Under the Sign of Amadeo: A Century of Art
For the first time, this exhibition is showing, almost all of the museum's collection of works by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (Manhufe, 1887 - Espinho, 1918), the Portuguese painter whose work heralded the advent of modernism and formed one of the early cornerstones of the CAM collection. Although the museum itself did not open to the public until 25 July 1983, the works that would come to make up the CAM's collection began to be purchased in the late 1950s.
Numbers and dates will be found throughout this text since anniversaries inevitably create a compulsion to tot up and take stock. ln the past thirty years, the collection has come to comprise ten thousand works. The monthly guided tours of the storerooms, which will take place over the course of a year, are an opportunity for the public to experience the collection in a more complete and intimate way.
Under the Sign of Amadeo: A Century of Art occupies the entirety of the space available in the CAM's building but contains only around five per cent of the collection, taking visitors on a voyage through the twentieth century. It is a voyage with pre-defined ports: in the nave, particular attention is paid to the representation of the body in action and to works classified as performance, one of the most disruptive and significant languages to have evolved in the transition between modern art and contemporary art': in the first room, the dialogue between British and Portuguese art, one of the characteristic features of this collection, is presented with a focus on pop art; in gallery 1, we see the outstanding masterpieces of the collection, which offer a summary of the period between the start of the twentieth century and the present day; in the multipurpose room, the film and video collection can be seen; in the temporary exhibitions room, the stage and the theatrical are presented in the context of modernity; and in gallery 1, spectators can see the work of the great modernist Amadeo. ln November, gallery 1 will also be used to host an international conference organised by the History of Art Institute and the Communication and Language Studies Centre ofthe Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The conference will place the Amadeo's work in context: in the period surrounding the First World War, between the cosmopolitanism of Paris and the manorial ruralism of Manhufe, between the various movements and avantgarde techniques, creating a unique language, helping to ensure that recent historiography, which is finally paying attention to work produced on the peripheries, establishes parallels with other artistic eographies.
In celebrating the CAM's thirtieth anniversary, besides showing the collection, we were also driven by a desire to examine the current space of the museum as a laboratory, a space of creation and risk, by commissioning Rodrigo Oliveira (Sintra, 1978) and Carlos No (Lisbon, 1967) to produce new works for the facade of the building and the hall respectively and by staging, in parallel, a performance cycle to take place between October and December, beginning with a pioneering figure in this genre, Alberto Pimenta (Porto, 1937), and ending with Isabel Carvalho (Porto, 1977), who is currently staying in Berlin with the help of a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Performance is a genre that evokes the theme of the avant-garde movements, having itself emerged from among them. For this reason, it has been chosen as one of the key elements of both the programme and our reflections. The avant-gardes attacked the artistic institution by questioning the traditional concept of the work of art, defending the right of art to be reintegrated into a vital praxis. Or perhaps into a praxis of life and the quotidian, which explains why these movements rejected the metaphysical notion of the artist. The concept of avant-garde is taken from a particular conception of the modern - that which identifies the modern with non-objectivity - and within it, performance is doubtless a radicalising genre to the extent that it puts an end to figuration and the question of matter in the work of art, establishing itself as a language based wholly on ideas and actions.
From the strictly theoretical point of view, performance raises a series of problems that stem from the fact that it is shot through with fundamental tensions (and premises) that largely manifest themselves as binomials: art-life, art-technique, the body of work equals the body of the artist.
From the point of view of communication, performance establishes a new relationship between the emitter and the receiver that demands the latter's participation, not 50 much in the sense that the spectator is included in the action but more as a means by which to approach a register of complicity or anti-complicity. We could say that performance makes a degree of involvement necessary: the emitter and the receiver are involved on the same plane. In other words, performance obliges spectators to define themselves as users: either positively or negatively; they do not experience a performance in the same way that they experience a painting in a museum.
For all of these reasons, performance puts art in an uncomfortable place because initially, and almost always physically, it has opted for an uncomfortable space - the streets, rundown spaces, informal sites - where performer and spectator are in an uncomfortable situation: with no stage, scenery or seats to divide them, they are mutually exposed to each other. The history of the concept of performance as an artistic field largely coincides with the history of the avant-garde movements themselves. In fact, the 19005 and 19105 witnessed the near simultaneous emergence of three artistic movements - constructivism, futurism, and dada - that would play the key role in what subsequently came to be known as the 'modernist rupture' and which would completely alter the configuration of all twentieth-century art.
Futurism echoes in several works by Amadeo and obviously in the work of Fernando Pessoa, the poet whom Almada Negreiros (São Tomé e Príncipe. 1893 - Lisbon, 1970) immortalised in portraits painted in 1954 and 1964. In fact, the greatest expressions of futurist ideology in Portuguese literature can be found in the eulogies to the machine and motion in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa (or rather, in that of his heteronym, the naval engineer Álvaro de Campos) and in Mário de Sá-Carneiro. Recall the passages in the 'Ode Marítima' in which the exaltation of the machine is accompanied by the use of onomatopoeia (or 'onomatopoeic artillery', as Marinetti liked to call it). A short extract from the acclaimed 'Ode Marítima' will suffice:
Crushed keels, sunk ships, blood on the waters,
Decks floating in gore, chunks of corpses!
Fingers lopped off on the gunwales!
Here and there, the heads of infants!
People with eyes gouged out screaming and howling!
Hey, that's it, hey, hey, hey!
Hey, that's it, hey, hey, hey!
And listen to the voice of Diogo Dória, near the Amadeo facsimile, reading Flaubert's The Legend ot Saint iullan the Hospitaller, in which blood also flows everywhere, and we can easily see that the authors who made the twentieth century breathed, if not the same air, then at least the same books and references. However, recall how the engineer-poet Álvaro de Campos defines himself:
And I who love modern civilization, I who embrace the machines with ali my heart,
I, the engineer, the civilized mind, the man educated abroad,
I would love to see again before me only schooners and ships built of timber
The same journey can perhaps be traced with Amadeo in moving from the 1917 work that places a cash register at the centre of both the canvas and the action to Casinha da Casa de Manhufe [The Kitchen atManhufe House] (1913).
The modernist rupture went further still when, in 1917, Mareei Duchamp's urinal became a work of art entitled Fountain, serving as a eulogy to and apology for the ready-made. The notion of the ready-made became a genuine source of inspiration for ali contemporary production and served as one of the most stimulating and operational concepts for future artistic generations (see, for example, O Menino Imperativo [The Imperative Child] by Marcelino Vespeira (Alcochete, 1925 - Lisbon, 2002): a dummy with a shell for a head is flanked by two candles which were lit when the sculpture was first presented, causing wax to run down the body).
Where the relationship between art and technique is concerned, the concept of the ready-made is essential in that it directly (and radically) confronts the question of the artist's hand and, consequently, the notion of original. The metaphysical notion of art, for which the artistic value of an object stems from the fact that it is made by hand and unique, is completely blown away, opening up the field of art to the domain oftechnique. Notions such as repetition, seriality, duplication, and the absence of any direct intervention by the artist in the act of artistic production are notions that traversed ali twentieth century art and reached their apogee in pop art: see the British pop artists and particularly Peter Philips (Birmingham, 1939) and his work For Men On/y - Starring MM and SS in 1961 (and yes, MM is the same Marilyn Monroe that AndyWarhol featured repeatedly in his work from 19620nwards).
The passage from the ready-made to the notion of anti-art was but one small step. The notion of anti-art, like the series of terms and attitudes prefixed by 'anti' that would follow it (the anti-artist, anti-taste, the anti-museum, or the anti-work), are the notions that gave birth to the artistic ideology that governed the emergence of performance.
Thus, while it is true that dada and the first wave of surrealism - see Rapto na Paisagem Povoada [Abduction in the Populated Landscape] (1947) by António Pedro (Cidade da Praia, 1909-Moledo, 1966) - were not guided by many actions that could be described as performance, the concepts that these movements introduced were extremely significant in the development of phenomena associated with that creative territory, namely, the notion of automatism advanced by André Breton and the introduction of psychology to art.
These phenomena were significant in that the importance of dreams and the psychic mechanisms of the mind - see the photograph Eu (auto-retrato) [I (Self-Portrait)] (1949- 1952) by Fernando Lemos (Lisbon, 1926) - would themselves become material used by performance, sometimes leading the public and critics to misunderstand the process given that it was operating precisely in the realm of assystematicity, the non-narrative, and the linking together of themes and images similar to those found in dreams and unavoidable psychic automatisms. Years later, in 1993, all of these questions were explored more deeply in the video Hypnotic Suggestion 505 by Jane & Louise Wilson (Newcastle, 1967), in which the artists, who are twins, undergo a hypnosis session.
The goal of provoking the public, preventing it from remaining in the passive stance of a spectator faced with a painting on a wall or a sculpture in a museum, was fully realised in the notion of performance. Lt was a question of inventing a new audience.
Today, the notion of the museum is still subject to debate, particularly the question of Whether the contemporary art museum should house a permanent collection or be a space that continually rotates artists and works that are usually constructed specifically for a particular space, making the way in which the work adapts to and interacts with the place an essential aspect of its nature.
The CAM has tried to strike a balance between these two extreme positions. We believe that a museum, as the term has traditionally been understood over the years, is a place in which to keep and conserve established masterpieces and in this respect we must acknowledge the importance of the donations that the CAM has received from artists and their families in the past thirty years: let these works be enjoyed by everyone. But the museum must also be a place in which artists reflect the disruption, chaos, violence or simply the ugliness that life and the world outside witness and sometimes display and exhibit.
What are artists seeking in adopting this attitude to the space of the museum? Do they seek complicity with the public or do they aim to provoke or even reject it? Or do they intend simply to alert us to the way in which the public, all of us, must confront a series of problems, be they economic, social, political or merely artistic?
This is how we are celebrating our thirtieth anniversary, with the collection but also with our questions.
Isabel Carlos
Numbers and dates will be found throughout this text since anniversaries inevitably create a compulsion to tot up and take stock. ln the past thirty years, the collection has come to comprise ten thousand works. The monthly guided tours of the storerooms, which will take place over the course of a year, are an opportunity for the public to experience the collection in a more complete and intimate way.
Under the Sign of Amadeo: A Century of Art occupies the entirety of the space available in the CAM's building but contains only around five per cent of the collection, taking visitors on a voyage through the twentieth century. It is a voyage with pre-defined ports: in the nave, particular attention is paid to the representation of the body in action and to works classified as performance, one of the most disruptive and significant languages to have evolved in the transition between modern art and contemporary art': in the first room, the dialogue between British and Portuguese art, one of the characteristic features of this collection, is presented with a focus on pop art; in gallery 1, we see the outstanding masterpieces of the collection, which offer a summary of the period between the start of the twentieth century and the present day; in the multipurpose room, the film and video collection can be seen; in the temporary exhibitions room, the stage and the theatrical are presented in the context of modernity; and in gallery 1, spectators can see the work of the great modernist Amadeo. ln November, gallery 1 will also be used to host an international conference organised by the History of Art Institute and the Communication and Language Studies Centre ofthe Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The conference will place the Amadeo's work in context: in the period surrounding the First World War, between the cosmopolitanism of Paris and the manorial ruralism of Manhufe, between the various movements and avantgarde techniques, creating a unique language, helping to ensure that recent historiography, which is finally paying attention to work produced on the peripheries, establishes parallels with other artistic eographies.
In celebrating the CAM's thirtieth anniversary, besides showing the collection, we were also driven by a desire to examine the current space of the museum as a laboratory, a space of creation and risk, by commissioning Rodrigo Oliveira (Sintra, 1978) and Carlos No (Lisbon, 1967) to produce new works for the facade of the building and the hall respectively and by staging, in parallel, a performance cycle to take place between October and December, beginning with a pioneering figure in this genre, Alberto Pimenta (Porto, 1937), and ending with Isabel Carvalho (Porto, 1977), who is currently staying in Berlin with the help of a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Performance is a genre that evokes the theme of the avant-garde movements, having itself emerged from among them. For this reason, it has been chosen as one of the key elements of both the programme and our reflections. The avant-gardes attacked the artistic institution by questioning the traditional concept of the work of art, defending the right of art to be reintegrated into a vital praxis. Or perhaps into a praxis of life and the quotidian, which explains why these movements rejected the metaphysical notion of the artist. The concept of avant-garde is taken from a particular conception of the modern - that which identifies the modern with non-objectivity - and within it, performance is doubtless a radicalising genre to the extent that it puts an end to figuration and the question of matter in the work of art, establishing itself as a language based wholly on ideas and actions.
From the strictly theoretical point of view, performance raises a series of problems that stem from the fact that it is shot through with fundamental tensions (and premises) that largely manifest themselves as binomials: art-life, art-technique, the body of work equals the body of the artist.
From the point of view of communication, performance establishes a new relationship between the emitter and the receiver that demands the latter's participation, not 50 much in the sense that the spectator is included in the action but more as a means by which to approach a register of complicity or anti-complicity. We could say that performance makes a degree of involvement necessary: the emitter and the receiver are involved on the same plane. In other words, performance obliges spectators to define themselves as users: either positively or negatively; they do not experience a performance in the same way that they experience a painting in a museum.
For all of these reasons, performance puts art in an uncomfortable place because initially, and almost always physically, it has opted for an uncomfortable space - the streets, rundown spaces, informal sites - where performer and spectator are in an uncomfortable situation: with no stage, scenery or seats to divide them, they are mutually exposed to each other. The history of the concept of performance as an artistic field largely coincides with the history of the avant-garde movements themselves. In fact, the 19005 and 19105 witnessed the near simultaneous emergence of three artistic movements - constructivism, futurism, and dada - that would play the key role in what subsequently came to be known as the 'modernist rupture' and which would completely alter the configuration of all twentieth-century art.
Futurism echoes in several works by Amadeo and obviously in the work of Fernando Pessoa, the poet whom Almada Negreiros (São Tomé e Príncipe. 1893 - Lisbon, 1970) immortalised in portraits painted in 1954 and 1964. In fact, the greatest expressions of futurist ideology in Portuguese literature can be found in the eulogies to the machine and motion in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa (or rather, in that of his heteronym, the naval engineer Álvaro de Campos) and in Mário de Sá-Carneiro. Recall the passages in the 'Ode Marítima' in which the exaltation of the machine is accompanied by the use of onomatopoeia (or 'onomatopoeic artillery', as Marinetti liked to call it). A short extract from the acclaimed 'Ode Marítima' will suffice:
Crushed keels, sunk ships, blood on the waters,
Decks floating in gore, chunks of corpses!
Fingers lopped off on the gunwales!
Here and there, the heads of infants!
People with eyes gouged out screaming and howling!
Hey, that's it, hey, hey, hey!
Hey, that's it, hey, hey, hey!
And listen to the voice of Diogo Dória, near the Amadeo facsimile, reading Flaubert's The Legend ot Saint iullan the Hospitaller, in which blood also flows everywhere, and we can easily see that the authors who made the twentieth century breathed, if not the same air, then at least the same books and references. However, recall how the engineer-poet Álvaro de Campos defines himself:
And I who love modern civilization, I who embrace the machines with ali my heart,
I, the engineer, the civilized mind, the man educated abroad,
I would love to see again before me only schooners and ships built of timber
The same journey can perhaps be traced with Amadeo in moving from the 1917 work that places a cash register at the centre of both the canvas and the action to Casinha da Casa de Manhufe [The Kitchen atManhufe House] (1913).
The modernist rupture went further still when, in 1917, Mareei Duchamp's urinal became a work of art entitled Fountain, serving as a eulogy to and apology for the ready-made. The notion of the ready-made became a genuine source of inspiration for ali contemporary production and served as one of the most stimulating and operational concepts for future artistic generations (see, for example, O Menino Imperativo [The Imperative Child] by Marcelino Vespeira (Alcochete, 1925 - Lisbon, 2002): a dummy with a shell for a head is flanked by two candles which were lit when the sculpture was first presented, causing wax to run down the body).
Where the relationship between art and technique is concerned, the concept of the ready-made is essential in that it directly (and radically) confronts the question of the artist's hand and, consequently, the notion of original. The metaphysical notion of art, for which the artistic value of an object stems from the fact that it is made by hand and unique, is completely blown away, opening up the field of art to the domain oftechnique. Notions such as repetition, seriality, duplication, and the absence of any direct intervention by the artist in the act of artistic production are notions that traversed ali twentieth century art and reached their apogee in pop art: see the British pop artists and particularly Peter Philips (Birmingham, 1939) and his work For Men On/y - Starring MM and SS in 1961 (and yes, MM is the same Marilyn Monroe that AndyWarhol featured repeatedly in his work from 19620nwards).
The passage from the ready-made to the notion of anti-art was but one small step. The notion of anti-art, like the series of terms and attitudes prefixed by 'anti' that would follow it (the anti-artist, anti-taste, the anti-museum, or the anti-work), are the notions that gave birth to the artistic ideology that governed the emergence of performance.
Thus, while it is true that dada and the first wave of surrealism - see Rapto na Paisagem Povoada [Abduction in the Populated Landscape] (1947) by António Pedro (Cidade da Praia, 1909-Moledo, 1966) - were not guided by many actions that could be described as performance, the concepts that these movements introduced were extremely significant in the development of phenomena associated with that creative territory, namely, the notion of automatism advanced by André Breton and the introduction of psychology to art.
These phenomena were significant in that the importance of dreams and the psychic mechanisms of the mind - see the photograph Eu (auto-retrato) [I (Self-Portrait)] (1949- 1952) by Fernando Lemos (Lisbon, 1926) - would themselves become material used by performance, sometimes leading the public and critics to misunderstand the process given that it was operating precisely in the realm of assystematicity, the non-narrative, and the linking together of themes and images similar to those found in dreams and unavoidable psychic automatisms. Years later, in 1993, all of these questions were explored more deeply in the video Hypnotic Suggestion 505 by Jane & Louise Wilson (Newcastle, 1967), in which the artists, who are twins, undergo a hypnosis session.
The goal of provoking the public, preventing it from remaining in the passive stance of a spectator faced with a painting on a wall or a sculpture in a museum, was fully realised in the notion of performance. Lt was a question of inventing a new audience.
Today, the notion of the museum is still subject to debate, particularly the question of Whether the contemporary art museum should house a permanent collection or be a space that continually rotates artists and works that are usually constructed specifically for a particular space, making the way in which the work adapts to and interacts with the place an essential aspect of its nature.
The CAM has tried to strike a balance between these two extreme positions. We believe that a museum, as the term has traditionally been understood over the years, is a place in which to keep and conserve established masterpieces and in this respect we must acknowledge the importance of the donations that the CAM has received from artists and their families in the past thirty years: let these works be enjoyed by everyone. But the museum must also be a place in which artists reflect the disruption, chaos, violence or simply the ugliness that life and the world outside witness and sometimes display and exhibit.
What are artists seeking in adopting this attitude to the space of the museum? Do they seek complicity with the public or do they aim to provoke or even reject it? Or do they intend simply to alert us to the way in which the public, all of us, must confront a series of problems, be they economic, social, political or merely artistic?
This is how we are celebrating our thirtieth anniversary, with the collection but also with our questions.
Isabel Carlos
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