ERNESTO NETO

Sensing space and the place of the body
Ernesto Neto lives in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, one of a new generation of Brazilian artists who have emerged in the 1990s.   There are many fascinating contradictions and overlapping traditions in Brazil that come through in the diversity of contemporary practice.  In the recent past there has been a strong concrete art movement that found its way into aggressively modernist architecture and design as well as sculptural form and painting.  By contrast there is an older tradition that derives from the sometimes-steamy meeting of vivid Portuguese Catholic iconography, African rituals, objects and shrines and surviving indigenous cultures in the impossibly fertile jungles and mountains of Brazil.

This vast country is built around the Amazonian basin and its impenetrable rainforests.  Brazilian Identity is even more strongly tied to the imagination of this rich and mysterious interior than the outback is for Australia.  The ancient and the modern collide here and nowhere more spectacularly than in Brazilia the futuristic capital city that the Government symbolically chose to construct in the heart of virgin jungle. 

The 1998 Sao Paolo Biennale took the theme of Anthropophagy that exemplified this cultural cannibalism, merger and hybridisation.  The centrepiece of the exhibition was a popular painting depicting a dismembered martyr painted by a 16th century Brazilian master.  This image of ritualistic violence and the body opened up for our gaze set the tone for the rest of the Brazilian section and had resonance with other mini exhibitions by artists such as Francis Bacon and the wounded canvases of Fontana�s Concetto Spaziale series.

The modernist tendency expressed in this exhibition was also infused with bodily references most notably in the work of Lygia Clark, Tunga  and Cildo Meireles.  It is against this background that the younger Brazilian artists are making their way.  There is a passionate attachment to materiality and sensuality in their work that is expressed in a performative even ritualistic approach to materials and spaces.  The senses are engaged in a multiplicity of ways and the body is discovered in unexpected encounters in the church, the butchers shop, the bordello, the carnival and the life of the street.  

The installation of Ernesto Neto stretches the membrane that separates art and life.   The body ingests the work and is simultaneously ingested by it.  His use of transparent elastic fabric describes the tension of spaces he invades while anthropomorphising architecture.  Vast masses of fragrant spice swell the fabric in voluptuous almost bodily forms that fill the gallery space and our olfactory organs with its aromatic intensity.  Scent entails the physical invasion of the body by its particles unlike vision that always exists as a translation conveyed to the eye by light from a distance.

The bodily connotations of Neto�s forms are consistent across a number of distinct types of sculpture and installation.  In part this is due to the particular physical properties of his most used material, a kind of stretchy Lycra that produces sensuous curves when it is stuffed, stretched and subjected to the effect of gravity.   Three strands most commonly dominate his work; they are freestanding sculptural forms, enclosed but transparent spaces that invite entry and the weight of spice that stretches the fabric through architectural space.  The freestanding forms are usually white Lycra filled with polystyrene beads like beanbags.   These often take on a figurative character sometimes in crowds of small figures or in pairs and family groups. 

The bodily association of these forms comes from their rounded surfaces but it is further enhanced by the insertion of openings in the shapes that suggest navels or other bodily orifices and by winding and knotting the ends of the Lycra tubes in such a way as to irresistibly suggest umbilical cords because of the pneumatic curves and folds that the material naturally takes when twisted.  It is surprising that such a pristine industrial material can so strongly suggest bodies since apart from the formal associations that are inherent in the material and the process of assembling it there is absolutely no imitative quality such as flesh colouring or bodily textures, hair, pores, or veins.  It is perhaps precisely because of this absence of the detailed and particular simulation that the auratic presence of body is so powerful. 

The subtlety of this organic association is important when it comes to the suspended rooms.  Neto suspends these transparent cubes of Lycra between the ceilings and the floors of existing architectural spaces using weighted sacks that are made by stretching the corners of the cubes.  We take it for granted that this material is infinitely extendable and that everything is inherently part of the process and an expression of the material itself but it is Neto�s consummate skill in conceiving these forms that creates this impression of inevitability.  This quality also informs the organic feel to the work as if they grew this way rather than being constructed.

These translucent volumes have slit-like openings to allow the audience to enter them.   In earlier versions such as the piece installed on Pier 2-3 for the Biennale of Sydney 1998 and another at the Sao Paolo Biennale the same year the suspended cube was sufficiently transparent to allow us to see the figures moving about inside as if they were being ingested by an enormous protozoa.  The robust stretch material allows them to leap around bouncing off the walls as if in a child�s fairground game, some however choose to take a more passive role.  Neto is in a sense operating a behavioural laboratory that dramatically demonstrates the different personalities of those who interact with it. 

This engagement of the viewer�s active participation is another aspect of the multi sensory nature of the sculptures and is an example of the performative quality permeating Brazilian art today. With the groups of freestanding objects we feel invited to rearrange them and to play, the spice works invade our senses and attract us to experience them tactilely as well as visually and aromatically.  Unfortunately touching the pendulous bulbs of spice actually destroys their pristine surfaces making marks in the fine accumulation of material that slowly seeps through the fabric to give them a colourful bloom like the yeast on a grape.   This bloom also slowly falls as fine dust to create halos of colour on the floor below.

Neto first installed one of his spice works in Sydney in a Brazilian exhibition Material - Immaterial curated by Benjamin Genocchio for the Art Gallery of NSW in 1997.  In this installation Neto included many smaller figures and one spectacular spice work.  A tube of Lycra was attached to the ceiling grid and a hundredweight of turmeric was poured into it.  The weight was all collected in the �toe of the tube which was then thrown onto the floor stretching the tube across the room and creating a dramatic halo of orange dust around the globular sack where it landed.  In some works the Lycra room and the spice tubes have been combined creating a kind of internal body experience for the viewer who enters a room completely lined by a continuous membrane of the fabric that astonishingly forms itself into a tube that stretches out from the centre of the ceiling into a dramatic spicy gesture like a distended epiglottis.

In some of the more recent room installations the transparency has given way to thick opaque walls and bulging panels of padded fabric that transform the coextensive floor, ceiling and walls into organic vessels.  Sometimes the viewer who decides to enter must push through constricted passages struggling with fat folds of material that clutch at the feet as you drag yourself through the maze.   It is of course completely womblike and for some an intensely claustrophobic experience. 

This introduces another significant issue in Neto�s work that is the very deliberate matter of scale.  The small stuffed �figures� make us feel gargantuan as we walk amongst them while the large spice pieces may make us feel dwarfed as if in the stomach of a whale or even like microbes on a journey through the living body.  Entering the confined and pressing folds of the new womb-rooms precisely defines the limits of the body through spatial constraint and total bodily contact with the lining of the space.

All of these characteristics of Neto�s work invite us to experience a heightened awareness of our own sensing and feeling bodies, they are almost overwhelmingly sensual and yet they have a formal harmony and simplicity that derives from their conceptual clarity.  They might be thought of as exemplary manifestations of Brazil�s dialogue between the modern megalopolis and the primordial jungle.

Anthony Bond