Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Deviations

The oeuvre of Caetano Dias emerged within the context of the 1990s and may be analyzed from a sociopolitical point of view, taking into account the Brazil of the last two decades. This artist’s perspective provides a parameter for understanding the constant tension between mechanisms of power and techniques of resistance, and his poetics center around the body.

The complexity in Dias’ work stems from a production comprised of operations with different media, starting with straight sculpture and painting, passing through actions and interventions in the urban scale, and ending in photography, video, and film, as well as Internet actions and interventions that generate Web sites and interactive work.

The range of issues proposed by Dias is a broad one, as they imply the creation of different metaphoric levels: the discussion of sexuality, the displacement of the statute of religiosity, the presence of mythical aspects, and of fabulations. Dias often positions himself as a voyeur, too. Finally, the exaltation of the viewer’s sensuality in relational experiences configures the wide set of actions and spinoffs that make the body into the significant protagonist that is capable of generating metaphors in his oeuvre.

Upon recreating the precarious and casting an eye on the baroque, Dias promotes human interactions inserted into the urban context of the city of Salvador and discusses the homosexual condition on a metaphoric level. And he does so by means of a homoerotic aesthetics, intermingled with a strong religious sentiment. One such example is the Bestiário digital series: the culling of images from the Internet, which skate away in a possible limbo, may take place as a measure of asepsis and by the elevation of porno to a sacred level.

It is in the field of urban interventions, be it in the real space or the cyberspace, that we may allocate the production of this artist, who researches different modes of existence and different models of action inside a reality. The scale chosen by Dias consists of recreating meanings and new subjectivities based on an aesthetics that conjugates simultaneous, interacting profiles.

Owing to the characteristics of the time that he lives in, Dias has no problem using a given medium in art. On the contrary, he takes advantage of the convergence and coexistence of different media to pick out of them the subject and the object of his universe.

Thus, when the artist transfers his appropriations from the analogical level into the digital, virtual, global level, he produces the series Santos populares, Sobre a Virgem, and Corpus Christi. Each of these has generated countless others, within the series themselves, and results in photos, installations, sites, performances, and videos.

In Dias’ work, the interest in the possibility of resignifying the body dates back to the early 1990s, when he would appropriate himself of engravings crafted by the traveling artists of the Brazilian colonial period to rework their exotic gaze. Constantly moving back and forth from construction to appropriation, Dias is an investigator of the possibilities of different media, and places them at the service of his reflections. He uses Internet search engines to find a repertoire of erotic images and reprocess them. By diluting their shapes and putting them out of focus, the artist returns them to a condition of anonymity: upon losing their focus, the images lose their origin; the features that configure identity—eyes, nose, mouth, forehead—are altered so as to change the image’s significance.

In a second phase in this operational sequence, the artist renamed those representations and created the Santos populares and Sobre a Virgem series. He promoted a displacement in the gravity center of the object in question and mutated its identity. He retrieved the “sacred” sense in popular tradition. The retrieval and the coming close to popular tradition do not take place with regard to form. “My intention is not to virtualize what is real as a technology of form.” Dias moves in the opposite direction of the form as represented in popular culture. He creates pictorialities using photography, updating the representation of the body: “I make use of resources that remove reality in order to subtract part of the matter ... I also combine images off the Internet with photographs of places that I go to in my day-to-day.”

The painting that dismantles in his photos and the drilling of Sts. Barbaras, for subtraction of matter, configure acts of violation, of iconoclasm; the same occurs with the Corpus Christi site—of ambiguous meaning—, in which image disintegrates wherever the user places the cursor.

All of these actions by Dias give structure to a creative process that builds and instrumentalizes the loss of meaning. The creation of a sensorial/playful relation, which establishes itself as a game and promotes interaction, contains the visual perception in its genesis and proposes a confrontation with reality. After all, the images chosen are significant parts of a given geographical or historical context. By means of actions that alter the “signical,” symbolic, and formal content, Dias promotes “resemantizations” that run the gamut from spiritual to aesthetic, despite the technologization of culture and the virtualization of the use of the body in the globalized world.

The “iconoclastic” actions created by Dias seem to border on abjection, but looks are deceiving. The titles of the works attest to their constant coming and going from construction to deconstruction. They create antagonism so as to destabilize a system taken for granted. Perhaps Dias does not exactly believe in a coming closer to the sacred. The attempt at reducing the sacred/religious symbolic burden places the image in a more humane level, bringing profane and sacred closer together. This intersection shows an attempt at reducing guilt, which lies in between desire and prohibition. The artist subtracts in order to neutralize a death drive. In the Christian era, the allusion to the denial of the body reveals a desire to reaffirm it. It is a way of promoting a sort of utopia of the body through nondenial.

The affirmation of the body becomes the proposal of another model of social management, as it is the mirror of our society. Religiosity, in this case, is alluded to, but does not happen in fact. The elevation of the profane to the sacred is simulated, a quasi-sacralization, as the image always dematerializes: in the saints, the out-of-focus photographs, or on the Corpus Christi Web site.

The site is almost an antisite, as it does not grant access to certain images. Conceived based on the principle of the myth of Midas—in which everything he touched would turn to gold—, whenever the cursor passes by the images, which represent the Passion of Christ, they fall apart. If, in Midas, gold can be associated with death, the image undone by the cursor can also be associated with the metaphor of death, brought about by the guilt of desire.

On the one hand, this field of abjection in his work may lead us to the notion of a predatory action, as the “looting” of images from the Internet lays bare the voyeuristic character of the action. On the other hand, however, the erotic-virtual action of Caetano Dias occurs according to the perspective of citizens of the globalized third world—in a direction opposite to the type of abjection found in the Duchampian universe or in that of Cindy Sherman—in which appropriation and resignification take place in order to destabilize the statutes in effect in art and market. Dias’ field of action is the universe of tradition and everyday life of Bahia, in the context of the global world.

By means of those actions, Dias questions the possibility of simulating absolute pleasure, by means of the “erogenization” of image on the Internet. He also looks into the idolization of the dead and naked body, as well as guilt, simulated in Catholicism by the ingestion of the body of Christ. By approaching with irony the notion that the iconographic representation of Christ is created “in the image and likeness of God,” he intensifies the conflict between guilt and desire by means of appropriation.

The turn of the millennium brings about another change in the work of this artist who, ever since, started seeking audience participation more and more. From 2001 onwards, Dias introduces a relational aspect in his work. And proposes another work in order to attempt, once again, to destabilize the notion of body in Christian culture: Re-ligar [to reconnect].

Migrating from the universe of Jewish-Christian culture to the universe of Eastern culture, the artist observes that, in the Kama Sutra, sex originates from a more permissive culture, in which the otherness flows along with relations. Re-ligar proposes a new way of interaction or reconciliation with the body, hence the almost mystical aspect of the Re-ligar video. The photos show ordinary people being “reconnected” to everyday life by means of suction caps. As in the Passion of Christ Web site, the work only turns real if it interacts with the audience, thus proposing a change in relations between people. In the suction caps, devoid of sacrality and free from erotic components, the connection between people takes place from a ground zero. Taken from the millenary Chinese medicine, the suction caps are meant to drain, purify, and free the energy flow between body fluids, hence the metaphor of fluency between people. Re-ligar once again reveals the notion of resistance, in the sense of unmasking power relations, so as to “reestablish” a new order between the body and its imagery.

This space for human relations and collective elaboration of the senses, which creates dialogues in simultaneity with religious, mythical, and fabulation aspects, creates the interstice that favors and expands certain zones of communication and, at the same time, problematizes the social sphere to which Dias alludes.

The confrontation that previously took place between the virtual and the real in the Corpus Christi site is elevated to the level of materiality with the coming into effect of the three-dimensional body meant to be consumed based on the metaphor for cannibalism present in the work Cristo de rapadura, in which a life-sized Christ molded after a black man’s body is made available for the audience to eat.

The representation of the dead Christ evokes the sublime that had already been hinted at in Bataille, where eroticism and death intermingle. Here, the artist allows a leakage in the fine line between erotica and sacrifice as propagated by Christianity.

In turn, Água benta geladinha is an installation comprised of a bar refrigerator, disposable cups, and water that invites the audience to drink a “sacred” liquid. The ingestion of the water (supposedly) leaves the audience prone to a sort of collective “purification” or “baptism,” and once again the artist faces the audience with a mocking and ironic experiment.

Canto doce 01, 02, and 03 is a series comprised of an installation (01), a photographic sequence (02) of the building of a sugar wall that barricades a street in the city of Salvador, and (03) of the building of a small labyrinth, with the participation of the crowd, at the Calçada railway station in Salvador. The series’ three actions generated a process of construction and swallowing of the works, characterizing evanescence and the ephemeral. As a counterpoint to the aesthetics of disappearance, they now present themselves as photo and video recordings.

In Doce amargo, in turn, the copy of a male body simulates an indigent. Dias created a solid sculpture, melted in sugar, to be placed at public spaces such as wastelands, forest areas, squares, or walkways. Whenever the item is exhibited, the action of the public that is faced with it must be filmed, as a recording of the different reactions that contact with the work may elicit.

Santa preta de duas cabeças – fala que te escuto 2006 is an urban intervention. It consists of a sacred image of popular use, removed from its context—the trade of religious icons—, modified, and reinserted in its place of origin. The anomalous image, located in a place that is no longer its own, makes passersby uncomfortable. At the street market, people exchange glances, eager to understand the two-headed icon, a noise in the sacred iconography. Caetano Dias calls attention to religious dynamics as a cultural process. In a way, the mutation imposed upon the icon is also an allusion to the changes in living organisms, a sacred transgenicity that speaks of the manipulation of life.

In Respire (Eternit), the artist discusses the persistence of childhood fantasies in the subconscious mind of adults. In this video projection, a person sleeps inside a water-filled Eternit-branded tank. The audio reinforces the idea of the water filling up the tank and being set in motion by the character. The recurring themes of subordination of the conscious mind to imperative childhood fantasies and the emergence of subconscious symbols and images are tackled here in a blunter manner. The inability to wake up or the subjection to a state of enchantment that one cannot leave becomes agonizing.

The dark attic in which people keep their fears and desires, old, useless stuff, things from the past provide the settings for this dream. The video is about the retrieval of childhood, where fear, curiosity, and fantasy evoke enchantment. This work also depends on interaction with the audience, which activates a device that can prevent the character from breathing or make it easier for him to do so.

Mar de dentro presents a series of sculptural objects built using the same materials as the slums. These objects are not actual houses or shelters, given their condition of impenetrability. They are projectiles, irregular bolides meant to roll aimlessly, created so that they can be activated by inhabitants of a slum in Salvador. They are nonsculptures, with no place and no direction, that roll downhill as a result of collective action.

The actions created by Dias cannot be measured using a single measuring unit. Yes, because his relational actions aim solely at the creation of intersubjectivities, of flowing, moving spaces in the inside of the subject, and they often border on iconoclasm.

In the action of sharing proposed in these works, the artist commissions the dialogue, puts to use the relation between subjects, and alters the modes of reception of art, the essence of his artistic practice. The expansion of the work’s primary goal and its supposed destination (the institution, the gallery, the market, the private collection) is constantly carried out by Dias, who, in the last instance and by indirect means, also puts at stake the exchange value promoted by the work. The exchange here is made of abstract transitivities that transcend the notion of style, be it thematic or iconographic.

The sphere of interhuman perspectives that aim to reconnect individuals and create spaces for communication among them, escapes the pragmatic immediacy of consumption logic. The artist builds procurements, possible relations between distinct units, alliances between different partners; in the videos Uma and O mundo de Janiele—one of the most delicate works produced in contemporary art—, what the artist seeks is fairer social situations, denser ways of living, through the construction of complex spaces for the building of subjectivity.

Thus, one can easily understand why photography, film, and video are the prevailing media. These are media that fit in perfectly with the formalization of his actions, interventions, and sensorial experiments, in which the notion of transformation is a vehicle that favors otherness, because what Dias aims at is a type of expanded communication that reaches the collective in the inside of its everyday life. The displacements that he promotes are indeed of a conceptual order, in the inside of the language, and do not disregard the aesthetical contents of the work.

If his experiments rebel against a situation of consumption and massification, still they do not oppose themselves to the artistic object. They take language as an integral part of the proposal, bear a strong semiotic load, and are vehicles that lead to the “other.” For Caetano Dias, there is no separation between object and action, and one is an integral part of the other. Thus, whereas the sensory experience stems from intervention, aesthetic fruition per se stems from the materialized work.

Videos, films, and photos, as in the series Coleção de cabeças, for instance, translate the materialization of the ephemeral. The series, presented in the form of a photo installation, was crafted from sugar sculptures. In their photographic version, the space-time in which these works are produced changes. Our notion of reality changes, our dialectical sense changes. The recordings of the actions, extended to Coleção de cabeças, when they reach us, are the only opening to the glimpse of a “duration” that dialectizes with the aesthetics of disassembly and disappearance enunciated during the interventions. When we look at the photos of the heads, do we remember their previous lives as sculptures? In this sense, there appears the counterpoint to an aesthetics of disassembly, of erasure, in which the discussion of the ephemeral touches upon the idea of death and disappearance as presence.

By means of photo/video/film recordings, it is as if Dias were facing death, the baroque tradition, and its religious burden. It is a sort of militancy of the desire that openly opposes any notion of tradition, without, however, affirming rupture. This is where the artist unfolds his bodies into metabodies, and formulates the enunciation of an erotic body and of a social body. It is also a way of surviving in a borderline condition, always in suspension. On the razor’s edge, Dias resists and promotes the confrontation of the challenge of life, in the realm of viscerality, of damned groups, of social and racial minorities, of deviations.