923 and 1924, had a great impact on Bataille, who, in turn, would present a theory that he began to formulate in 1932 in the essay The Notion of Expenditure, resulting from reading Mauss's work, in which the anthropologist describes his studies regarding the practice of potlatch by the indigenous tribes of the American Northwest. See: MAUSS, Marcel. Sociologia e antropologia. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2003; and BATAILLE, Georges. A parte maldita. Preceded by A noção de despesa. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1975.

7. According to Eliane Robert Moraes. In: BATAILLE, Georges. História do olho. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004, p. 14.

8. LEIRIS, Michel. Op. cit., p. 15.

9. As per note 8, p. 20.