How to Build Cathedrals. Cildo Meireles: A Sensory Geography of Brazil

Abstract

Taking Cildo Meireles’s installation, Mission/Missions – How to build cathedrals, as a starting point, this article will discuss artistic procedures in the artist’s work and their enunciations in social structures, taking land as an artistic and literary topos. Within Cildo Meireles’s Mission/Missions – How to build cathedrals (1987), there are points of intersection between artistic, philosophical, and literary forms of knowledge that ceaselessly and reflexively give rise to new questions. In this work, a sensory and schematic knowledge arranges the pillars of economy, the sacred, and animality around an architecture that is elaborated using coins, communion wafers, and animal bones. In Mission/Missions, Cildo Meireles creates a space at once geographical and historical that exposes the internal fractures of Western civilisation in its expansion on the South American continent. Working from this installation, we will revisit the artist’s previous works to find material and conceptual elements that have been decisive for the realisation of Mission/Missions. Reading the installation through the materiality of previous works helps to orient us conceptually in an intertextual network that the very installation summons through the space created by Cildo Meireles.

Keywords:

• Installation
• land
• economy
• literature
• materiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Figure 1 Cildo Meireles. Missão/Missões (Como construir catedrais) [Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals)], 1987. Media: 600,000 coins, 800 communion wafers, 2,000 cattle bones, 80 paving stones, and black cloth. Height: 235 cm, 36 m². 81 × 54 mm. Photo: Zoe Tempest. Courtesy of Daros Latin America Collection – Zurich.

Figure 2 Cildo Meireles. Zero cruzeiro, 1974–1978. Media: lithograph on offset paper. Dimensions: 6.5 × 15.5 cm. Unlimited editions. Photo: Pat Kilgore. MoMA Collection. Courtesy of Cildo Meireles.

Figure 3 Cildo Meireles. Introdução a uma nova crítica/Introduction to a New Criticism, 1970. Media: wooden chair, nails, black netting, and iron frame. Dimensions: 160 × 50 × 50 cm. 509 × 660 mm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Cildo Meireles.

Figure 4 Cildo Meireles. Arte física/Physical Art, 1969. Media and dimensions: Box of 30 × 30 × 30 cm (each box) and two photographic panels of 100 × 70 cm each. 25,7 × 19,0 cm. Collection of the artist. Photo: Pat Kilgore. Courtesy of Cildo Meireles.

Figure 5 Cildo Meireles. Olvido/Oblivion, 1987–1989. Media: indigenous land, six thousand currency bills, three tonnes of bones, 69,300 paraffin candles, charcoal, and sound. Dimensions: 460 × 8000 × 383 × 230 mm. Collection of the artist. Photo: Joaquín Cortés/archive MNCARS. Courtesy of Cildo Meireles.

Figure 6 Cildo Meireles. Amerikkka, 1991–2013. Media: 20,050 eggs, 40,000 bullets, wood, and metal. Variable dimensions. Collection of the artist. Photo: Joaquín Cortés/archive MNCARS. Courtesy of Cildo Meireles.

Acknowledgement

This text is the result of post-doctoral research carried out at IEL – UNICAMP, in São Paulo, and at CETHA – EHESS, in Paris. The author expresses his gratitude to FAPESP - SP, Eduardo Sterzi, Unicamp and Giovanni Careri, EHESS.

Notes

1 This way of observing Cildo Meireles’s minimalist-baroque practices offers another direction for a debate that took place in the United States, crystallised in Michael Fried’s text “Art and objecthood”, addressed to minimalist artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, in which the literalist-minimalist aesthetic is an absolute investment in form as a property of objects. Criticism of anthropomorphism and spectatorial engagement were elements of minimalist theatricality that Fried considered pejorative. Criticising Judd, Fried highlights the relational character and ubiquity that surrenders his work to the virtual inescapability of pictorial illusion (2002, 132).

2 André Jolles studied legends, gesture, divination, cases, and traces of spirits as forms of the German term Witz, in which these simple forms guide analysis that allows us to distinguish between archaic use of the “pre-logical” or “primitive” (Lévy-Bruhl 2010, 35–37 and 120–122). Cildo Meireles aligns popular phonic knowledge and Amerindian thought, such that, conceptually, the artist employs simple forms as marks of Brazilian culture’s orality, as a minimalist and conceptual event, unlike analysis that only deals with the influence of American art.

3 “In 1968, following four years of methodical, obsessive work with designs (I began with masks and faces, later transforming this into a dialogue between two characters, which were then enacted) (…). The last design I made during that period (I didn’t design again until 1973) was a crossroads (…). And, at the same time, I started making Corners, which generated negative space. Crossroads are places of action par excellence. The Corners were places where action did not exist, places of total refuge. They were geometric works about the Euclidean model of space” (Fernandes 2013, 63).

4 In Portuguese, the English words “how” and “like” are expressed by the same word “como”. Consequently, in the Portuguese, this “like” evokes the “how” of Mission/Missions: How to build cathedrals.

5 Although they are homophones, the artist spells his surname differently to his father’s. Their surnames are, respectively, Meireles and Meirelles.

6 On this subject, artists such as Anna Bella Geiger and Adriana Varejão have produced counterconquest art using mediums such as postcards and tiles.

7 On 29 November 1984, Joseph Beuys took part in a debate, which took as it starting point the question of What is money? A former banker and an economics professor also participated in the debate. In the words of Joseph Beuys, money will be freed “from being a commodity”, and will become “a regulating factor in the rights domain. (…) I’m trying to say something tangible about money here – that it is an economic value and that we have to reach a stage where it must become a necessary potential, must act as a rights document for all the creative processes of human work …” (Beuys at al. 2010, 17).

8 In Portuguese, the verb “olvidar”, to forget, bears a resemblance to the noun “olvido”, the title of Cildo Meireles’s work here translated as Oblivion.

Additional information

Funding

Funding received from FAPESP (The Foundation for the Support of Research of the State of São Paulo) process number 2014/12206-5.

Notes on contributors

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

Eduardo de Oliveira is Assistant Professor of Brazilian literature, culture, and media at the University of Zurich. At that institution, he is a member of the Centre for Research on Latin America (LZZ) and the Centre on the Theory and Culture of Art (ZKK). He is the author of A invenção de uma pele. Nuno Ramos em obras (Iluminuras, 2018) and Signo, sigilo. Mira Schendel e a escrita da vivência imediata (Lumme Editor, 2019). Email: [email protected]