Cildo Meireles

With the impressive space of HangarBicocca also playing its part, the exhibition showcases the engaging nature of Mereiles’s work and his continual search for new solutions.

Emerging from the darkness of HangarBicocca like so many illuminated islands, Cildo Meireles’s eleven large installations, which take up the whole of the exhibition space, create a captivating journey for the visitor.
There is one other work on display, Cruzeiro del Sud, which we meet for the first time: a tiny cube nine millimetres by nine, half pine and half oak. Cruzeiro del Sud is a reference to the culture of the Indian Tupi population, whose indigenous tradition tells that fire was first discovered when pine and oak, both seen as sacred, were rubbed together. At that moment the Goddess of Thunder revealed herself, followed by the whole Tupi cosmogony.
In apertura: Cildo Meireles, Abajur, 1997/2010. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014. Photo Agostino Osio. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles. Qui sopra: Cildo Meireles, Marulho, 1991/1997. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014. Photo Agostino Osio. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles.
But the objects also allude to the process of simplification imposed by Jesuit missionaries in their encounters with the Tupi culture. The synthesis of Cruzeiro del Sud offers a genuine concentration of meaning. Also, because of the poetic, symbolic energy that it radiates and because of its position – placed simply on the ground at the start of the exhibition and in the centre of a large circle of light – the work, which draws us in and forces us to stoop to get a better look, could be seen as the pivot from which the rest of the exhibition develops. The work is of a piece with those Meireles created in the 60s and to which he himself applied the term “humiliminimalism” – a term coined to express a reinterpretation of American minimalism in a more “humble” style.
Cildo Meireles. Photo Agostino Osio

During those years, the artist, who had left Brazil for a brief period, participated widely in the conceptual cultural climate, spending time with minimalist artists and sharing key moments in the movement, such as the large exhibition Information, staged in 1970 at MoMA. But Meireles never fully belonged to that world. He had preserved his independence of thought and poetry and also a deep connection with the work of contemporary Brazilian artists and the Tropicalism movement, which displayed a more pronounced relationality and an experiential, sensory and empathetic attitude.

His work in fact combines sharp poetic criticism with a capacity for seduction – and in many cases a sense of humour – signalling Meireles’s distance from US artists.

Cildo Meireles, Amerikkka, 1991/2013. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014 Photo Agostino Osio. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles

Elegant formal perfection is felt as essential if the message is to be conveyed in its entirety, but this is done slowly, as if better to surprise us.

While Cruzeiro del Sud reveals a inclination to highlight the relationship between the work and the visitor and to theatricalise it, the other installations on show at HangarBicocca can be walked through and used. Each is a kind of small, immersive, seductive theatre. They involve at some point all the senses: touch, vision, hearing and taste, as well as the perception of temperature, balance and risk.

Cildo Meireles, Através, 1983-1989. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014. Photo Agostino Osio. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles
What matters is the internal relationship of the parts that the artist has organised and each visitor’s response – which is different in each case. The combination and juxtaposition of the materials, selected for their intrinsic meaning, are fundamental. The imposing Através is a good example of this. The work, a navigable structure, is in the form of a labyrinth created with fishing and hunting nets, fences, gates, barriers and metal posts, but also voile and cellophane, and much else besides. The floor is completely covered in glass, which creaks and crumbles with each step. By using the direct physical experience of transparency and the sense of danger, Através is a thematic expression of the tension between visibility and invisibility, penetrability and impenetrability, and inclusion and exclusion.
Cildo Meireles, Babel, 2001. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014. Photo Agostino Osio Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles; The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finlandia

Eureka/Blindhotland is also based on the divergence between perception and reality, between expectation and result. The work uses a thin curtain to enclose a space. Inside there are objects of different size but the same weight, and balls that look identical but do not weigh the same, with sound that contributes to the visitor’s sensory disorientation.

Reflection on the ambivalence of perception and the paradox of vision and space are also central in Olvido. This is an Indian tepee with a black coal floor that stands in the middle of a circle of cow bones, encircled by a low wall of white candles. It is a work of great beauty, but the bones give off a hideous smell and the tent emits the buzz of an electric saw. The meaning of the work, a criticism of the effects of the colonial dynamic and its regrettable legacy, springs from the discrepancy between formal balance and the disturbing elements.

Cildo Meireles, Cinza, 1984-1986. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014. Photo Agostino Osio. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles
The same could be said for the other installations. These are invariably stamped by an aesthetic of accumulation and repetition and refer to art history, older as well as more recent. What they all have in common is that they provoke contrasting emotional reactions. Babel, for example, radio towers from every era are tuned to different stations; the result is a polyphony/cacophony and a sense of divergence between the sometimes antiquated appearance of the equipment and the – necessarily current – sounds they emit. Another example is Amerikkka. The visitor walks with difficulty over 22,000 white eggs (made of wood) under a golden sky that evokes medieval gold leaf ceilings. In reality it is made up of 55,000 bullets. Once again we are torn between wonder and admiration at the perfection of form and physical and emotional discomfort – here the result of the difficulty of walking and our awareness of the cartridges suspended dangerously above our heads.
Cildo Meireles, Cruzeiro do Sul, 1969-1970 Courtesy Cildo Meireles. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014. Photo Agostino Osio Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles
With the impressive space of HangarBicocca also playing its part, the exhibition showcases the engaging nature of Mereiles’s work. At times the evidence of the artist’s continual search for new solutions and absolute control over every element of the composition is so strong that there is a risk that other important components are forgotten. Mereiles’s work is permeated with a pronounced sense of morality: in many cases the pieces spring from a need to react to situations of inequality. In the 60s and 70s Meireles responded to the military junta that had seized power in Brazil. Later he focused on developing a meticulous reaction to postcolonial cultural and economic dynamics. The Milan exhibition, however, has no trace of the many works linked to the ideas of transaction, speculation and censorship, except in the excellence guide available to visitors.
Cildo Meireles, Entrevendo, 1970/1994. Installation view at Fondazione HangarBicocca, 2014 Photo Agostino Osio. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan; Cildo Meireles
Balance is restored with the work that closes the exhibition, Abajur. This theatrical piece evokes the magic lantern, giving us a seascape panorama with seagulls in flight. On closer inspection we discover that the light is powered by men pushing a wheel around, a hidden mechanism requiring tiring, frustrating physical effort. This time the tension is between our initial enthusiasm and our subsequent discovery: the social and political meaning of the work is clear.
© all rights reserved

Until 20 July 2014
Cildo Meireles. Installations
Curated by Vicente Todolí
HangarBicocca
via Chiese 2, Milan

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