DouAções: Atelier of collective painting inspired by Ivan Serpa, October 12th, 2011. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009-2013). Photo: Ignes Albuquerque and Taisa Moreno

DouAções: Sharing the State of Creation

Sabrina Curi

[…] that the importance of something should be measured by the sense of wonderment it produces in us.”

Manoel de Barros¹

It was a dazzling spring afternoon in October 2011. The Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro was celebrating Children’s Day with a tribute to the artist and teacher Ivan Serpa. The event transformed the museum’s gardens into an outdoor atelier. Shapes and colors interwove with collective creation. Memories of MAM’s experimental past seemed in playful synergy with what was happening at the present, a pure state of sheer invention bringing together the creative worlds of the child and the artist.

“Free-painting classes for children,” was what Ivan Serpa called the course he oversaw at MAM in the 1950s. Invited by museum in 1952, the artist², just 29 years old, began his teaching career at the recently inaugurated institution, contributing to making MAM a critical engine of a new generational vanguard in Brazilian art. From pint-sized painters to future masters of the arts, in short order Serpa expanded his course offerings to include adults and soon-to-be artists such as Aloísio Carvão, Hélio Oiticica, Waltercio Caldas, among others, stewards who would usher art from the realm of modern to contemporary. The spirit of free experimentation that imbued Serpa’s classes – encouraging the free use of paints and welcoming diverse forms of artistic expression – greatly influenced the creativity that flowed that October afternoon.

DouAções: Atelier of collective painting inspired by Ivan Serpa, October 12th, 2011. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009-2013): Photo: Ignes Albuquerque and Taisa Moreno.

That day, besides the pigments and vast canvas on which parents and their children painted, the gardens of landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx played a major part in what was going on, as the museum grounds expanded to wholly envelope the memory of Serpa and the captivating setting where all unfolded. An assortment of colored and textured fabrics, hung from strings wrapped around the gardens’ meticulously placed trees, bellowed outward in rich colorful surges amidst the beautiful afternoon sunlight as the large canvas became covered with painterly experimentations, transforming the landscape into a three-dimensional living artwork. Here, nature was no longer a backdrop, but an integral part of the collective artistic happening.

 

A paintbrush, an assortment of paints and colors, a landscape, freedom, room for creation in its purest sense – that sums up what transpired that afternoon. Sparks set off the first fire of artistic inspiration and triggered the creative drive that compelled all the kids, adult-kids, kid-artists, and adult-artists in a freestyle painting experience or happening, taught for and by one and all, and inspired by the living memory of Ivan Serpa.

DouAções: Atelier of collective painting inspired by Ivan Serpa, October 12th, 2011. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009-2013). Photos: Ignes Albuquerque and Taisa Moreno.

The DouAções program was inaugurated as one of the many experimental initiatives of the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio, a collective art and education project active from 2009 to 2013 at the museum. I’ll even dare say that, of all the programs, this was the one that best expressed the DNA and essential inspiration behind Experimental Nucleus’ philosophy. Starting with the name itself, DouAções, a neologism fusing the Portuguese words doar (give) and ações (actions), provided a semantic convergence brimming with meanings and potential interpretations and future inventions.

Before diving further into remembrances and impressions regarding specific things that took place, I will chart some concepts and characteristics that permeated the entire DouAções program.

Collectivity/Solidarity: Collective processes – team, artist, publics – integrated in various ways throughout each endeavor, transforming it into a bona fide exercise in artistic solidarity, creating not only an event, but also a collective artistic practice activated by unique creative occurrences. Each program was a liftoff in itself, bringing with it unexpected details, always richly powerful experiences of collectivity from which arose the kinds of serendipitous poetries that such encounters can inspire. The experiment in freedom was bolstered by a feeling of solidarity in the aesthetic and ethical forms arising in the shared inclinations and expressions that were indivisible from the social and personal interactions so essential to the practice of contemporary art and teaching.

Artistic DouAção: None of it would have been possible without the incredible and genuine generosity of the artists, who shared their work and collaborated in what transpired such as: Marcos Cardoso, Edmilson Nunes, Carlos Vergara, Guilherme Vaz, Laura Erber, José Bechara, Manuel Caiero, Yanomine, Ernesto Neto, Carlos Cruz Diez and more, not to mention honorees such as, Ivan Serpa and Hélio Oiticica. Each artist conceived of and/or inspired DouAções in a unique way, resulting in a diverse array of creative forms and formats, and catalyzed by the possibilities of art as the occurrence and sharing of a creative state.

Dialogues with Artists, History and Context: MAM Rio was stage to a number of events showcasing Brazil’s artistic vanguard. The Experimental Nucleus’ programs and studies sought to dialogue with this history both the practices and works of artists who exhibited and engaged with the museum and its territorial palimpsest of events and happenings. Hence, it was not only the legacies of artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Ivan Serpa that became important references for our artistic, pedagogic and poetic practices, but also the very territorial genealogy of MAM’s experimental history. These synergies fed the poetic and experimental foundations of the Nucleus as a living laboratory for experimentation in contemporary art and education, exploring dialogues with MAM’s vital past.

Zero Distance – Artist and Audience: The “zero distance” concept, according to artist/composer Guilherme Vaz, one of the co-founders of the Unidade Experimental (Experimental Unit) at the MAM in 1969 along with curator/critic Frederico Morais and the artists Cildo Meireles and Luiz Alphonsus, strove to break down the barriers between art and audience, creating hybrid zones of both creation and reception between participative experiences and hands-on artistic experiments.³ Inspired by this concept, DouAções stimulated fresh encounters and situations between artists and an array of different types of audiences, enabling the two to fuse within the same creative time-space. Vaz himself oversaw a special laboratory exercise for DouAções where he resurrected the memory of “zero distance” through the experimental relationship between artist and public, drawing on the history of the Unidade Experimental. From Africa to Brazil, the artist Yonamine, who at the time was taking part in MAM’s exhibition Terceira Metade (Third Half)⁴, in 2011, held a production workshop featuring tattoos made with tin cans, that simultaneously created magical synergies: a musical composition reminiscent of forest sounds and light and shadow effects produced from the very same material.

Art Itself as Pedagogy: We strove not to create a parallel pedagogic program to complement an artistic practice but rather a artistic-pedagogic event that opened up and shared different artistic practices. Here each art practice carries within itself its own pedagogy. Hence no two DouAções events were alike. Events, formats, initiatives – all strove to dialogue with the diverse practices and thoughts specific to each of the artists involved, thus embracing an ethical dimension allowing multiple voices to come together as part of a single effort.

Museum Turned Inside Out: Just as the Burle Marx gardens can be seen as inseparable from the museum architecture designed by Affonso Reidy architecture, DouAções understood the museum as an expanded entity – as a phenomenon without walls in its varied poetic and historical layers. In this way the program made use of the museum’s multiple spaces and contexts – its collections, exhibitions, building, gardens, surroundings etc. All the nooks and crannies were explored for their potential for poetic creation. DouAções invited artists and collaborators to create actions that could occur in the gardens and any of the museum’s diverse environments, even using the potent “living waterfall” of the massive air-conditioning system housed in the museum’s basement. Multi-sensoriality was emphasized combining creative actions and art practices with poetic responses to the exhibitions and environments both inside and outside the museum. An afternoon of drawing, music and dancing could just as easily take place in the museum’s monumental gallery, such as the DouAções inspired by the exhibition of José Bechara, or in the gardens. Numerous participative artistic interventions were conceived of and shared by the Nucleus as specific responses to the spaces and architectonic structures at MAM. From the old Bloco Escola (School Block – an adjoining building part of the original museum plan intended for courses and workshops) to the acoustical patio space afforded by the museum horizontal structure on top of a series of pillars, different aspects of the building were taken over and transformed to comprise collective living sculptures, like the intervention with colored fabric conceived by the artist Gabriela Gusmão.

DouAções occupied and used different museum spaces as terrains in which creative and collaborative actions could flourish. As a kind of reversible inside-out structure these participative and artistic ‘happenings’ occurred both inside the exhibition galleries and outside the museum’s glass walls both lead by artist-creator and participants.

DouAções. Gabriela Gusmão. Território do porvir. Intervention for the event DouAções: Experiences in the Labyrinth in the collaboration with the exhibition Hélio Oiticica: Museum is the World on November 20th, 2010. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009-2013). Photo: Jessica Gogan

Poetic Tool or Object: As works unto themselves, as concepts or as catalysts for action, specific objects were used and/or transformed into poetic tools giving rise to new creative possibilities and to the converging of languages. The artist Laura Erber spent the months leading up to her exhibition sending telegrams to the MAM’s curator artfully questioning and exploring the history and context of the museum, contemporary art, and critical discourse. As an act of generosity, Laura allowed one of her telegrams to be translated into Braille for her DouAções event that integrated with the Nucleus’ multi-sensorial program for the blind and seeing. The resulting printed sheets of transparent plastic gave a poetic physicality to the telegram’s words – ones that only the blind could decipher. The piece became part of the artist’s ‘gift’ of telegrams to the museum. In much the same way, the artist Virginia Motta (one of the Nucleus’ artist/educators) shared her project Biblioteca de Afetos (Library of Affections) where she invited people to donate to an evolving ‘library’ books that recalled affective memories and stories from their lives. Along these same lines, there was also the ‘artwork-table’ by the artist Ernesto Neto, Lugar da criação e semente criada (Place of Creation and Seed Created), which he loaned to the Nucleus for a year and acted as a symbolic and poetic meeting place. Basemóvel levo mesa B (a palindrome term) created the by artists Vitor Cesar and Enrique Rocha, was designed for the Nucleus as a conceptual artwork-tool, which itself became a functional meeting place for itinerant projects, inside and outside the museum. Furthermore, on the occasion of the exhibit Terceira metade, the Portuguese artist Manual Caeiro gifted the Nucleus with a public painting-lesson, breaking down step-by-step, starting with a blank canvas, how he builds his pictorial structures, sharing his artistic process and practice. In an act even more symbolic and generous, the artist literally donated the canvas (yet unfinished) for auction to ASSMAM (the Friends of the Museum of Modern Art Association) to raise extra funds for the Nucleus that proved critical to ease the difficulties stemming from a lack of support and sponsorship.

Manuel Caeiro. Painting-Class. DouAções: Yonamine e Caeiro presented in conjunction with the exhibition Terceira Metade, February 20th, 2011. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009-2013). Photos: Taisa Moreno.

The remembrances surface infused with fragrances, feelings, color, form, emotion…

The sounds of the cuíca from the children’s drum band Pimpolhos da Grande Rio, echoing under MAM’s suspended pillars, set the joyous tone for a preliminary carnival ritual for swarms of ‘little’ artist-artisans on an unforgettable January 2010 morning. Already in gear for carnival, the artists Marcos Cardoso and Edmilson Nunes converted MAM into a true carnival-parade float, inspiring a collaborative happening weaving Brazil’s popular carnival culture with one of Rio de Janeiro’s artistic strongholds. In a flash, a 1972 VW Beetle was converted into a true contemporary installation, strewn with props and decorations that wouldn’t be out of place parading with a samba school, nor in an art exhibition. The power of Cardoso’s and Nunes’ offering brought to MAM the joy and freedom inherent in samba culture, breaking the boundaries separating contemporary art from Rio de Janeiro’s popular culture. The legacy of Hélio Oiticica’s famous Parangolé capes and standards and his performance at the opening of the Opinion 1965 exhibition at MAM, where the artist invited the Mangueira samba school to be part of his dynamic participatory artwork, suffused such moments.

Marcus Cardoso and Edmilson Nunes. DouAções, January 23rd, 2010. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009-2013).

Indeed, these synergies where vibrantly present in various DouAções, particularly on two different occasions paying a special tribute to the Brazilian artist.

On the closing day of Carlos Vergara exhibition (2010), the Nucleus presented a special DouAções that honored the friendship between Vergara and Oiticica and their different artistic engagements with the world of carnival — Oiticica’s Parangolé and Vergara’s Cacique de Ramos a series of photographs from the 1970s of the ‘bloco’ (neighborhood party during carnival). The museum gardens had already played stage to the collective musical group Orquestra Voadora (Flying Orchestra), which on their own accord gathered hundreds of people on Sunday afternoons outside MAM during Rio’s summer months.

The scene that day was perfect and filled with memories, affections and potential encounters between the past, present and future, an irresistible terrain of creative possibilities and ethical dichotomies activated and transformed into a true experimental contemporary laboratory, both of its time and – why not? – something timeless in itself.

 

Children from the NGO Casa da Arte da Mangueira, invited to take part in the event, actively participated in ‘re-living’ Oiticica’s Parangolés that the artist had once offered as a ‘do-it’ yourself workshop (Faça você mesmo). Magically empowered by Oiticica’s Parangolé capes the children danced and played as though choreographed in a contemporary performance piece, one could say perhaps embodying Hélio’s artistic liberty. What was experienced and witnessed was a veritable ritual that beckoned one and all to participate in the delightful celebration.

As a provocative accompanying gesture, participants were invited to contribute a question, a phrase, a word to add to the melee of capes and performance. Paper and pencils were handed out to the crowd upon which they could write their questions. Before you knew it, hundreds of sentences and drawings were strewn around the garden and pinned to the participants’ makeshift ‘parangolés.’ Everybody was then invited to visit the museum while taking their ‘parangolé’ questions with them. In the midst of the music, dancing, art, memory, adults, artists, and children came a little ‘parangolé’-wearing girl with the following sentences emblazoned across her shoulders: “Have you played yet today? Want to play with me?” Upon reading the words, my entire scope of understanding of what art is, its power and possibilities, overran its bounds, bringing me to realize that art, above all, is a happening where beings encounter their most profound act of creation.

DouAções and Cooperation of Multiple Forms of Knowledge presented in conjunction with the exhibition Carlos Vergara: a dimensão gráfica – uma outra energia silenciosa (The Graphic Dimension – Another Silent Energy), March 6th, 2010. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009- 2013). Photo: Jessica Gogan

On that same afternoon, the performance group Galpão Aplauso offered their own tribute to Oiticica, also invoking the artist’s Parangolés: Faça você mesmo (Parangolés: Do-it Yourself) in their poetic responses through body and art. Meanwhile, Orquestra Voadora kept playing, with everyone joyfully singing and dancing. Once the presentation had run its course, the young members of Aplauso called on the crowd to take part in a “silent visit” to Carlos Vergara’s exhibition, provoking a slowing-down of time that took the crowd from celebrating in collective creative cathartic experience to an individualistic contemplative one. Yes, that was the intention, to provoke different experiences through and with art and to encourage participants to immerse themselves in new and different creative states of being.

We wrapped up that day with the discussion Dialogues – Cooperation of Multiple Forms of Knowledge, with the participation of the artist Carlos Vergara, professor and researcher in Carnival culture Felipe Ferreira (State University of Rio de Janeiro – UERJ), MAM curator Luiz Camillo Osório, and the Nucleus coordinator, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, exploring the influence of carnival in the world of both artists (Vergara and Oiticica) and its different ramifications in contemporary culture.

DouAções and Cooperation of Multiple Forms of Knowledge presented in conjunction with the exhibition Carlos Vergara: a dimensão gráfica – uma outra energia silenciosa (The Graphic Dimension – Another Silent Energy), March 6th, 2010. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009- 2013). Photo: Jessica Gogan

The DouAções program with José Bechara directly occupied the artist’s exhibition Fendas⁵ (Cracks), 2011. A number of artists and researchers were invited to explore Bechara’s exhibition as an experimental laboratory for diverse poetic responses – via music, dance, literature, and drawing. One of the most interesting aspects of the program was the encounters between artists and researchers from different expressive languages: Leonardo Stefano (musician), Madalena Vaz Pinto (professor of Portuguese literature and editor), Andreza Bittencourt (actress) and Anita Sobar and Leonardo Campos (visual artists and part of the Nucleus team) in addition to those of the audience/participants. And we can’t leave out the special performance by the artist Vera Terra, playing one of John Cage’s pieces on a tiny piano. An artistic community, with different talents, came together and joined forces with the Nucleus to explore directly alongside the audience/participants the expressive possibilities in the confluence of languages and experimentation.

The silent monumental gallery was soon overrun and transformed, and in no time at all it became the scene of artistic improvisation, tuning into intuitiveness in the most spontaneous and experimental synching of chance synergies. The assembly of different artistic undertakings resonated within Bechara’s exhibition, transforming and expanding the gallery spaces and the museum into a production site for instances and states of collective creation.

Initially, audience and artists/researchers divided into small groups, each becoming a creative interface occupying and activating the scene. After these gatherings, the groups met in the monumental gallery featuring Bechara’s exhibition. Mysteriously (unforeseeably) each of them took their place, quietly announcing that something was about to happen, though none of the participants knew quite what it was. After a few minutes, a dazzling occurrence of unexpected force emerged from the brazen experimentation. The ruckus of benches banging and dragging across the floor, conducted by the musician Leonardo and his group of participants, crashed through the silence of the museum, the echo announcing the arrival of the corporal-expression group. Authentic and existential, each manifestation and poetic response was shaped by and emerged from the environmental context of Bechara’s artwork. While that was going on, another group harnessed the shadows of the sculptures dangling from delicately suspended metallic structures, creating sketches as if they were extensions of the pieces themselves. There, in a silent proceeding of their own, the participants graphically conjured poetry and rhythms that gave structure to their own creative interpretations in the visual passage from three-dimensional to two-dimensional form.

 

At the same time, poetry and texts were read/performed, synchronized poetic choreographies as creative responses by the public to their encounter with art, and why not of the artist ‘re-encountering’ his own work. Bechara was there too and could revisit, with surprise, his artwork through the perspective of manifold eyes and voices, and his exhibition as a generator of new and different interpretations.

DouAções in collaboration with Casa Daros. Kinetic Kites: Colors in Space – An Encounter with Carlos Cruz Diez. May 7th, 2011. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009 – 2013).

I wrap up this poetic genealogy of my remembrances by returning to MAM’s gardens and the DouAções event that took place in partnership with the Rio based art institution Casa Daros and the French-Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez and his performative art piece Pipas cinéticas: Cores no espaço (Kinetic Kites: Colors in Space). With the help of Douglas, Jefferson, Rodrigo and Telto, residents of the Palácio favela community in Niterói, the public was invited to assemble their own kites with kinetic designs created by the artist himself. Delighted parents got to relive childhood memories and alongside their children to experience the art of kite making. Everybody took part, and the activity (re)kindled a spirit of playfulness in both children and adults, facilitating a moment of collective creation where art was yet again the medium for unforgettable encounters. As the workshop/happening came to an end, everyone let sail their kites, further extending creative boundaries and turning the skies above the museum into a true space of poetic suspension, celebrating art, form, concept, and creation!

Carlos Cruz-Diez is one of the world’s foremost exponents of kinetic art, a movement that began in the 1950s and 60s. His reflections and artistic research demonstrate how color, when seen by an observer, becomes an autonomous happening that can invade space. Once again, an artist-innovator appropriates popular culture integrating its language and meanings within his practices, and like Vaz’s unifying aesthetic of “zero distance” seamlessly brings together art and life.

DouAções in collaboration with Casa Daros. Kinetic Kites: Colors in Space – An Encounter with Carlos Cruz Diez. May 7th, 2011. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009 – 2013).

Over the course of its three-year existence, there’s no shortage of memories from my experience with the project of the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art. I have no doubt that my life, not just my professional life, is divided into a ‘before and after’ my experience there. The Nucleus was a true school for me, a place where I was given room to learn by experimentation; a true art and education laboratory that is part of my present, and of who I am. It’s not in the past; I live it and carry the experience with me in everything I do. I have the amazing feeling that this moment will continue to reverberate in my life. I would like here to take this opportunity to extend my sincerest thanks to my “nuclear” friends, protagonists like me in this story of true DouAções in the form of art – art as experience and a gift from life!

DouAções in collaboration with Casa Daros. Kinetic Kites: Colors in Space – An Encounter with Carlos Cruz Diez. May 7th, 2011. Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art of MAM Rio (2009 – 2013).

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¹ Manoel de Barros. ‘Sobre Importâncias.’ Memórias Inventadas: as infâncias de Manoel de Barros. São Paulo: Editora Planeta do Brasil, 2008

² Ivan Serpa was invited to teach art classes at MAM Rio by the then Presidente Niomar Sodré in 1952 where he taught children and later Saturday classes for young adults and future artists. See reference in enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa8922/ivan-serpa

³ Guilherme Vaz. DouAções, July 2011.

⁴ Terceira Metade. MAM/RJ 01/03 – 10.04/2011. Curator: Marta Mestre

⁵ DouAções: José Bechara: Contaminações Entre Linguagens presented on the occasion of the artists exhibition José Bechara: Fendas, MAM/RJ 24/11/2010 – 30/01/2011.