Sonia Andrade: in the intimacy of the visible
How does our relationship with images take place? How does our relationship with the world mediated by images take place? How does our relationship with images mediated by technologies (like video), media (like television) and other exhibition devices (like the art system) happen? What about art images? How do we think about the external conditions that determine the conception of art works, their modes of exhibition, their reception? These are seminal questions that traverse the artistic production of Sonia Andrade, who from her very first videos reflects on the intertwined relations between the methods of production, circulation, mediation and reception of visibilities.
Sonia Andrade is one of the pioneers of video art in Brazil, alongside artists such as Letícia Parente, Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado and Fernando Cocchiarale, Paulo Herkenhoff, Ana Vitória Mussi, and Miriam Danowski. This group, with a single camera borrowed from Jom Tob Azulay, started experimenting with video as art in 1974, amidst opposition from those with formalist conceptions of what constitutes art, the hardening of the military dictatorship, and strong resistance, especially from critics in Rio, to accepting video art as an art form.[i]
However, her production is not limited to video art and video installations, but includes a diversity of supports: from drawing-writing to the appropriation of objects and photographs, from postcards to mail art. Some specific characteristics of her poetics that permeate all of her work can be defined, even when the medium used is not video: its episodic, incomplete and relational character (which refers to her choice to conceive each work as part of a whole); the intersections and confrontations between images, objects and the (written) word, which generate inflections in their encounters and events; the enigma of time, presence and memory (the paradox of the deictic); the interstice and transit between fluidity and permanence, opacity and transparency, appearance and disappearance.
First videos: the body and television
In the absence of paradigms to lead experimentation in video, this experimentation would be constructed in a close relationship with the history of images – painting, sculpture, cinema and photography – as well as in confrontation with the invasion and massive diffusion of images employed, above all, by television. This mediation and legitimation device would not only disturb references of time, space, scale, and distance, but also transform visions and perpetuate preconceptions of the world. The television screen has become, since its invention, a place where fictions irrupt in the lethargy of daily life and a place of exposure to the increasing flow of images and information. As its reception generally takes place in domestic environments, in the midst of intimate and private relationships, it operates by simulating situations of recognition and proximity, conveying familiarity to events, dissolving boundaries between fact and fiction. Competing with the surrounding environment, its demand for its audience’s attention is usually dispersive: its ruse is to hide, to make itself transparent, so that the spectator believes he or she relates directly to the world. During the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985) [ii], television played a fundamental role in the construction of national identities, of an “image” of Brazil. More than that, in a culturally complex country, traversed by differentiated and sometimes antagonistic conceptions of the world, television was the great integrating machine, stifling dissent and hiding conflicts. In Brazilian homes, the TV played an agglutinating role: around it, every night, soap operas reproduced the fragmented and serialized time of modernity and also healed its lapses in the continuous temporality of the extended narrative. An unusual combination between orality, the telling of epic stories by the fire, with its organic and artisanal time, and the fragmented images of the audiovisual and advertising industry.
Of the artists in the Rio de Janeiro group, Sonia Andrade was the one who kept video and technical images as the main trigger of her work and, above all, who would more ostensibly confront this mediatic power, the TV, which invaded and shaped the look, the daily life and the behavior of people. She dissected its models and strategies of narcotizing seduction and veiled violence. The tyrannies – political, economic, religious, cultural, whatever they may be – that promote strategies of blindness and dumbing down: they manipulate desire, violate our capacity to judge, silence us.
Her first two sets of videos – the series of eight videos (Untitled, 1974-77) and the series of seven video-episodes (A morte do horror, 1980) – maintain the eye of the camera as audience and two main characters: body and television.
It is thus that we observe the skin deformed by a nylon thread which, stitching through the holes in her ears, causes furrows on the artist’s face like uncut scars; the right hand tied under threads woven into nails placed between her fingers by an awkward left hand; the threads and hairs covering the surface of her body being trimmed by a small pair of scissors. In these three videos (S/T, 1977), violence is sensed and touched. It is not explicit aggression to an intolerable limit of pain and provocation as can be found in the rituality of body art or of some contemporary performances. Sonia Andrade neither makes it visible nor hides it: surface over surface, image over image, skin-screen-world mirrored.
The body is, in these videos, questioned in its complex archeology. But it is also the body as image, molded and controlled by beliefs and knowledge, violated by several forces, subjected to spectacularization and commercialization. For this reason, the videos are established in the tension between the filmed body and its circulation as a spectacle; between the female body conformed by daily rituals and social codes (above all in a patriarchal society like the Brazilian one), by discourses and their silent insurrections; between the tortured and silenced body (those were times of mutilations and murders veiled in the cellars of the dictatorship) and the media catharses; between behavior in its servile docility and its political and market instrumentalizations; between the drive to see and the saturation of vision in advertising consumption; between narcissistic exhibition and the surveillance of cameras; between the framing of perception – its submission to exemplary mirroring – and the rebellions of desire.
One of her videos (S/T, 1975) is anthological: the artist, seated at a table, is eating beans and drinking guaraná (a Brazilian soft drink); in the background there is a window, the opening that displays the perspective of the outside world, common in pictorial tradition. Above the landscape, however, at the same level as the vanishing point that would attract and disperse the horizon, a television set is broadcasting an American show, Tarzan, and its commercial breaks. A window above another window. Tarzan was a show that supposedly took place in Africa, but was filmed in Mexico and shown in Brazil. A superposition of places and cultures: after all, the infinity of geographical distances is replaced by the infinity of images that reach us through the screen. Its dialogue with art history is patent: Vermeer’s Studio (1665-1666) and Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656), two paintings that disturb us regarding whether we are seeing or being seen. At the end of the video, the beans are thrown against the camera, over the glass film that would separate the outside and the inside, the real world and fiction, those who see and those who are seen. The veil of beans hides the scene, the screen becomes cloudy, disrupts the TV as a mediation device, denounces it as illusory, reveals its fake transparency that confounds who is inside or who is outside the apparatus, the constructions of reality and the deception of its models, the perception of a phenomenon and its representation, the self and the other who sees me, what is reflection and what is original. For the screen is not only the window through which the world reaches us, but also the surface of the mirror that offers us the reflection. Between the solitude of sight and the society of spectacle, humans themselves become the image and likeness of that which is conveyed by the media, the origin and the reflection of their made-up gods: the soap-opera celebrities, the characters of a reality show or those of a crime of passion. TV becomes a device that authorizes the behaviors it mirrors.
The complex relationships with media images would also be addressed structurally and metalinguistically in other works where the artist interferes in the viewer’s dispersive and passive relationship with television, in the control of time exercised by this media, in the repetition of a programmatic prototype, or in its clichés and audiovisual syntax. As in the video S/T (1977), for example, in which the artist, standing in front of several television sets tuned to the four open TV channels of the time, insistently repeats the sentence, “Turn off the TV!” Nobody then dared to turn off the TV.
An image embedded in another image that is repeated in the set A morte do horror (1981). In this series, each video-episode is emptied – both materially and metaphorically – of its narrative content, like a soap opera in reverse. A content whose ferocity is latent: in one of the videos, we see a TV set broadcasting the image of fish in an aquarium, until someone turns it off, causing a crack through which water, and supposedly life, slowly drains out. The last episode of the series shows us a multitude of television sets, one inserted into another, which the artist intertwines in a game of capture and escape, a mise en abyme.
Video installations: the paradox of the deictic
In her first video, made in 1974, the image of a wall on Jardim Botânico Street is shown in a continuous shot. On the wall, we see the signatures or scribbles of anonymous people, the claims or complaints of a brutally silenced time, as well as the artist’s signature. It is a curious crossroad between word and image that will reverberate in different ways, in many of her works. Decades later, in 2010, Sonia Andrade would film the same wall, from the same angle, seeking to reproduce her steps and the pace of the images. Between the two videos, the flow of time, the writings of a city. But writing (we must understand) is rather the babble of phrases, the incompleteness of stories, the testimony of traces and remnants that may remain ignored. The artist is a collector of these tracks and vestiges, of these shattered signs that official history condemns to oblivion.
In many of her video installations and video objects, written words are placed in proximity to objects and images. It is thus that enigmatic verses from the poem Song by 16th century Englishman John Donne (1572-1631) become the trigger and arrow of some exhibitions: “Goe, and catche a falling starre”, at MAM-Rio, in 1999; “Tell me, where all past yeares are”, at Parque Lage, in 2004; “Get with child a mandrake roote”, at Oi Futuro do Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, in 2010. The shows are, at the same time, individually independent and related to each other, for they constitute what Sonia Andrade conventionally calls “sets”. An early option of the artist: to conceive her works not as single units, but as parts, connecting open, incomplete and episodic situations.
We will call this specific set that develops based on the verses of Song “poem”[iii]. A poem in which the verses – the videos, the video installations, the objects, the word – are deposited in the world over the course of years, throughout an extended and sluggish time frame that requires from us an unhurried wait, that seduces and afflicts us with the promise of an uncertain future, of a gathering of stanzas that will arrive at an uncertain date.
John Donne’s verses are imperative — always written on one of the walls of the exhibition rooms —, and impart a voice of command for unreachable, perhaps impossible actions. It is from words, from their density, that the obscure command, the secret demand comes. Demand for what? For becoming an image? For becoming a work of art? For capturing the shooting star? For redesigning time and unveiling its enigma? For being magically fertilized by the mandrake root?
In the video installation Périplo (MAM-Rio, 1999), the epic character of the Argonaut’s adventure is presented specifically through the tiny scale of a solitary boat, sunk among the rocks, in contrast with the generously proportioned exhibition room. In the background, a small monitor shows the image of a frozen wave as a potential force of disaster or redemption. We are unsure if this stationary wave is the cause of the shipwreck or the promise of unstranding. Whether it is a no more or a not yet, a this here or a that over there. The suspension of the wave’s fluidity in its frozen form is fleeting, its paralysis is transitory. A mobility that the video image, its virtuality projected and confronted with the materiality of objects and space, only echoes.
Similarly, in the exhibition at Parque Lage, objects from the artist’s childhood — such as dolls, roller skates, marbles, bicycles — are placed next to her image in action in the video. Or the ultrasound image of a fetus is projected onto marble dust, par excellence the stone of classical sculpture and its desire for perenniality, confronting the ancestral history of the artistic image and the new technologies (a confrontation also evident in the video installations Vênus, Olimpo, Apolo – MAM-Rio, 1999).
Making the passage from presence to absence visible, the video image appears as a trace of an absent object, while it returns to the here and now, an ambivalent movement between appearance and disappearance. A plot of intersecting times that makes the enigma of presence and the paradox of the deictic explicit. Pronouns and figures of speech, the deictic present something, someone, something, while at the same time they make reference to the situational context and to the discourse itself. In these works by Sonia Andrade, the deictic that index time (now, before), space (here, there), address someone (I, you, he, we) or something (this, this, that) are not established without paradoxes, without superpositions and undecided intersections. What art does is multiply and shuffle situations and statements, times and spaces. Nothing can be named without imprecision: the here cannot be distinguished from the there; the no longer collides with the not yet; this is confused with that; and I with you. The artist evokes the non-presentable in time, not as nostalgia for lost eternity or the absolute, but as an eccentricity of consciousness, as a memory that survives in transmutations, losses, rewritings, and forgetfulness. Personal memories, the memories of art and its stories, the memories of time itself intersect. Is there an image of time?
What is at issue is the very status of the image that rises and unfolds beyond the visible, that triggers an invisibility in the intimacy of the visible, as something foreign that at the same time exalts and haunts, but from which the image constitutes itself and makes a universe unravel for it, in the mutual appearances and disappearances between human and world.
– Marisa Flórido Cesar
[i] The first videos were made in 1974 by Sonia Andrade, Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado, and Fernando Cocchiarale, and a few months later, in 1975, also by Letícia Parente, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Miriam Danowski. The group created approximately 40 videos, some filmed by Jom Tob Azulay himself. This group’s interest in video art was sparked by Walter Zanini’s invitation to some artists from São Paulo and to Anna Bella Geiger (asking her to call some artists from Rio) to participate in the Video-art exhibition that would take place in 1975 in the United States. The São Paulo artists could not get the necessary equipment, but the Rio artists borrowed it from Jom Tob Azulay, who had obtained a Sony Portapak. The Video-art exhibition was presented in four American institutions: the Institute of Contemporary Art/University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; The Contemporary Arts Center/Cincinnati, Ohio; the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, Illinois; and Wadsworth Atheneum/Hartford, Connecticut. Five Brazilians participated in this exhibition: four of them from the pioneer group from Rio de Janeiro (Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado, Sonia Andrade, Fernando Cocchiarale), and Antônio Dias, with a video made in Milan, where he lived.
[ii] Authoritarian and nationalist regime, established through a military coup that overthrew the government of elected president João Goulart on April 1st, 1964, and which lasted until March 15th, 1985, under successive military governments.
[iii] Another verse by John Donne, “It were but madness now t’impart/ The skill of specular stone”, from the poem The Undertaking also generated a series of video installations with crystals, exhibited in 2005 at CCBB-RJ and at Galeria Tempo in 2008.
Marisa Flórido César
Commissioned by 