Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Alexandre da Cunha / BMX

I believe in myself, I believe in myself… The sentence, monotonous and hypnotically repeated, accompanies the looped video showing an athletic youth executing a sequence of elaborate maneuvers with dexterity in a display of male exhibitionism amidst an urban landscape. BMX is characterized by a certain formal crudeness and immediateness or, more specifically, a lack of concern with technical execution. Image editing andmanipulation are kept to a bare minimum, as the overlighting and the trembling framing suggest a video shot without premeditation, an amateur camera in hand; it is as though the cameraman had stumbled onto this event by chance and decided to capture it without the previous knowledge of the pilot/performer.

The video was produced in 2002, when Alexandre da Cunha’s art was much more directlylinked to performance. Now he works mostly with objects, sculpture, and installation, which comprise his best-known output. His recent work is strongly marked by an idea of construction and tridimensionality, as well as by appropriation of shapes and objects from everyday life. Thus, an approach seeking to identify only formal relations between BMX and more recent work by the artist would presume a radical change in direction. However, this is not about discussing solely formal issues, and a slightly more attentive analysis of this work reveals a host of concerns and procedures that were already present in the video, and have been unfolding in different ways in his oeuvre over the last few years.

In the essay “Economias do desejo”*, produced on the occasion of Da Cunha’s solo exhibition at the Paço das Artes, in 2006, Rodrigo Moura points precisely to this urgency in execution and lack of attention to technical aspects that are already present in BMX, linking these features to punk, “do-it-yourself” aesthetics:

In terms of the economy of media and process, I reckon that in his work there is also some of the do-it-yourself from the punk movement and other underground cultures: an artisanal character, a making-sculptures-as-you-would-a-fanzine, but always keeping an eye on the international erudite repertoire. There is a certain detachment; he never (or very seldom) seeks external means in executing his work, as if everything that can be done in terms of physical effort should necessarily be within the reach of the hands.

Here, in addition to underscoring the artist’s lack of interest in technical virtuosity and his preference for using finished, virtually unaltered raw materials (readymade), Moura also brings another datum that is no doubt crucial to his production: the procedure of collage, in the sense of bringing together objects, materials, and references culled from traditionally distinct ranges and categories, often causing a short-circuitin hierarchies of value. Even though Moura alludes to a punk ethos regarding the idea of collage, it seems to me that in the case of Da Cunha the parallel is even closer to postpunk. Let us consider the experimentalism of bands that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as The Fall, Talking Heads, and Wire, and their bold eclectic incorporation of musical rhythms and styles as diverse as minimalism, funk, dub, and Africanrhythms, among many others. Those were bands that learned from the deconstruction proposed by the punk movement and applied the do-it-yourself attitude to sound and image creation (from the images created to illustrate the album covers to the choice of clothing, makeup, and sceneries), utilizing a multiplicity of elements taken from different sources.

>In a similar way, BMX is also the result of a collage of two raw materials that were found: audio from a self-help CD and video footage shot by the author of what can be considered a “found performance,” promoting the superimposition of two records that do not usually meet. By bringing together these two elements, taken from the universe of self-help and street culture, to create the video, Da Cunha carries out yet another operation, namely to bring this product into the art universe, raising issues pertaining tovalue, circulation, intentionality, among others, but also a certain critical humor or,better yet, self-critical, regarding the art system in itself, an approach that becomesincreasingly evident in his recent works.

The reference to street culture appears once again in the Fan Series (2004), a series of works in which he builds sculptures shaped after ceiling fans using skateboard decks,broomsticks, and metal household appliances. Da Cunha seems to recognize the formal potential of certain objects from everyday life that belong in his visual vocabulary, and he appropriates them, using them as elements to build up new shapes that are reminiscent of existing objects, and yet removed from their original purpose of becoming objects of art. This association of shapes and the construction through addition are key features of his work. The impression one gets is that the artist stumbled upon a certain object at a given moment—for instance a skateboard deck left in the street while walking home—and that in another moment not long thereafter, he looked at ceiling fans in a restaurant in a tropical country and intuitively established a relation between these two objects that culminates in a problem of formal resolution. Of course, the work resulting from this operation does not boil down to a formal discussion, because it brings with it the entire symbolic meaning of each of these objects, and the relations that are established based on the junction of those meanings.

One recurring reference in Da Cunha’s oeuvre concerns modern and contemporary art styles and movements. In series such as Deck Paintings (since 2004), in which beach chaircanvases are stretched on a wooden chassis to create abstract “paintings” reminiscent of the elegant work of United States color field painters, or Platinum (Column) (2005), in which he creates vertical sculptures by piling up metal household utensils, evoking the simplicity and grace of Brancusi’s columns, he alludes directly to the erudite, sophisticated universe of art, and specifically to artwork of high symbolic and material value. These valuable works are then redone using industrialized everyday objects, bringing popular culture, the mundane object, and a certain urgency in creating into the high-art universe.

Lately, Da Cunha has been setting sights on the legacy of modernism in Brazil. Living and producing art in London for over ten years now, the artist often has to deal with the British (and international) audience’s expectations concerning what it means to be a contemporary Brazilian artist. As a result of the growing internationalization of a certain segment in contemporary art that is affiliated with a mostly neoconcrete tradition, in many international circuits, young Brazilian artists are expected to produce a type of work that incorporates formal and stylistic features of that output. In his essay for the Laissez-faire exhibition, held at the Camden Arts Centre, in London (2009), Jens Hoffmann criticizes the attempts at including Da Cunha’s work in the category of neoconcretism:

Even more distressing is the fact that most historical references used to describe Da Cunha’s work are the same ones that are used in order to talk about so many other Brazilian artists in his generation, even though their works and styles are so different. Was the neoconcrete movement really the cradle for the variety of Brazilian art that wesee today, or are we witnessing a form of reductionist melancholy for times past, combined with a desperate, ignorant desire to establish an artistic canon?

Aware of this desire, in the series Sunset (Flag), 2009, Da Cunha juxtaposes typical sunset photographs in paradisiacal scenarios—with all their tired, corny tropical-cliché beauty, and their vibrant gradient comprised of reds, oranges, and yellows—and the hard, geometric shapes in solid areas of black and white, reminiscent of traditional drawings of national flags. Framed and displayed in an orderly fashion on the walls of the gallery or museum, these works also become reminiscent of the shapes of Brazilian concrete art, bringing the cliché of exoticness associated with peripheral tropical countries such as Brazil closer to the cliché of the concretist root projected by the supposedly more educated and liberal international artistic and intellectual sector. It is also a good-natured comment on how artistic procedures that used to be revolutionary ended up being absorbed and co-opted in a fetishistic manner by a market-oriented system.

The Palazzo (2009) installation, presented in that same exhibition, may also be understood as a comment on the international fetish regarding Brazilian modernism. A huge wall built using hundreds of interwoven mops reproduces what resembles a curved section typical of Niemeyer’s architecture. Here, the precision and the durability of concrete are replaced by the malleability and fragility of the mop, and the intellectual procedure of the architectural plan is turned into the artisanal procedure of joining together, one by one, the items that comprise this construction. Once again, the mundane and the popular are inserted in the exclusive universe of art. There is also the twist promoted by the work’s title, reminiscent of the names given to high-end buildings increasingly seen in the Brazilian metropolises, in what may be regarded as another acid comment on how value is ascribed to the architectural or artistic object.

Maison, Château, Palazzo, all of these words borrowed from foreign languages to baptizethe homes of the national elite express a desire for an assumed European sophisticationthat materializes itself, for instance, in the architectural pastiche of the neoclassical buildings that pop up in the city of São Paulo. In what could be considered the literary counterpart of these high-class buildings, we hear the echoing voice that blindly repeats: I believe in myself…

*Rodrigo Moura, “Economias do desejo.” In Alexandre da Cunha (catalogue). São Paulo: Paço das Artes, 2006, 5.