Drawings of the animations of the Delusion performance Drawing from animation in Delusion performance, 2010. Photo: Publicity

Upon meeting the artist Guto Lacaz at the exhibition I in U – Me in You, by Laurie Anderson, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB), in São Paulo, he told me – in front of the work The Neon Arc, that we were looking at his first contact with Laurie – who on the album big science the back cover of the LP had the author playing a violin with the aforementioned bow. In the early 1980s, the American artist's works were the embryos of experimental art, mixing the body, technology and music, putting them in contact with everyday elements. His reflections on technology also remained – turning, for example, a vacuum cleaner into a weapon.

The exhibition took a look at Laurie's production. There are from great videos of their performances to a large wooden table, in the center of the CCBB dome, where, placing a fist on the surface and the other hand in the ear, the sound reverberates through the visitor's bones, and stories are transmitted, having the body itself as the medium of the message. This work was made, according to Laurie, to counteract the noisy environment around the museum.

Marcello Dantas signed the curatorship of the exhibition, continuing his tireless work of expanding art to the entire population. Also responsible for the artistic direction of the Portuguese Language Museum, the most visited in Brazil, Dantas began his career as a videomaker and then expanded his work to all stages of the artistic process. “In my group, Coletivo BijaRi, I take art to the streets, taking it away from the common museum element.” Dantas, however, subverts this museum space, its linearity, to merge elements of pop culture with the erudite and make it a more attractive place. It uses the show's techniques without being spectacular. With the often disaggregating mark of our time, technology, it succeeds in inverting its logic and bringing creation closer to people's daily lives.

The common criticism of Dantas' work is the superficialization, caused by the impact of technologies, which leaves reflection aside. It would be what the theorist Marshall McLuhan would call a “hot medium” – a high concentration of information and sensorial experiences, which would have a great impact, but little interaction with the work. Dantas manages to cool, with the reassuring elements of art, this heat of technology. He heats, reheats, stirs and at the end he gets the taste of homemade food prepared in old clay pots, but with fresh spices. Everyone is delighted and tries to guess each ingredient that made up the dish.

The curatorship and artistic production can often leave the creator Marcello forgotten. But he is an artistic educator, he makes a dialogue between art and everyday life, and makes it accessible to everyone. Today people discuss the law, the decisions of the Superior Federal Court (STF) are debated and the old cliché that laws should only be analyzed by judges, lawyers and “doctors” has fallen. This movement is also happening in art, making it as present as the average with bread on the plate in the bakery.


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